Episode of My First Million with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri.
Transcript
Note: This transcript was auto-generated from YouTube captions. It may contain errors and lacks speaker identification. A full Gemini audio transcript will replace this.
Kind: captions Language: en what uh what do you do with your money yeah yeah i know you got a ranch uh i think you live here he’s had that forever that i mean that was like my house that so it’s it’s not like it wasn’t like a hot uh like a luxury property or whatever like kanye having a ranch in wyoming you actually live there because you wanted to live there sam sam i think has some some similar aspirations um but what do you do are you like i’m an investor you just do something boring with your money what do you do yeah uh well i spent a lot of it on this bookstore uh i i bought two buildings in this in this small town of bastrop uh originally there’s gonna be a bookstore in a coffee shop now it’s a bookstore and i rent out half of it to a a record store but i wanted i needed like a space to do all my stuff so up top is like my office my wife also wanted me to take all my books out of our house uh so uh that was part of it it was like getting all the [ ] out um but no i don’t really do anything i don’t really do anything with it i invest it [Music] i like investing in things that are very different than internet things so most of it’s like in income producing real estate how do you describe yourself you know i don’t do it very well uh you you nailed i i would sort of if i had to say what do i identify as i would say i identify as a writer and then i i sort of have these other things that i do in that are somewhat related and somewhat unrelated but like if i had to sort of only pick one thing or like what what do i feel like i was like meant to do it’s it’s writing so i identify first as that sean do you remember this did i ever show you this coin i used to carry around i would have it with me a lot particularly in the old san francisco office i had a coin remember no i’ve never never seen your coin what do you do there’s two face of me um no it was it said um what did it say momentous mentor yeah which means like you’re gonna die you only live once right by the way don’t you love that sam carried it around for years doesn’t know what it says on it momentous i knew that it meant like you have to live today like you’re gonna die yes right and uh i was thinking about it i bought one for 26 and i was thinking about i was like this is the greatest business of all time i just bought a like a fake coin from ryan for 26 it cost him it was just probably a post like a stamp just to mail it to me so only 50 cents there’s not gonna be any returns there’s no it’s one size fits all and it made me happy and i carried it around and i was like this is the is that the greatest business of all time selling coins it’s uh it’s been it’s been a nice business better than the publishing business right like what’s interesting about books is like like the the new book so you spend two years of your life writing something it’s like 60 000 words uh you have to you know the publisher is taking managing all of it so you know they’re they’re the middleman in all of it but like that book is 26 and people if if that book was 32 people would be upset because there’s like a a sense of what a book should be right like this is what people are willing to pay and regardless of how good the book is or not it’s exactly something of this shape i pay either nine dollars 13 or 2016. yeah right and so one of the things uh as as daley stoic which i started as this email list became sort of uh big if the idea was like okay are we gonna advertise uh are we gonna monetize this via advertising uh or are we gonna like is there stuff we can sell that you know makes it a business to pay for itself and uh as we were thinking about stuff you could do as because i came from the apparel business before i was a writer um i was like we are not doing t-shirts under no circumstances are we doing t-shirts first off because t-shirts uh uh are like are you know it’s kind of cheap you know but t-shirts are the worst business you can do so like bands become popular people build a brand the first thing they always think is t-shirts but what i remember is just how [ ] complicated t-shirts are first off because you have to get someone to make them but if you sell one t-shirt that’s already at a minimum three skus right small medium large if you want to do extra large and and uh extra small okay now five skews and then you’re like okay we’re gonna do white then we’re gonna do black so now you have ten skews right and it’s in and then then they don’t fit there’s quality control issues all so i was like we’re not doing shirts and also like shirts even though all of that people will only pay a certain amount for sure because we don’t value it as a thing so um i would think i was like i want to make something that’s better margins that’s less work all of that so i was just really thinking about and then one day i was at the airport i was at the austin airport and i was thinking about this idea of memento mori which is um like if you look at a lot of old like renaissance paintings the philosopher always has a skull on its on his desk um and so there was a philosophical genre of like reminders of mortality and i was like it would be really cool to have a reminder of that what would that be i was like oh i could get a tattoo and then i was like i don’t really want to get a tattoo and uh so i was like what could i have and the idea of the coin popped into my head and it turned out to be really cool we actually used this mint in um minnesota that invented the the alcoholics anonymous chip like that you get it like 10 years or 20 years so um they’ve been in business since 1888. wow that’s i think i think we’re their biggest customer now um uh and uh that also is a really cool business that i’ve been fascinated with but yeah that was that was close i’m going to i’m going to ask you about the minutes in a second because i have another mint that i think you’re going to get a kick out of but do uh can you reveal how many of those coins you sell a year or do you’re not talking i don’t want to say exactly how many but like ten tens of thousands uh it’s uh a lot of them and and people like i’m giving a talk in marble falls uh next week and like they bought one for each of the attendees so it also became it’s a really cool way to like what i’m interested in is not like tchotchkes or like just random ass merchandise but like what are phyllis what are physical manifestations of the ideas that i talk about that could actually provide value in some way so like i have i have this this one on my desk but then the other one uh that i have this for my others this is this one says tempest fugit which means time flies this is like a parenting one it’s just a reminder that like to be present as a parent so i kind of start with stuff that would be helpful to me and then if if it works for other people it’s good i do think entrepreneurs tend to think about digital products first and not physical products that have good margins and this so that’s been really cool well how much does a coin cost you a dollar uh more than that uh because more than that and then there’s also packaging and all that all that kind of stuff but um but yeah it’s i’ll just say it’s a good it’s a good margin uh but um but uh yeah it’s a good mark not as good as a digital product but good enough that business i feel like um you know i have this phrase you you know you you are what you admire which is like if you admire things enough you you end up moving in that direction and that’s a type of business that i’ve really like the thing the the little thing you just said gets like the highest amount of respect for me like okay elon can send a rocket to mars you know steve jobs can [ ] you know where’s turtleneck and do his thing but an entrepreneur who says well i wanted to create i really was interested in stoicism so i created this free thing to give it away and i didn’t know what the business would be the traditional model doesn’t really work ads um it would like you know how kind of shitty would a stoicism newsletter be if it was just plastered with ads uh but i did it anyways betting on myself that i’ll figure it out and then i figured it out first by having my little framework of like what’s a thing that represents this belief that has high margins that has low headache like i have a ddc business with over like 3 000 skews so when you’re saying that my body’s just like you know inside just shriveling up and dying um and i’m like oh wow how amazing would it be if i had one skew that was just high margin and like i could just make that skew amazing um so hearing you pull that off and uh you know the way kind of like sam has it and people at the conference buy it to me that’s like you know top level respect because uh the creativity that that requires and the thoughtfulness that that requires is um is kind of amazing i think most people would just kind of declare creative bankruptcy and say i don’t know i don’t know how to figure it out and just never never that’s why i think shopify is going to be like the biggest company in the world because they like let people do that do you know what i mean like you just come up with an idea and then you know it plugs into a third-party warehouse although i have a fulfillment center here in austin where i do some of the stuff out of the bookstore but just like that you can just come up with stuff and make it and sell it to people is is to me is going to unlock like so much potential um and part of the reason i’m able to have the books to like a physical space is that because most of what i sell online can subsidize like uh in person retail also right sean have you heard of th this story is going to come full circle but not till the end have you heard of stuart resnick stuart resnick no all right i bet you’ve heard oh i think i know this guy they own the pistachio company right yes so when you go to the store juice or whatever yeah so they own this it’s a privately owned company it’s probably one of the large linda and stuart resnick it’s probably one of the largest uh privately owned companies in america they do multi-billions in revenue his he started like a security business that he sold and he got some money and then now he owns palm wonder like the drink palm drink he owns um pistachios and a bunch of stuff anyway he one of his first businesses after he sold his security company made a little bit of money he bought this thing called the franklin and the franklin mint i knew i knew ryan i knew you’re gonna know what this was and the franklin mint basically started out by selling coins eventually they expanded to a bunch of other collectibles but they started selling coins and up until somewhat recently they are one of the largest i think advertisers of digital and uh not digital um print media and so like if you would open up a magazine like a usa like a tv and news guide like the things they were always selling coins and it was franklin mint and he uh sold it for like two or three hundred million dollars when he was done with it and you know who bought it recently was tai lopez oh wow didn’t he buy radio shack also and a bunch of [ ] he’s bought so much stuff hold on i’m kind of stupid what these mint okay is the mint literally a coin factory so they take metal that shape it into a coin of your choosing and then they they sell it uh or they they you know they provide it to you who sells it is that the idea is a coin factory is that what a mint is yeah although the franklin mint is like commemorative quarters and dollars and stuff right but they don’t but they do like they do that no but yes they do but they got actually sued because they use like a princess diana coin or they’ve done like a like a i don’t know like some like famous person that like middle american moms like care about you can buy like a coin with their face oh interesting i met this guy who has a very interesting path that like intertwines with the silk road and other things and uh he had said something like he’s like yeah what i’m doing now is i’m buying these email lists of like hundreds of millions of people like the you know like the leaked madison read or whatever what it was not massive what’s that ashley madison yeah yeah email list for like uh linkedin got hacked cool i’ll take all those emails and like you can’t you can’t really even send to that big of a list it’s like too dirty and you’ll get like banned or whatever but he like had some like expertise and how to send mass emails and i was like what are you gonna do with this like you start a new thing and he’s like oh no i’m just gonna find people who like trump and i’m gonna sell them coins i’m gonna sell coins and hats to trump fans and i was like i was like wow and he’s like yeah like if point two percent of my list 0.02 of my list of whatever ever converts uh like you know i’ll just make millions of dollars passively sending these emails and i was like wow this is the one of the craziest business plans i’ve ever heard there’s an argument that fox news basically exists for the sake of like reverse mortgages gold coins and other forms of grift like you if you watch fox news just the commercials you get a sense of like just how dumb the audience is to be perfectly honest and then you realize why the content it’s almost as if like i heard this great thing about spam they were saying like like you know you get an email from like a nigerian scammer and you’re like oh this is obviously spam that’s because it’s not for you right it’s for someone who’s dumb enough to to not be bothered by how all the red flags that are there and so well even further it’s uh they want people who after they get scammed won’t really know how to like have any recourse yes so they won’t be able to get back at you and so they filter out all the people who have like lawyers yeah and so when you watch fox news and you get the sense oh this exists to create the kind of customer that would fall for these like obscenely high margin almost criminal enterprises i know this is an exaggeration but but like right on this side of what’s legal or not businesses that tend to exploit not very smart or savvy people that’s why the content is what it is is to set up the commercial break where people won’t buy real things when you turn on pretty much any other form of entertainment you’re not seeing those advertisers because you’re that’s not who it’s appealing well this it reminds me of an india uh and i want to do a deep dive on this at some point but there’s like india has this culture of gurus right so like in first in terms of gods we have like whatever 50 gods so the then the gods all have like their gurus and the kind of like the saints type of people who give you know genuinely good advice but then they also kind of like do magic tricks and you’re like to show that they’re like you know you know the the man of god it’s like he can produce something in his hand but it’s like literally an illusion uh like a magic trick um but the way they work is they have this like virtue virtuous brand of being this person who only wears their white robe and they like don’t have any material possessions whatever but when you go to visit them and people i mean there’s like miles long lines like going wait like crawling up mountains literally they crawl to show their devotion to get to this person’s like thing and then you donate your gold chains you donate like gold and so these guys inevitably get raided by the government because they pay no taxes and they like you know are involved in crimes and they go they find like tons of gold literally like the physical the measurement tons of gold in their house and they have like then they’ll like license these like chip brands and like popcorn brands and stuff like that and it’s like the face of this guru but he’s selling like you know potato chips dude vikram yoga vikram yoga had ketchup i think yeah it’s crazy yeah no it’s uh it’s it’s uh it’s very strange uh once you get into sort of the back end of how some of this stuff works do you know anyone ryan who’s out selling you in terms of coins if it’s selling more coins no i mean i do sometimes wonder like when when um when we order like we’ll order like you know a bunch of the coins from the from the mint uh which is in minneapolis they’ll be like oh no we’re really backed up like sorry your order will be like in a couple weeks or whatever and i’m always like who is it who is ahead of me um but but there there is i mean so so i was thinking about it like i was thinking like okay i wanted a reminder of memento mori and then i thought coin um and and it didn’t occur to me because i had a bunch of them already so i was probably but there is a genre of there’s a thing called the challenge coin that like the military gives out or police officers give out or firefighters give out sometimes it’s like a commemoration like you visited this place but like if you did like you know this tour of duty and operation enduring freedom or whatever like they’ll they’ll often give you challenge points so i think a lot of them are like government clients or um like you know non-profits or organizations like that but like i could get them done like we’re talking about margins they would be much cheaper for me to make them in in large bulks like from china um but but we haven’t done that we’ve always used this this original place um i wanted to do made in usa but then and then as it happened during the pandemic it was great because it was like we never ran out of stock of any of our products because everything we sell is made in the u.s that’s awesome now brian i wanted to ask you because you’ve done a bunch of different things okay so you’re uh you’re a college dropout correct you um you worked for tucker max you consulted with tucker max uh robert greene who’s the kind of 48 laws of power or whatever um you’ve written a bunch of books you’ve you own a independent book shop you got your coin business you sell courses all that you’ve done a bunch of different things okay so i wanted to play a little game just to get to know you game and um and it’s called first worst best best last week okay and basically it’s um okay so what was the first job and it doesn’t have to be like a job it could be like a side hustle you had so what’s the first kind of dollar you earned i worked at it i worked at a deli at a grocery store called obexers in uh in homewood california right on lake tahoe and what were you doing at the day like making sandwiches and i worked in the stock like just like a like a just a kid i was 15 15 15 16 yeah 15 you know just like six dollars an hour whatever minimum wage was uh in california then just a you know kid who worked at a little little small town grocery and what was it like because you make six dollars an hour i don’t know how many hours you’re working but you end up with like you know a couple hundred bucks after you know a couple weeks that’s a lot of money to a kid do you remember like what you did with the money or how you felt about that that amount of money at that time you know what i don’t remember what i i was super into snowboarding so i probably bought a snowboard or something um but uh yeah it occurred to me the i was just thinking about this that i’ve basically worked non-stop since i was 15 years old like uh then i worked at i worked at wendy’s after that if i remember correctly that was a lifeguard so i’ve had like a bazillion jobs but that was that was the first one and then like i feel like at age like 18 or 19 or something stupid you’re like the boss of american apparel or something like just like something ridiculous or like at 18 you like worked for robert green writing 48 laws of power well 48 laws of power came out when i was uh like 11 years old but um so not not exactly but uh i did i started working for robert when i was 20 and then i was uh the director of marketing and american apparel like in my in my early 20s so so you when you dropped out you dropped out because what you just hated school or you had something you wanted no i liked school but i wanted to be a writer and so i i had this i was going to uc riverside so uh i was i was working for tucker who was at that point one of the first bloggers to to have a book deal um so i was like i was working for him doing like marketing and online stuff and then he got me a job at a talent agency um where i did like yeesh i could not see you fitting in yeah i was like answering phones and stuff but i worked on like new media uh like so this is right like youtube had just sold um so everyone’s sort of interested in internet talent so that’s what i was working on and then um this summer i was at the end of that summer that i was working there i was supposed to go back into college and within one week uh i got an offer to to stay on at the talent agency to i was working for this movie producer there to be his assistant uh and then uh i’d met robert greene and robert green needed a research assistant on a book he was writing called the 50th law and so why did all these people like you why did tucker hire you when you’re 18 what did you what did you do to get hired by him because at that time he’s writing basically like funny dating stories and sex stories right like that was like his blog at the time if i remember correctly i think i was very young very ambitious very hard working and i was just obsessed with the internet like what what this sort of internet culture would become and i loved books like i just i’ve always loved books and so i i think they sensed that i wanted to be a writer and they sort of went under their wing as like an apprentice you know how to do how to do what they did did you just cold email them so when i met tucker because i was writing for the college newspaper and i wrote an article about him which is what i was doing i would write articles about people in the way that now you’d be like oh i want to meet this person uh will you come on my podcast right um yeah but but this is before pocket so i would just interview people and write articles about them so that’s how i met tucker i was a huge robert green fan so i met robert through through tucker and then the talent agency uh the guy who i worked for was producing a movie about tucker’s book first book so they’re all sort of connected and then it was through robert greene that i met dov charney who was the director or who was the founder of american apparel so it all kind of was all swirling about each other and what was the first kind of like personal hustle you did right you’re helping tucker achieve his goals you’re helping robert green achieve his goals you’re helping the talent agency find talent when did ryan go into business for ryan that’s a good question um i don’t know what like the first thing i would have i mean i started my marketing company in 2011 when i was writing my first book but i think the first big bet i made on myself was i mean i’d done other like little stuff before but the first bit i in 2011 i basically quit at american apparel to go write what was uh my first book trust me i’m lying so that was like the first big bet on myself and that was a hit i mean that was that was pretty it seemed like it took off it got a ton i sold it for a good chunk of money for for at least to me then um it got a ton of attention it ironically it will it sold well but it will earn it will probably earn out its advance by this summer which will be the 10th anniversary of it like by the the i’m it’s looking like the the royalty statement i will get in july of 2022 which would be the 10-year anniversary of the book it will finally go from pi from negative to positive on the advanced statement what was your advantage i was two 250 uh it was i think it was 200 with some incentives um although when i announced it um i announced that it had been sold for 500 000 because i know i knew people nobody actually fact checks press releases so uh trust me yeah so so the whole point of the book was to prove that like uh the problems i was talking about in the in the media system in the book were real so i i promptly uh doubled the advance when i announced it and and uh nobody nobody checked that’s funny did you um so you got a big advance you didn’t have that big of a following at that time how did you finagle any advance let alone like a quarter million dollars so it’s your first time so the bet on myself was that i i left and i wrote the book first almost all nonfiction is sold uh with a proposal and then you go write the book but i didn’t i didn’t necessarily need to do that so i wrote the book so i had what was like i had a it’s like i had a good piece of property like i i wrote something that was like unlike all the other books at that time that i don’t think really there’s been that many books like it or that i would maybe um chaos monkeys would be another like similar book that i i’d sort of which i thought was good um but but so i sold it that way um so i wrote it so that i had it um but it was mostly just all the authors that i knew i sort of got in because i i’d worked for tucker i’d worked for robert i’d worked for tim ferriss at that point so i had a pretty good sort of rolodex of people who got me in the door when i when i sold that book are you still doing the deals now those type of deals now with all your latest books or are you self-published i’m still at the same publisher actually i’ve done all my books with the same publisher um uh i’ve self-published uh a children’s book and then i’ve self-published two high-end editions of traditionally published books that i have like i have a leather edition of uh the daily stoic and the obstacle is the way um but other than that everything’s been traditionally published i guess i own the audio right so why is that because like 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 and someone like you you have a a lot of business sense b yeah 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 i look at it on a case-by-case basis you’re just you’re really doing the math um will uh will the what they’re paying for it plus the royalty um what 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 um but i 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 um i 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 um and then once i have that number then i think okay 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 um 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 uh wasn’t it like wasn’t in their wheelhouse they didn’t totally get the project um 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 um fulfilling books through amazon is like in like and then also the thousand independent retailers in the united states plus every international edition you know um is extraordinarily uh logistically difficult um 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 just 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 raised and were pretty steady with daily sales and you’re like that’s because i make [ ] that can last a long time and this was actually for when you’re writing perennial seller i think you’re like proving this point is is is that still the case and considering all of your other businesses is booked 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 all but you make the bulk of your money from other students yeah it’s it’s uh most non-fiction authors make more money from speaking than from books um that’s because speaking can be more lucrative but it’s also because most authors don’t sell very many books right um so i’m in an unusual space where um my books do sell consistently and i have a lot of them uh so i make a good living from that but probably make more money from stuff other than books than books uh all in dude that’s crazy um that that you’re like the man and yet still it’s like the other well that that’s like that’s another reason to traditionally publish right so so like you you’re a publisher does not take any percentage of speaking does not take any film or tv adaptations uh does not take any ancillary products any merchandising anything like that so really this the book is um it’s not a loss leader because uh people pay for books and and books have value to people but like the the the ideas in the book everything else is downstream from whether that that takes hold or not does that make sense um 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 less significant i think um what my so so in publishing there’s the front list and the backlist front list is anything uh within one year uh that like the year of release that’s considered a frontlist title and then it becomes uh a backlist title after a year um so most titles stop selling when they leave the backlist when they leave the front list and become on the backlist but almost all of the income in publishing is from the backlist so so for me it’s about like i’ve tried to create that in my own my own catalog of like titles that sell every year um 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 anymore 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 a nude yeah yeah i mean so so like uh 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 best-selling book and i was like there’s no way that doesn’t make any sense he’s like yes it will every new year’s like it will and he’s right the book sold uh more copies this already this january than last january amazing what uh what do you do with your money yeah yeah i know you got a ranch i think you live was like my house that that so it’s it’s not like it wasn’t like a hot uh like a originally was gonna be a bookstore and a coffee shop now it’s a bookstore and i rent out half of it to a a record store but i wanted i needed like a space to do all my stuff so up top is like my office my wife also wanted me to take all my books out of our house uh so uh that was part of it was like getting all the [ ] out um but no i don’t really do anything i don’t really do anything with it i invest it um i’m i like investing in things in which state uh texas and florida and you’re just buying like what like multi-family i have some multi-family i have some mostly single uh single-family uh and then some like vacation rentals and you have a manager who do you are you hands-on with that is it a headache for you yeah i try i mean i try to have it be as little a headache as possible most of them are managed by yeah property managers um but uh but i like it’s not that i think that the stuff that i do will go away but i like the idea of like like my decision to write trust me i’m lying and not having to think about needing to sell it up front um there was a similar one when after i wrote trust me i’m lying i was like hey for you know for my next book i want to do this book about uh ancient philosophy and they were like um are you are you sure you know so they gave me less than half i got 75 000 for the obstacle is the way um which has sold you know many many times more copies than trust me i’m lying um and you know obviously set up all these other things um but when they came back with that offer i was like okay sure whatever you know it wasn’t i didn’t have to think about whether i could live on 75 000 for however long it took me to write the book because my life wasn’t set up around needing that’s that’s really like when people hear a book advance it can sound like a lot of money um like even you know two hundred thousand dollars right trust me i’m lying so but it’s just like a salary right for two years but even worse than that right so i had to i let’s say i left my job and then 18 months later the book came out um from from like when i left so 200 000 over 18 months that’s that’s pretty good but like i said it hasn’t earned another dollar for 10 years so so over 11 and a half years uh 200 000 is not is not great um but i really i wanted that’s the book i wanted to write and obviously it opened up other business opportunities but i like to be able to do my creative work um and not have to think about uh does it make sense in the dollar instead and this is this is how the entertainment business works as well like um almost all the money is in the catalog in owning the intellectual property uh over the long term but you can’t do that if you are dependent like you get paid as an author every six months uh so and you’re getting paid for the previous six months of earnings not like okay it ended yesterday here’s your thing you’re you’re getting essentially a paid from a year ago um and so that’s like you know that’s a you can be living hand to mouth that way even if you’re a very well-known person who’s in you know the media all the time and so i i want to be in a position where that’s not the case sean do you remember like uh seven maybe 2014 i think basically when when you and i were just getting to know each other uh there was this article that went viral and it said you can buy a ghost town in california for like 1.2 million do you remember that it was like you could buy like an old mining ghost town yeah and people did a group did it right and i think yeah i saw your notifications that ryan was involved in that i think ryan and his brian so ryan correct me if i’m wrong i’ve never met bro my best buddy oh really okay so listen to this shot okay so neville is good friends with brent so i’ve heard all about him so if you go on youtube sean and you type in like ghost town brent you’ll see this channel where this guy named brent he’s this really cool dude who’s got like 1.5 million subscribers on youtube uh he started living in this ghost town that he bought a while ago but just when the cove when pandemic hit he just moved there and it it went to the moon and it’s the best youtube channel i’ve watched well anyway ryan weren’t you like the you and brent were like the mind the brains behind it you were just kind of the quiet i was one i was one of the investors there’s a there’s a bunch of investors i think we know uh you probably know like half of them at this point uh or more more than half uh but i to be perfectly honest i thought it was a terrible idea i was like you’re you’re gonna lose all your money uh this is not gonna work uh but i mean i’ve known brent for so long i i just sort of was like one of the small token investors but i and i didn’t see it becoming what it was becoming i should have like i was thinking about it in terms of real estate because brett and i have invested in in real estate in austin before and so i was thinking about it in real estate and you know being from california i was like that area is like like a pit you know uh anyways uh i didn’t think about it as a content play and that’s obviously what what it ultimately probably will become i mean you could make more money off the youtube channel than the actual any money you could make off just turning it into a hotel that’s one of the things i found with the bookstore and that’s kind of where where the it clicked for me was realizing that so opening the bookstore that like that making money from selling books might be the third or fourth least important revenue stream or or use of the property like the office being number one uh the space to film and make stuff like content being number two and then like real estate being number three and then uh you know like the actual uh brick and mortar retail business being like four or five that’s amazing so you basically are like you bought a set the set actually just kind of functions it’s like what do you mean it’s like dude it’s like coffee it’s like 300 acres in the middle of the mountains yeah have you seen it shawn no no no no i’m talking about the bookshelf but it’s the same thing i mean the the ghost town is an enormous set uh it’s a set piece to film and create content and have a a life and a brand that people care about you know and uh so so hold on so it’s been many years now so what’s actually what is that today is there i don’t watch the youtube channel is there like a functioning town do people come visit what the pandemic obviously made a hospitality business you know not very viable so right now it’s it’s mostly just in the sort of rebuilding phase they’re like rehabbing all these different cabins and then he films you know if some videos there and they do like merchandise and stuff like that it’s really but like my son like my son is five he watches one of those videos every night before bed he’s like obsessed with it it’s beautiful it’s like a beautiful youtube channel it’s and brent is very endearing he’s awesome and it’s crazy i mean it’s crazy that the quality of stuff you can make of one person can make with like a drone a gopro and like you know one decent like sony camera like you can i mean he it was at one point putting out like a 45 minute video a week like he was putting like a television quality show out for millions of people you know for like a couple thousand dollars a month it’s crazy what you can do anyway it went from like zero to like 1.5 or one point i forget exactly over a million subscribers in like 18 months yeah i mean he got tons of media attention it’s done like hundreds of millions of views um i’m very bullish on youtube as a social network i’m like late to youtube ironically considering that’s like what i left school to focus on like i i saw at this talent agency i signed their first youtube client and i remember this agent coming up to me and he’s like what are you gonna do you’re gonna commission their advertising revenue and i was like i guess yeah and like that’s like of course that that’s way better than commissioning checks from you know a television series um because you just what you actually own own the stuff but um i’ve seen it even with it with daily stoic like like as an author you get recognized like every once in a while it’s actually been weird for me in the pandemic because like i haven’t done that much stuff and so every time i if i go out or i do something like i was i saw someone in austin a couple weeks ago and then i was i was just in new orleans and like because of youtube uh and and like instagram reels like the amount of like fans i see in person it’s like exponentially different than what i was getting from like who i was i see you on tick tock like every day you’re in my tic toc feed every day uh oh well i’m sorry to hear that telling me to like you know uh thanks marcus aurelius said yeah yeah tell me something some ancient dude you know said about you know remembering i’m gonna die or like you know not not being anxious about the future and i’m like yeah actually this guy’s talking some sense uh i like it and this and the the video quality’s actually really good um like i don’t know if you’re i don’t know what you’re doing for that but like it’s like a gopro that’s a gopro 9 hero it costs 600 and you can shoot in 4k video with a it doesn’t even have an external mic it’s like it’s crazy what you can do but you could do a 4k video on your iphone but when i upload on 4k my [ ] never looks good i think the gopro corrects but i don’t know the gopro does incredible the the lighting in the building i have to say not something i control is quite good um well it looks like you’re on like a farm and you’re leaning on i mean the gopros are better for outside stuff but yeah you just i mean just put it there and it shoots like you know super high quality stuff and then somebody cuts it up do you edit or you just hand that off to somebody you see i and then i i try to shoot i try to think about what i want them to make when i’m shooting it and sometimes i’ll give notes i’ll be like okay you know cut this here or whatever but i’m mostly yeah i mostly just shoot in like small blocks um and then the idea is like okay so if i’m shooting in a in you know between 30 and one minute 30 second and one minute chunks uh okay so that goes uh a content of that size can go on twitter uh instagram as a reel it can be a facebook video and it can be a tick tock so you’ve got like four shot four bytes at the apple there then that content can be packaged together to make uh videos on on youtube so i’ll take like eight of those and that can become an eight minute youtube video um and so so by shooting like these little things i get like lots of different like platforms that they can go out on so basically um well so ryan i i had i made a living with a daily email sean sean just released this new business that he’s working on which is amazing sean i gotta reply your email it’s called the milk road it’s pretty hilarious and it’s like a bit uh a crypto daily email that he’s working on with his partner ben but uh you have the daily stoic which is awesome but you have this new ish thing that seems to be like working out really well and honestly i think could be like one of your bigger businesses i also think it could be bigger because you could sell it because it’s not exactly like the ryan show but it’s called the daily dad yeah so i do two daily emails slash podcasts daily dad and daily stoke who’s who’s writing all the daily dabs i write them all i write daily dad and daley stoke what how big is that business or how big is the email uh daily dad is like 60 000 people i think um it’s weirdly not as big as i want and not just want it to be but i actually thought it would grow faster than daley stoke did and it’s actually been a little bit slower um but uh how big is the daily stove 400 oh my god really holy [ ] and do you advertise to grow these or what are you just through content then you capture you you make videos i make content uh social drives a lot of the sign ups um and then the book i mean the book sold you know well over a million copies um but yeah so i write both of them and then it’s it’s mostly organic but i’m trying to i’m having to get more serious about sort of i think some of the low-hanging fruit’s probably been picked so i’m having to start to think more seriously about it as a business not just a content that i make man you you you oh my god you’re killing me why weren’t you advertising like three or four years ago it was so much cheaper you could acquire email for a dollar fifty now it’s like five six seven dollars uh i i should have asked you so you you’re hanging out with people all the time that are you know super successful i know a bunch of people who know you and i think you’re respected in the kind of like the business world entrepreneurial world but i feel like the matthew mcconaughey i feel like you you are uh pretty grounded and you’re i don’t get the vibe from you that i get from a lot of people i hang out with which is just like more more not enough uh i’m not there yet i got to go bigger bigger and uh and really it’s just kind of like i haven’t succeeded enough yet i haven’t earned enough yet i want more money more success and i don’t get that vibe from you are you just hiding it or is that the case i mean i definitely have there’s definitely a part of me that’s in that i mean i’ve written 12 books in 10 years if i was just like oh i’m good you know like clearly there’s the drive there uh or even some might say a compulsion um i think uh so so there’s a part of it but i i have so i’ve been with my wife since we since i was 20. uh so we met like right as all this stuff was happening and so and then i had kids five years ago um so i’ve always been a little bit more of like a normal person i don’t mean that in like a [ ] up way but i haven’t been like oh i’m a digital nomad or like uh you know i’m i’m gonna go live in puerto rico for two years like you know like i’ve been more of just like a regular like i don’t say a nine to five person but like i’ve just been like more rooted in like regular people life than i think a lot of like creative entrepreneurial people i know who i tend to find are a bit more like chaotic it sounds judgmental but just it’s a different lifestyle and so i think that’s i think that’s a part of it no i know what you mean like for example right now a whole bunch of my friends are either you know like you said they’re crypto rich moving to puerto rico they don’t pay taxes they’re going to miami because i heard the actions there right now i’m doing this doing that and i’m just like but you know like i just got i have two little babies and i’m like what the idea of moving like i mean the idea of like getting the kids into the car to go to the park is like overwhelming let alone like uprooting my life in some way in any way taking like massive risks now just is not like appealing to me in the same way like when i was 24 i remember i moved i picked up i moved to silicon valley i didn’t know what i was gonna do but i was like this is where the action is i’m just gonna move to silicon valley and then i ended up getting um this job working with this like billionaire dude in the office he had this dope office and i remember i slept in the office like 232 days out of the 365 days and i was just loving it i wasn’t like i was being forced nobody’s forced the the office had an apartment right don’t feel bad it was like it was like it had like two million dollars with the furniture it was a lovely it was a billionaire a better imagine peter thiel’s office yeah i wasn’t sleeping in a garage like the bathroom floor was heated in the morning so your feet were your toesies weren’t cold so you know it wasn’t super rough but nonetheless i basically was choosing to obsess and like go all in in a way i was like excited about that and able to do it in a way that i couldn’t as real life stuff layered on like relationship and kids and things like i remember when clubhouse blew up like a couple months ago or six i was like what like i was like i don’t even want to go to a real conference let alone be in like an internet room conference like i it was just totally inconceivable to me that anyone would want to do it have the time to do it it that’s so that’s sort of not been i actually like writing you know what i mean so the other part of it is it’s not just like the sort of uh wanting to have more of a normal sort of rooted life although i feel like i do weird unusual i take risks in other ways living on this farm and stuff but um it was also like for me like i i writing to me is a calling that’s a little bit different than i don’t know um making money in crypto or something like it’s it’s a blessing and a curse right it’s a blessing in that it’s fulfilling it gives you purpose it’s artistic it’s like a thing you master there’s also i think a ceiling on it you know and like you can you can be good at it there’s obviously the jk rowlings of the world but like you know um but there’s not a ceiling to being famous i mean you know we’re both friends with tim ferriss and like his fame allowed him i don’t know what he’s worth but he’s probably worth hundreds of millions of dollars because of his investments yeah i mean there there’s not a ceiling on being well known and getting access to no but i mean you sort of you end up in different niches right if you if you’re called to be a poet you obviously would be more lucrative to write business books but like you are where you are you know there’s a certain amount of uh like you don’t choose what muses visit you i know that sounds a little mystical but like you i like sometimes people have been like oh he’s writing about stoicism to get rich which i always laugh at because like again i if i if being rich was what was motivating to me i would do literally anything but this right like this is the worst possible of the things to affect um but i guess my thing is like i i really like the routine and the ritual of sitting down to write which is also i think inherently a bit grounding in a way that some of these other pursuits maybe aren’t what does your uh normal workday look like i mean are you are you doing like a nine to five uh not nine to five like i wake up early i i go for a run or a walk with the kids whether we’re at my farm or my place in in town um i don’t check my phone in the morning i don’t eat in the morning i usually journal in the morning and then i go i write usually for two or three hours and then the rest of the day after that is business other work stuff and i’m i’m done by four almost every day so i’m probably work eight thirty to four seems like a good asset i like it i try to i but i like it’s important there are also i i don’t know to me being really great at what you do and somehow managing to be like a somewhat normal person to me is actually like a rarer thing to do than to to just be great at what you’d like i think if anyone decided to be like tom brady’s tom brady but there’s a cost to being tom brady but like if you choose to be that singularly dedicated to what you do it’s easier to be better at what you do than to say like i’m gonna work nine to five and be great at what i do if that makes sense so you um used to work for tucker max you then became buddies with them and um you had a a business together but i’ve never asked either of you about this you’ve probably it’s based off of some of the stances i know that you’ve seen you’ve written some great stuff about like a letter to your dad about voting for trump i know that you’re against like some a lot of these statues and you’ve donated money to that and uh tucker i think has gone the other way where no i wouldn’t i don’t want to call it the opposite because of course he’s probably against a lot of the things or for a lot of things you are but maybe different and he actually recently came out this article that uh sean and i talked about it’s called doomsday optimism and it’s about how barry bluntly but he’s such a good writer that like everything he writes it seems like convincing but basically he talks about how he thinks like the american government is basically gonna collapse in two to four years and how he’s preparing for doomsday and it was like crazy fascinating but i what is your opinion on that i’ve been eager to ask you what you think about that and what if you have an opinion on it uh tucker was very good to me early in my career and uh set me up for the success that i’ve had so i feel very grateful for that in a lot of ways he and i live in very different realities now um i think uh i don’t know exactly what caused that or or what the driving force of that is i mean i have some theories but a lot of that stuff that i see and read i think it probably has nothing to do with whatever he’s talking about it’s it strikes me as um as driven by driven by something else um which i’ve seen a lot of like i think the pandemic brought it out in a lot of people they’re probably so we both know but i’ve noticed a kind of a radicalization or an untethering from people that otherwise i would have assumed were in in alignment on i’ve just noticed uh an untethering that i don’t i don’t know where it’s going but it certainly worries me is that a diplomatic answer yeah and i don’t really like that answer because i understand what you’re trying to do i i i think you could you could not agree with his opinion and still be respectful towards a but i understand that you’re trying to like keep it you know be cool but like in one regards i could be like well i i i unders i actually could see ryan thinking almost something similar because he lives in the country and he likes privacy and like he you know you’re like so so high iq that high iq people typically are like quirky and have like weird opinions but then on the other side i know like some of the things that you stand for and i could see you just laughing at that being like what are you ridiculous uh but it’s it’s it’s it’s weird i i’ve noticed this sort of trend in like sort of tech entrepreneurial people where i don’t want to say fads but it’s almost like these idea viruses sort of enter the community and some people end up taking them to like very strange extremes so like polyamory was one a few years ago and then crypto is one i i i have like i’m not anti-crypto i i i think there’s a lot in crypto i’m invested in it too but then then it then in the pandemic there was like then there was this sort of anti-vaxx uh anti-lockdown anti like coveted denialism that was one and then i’m i’m very alarmed by some of the people that i know in that space that are now going in sort of um like a it’s worse than a trumpian direction it’s more of like a january sixth like uh end of the gov like a like a toxic uh like we gotta buy guns and i have guns but there’s this like almost like doomsday like disaster cultish direction that it’s going in and i don’t it strikes me as coming from somewhere other than like what they’re actually say it’s coming about does that make sense and by that do you mean uh belief is coming from some other like kind of reasons or the motives meaning like trying to make money yeah like if we perpetuate this we’ll get more notoriety we’ll get more money we’ll get more attention like you know there’s some people like clickbait in general is that right like i may not believe this like if you watch a sports talk show on espn they don’t necessarily think that lebron james is better than michael jordan but they know if they say it it gets clipped and it gets shared and so there’s like this yeah i do i perform versus like do you think that the belief has come from somewhere or the motive might be driving them to extreme you know radicalization i think it’s both those things so i think number one uh all these people are are very smart right and so if you’ve built your whole career being smart and being a contrarian it can put you in an uncomfortable position where you’re like rejecting things that make sense because that’s instinctively where you go like this is what happened with with with dove at american apparel his whole cr everything he did was [ ] insane i’m gonna start a usa apparel company i’m not gonna use professional models i’m gonna pay a living wage none of that makes any sense that was all those individually or very bad ideas but he somehow built a billion dollar company out of it so then when people were like you need to hire a professional operator uh inside you know you need to hire a real cfo and a real cmo and all this stuff he was like no right so he just got used to rejecting everyone’s advice and it led to this downward spiral so i think that there’s a little bit of that i think there’s um i think there is this sort of as people become like i think there’s you know what audience capture is where you sort of get used to telling the audience what they want to hear and so the algorithm is very seductive it tends to reward like obviously controversial things it rewards uh you know uh polarizing things and so i think what happens as certain people’s relevance slips they are more prone to it’s like you know you’re always putting stuff out and if what you’ve put out and in the world hasn’t been working and then suddenly you like you chance upon something as as uh compelling as like anti-vaxx or uh this or that that then if you it’s like you’re getting it’s like a blast from the past you’re like [ ] this is it right so i think there i think there’s some of that uh that that’s taking that’s spiraling people i also think just the pandemic [ ] with people’s head it’s been a long life we’re not meant to live like this i think it’s that um the other thing like in like a joe rogan or some of the intellectual dark web people i’m also noticing i just like when you’ve been very mistreated by like say the media or just like elite culture um it’s very hard for you to agree with those people even when they’re right so you end up going back to the contrarianism you end up like going against things that ordinarily you wouldn’t agree you would totally agree with but from a tribal perspective you know you you it’s imagine if trump had gotten reelected like how many liberals would have trouble with the vaccine because you would have to then agree with a trump thing um i think i think we’re seeing that i think this is why in a lot of men who have been uh sort of not media darlings are going towards some of the direction of things we’re talking about it’s just a sort of like i’ll die before i agree with those people on anything there’s a there’s this chart i saw that was amazing it was in a cr it was in a crypto annual report and i said yeah what is what are some of the underlying things that drive this like crypto’s like a religion it’s like a cult it’s like this very very strong it’s not just the same as like i like this business i i’m gonna invest in this asset you know people don’t feel the same way about bitcoin as they do you know a piece of property in dallas and so it was this chart and the chart basically was on the on the on the y-axis it was like do you believe it was about institutions it goes do you believe that institutions are like credible or not credible meaning like are they honest or are dishonest i think the way they put it and then on the other side was are they competent or incompetent as i rank these institutions i was like the us government it’s like dishonest not not competent incompetent and then it was um the cdc and it’s and it showed how they’ve been moving over time and basically every institution that you can think of whether it’s universities whether it’s health organizations the nih and who and cdc whether it’s the us government they are all sort of traveling towards dishonest and incompetent as the general public viewpoint of them and this has a bunch of implications it’s like well so people so the things that reject institutional beliefs so you see joe rogan just explode in popular you know he’s bigger his show is bigger than quote unquote mainstream media he is more mainstream than mainstream media but his brand is not an institution and he doesn’t look like them he doesn’t read off a teleprompter and so he’s got this like appearance of higher honesty higher competency and so the same thing is true with crypto which is non-government money and blah blah blah and so all these things are like on trend right now and that doesn’t necessarily make them more honest and competent but it is the perception that’s good yeah and when i was listing the different things the other one i put in there is i think like psychedelics is another one where it just becomes like this idea virus and i’m not saying that i have a disagreement about it i just it’s very interesting how these things just sort of infect these different subgroups and become almost a new it’s their identity is primarily in that the the it’s like it’s very tempting to fall into a thing where you’re smarter or better than other people that sort of outsider mentality and so i think i’m just i’m very wary of how that’s affected people that i know and i’m worried it’s taking some of the more fragile people into a dark potentially dangerous direction where they’re just they’re [ ] with things that once you [ ] with they’re very difficult to unfuck and speaking of psychedelics and we’ll wrap up a second here um i saw i follow uh so we’ve talked about aubry marcus on the podcast because aubry has a crazy story because his dad liking invented like the fleshlight and then he like kind of parlayed that into building this awesome uh supplement empire but i got this instagram ad or maybe i just saw on his page so sean i don’t know if you saw this aubrey marcus the guy we talked about he has this documentary where somewhat recently he spent i think seven days in complete darkness like and and i heard maybe it was in sarah gordo am i getting the details no it’s definitely not at saragodo okay well for some reason i thought it was at yours okay i’m wrong then but did am i right though and that it was like five or three or seven like a multiple days in complete pitch i don’t know i haven’t i’ve not heard about that but i am uh oh man i like aubry alive i’ve known aubry a long time but he’s he i i’m a little worried about him he he he’s a wild man sean you didn’t see this so basic idea why did he do okay so so basically he had a uh a night vision camera looking at him and he was in a small room with a bed and basically pitch dark and after 24 hours or something like that he kind of starts hallucinating and kind of goes crazy and he’s talking to himself and the whole documentary is is basically showing the night vision camera of him talking to himself and then like a voiceover and some flashbacks of him talking like what he was experiencing to that point and he was trying to go through like almost a psychedelic experience because i guess there’s something where i don’t know the science behind it where you’re in the dark for a long time you start going nutty and have some realizations i don’t know if it’s true or not but it was [ ] insane it was crazy i mean the way that i see it is like to me it’s like i don’t care if i’m an outdoorsman if i see a huge epic mountain i’m gonna be in awe and that’s how i was with aubry marcus in this documentary i’m like i don’t care about drugs i don’t care about this guy that’s not that much you just saw the ad i just saw i i watched parts of it i started watching parts of it because he released like five minutes at a time on his instagram and i started watching parts of it he is it’s the [ ] craziest thing i’ve ever seen the guy’s insane uh you have to watch this [ ] it is why did he come out okay or you haven’t gotten to the end well this was filmed like a year ago and he was on instagram so so we assume it all worked out okay well the reason i didn’t buy it is it i’m afraid i’m kind of afraid to watch it but like he’s wild man because i watch his instagram and i see some of the [ ] he does and i’m like this is i’m just i’m very i’m very concerned that these people are messing with their brain chemistry in a way that it’s hard to come back from and you know uh i i i am not a fan of uh this sort of like uh prescribed medicine for yourself to heal unnamed traumas like i i think it’s going to end very badly maybe i’m a little conservative uh and i’m missing out on something but i i don’t think you should [ ] with your brain the way some of these people are [ ] with their brains and i think it’s gonna i think we’re art we’re starting to see some of the ramifications of it with some of the stuff we’re talking about here but i i think this is hard to put back in the bottle yeah this this is wild this is are you looking it up yeah i’m reading about it right now what does it say is it seven days it was like days so like okay there’s a part of this i can get behind which is like you know people whether they go try to climb mount everest or wim hof getting in a cold black cold bath every day to like you know challenge themselves to like uh like it’s a you know there’s a form of meditation for example so he says my thinking was this if the prospect of sitting in the dark with just your own thoughts frightens you maybe that’s exactly where you need to be oh my god rattlesnakes scare me too i don’t need to get bit by rattlesnake and so on for me there’s a part of this that i actually like i get part of that which is like um i think the more comfortable you could be with yourself and by yourself and not need stimulation not need others not need constant entertainment i do think that that is like a direction personally that i would like to go in where i can i can be at peace and happiness without something going on now in this and this one i think is less it to me it’s less scary than like being like yeah i’m gonna start micro dosing lsd or like i’m gonna go on this ayahuasca trip in the [ ] forest because i heard joe rogan say that it was transformational to me that’s like way higher risk and um maybe not necessary compared to you know i guess this darkness thing is a little bit less permanent feeling for me but i mean that’s what they do to like break them i i don’t think it’s something you want to be messing with but again yeah maybe it is like deeply traumatic i’m not sure hey you know what the phrase is whatever doesn’t kill you makes you weaker seriously man i don’t i don’t know whatever doesn’t kill you [ ] you up really bad the way i always read these is to me these are like um these are content stunts right this is no different than jackass and a bunch of other things like maybe some people come from a good place and i’m just kind of skeptical about all this stuff like for i’ll give you ryan i’ll make it personal for you which is like when i saw the daily stoke i was like oh that’s smart stoicism is this growing trend he probably likes stoicism but like you can like it without having to do all the work of creating a daily email and content around it like that is the opportunistic side of this like kind of cool niche thing that’s clearly growing and i’ve said i i don’t know you right so i’m just thinking from a farm thinking oh that’s smart um and you know he probably recognized this growth and said okay i could build a cool brand around this thing that i like and i see is growing and so when i see and you know so for example if i see you making a tick tock every day about stoicism i think to myself well you know uh i don’t know how much of that is like well this content is gonna work so i’m gonna do it versus i really just needed to get this off my heart and share this with the world so similarly when i see you know these stunts i think to myself well they know this is content that’s gonna hit and they can get a bunch of attention from it and like did he really need to do this and want to do this i’m not sure right those motivations get mixed i know for myself they get mixed because you know if i i’ve had a bunch of tweets go viral you know i added 200 000 twitter followers last year it’s very addictive and in uh i don’t know if you saw his uh the the um the stand-up special that that hussain is doing but did you see him when he was in austin he has this part in it did you see when he was in austin i saw him in san francisco i live in san francisco so i saw him when he was here and he’s got this whole part where he’s basically like you know he’s like i challenged you know this dictator who was doing this thing and then boom that clip goes viral i made fun of trump at this thing boom that clip goes viral the likes the views the followers the comments and he’s just like [ ] inject this into my veins i need that next hit so i went after the next big dictator and then the next big fish and then all of a sudden like you know there was a price to be paid for and he talks about how he received something in the mail uh that was like you know something like anthrax looking thing and it got on his kid and it turned out to be all okay but like his wife was like dude you have to figure out how to keep maybe you shouldn’t be poking it’s very important and that’s kind of what you’re talking about right right there you got to figure out how to keep that on a leash and i think about that a lot and i think about it you know even with what i do i remember i was uh i was on some big morning show and i remember thinking like there’s a i know what i could do to make this like national news like i know i could i’m i’ve got a you know an audience of several million people right now what what and then just going like life is too [ ] short and also i want to continue to live in reality and so i think what happens is certain people get desperate or maybe their judgment is not good or they don’t have someone in their life that’s like uh you know that could work but what about this this this and this as a consequence and uh you can you can become unhinged very quickly um especially if there is any also comorbidities with like a mental illness or you know like and so i it most of the people who want to be in the public eye you’re already a little you know like that uh and so you got to be really really careful and i’m i’m worried about where some people i know are going yeah sam as a fitness influencer i’ve been wanting to talk to you also about your excessive exercise and what this might be leading to hey man you might spend three days in darkness only doing squats uh just to you know hit those views i’m in a good place my friend i’m i’m doing everything right at the moment we’ll see how long that could last ryan this has been awesome man i appreciate you coming on this is fun um thanks for thanks for coming in the they didn’t even say the name of the book courage is calling um it’s awesome i i’ve not read that one yet but i’m gonna buy it i’ve read everything else perennial seller obstacles away conspiracy i guess i’ve read four conspiracy and um uh trust me i’m lying and then the middle two are just the stillness one i haven’t read that one stillness this is the key and then ego is the enemy is the one i think they’re missing the ego is very good and obstacles always very good those are both both great well and you’re awesome i appreciate you thanks coming you