 When it comes to books, people buy copies of their own book to get on the New York Times list. It's a game. It's a game. I didn't do that. I know people who pay people to write their book and then buy all their own books. So they didn't write the book and they didn't sell the book. But now they're New York Times best-selling authors. I'm over here salty because I hit number 11. Number 11 doesn't get the fucking sticker. You only get sticker if you're 1 through 10. You know how bad I was? You know what I was about that? But at the same time, I sold, I really did write it and I really did sell it. So it's like you're not comparing the same thing. You sound like an artist right there, right? That's the exact same game in the same struggle in that particular space. It's literally, oh, the charts, they're read. They're people paying for these. I actually wrote my song. I didn't have it. That's the exact struggle you lived it through. When I signed with my publisher, you know, because this first book was with Penguin Random House, which is the equivalent of Atlantic Records, the big label, you know, and when I signed with them, I mean, do we still have time when I talk about this? No, yeah, you're good. Go ahead. Okay. When I signed with them, they asked me straight up, like, so who do you want to write your book? I'm like, come again? Like, like they expected me to get someone to hire someone to write the book. Wow. That's crazy. I've written everything up to now. Why would I hire someone else to write this? And I just want to give you a quick little snippet on, like, what numbers look like on the publishing side, because the next books that I'm creating this year are going to be all independently published. I have two possibly three books I'm dropping this year and they're all self-published. And again, you know, Ryan with the huge inspiration for that and just like Chance and following these like independent artists were like really intelligently, intelligently navigating the system. And, you know, I'm grateful for having this book out and it's reached a lot of people. You know, we sold 10,000 copies, but I also haven't seen a single dime since my advance. My advance on this was $150,000, which is good for a first book advance. 150k plus 15k for Audible. So it's 165k. Okay. Now that advance will split up over four payments over two years. Yeah. Four payments over two, maybe two and a half years. So it's like, I didn't get it all at once, 15% of that goes to my agent. So I'm walking away with maybe 120 before taxes over two to three years. So that's not really that much money at all. And the way that it works with book publishing, I'm not sure how it is with records. I'm sure there's similar. You know, it's like, I have to pay back that advance before I make any actual money off of the world. These are the book and but they don't count a sale for a sale. The book sales, this hardcover sells for, I don't know, like almost 30 bucks, hardcover, maybe $25, but they only count a percentage of that hardcover price as attributed towards my advance. So maybe they only count five to 10% of that as going towards the advance. So I need to sell like 50 to 100,000 copies before I see any more money back, probably more than that. Before I see any money from the actual is very hard. And these are books. Not even music. Okay. Books. Okay. People only even reading one. Um, but check this out. I sold, um, I sold 30,000 copies of this book. Okay. Let's just say for shade first, it's a lot for, for sake of argument, let's just say that that's at a $20 cover price. Now 150 K upfront, minus 15% for my agent over two years. Or if I'd sold it all myself on Amazon, just self distributed at $600,000. So I missed out on 450 grand by publishing with the big publisher. Yeah. I got in the bookstore. Yeah. I mean, Barnes and Noble, my mom loved that shit. But like at the end of the day, you know, I'm out for 50 K. And that's, you know, and I did all the, the, the publisher, Sean didn't do anything. The reason why they signed with me for that amount was because they knew I already had the numbers to drive the sales. They only wanted me because I could already do the work. You know, they didn't get me on Trevor Noah. I said, get me on Trevor Noah. I never got on. You know, you know, that's, see, I mean, that's something that I was thinking about earlier that we got a touch on the fact you, you have the platform to do it, the marketing, but that's a huge aspect that this takes out, right? You don't have to pay as much for marketing. So let alone the fact that you get a bigger cut of whatever you're selling, let alone the fact you get higher open rates and all those things. The fact that you're marketing is not zero, but it gets far closer to zero than you would get running ads and all the other things that you would do. As a matter of fact, it actually creates more opportunities because now you can get ROI on certain opportunities that you wouldn't even do because you couldn't get ROI. Like I can now just text message, oh, then you bam, get a ROI on that where in doing a Facebook ad in a lot of cases, but depending on your size and the brain and all that stuff, you wouldn't be able to even fill out that fill up that venue or the how much you would have to invest wouldn't be able to bring back the ROI that will make it worth doing. So no, I think I think we're going to get to a point, hopefully, right? Or hopefully not, right? It just makes it better for people like us where people start to ignore the vanity as much because the vanity always dilutes the economics and the economics. That's a quotable. That's a quotable. That's a quotable. Vanity dilutes economics in most cases, in most cases. Sometimes they're the same. Most times are not. Yeah. Not to mention the fact that at the end of the day, I don't actually own this book. I can't, you know what I'm saying? I don't own the publishing to this. So technically, it's illegal for me to give out e-book copies of this for free if I wanted to. Technically. Well, yeah, I don't own it, you know, because Random House owns this. The way that they make money is they buy every single book and hope that three of them a year explode, you know, Barack Obama. Yeah, Barack Obama got a $40 million advance for two books. He's taking all my money. I'm not going to get a better advance now because Barack's taking all my money, you know, which now big publishers aren't dead because, you know, Penguin Random House, they own like the majority of the publishing rights to most of the big versions of the, you know, King James version of the Bible. And then like they own so many. What? I never thought about it. Just weird to think that somebody owns the. Yeah, I mean, they don't own the Bible, but like they own all the popular versions of it. So it's like they're printing money forever. Publishing is not dead by any stretch of the imagination, but it just doesn't make sense for me. You know, and I've been working on another book this year and I pitched it to my agent and she loved it. And then I was like, wait a minute, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Wait, why would I want to do this again? And in person, if you ever watch an hour and a half into this interview, which I know you won't, I still love you and maybe we'll work together in the future. But I'm just saying, you know, I'm not going to lose half a million dollars again on this. I'm sorry. I can't do that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it doesn't make sense that you're an entrepreneur, right?