— I’m kicking off this post on Friday (my time) with a bit of an explanation about how this whole blogging gig is gonna roll going forward. I think I’ve finally nailed down how I want to keep slinging words as a blogger with a paid option. I went paid back before all the Substack bullshit even existed—I did it in 2021 during the COVID circus, and my setup is totally in-house. I don’t rely on Substack or any other platforms, and it’s been working like a charm. I’ve got hundreds of subscribers shelling out cash, plus over 50 lifetime members who dropped 500 bucks a pop. But at the same time, I’ve been fucking weary of the whole blogging grind. Still, I love it. I’ve been out there grinding since 2003, so we’re talking 22 years, over 5,500 posts, and at least a few hundred loyal bastards who’ll stick with me no matter what crap I churn out. I’d like more, because I’d like to keep doing it, but social media just kills me sometimes. It’s like an endless stream of doom-scrolling bullshit, and I don’t want to blog like that. I don’t want the people who read me to think like that—oh, the world is ending. No, it’s not. Not even fucking close, not in a million years. But the reason people peddle that crap is simple: it sells their products. The only reason they do it. Your health is going down the tubes? Buy this. Buy that. It’s all bullshit anyway.

That said, I’ve gotta admit my longtime friend Mark Sisson lit a fire under my ass recently. After he sold his business to Kraft Heinz for roughly 200 million bucks, then created a successful shoe company, now in his early 70s, the guy’s still hungry to do stuff. So he launched a new blog where he’s just gonna be untethered—pure Mark, the way I’ve known him for years and years, but the version he could never talk about publicly before. That’s what I’m hoping for, at least. So I’m thinking, okay, if he’s jumping back in, I’m staying in. But how? I’ve thought long and hard about quitting—hell, I’ve pondered it so many times—but at the same time, I’m like, Richard, you’ve got a legacy of all these years, plus lifetime members who paid you 500 bucks to stay in the game forever. I feel like I owe it to them to keep going until I just can’t take it anymore. So I’ve been wrestling with myself for months on how to make this work, and I’ve come up with a model that fits me.

It’s modeled after various other successful folks out there, but for me, it’s gonna be like this: It’s damn hard for me to zero in on a single-purpose post about anything, but what I can do is say, okay, here’s 3 to 5 things I want to rant about, and I’m good at that—with a total post length of 1,000 to 2,000 words. Now, about the paid versus free split? I’m borrowing another model for that. All my posts are gonna be pretty much the same in terms of quality, but here’s the deal: Monday through Friday, they’re always open to the public—free for anyone. If I post on Saturday and/or Sunday, those are for members only. There’s no real difference in the content—it’s all gonna be solid. But if you like what I drop in those one, two, or three posts Monday through Friday, and then I fire off one on Saturday and you’re jonesing for more? You gotta pay up. You gotta get off the shitter and decide: am I gonna pay for the content Richard does, or just accept the free stuff?

This relieves me of all the decision trees. How TF do I know if some content should be free or paid? Now, it’s simply, what day of the week?

— Tom McDonald put this together in a day.

— Always juxtapose. It makes you smarter.

Juxtapose our current VP with the former day-drinking skank who stumbled her way up by mainly sucking BBC.

— This is not the way, though.

You do not want to appear like common niggers.

I’ll be back.