The 12 Awards Of 2023: No.1 Unsexy Business, Wildest Predictions & More

Andrew Wilkinson

Alright now we're

Shaan Puri

Ready for part 2 of the Millie Awards? We've got a bunch of categories, like **Breakout Company** or **Product of the Year**, and "Who is the craziest or most delusional person we met this year?" We also have things like our favorite content, books, and podcasts that we consumed. What is the best of the best? One of my favorites is **Unsexy Business of the Year**. So, what's a business that, on the surface, looks maybe boring or flies under the radar but actually secretly crushes it? We each share our own, so enjoy part 2 of the Million Words. Alright, the next category that we have is the **Craziest, Most Delusional Person** that you met this year. This is somebody who is kind of out there; they broke your frame a little bit. It could be good delusional crazy or bad delusional crazy. This is just saying this person thinks way differently than you, and they're a bit like they're living in their own world. This was a tough one for me; it was a tough category. Sam, who did you have?

Sam Parr

So, the easy one was Elon Musk. Do you guys remember how Elon and Zuck almost got into a fight? That was hilarious! I think Elon’s insane, but I didn’t want to pick him because that’s too easy. So, I chose this guy named Val, who I’ve met via Hampton. You probably have seen him on Twitter; his name's Val. Basically, Val was under the radar for years. I mean, he’s probably 45 years old, and he just started using Twitter. He built a bunch of businesses. He was a Soviet Union immigrant who came to America at age 19 and built a business that made $10,000,000 in profit in year one. I started hanging out with him, and now he’s got this massive set of businesses that probably do like $150,000,000 to $200,000,000 a year in revenue. He owns all of them and has never raised money for any of them. I invested in one of his real estate deals right when I met him. He was new to it, and I got a great return, so I did another one with him. I started talking to him, and he’s like, “Yeah, we own this many tens of millions of dollars of Brooklyn real estate.” And I was like, “Val, what...”

Shaan Puri

the hell how did you figure out how

Sam Parr

To do this, he goes, "Well, I just did the math, and I did this, and I did this." He was so logical and yet so calm about it. He was comfortable with the risk, so I gotta give love to Val. Here's a fun fact about him: I started talking to him even more. He wakes up at 4 AM and starts working at 3 PM, basically working until 4 AM. That's his life. I'm like, there are so many reasons why that's bad, but he was calmly just saying, "Yeah, but it works for me." He's got five kids. I love people that have tons of kids, so this guy is the best. He seems like a good dad and a good husband, but he does crazy business stuff—just absolutely crazy. Yet, he's so calm about it. He's one of the craziest people that I've ever met.

Shaan Puri

andrew you wanna go next

Andrew Wilkinson

Sure, so I actually struggled with this. I think I said Brian Johnson - he was the person that comes to mind. Really, really nice, interesting guy, but definitely crazy with all the health stuff he's doing. Elon Musk is another obvious answer, but I actually couldn't think of somebody that was crazy. So I actually inverted it. I said, "Who is the sanest, calmest, most boring person?" Chris and I got to meet Michael Dell this year, and Michael Dell is worth $65 billion.

Sam Parr

that's insane

Andrew Wilkinson

And we sat down with him. I'm going like, "Okay, I'm gonna crack this guy open." Right? Like, you read his book, it's all very tame. His public persona is very, you know, serious and calm and nice and all that kind of stuff. His book is literally called "Play Nice But Win." So me and Chris, we go into this office. You know, he's got this huge [office, presumably]...

Shaan Puri

sorry go ahead

Andrew Wilkinson

So, we go into this huge gray office park. We're in this boardroom, and he sits down with us. Chris and I just walked away thinking, "Oh my God, he's like the 'I can't believe it's not butter' of billionaires." He's just like steady Eddie, super nice. We're asking him, "Dude, what do you do with your money? Have you gone crazy? Do you own 20 houses? Do you own a bunch of planes?" And he's like, "Nope. I just love operating my business and growing it over time." I think he owns two or three nice houses—obviously, they're very, very nice houses—and one plane. That was it. We couldn't get anything else out of him. He told us this anecdote, which shows how much of a baller he is. He goes, "Yeah, so about 20 years ago, I took $200 million and started a family office. In the family office, I wanted to make like a 10% return, so I hired these really smart guys. They started doing private credit." I don't know if you guys know what that is, but usually, it's lending to people that the bank won't lend to, so it's higher-risk lending. One of the people he lent to was, I think, a billionaire who owned a hockey team in Dallas or something.

Sam Parr

When you were saying that, I was thinking of your cousin Dom down the street who's going to buy a rookie LeBron card and flip it, I guess, right? Oh yeah.

Shaan Puri

totally so so he

Andrew Wilkinson

He goes, "Yeah, and then one day I just got a call and they said, 'Well, you own the Dallas Stars now.'" I think it was the Dallas Stars, but some professional sports team. He had just literally just owned it because he had lent the guy money and the guy defaulted. That's how much of a baller Michael Dell is.

Sam Parr

dude he totally spf'd your ass see elizabeth holmes you I bet you michael bell is just

Shaan Puri

way more viscous basement dude no the basement's got something crazy in it

Sam Parr

This guy is lying to you. Michael Dell is... in order to get there, Andrew, you know more than me, but in order to get there, you have to be the sharkiest of all sharks.

Andrew Wilkinson

I don't I don't agree with that

Sam Parr

what there is

Shaan Puri

no I think you

Andrew Wilkinson

You have to be very aggressive, but I do think you can be... You have to be a wacko, right? You have to go... You have to be a maniac. You have to go extreme. But I think you could be nice.

Shaan Puri

I can't find this client info

Hubspot

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Shaan Puri

Dude, have you ever used a Dell computer? A Dell computer is the technology equivalent of what you just described. It's like the... the most "Can't Believe It's Not Butter" of computers. That... that... by the way, I don't even know what that analogy means, but... yeah, Chris said...

Andrew Wilkinson

it it just made sense when he when he said it

Shaan Puri

it's kind of an insult I think

Andrew Wilkinson

right no it's like he's just like he's straightforward you know

Shaan Puri

It's like saying someone is, you know, "the missionary position of lending." It's like...

Andrew Wilkinson

exactly did you

Shaan Puri

Just diss me. It's like, "No, missionary's great. Everybody loves you," right? And it's like, "Yeah, but you don't want to be called missionary."

Sam Parr

it's the dad jeans of billionaires sean what's yours

Andrew Wilkinson

nicest guy ever

Sam Parr

yeah right dude

Andrew Wilkinson

no no I swear to god

Sam Parr

right when you walked out the room he was probably

Andrew Wilkinson

Just like... here's how I know. Here's how I know you can always tell whether someone's like a psycho or scary based on how their employees talk about them, right? Their employees love him. They gush about him: > "He's so nice. He was so respectful to everyone. Someone came in and brought water to him, and he looked them in the eye and said their name and said thank you." Like, he is a nice guy.

Shaan Puri

Wow, a profound story you just told. That was amazing! I thought that was going to be something crazy... Voiceovers... Alright, so this was kind of tough, but then I realized I had an answer. I did a call the other day with a guy. Ben was like, "You've got to meet this guy. I met him at a brunch." Ben's thing is he always says, "This guy's got the juice." I was like, "He's got the juice?" He goes, "This guy's overflowing with the juice!" I was like, "Alright, I gotta meet this guy." So you get on a call... [The transcription ends abruptly]

Sam Parr

seem like a brunch guy what were you doing

Shaan Puri

I wasn't at the brunch ben was at the brunch oh okay so you know like in when people used to fight back in the day and they'd be like I nominate my second to fight for me that's ben ben ben does all the fighting he gets out in the room and meets people so anyways he he's like he gotta meet these guys we get on a call and the guy's like he starts talking and immediately I love him why because I love the middle eastern accent anyone who's like persian iranian my friend they're like oh my god I love like they could tell me any story they could tell me that same michael dell story and I would have felt like it's an hbo documentary like it's so good to me so anyways he he's got the accent. 1. 2 he goes love your podcast look look I have a podcaster he holds up these headphones he goes me and my wife we get high and then we record it and I was like okay alright and then he's like that's just how we started we hadn't even said anything yet he's like I'm like so what do you work on and he's like I he's like american food is shit and I'm like I think I agree but okay where are you coming from with this and he's like I he's like I'm a super smart guy sold my last company decided I was like I went back to turkey where I'm from and I ate a banana and I was like this is what food is supposed to taste like so he's like I realized I can use ai to grow better crops like I can literally grow better food if I take everything in machine learning he's like I trained a dataset on all like scientific papers I scraped all the scientific papers from like the journals and I trained a version of gpt only on that and I tried to figure out what can I do to get more minerals in the soil so that american food which is like it's the same food it's a banana but it tastes bad and it doesn't it doesn't taste like as rich as it does in other places and it's like deficient in all these minerals and so he's like I'm gonna grow more mineral rich food he's like I have the best he's like you like dried berries and I was like I kinda love dried berries to be honest with you and he's like I'm gonna send you dried berries right now he's like these are the best berries you ever had and he's like one serving of this is 60% of your daily vitamin c intake and I have like we buy whole foods whatever you go look at that it'll be like 5% like it's like nothing he's like no no this is 60% and he's like we grow it without soil and I'm like I don't even understand what that means but okay he sends me these berries my kids are obsessed with them they taste so goddamn good and I'm like you know getting all these minerals so I'm like this kind of actually might not be full of shit then he's like I'm like okay what's is that like your main thing he's like yeah it's that he's like but I also love to give back he's like you know I immigrated here it really changed my life he's like so I'm gonna bring 10,000 turkish engineers to america engineers and lawyers and I was like what he's like yeah my business plan is I'm gonna bring 10,000 engineers and 10,000 lawyers to america from turkey and for those people in turkey it's gonna change their life and for america you're gonna get high you know super smart talent that's gonna come here and work and I was like how why is that your goal how do you even do that and he's like basically he had figured out an entire like by the book way to get people visas systematically and programmatically and he's like and he created a model where he's like basically he he brings you over and you have any little income share so you're gonna start making a 100 k + a year as a lawyer or a or an engineer he takes the income share of that he invests it in bringing the next engineer over he's like I basically have to fund 10 of these guys if I fund 10 I can get to 10,000 and I was like this guy is thinking on a totally different wavelength the way he worked out this this plan I thought was great his overall energy was great and he was not just working differently than most people are thinking differently he just works on different things than anybody I know like I don't know anyone that's trying to grow like mineral rich berries and bring 10,000 people immigrants into the country like that's what this guy's game plan was

Sam Parr

By the way, I gotta share with you guys a funny conversation I had. I shared it with Sean, and I'll read it here. Basically, I didn't want to bring this guy up because I've talked about him so much, and I get made fun of. But I invested in this guy's company named Brett Adcock. He's like my... I have a man crush on him. He's got this robot company, and he sent me a picture of the robots and how they're moving. It's amazing! I was like, "Wow, that's amazing! You've done all this stuff in 18 months, and you've not raised a lot of money. Is this like a business that you can not raise a lot of money for and still own a lot of it?" His response is a perfect example of why crazy people exist and how I'm just absolutely not one of them. He says, "Well, this is verbatim: 'Well, it's gonna cost a little under $1,000,000,000 to ship 10,000,000 robots, so I don't think it'll work without raising.'"

Andrew Wilkinson

and I

Sam Parr

Yeah, "fuck me," right? Like, what do I know? I'm going to go tweet. I'll be right back.

Shaan Puri

You're basically with these guys building AI robots, and you asked them the equivalent of like, "Hey, have you thought about just doing a newsletter about it instead?" You're like, "Do you think you could just bootstrap this and not raise any money?" He's like, "I need a trillion dollars."

Sam Parr

I felt like such a little **bitch** when he said that. I was like, "Yeah, yeah, you're right." Alright, what about the best and worst investments for the year?

Shaan Puri

Yeah, this is my favorite category. Andrew, you've had the best stories in this. I think you have the most... you're probably the most prolific investor that comes on this pod. So can you give us yours? Give us your best and worst.

Andrew Wilkinson

So, yeah, my best was I was in New Zealand. I've been working on getting my New Zealand citizenship for the last two years or so.

Shaan Puri

so I

Andrew Wilkinson

Had this... yeah, they have this. There's this mandatory conference that I had to go to, and I was absolutely dreading it. I had been traveling a whole bunch, but I thought, "I gotta go." I was thinking about it and going, "Okay, well, who do I know in Auckland, New Zealand?" I realized I'd met this guy, Matt Buchanan, about 10 years ago at South by Southwest. He ran a design agency at the time and had started this website called Letterboxd. Do you guys know what Letterboxd is?

Shaan Puri

yeah that's like a movie thing

Andrew Wilkinson

What is it? It's a social network for film buffs. It started out really, really small; it was just hundreds of people at first discussing films. Then, over time, especially during COVID, it grew like crazy. So, Matt and I met up for coffee, and I just asked him about how everything was going. I wasn't at all thinking about investing or buying it. He started telling me that they had 10,000,000 registered users and that it had grown like crazy. At the end of the coffee, I literally just blurted out, "Do you want to sell?" He was like, "Well, I haven't really even thought about that." I said, "Throw me the craziest number you can think of." So, he threw the number out, and I said, "Okay." I sent him an offer within 48 hours, and we just bought that business. We didn't buy all of it; we bought, I think, 60% of it about three months ago.

Shaan Puri

did you buy it for the number he said

Andrew Wilkinson

Yeah, the valuation... I think it worked out to about **$60,000,000**. Something like that.

Sam Parr

and it was 3 guys

Andrew Wilkinson

Yeah, no, it was about... I think there are about 10 or so employees, all in New Zealand. So, totally bootstrapped, New Zealand-based designer and developer started it. Incredible business! They're going to keep running it. But it's an example of, you know, we bought a business called Dribbble about 8 years ago, which is a social network. Social networks are just incredible businesses. I call them like airports. You know, if you own the airport, you've got this group of people that's going to congregate there on a consistent schedule. You can sell them, you know, all sorts of stuff. You can sell them a book, you can sell them a hot dog, you can sell them a massage. As long as you don't mess with them and you keep the community happy, you know, you can do some incredible stuff. So, I'm super excited about that.

Shaan Puri

Dude, this is your in for Zuck. You can go back to Zuck. Hey, Mark!

Sam Parr

I told you it

Shaan Puri

was a

Sam Parr

good idea

Shaan Puri

**Social... oh, social network owner. You got 1, I got 2, but who's counting? Happy to meet!**

Andrew Wilkinson

I fell he got my in

Sam Parr

Yeah, you guys can start your own little Facebook group of social media owners. Your best one last year was "girlboss," your worst one last year was venture capital in general. What's your worst one this year?

Andrew Wilkinson

So, my worst investment this year was one I made about five years ago. It's a great example of **shiny object syndrome**, lack of focus, and what I call a **money bonfire**. I bought a podcast player called **Castro** about five years ago. At the time, I was really excited about podcasts and subscription podcasting. It was around the time I started coming on **MFM** actually. I bought the business because I was excited about the space, not because I had a plan. As a result, the business basically just languished. The founders left, and I couldn't find anyone to run it. Every month, I thought about it. I bought it for **$1,000,000**, and it just lost **$10,000 to $20,000** a month. It was a small enough number that it blended into all my other stuff, so I didn't really notice it. It wasn't like an urgent thing. This tiny little ember turned into a money bonfire. I think I lost around **$2,000,000** over the last five years on this business, and now I'm in the process of selling it.

Sam Parr

anyone want it good thing

Shaan Puri

you too would like a money bonfire

Andrew Wilkinson

Maybe someone who wants to get into podcasting. But anyway, it is one of those things where I've done this so many times... where I start something and it's a runaway train. I just don't get the right people in, and it slowly burns money.

Sam Parr

Dude, unless you're like a Huberman or, you know, a host like us, I think podcasting could be good. I think podcasting as venture capital companies mostly is shit. It's a very hard business. I think to build tools for... We get pitched all the time on people who are trying to make podcasts more discoverable or this or that. It's a hard business, that's a hard industry.

Shaan Puri

yeah yeah a 100% sam what you got best and worst investment of the year

Sam Parr

Alright, I don't remember what I said last year for best. Do you know? Did I say...? Tell me that in a second. But alright, my best investment. One weekend, I was talking to my wife. I was like, "Hey, we're going to have kids one day. Do you want to keep working, or what do you want to do?" She was kind of telling me, and I was like, "Well, I'll tell you what. To make your decision a little bit easier, I've got this idea for a little copywriting thing. I'm just going to put it together because it's fun, and it's how I taught my team how to write. It's how I learned how to write. I'm just going to do this for fun, and if it works, maybe one day you'll want to quit your job and run this." Turns out she doesn't want to, but I made it anyway. Yeah, so it...

Shaan Puri

didn't work now I run this yeah

Sam Parr

So, I made this thing called CopyThat.com. I just did it for fun over the weekend, and that one little thing I made pays for my living expenses. I don't really do much for it; I don't do anything for it, and it pays for my living expenses. For some reason, with some of my other things, like this podcast or Hampton, when things get a little bit bigger, you can't really deviate or move quickly. I just use this as a little bit of a playground to do whatever the hell I want, and it's been fun. I've really enjoyed it. Now, my worst investment so far... Sean, I've invested about $1,000,000 into companies via angel investing. I have seen not $1 back since I started doing it in 2016. I've got a lot of markups, and that $1,000,000 is maybe worth $5,000,000 on paper. But paper doesn't pay my mortgage—at least not this type of paper. It's pissed me off because I knew what it was going into it, and I just don't like having to have the patience or not having any involvement. So, that's probably been my worst investment so far. I don't think it's going to be worse in terms of ROI, but I think it's worse in terms of I just don't enjoy it.

Andrew Wilkinson

You know what's interesting? I've got a friend; he's an angel investor. He sold his company, like you, and he said, "I've always wanted to be an angel investor." So, he invested in 5 companies, and 2 of them paid him back 10 times within 2 years. He learned the wrong lesson, right? Because that's not most people's experience. Then, he doubled down on angel investing for 5 years and didn't see a single return for 10 years. I think it's like anything: if you try something the first time and it gives you a win, you love it. I guarantee you, if you have already gotten $2,000,000 back... yes.

Sam Parr

it's awesome

Andrew Wilkinson

You'd be like, "I love angel investing! It's the best!" Right? But what you've really done is you've gone into the casino and gambled, maybe with like a slight edge, but you're really gambling. And I feel the exact same way. I have barely seen any money back.

Sam Parr

have you seen any money back andrew

Andrew Wilkinson

yeah I have but it took 12 years for the first one

Sam Parr

but was it significant

Andrew Wilkinson

Yeah, so I put in $75 into a business and I got $800 back. Then I put $250,000 into one and I got $3,000,000 back. But I also, over the next... invested like $20 or $30 million in the venture. So it canceled out all the other gains. It all comes down to *when* you're investing, right? The year you're investing. If you invest in 2020 and 2021, it's just... everything's out the window.

Sam Parr

yeah well we'll see sean have you seen any money

Shaan Puri

Back there, year I started my rolling fund. It was just ironic, actually. The first batch of investments we did were, so far, the highest performers. The first like 6 investments we did were the best batch, which is kind of interesting.

Sam Parr

Well, you've picked a handful of winners. I know a few that you've picked, and you've got a couple that are really, really good.

Shaan Puri

Great companies, you know, you don't get the liquidity until... if it's a winner, it's gonna run for 10 years, right? So it's not a good thing to do if you need cash today, which is probably...

Sam Parr

Just... I've got winners. I mean, it's gonna be good. It's just boring... just lame. Well, okay.

Shaan Puri

my best and worst investment alright so my best I had a couple more interesting examples but I'm just gonna say the one that's actually the best so the truthful answer is clearly hands down shepherd so I had this idea mostly inspired by you andrew which was wow this guy does really well and he doesn't have to start and invent the next big thing so you know you buy businesses that already are working and then maybe already have a tailwind so they're gonna just keep working at a greater rate in the future like when you got into like let's say the the shopify ecosystem with with wecommerce I was like oh that makes sense to me buy something that's already working that has a tailwind and hopefully you can accelerate it or make it work better but even if you don't you can still make good money if you buy at the right price and we got like a basically like a it's a crazy result so far out of the shepherd deal so had this idea which was let me find a product that I use that I like that I kinda believe in of a business that's already working shepherd fit the bill buy in we buy in this case a minority stake not a majority stake so that marshall would keep operating the thing and keep growing it the tailwinds were behind us basically first it was covid so people went remote that was one big tailwind 2nd tailwind was when the economy started to slow down over the last year everybody started to realize they need to be profitable well one way to be profitable is hire talent for 5 times less than you're currently hiring talent in the united states and so higher offshore talent became like a very obvious thing for business owners to do if they wanted profits and so sheppard just takes off and and the third piece which was can we accelerate it and we had done a couple of experiments of like look we have this big audience right between twitter's almost half a 1000000 people the podcast is way bigger than that newsletter we have a diff we have we have not just a big numbers but like big trust that has been built up so if we pick a product that we actually believe in I think this will work we in the last I don't know we've only owned the owned our stake in the business for like 6 to 9 months or something like that the business has tripled and it was already big to begin with and so this is just like an incredible result

Sam Parr

what how much of that is because of you

Shaan Puri

Well, we could see it because when people sign up, they either sign up through our link or they indicate where they found it. So that's a minimum. There are some people who have heard about it on the podcast but don't click the link or whatever. Nick does a great job too, so I don't want to take away from that. But in the last six months, we drove like 50% or more of the leads to the business. That's a pretty insane value driver. Now I'm like, "Oh, I have an unfair advantage." I don't need to do ten of these. If I just find a couple of businesses that are already standalone good businesses that I believe in, and I do the same thing, if I can add $1,000,000 of ARR to this business, I basically can't lose. That is a completely unfair advantage to have. Now all I have to do is choose wisely, and that's what I've been doing. We only did one deal this year, and we saw maybe 60 or so, but I think we picked the right one because that investment has paid off. That business has added probably— that one deal I did, I thought I was getting in at a good price, but it has added at least $35,000,000 of value just to that business based on the growth. So that's a crazy deal for him too. Good, good, good on Marshall for cutting.

Andrew Wilkinson

That deal... it's interesting because I think I assume that he did it as a secondary or something like that. He wanted to de-risk, take money off the table. But effectively, it's like a primary still because you've injected, call it 10 or $20 million of free marketing as part of the partnership, right?

Shaan Puri

yeah exactly

Andrew Wilkinson

Super smart, and it goes back to that idea I think I've talked about on the pod: "one plus one equals a hundred." You can take a mediocre business and... I think Shepherd's a great business, so better if it's a great business.

Sam Parr

well that's not how math works

Andrew Wilkinson

No, it's not right, but it's business math. You can take a product and combine it with an influencer, and you can get an incredible outcome. Because you basically have a free $50 million a year marketing budget as a result.

Shaan Puri

Well, people had talked about this, but when I think of an influencer, I think of like Kim Kardashian or Mr. Beast. It's like, yeah, obviously, if they promote a product, it's going to go really well. It turns out that there's a thing like B2B influencer marketing. There’s a person who is respected among business people who is essentially, you know, I'm not saying my ass is big, but we're kind of the Kim Kardashian of business influencers. You can promote to a community that understands what you're doing. If you pick a good product with a good business, it will actually take off. However, if you have a bad product or a bad business, they'll try it, and then it'll leak out right away. So, it doesn't really work.

Andrew Wilkinson

Literally, this is what HubSpot did. HubSpot looked at The Hustle and they said, "Well, right now they're making, call it $20 million." I don't know what the exact number is, $20 million of ad revenue. But how much are those advertisers making off that $20 million of ad spend? Maybe it's $30 million, or $40 million, or $50 million. And so they can pay up to buy this business, and then they can just direct the traffic to themselves and make all that money.

Sam Parr

and I've seen the numbers I think it's a good I think it works for them

Andrew Wilkinson

and let me tell you

Shaan Puri

A crazy thing about this shepherd deal that I haven't shared before is how we structured it. It was beautifully done. I was like, "Look, the business is good. The business is already spitting off $1,000,000 of profit." So it's like, "Cool, guys, I can bring you capital, but you kind of already have a cash cow that's spitting off $1,000,000 of profit." So, I don't really want to... well, that's not really the value add. Clearly, the value add is going to be that I can help grow the actual customer base, right? Because of the audience. So essentially, I put a very small amount of money down, and then the company lent me the money to buy my stake in the company.

Sam Parr

that's insane

Shaan Puri

And I was like, "What?" I thought, "Did they type this wrong? They're going to give me the money to buy the business? Give me the money to buy the business?" I was like, "Alright, deals! Where do I sign? This is easy." It was a great deal for me, but again, like I said, the valuation of the company has grown over $30,000,000 just in that period of time. And it's been less than a year. So I thought, "Dude, I'm getting an absolute steal here." Turns out they got an even bigger steal than I did, you know? It was like a win-win. And so that's deal structure. Because that's another thing I've learned: when it comes to buying companies, like in venture, there's no structure. In venture, you put in money on a SAFE note or a priced round. It's not even negotiating on really the terms unless you're the lead investor and you're doing something really funky. But it's not standard at all. When it comes to buying companies, structure can make the difference between a good deal, an incredible deal, or a terrible deal. Structure really, really matters. I learned a ton about structure this year negotiating a bunch of these deals.

Sam Parr

So, Shepherd kicked ass for you. You did great! Let's move to the biggest loss that you took this year. What was that one?

Shaan Puri

Last year, at the end of the year, this time last year, I was like, "Hey, tax optimization! Why don't I sell a bunch of my crypto for tax purposes?" With crypto, you can wash trade. You could basically sell and buy back the next day. You could book the loss because crypto was down last year, let's say. So, you could book a loss on any crypto that you had bought higher than that. Crypto was crashing. Bitcoin went down to, like, I don't know, $16,000, and I had bought a bunch of Bitcoin when we were doing the Milk Road, probably closer to $30,000. So, I could book a big loss, and then I was like, "Great! I'm just gonna buy it right back. I believe in crypto." But there is a funny psychological thing where, you know, catching a falling knife... It's like, I could buy back in, but should I buy back in now? Is it gonna go lower? Should I just kind of wait this out and see how it goes? Maybe I'll just do this other thing that's hot right now. Crypto's cold right now, so let me just wait. I'm gonna do it, but I'll do it, you know, at the end of the month. I said I'll do it at the end of the month for 10 months straight, just enough time for Bitcoin to rip back up another 35-40%. I bought back in, and you know, my tax savings cost me a lot of money. So, that was a big loss that I took, falling into a bunch of obvious psychological traps that I could have pointed out for anybody else. Now, luckily for me, I didn't sell all of it because I bought a bunch lower than that, so it wasn't like that part would have been a tax loss. But still, dumb.

Sam Parr

that's the that's the second time you've done that that I know of

Shaan Puri

Buy my course: sell low, buy high. Right? That's basically what I executed to perfection this year. I have one more that was like a big miss.

Sam Parr

wait what is it

Shaan Puri

So, we talked about angel investing. In angel investing, we're discussing getting returns. The game of angel investing is that you're going to invest in 30, maybe 50 companies, and it's going to be 1 or 2 that are like the runaway winners. That's really what you're playing the game for. It's not about having a high hit rate; you're trying to have a huge slugging percentage with a few absolute grand slams. I missed 2. 2 is a lot. 2 is the number you need to win, and I missed 2. The realization here was that it's not about the bad investments you make; it's about the incredible investments you miss. That's how it goes in venture capital. I got introduced to a company called Whatnot. I don't know if you guys have heard about this business.

Sam Parr

we talked about it on the pod you're early talking about it it's like ebay

Shaan Puri

I talked about it. I believed in it. I was like, "Dude, I was at Twitch." It's basically live video streaming, and it started with baseball cards and then sports cards. So, basically, people would open up a pack live, but you would buy the pack. It's like live; they're sitting there, they got all these packs on the table. You would buy one, he would open it up, and he would be like, "You got a Luka Doncic rookie card! Wow, this is amazing!" The chat's going wild, and you just keep buying packs. So, it was like this kind of live video, sort of like a casino. I like all those words: live video and casinos. I was like, "I want to invest." The guy's like, "I don't know, man. We're pretty oversubscribed." I'm like, "But it's me! It's your pal Sean! We just met, please!" He was like, "Alright, let me think about it." Then he said, "I don't think so. I don't think we have space. Let me go talk to some people and see if I can make space." I made a big mistake. I waited, and I didn't chase. Now, it's valued at, I think, $10 billion. That would have been by far the best investment in all of my angel investing. I was there early on, and I believed in it. I wanted to invest, and I just did not fight hard enough to find a way to get into that company. In angel investing, it's not about, "Oh, I made this one bad investment and I lost 1x." It's that I missed out on a 200x or a 500x return on that one deal, right? Without my $150,000 check that I wanted to get into, that would have been like a $30 million position.

Andrew Wilkinson

So one one question was it when was it valued at 10,000,000,000

Shaan Puri

I think it is it it might have been at the kind of peak time

Sam Parr

july 2022 they raised at 3.7

Shaan Puri

Yeah, so, okay, maybe it's at $4,000,000,000 now instead of $10,000,000,000. So anyways, you know, basically that would have been a multibillion-dollar company now, which is all you're trying to do in investing. The same thing happened with a company called Shuffle. My former intern, who came on the pod, did an episode about that. I was like, "My old intern became a millionaire." When we were hanging out during the pod, I asked him, "So, what are you doing now?" He said, "Oh, I'm doing this crypto casino overseas." I was like, "I like all those words when it comes to making money." I wouldn't want to take the risk myself of running that company, but if you're going to run that company, I think it's a great investment. These things, you know, we've talked about Stake.com, which is just this absolute juggernaut. Stake is issuing like $1,000,000,000 in dividends a year. They have so much cash flow, and these guys are building a Stake competitor. I wanted to invest, and then our lawyer and back office were like, "Yeah, but they're based out of this country, so they're not going to provide the K-1s in time, blah blah." I was in a fund, and I was like, "I can't put my fund money into this because, again, it's like this overseas crypto casino thing." The fund cost me... this thing is going to be a total winner. It looks like their volume is growing like crazy. I think they have, like, I don't know... I'll look up the latest numbers. I mean, it's just painful every time he tells me the latest numbers, where it's like every day is their biggest day. They're doing $1,000,000 in daily betting volume, and they're profitable. I'm like, "Shit, you know?"

Andrew Wilkinson

What you know, what's interesting is you might feel like you've missed the boat on that. But one of the things I've learned is to think about Amazon.com, right? Amazon.com launched in what, 1994? You basically had until 2012 to buy the stock. Now, obviously, it's publicly traded stock, so it's easier to get into. But I bet you could go to him and say, "Hey, remember your old pal Sean? Can I put $100 in or whatever it is?" Just suck it up, right? Don't get caught up in the fact that you could have invested at some low valuation. That sounds like it'll be a winner long term.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, and I mean, who knows? That's a super high-variance bet. They could get shut down tomorrow if, like, wherever they're based - some little island somewhere - gets seized. You know, who knows what's going to happen with that? But that's a roller coaster I wanted to be on. If you're going to do angel investing, you need high-variance bets that can become absolutely massive or go to zero. You don't want things that are low risk, low reward. That's not how angel investing works. Anyways, so those are my two worst investments. They're *missed out*, not lost money.

Sam Parr

what's yours andrew

Andrew Wilkinson

So, I'm a designer. I like things to look nice, and I think every designer has this dream of building their dream house. About seven years ago, I bought a piece of property and started building an amazing house. I hired amazing architects and interior designers. I'll just say now, if you think you want to build a house, try it. It really sucks. You know, everyone has this fantasy, but what it really is... you think it's going to be about approving beautiful exteriors. What it really comes down to is you are choosing where the electrical outlets go. You are approving what color tone all the lights are. You make 10,000 decisions, and eventually, you get decision fatigue. You start making bad decisions. Or, if you delegate, you delegate to someone else. Delegation is great in a company, but when you live in this space, the things bother you. What I found was, because I was building my forever home, I would approve things. They'd be like, "Okay, do you want this marble, or there's this really, really nice marble that you can get where it's got nicer designs or whatever?" I'd always choose the more expensive option because I was thinking, "This is my dream home. I only get to build it once." So, I massively overbuilt and massively overspent. I ended up not being happy with the actual house once I was done.

Sam Parr

wasn't the house like 8,000 square feet

Andrew Wilkinson

It's huge. I had everything I could have wanted: a gym, a movie theater, all sorts of stuff. I ended up not even liking the house when I moved in because I'd just walk around the house going, "Goddamn it! I remember making that decision. You know, why did I make that beam that height? Why did I put that light there?" Anyway, I ended up getting divorced a year and a half ago, and neither my ex-wife nor I wanted the house. So, I had to sell it, and I took a 30% loss on this house that I'd spent, you know, five years building and spent tons of money on. So that was my big loss and my big lesson. I remember my dad said, "You always want to be the second owner of a hotel." Right? You want someone else to go crazy and build it out, then go bankrupt, and then you want to come in and own that. I think the same thing is true with houses. Just go buy a nice house that someone else built. That's a great line.

Sam Parr

you had an even bigger one though written down here

Andrew Wilkinson

yeah the other the other

Shaan Puri

thing that happened to me

Andrew Wilkinson

This year, this has happened to everybody, but no one feels it. My net worth got cut in half on paper. Let's just say what's publicly available: my tiny stock was worth around $750 million to $800 million, and today it's worth about half of that. It's really fascinating. When you own a private business or a real estate portfolio, you don't have a ticker. If you own a $1 million house and all the houses in your neighborhood go down by 20%, you don't see that; you're not reminded of it. One of the crazy things about having a stock ticker is that every day you can see your net worth go up and down in radical ways. So, yeah, that was a pretty insane experience to witness that happening over the course of six months.

Sam Parr

I would never text you this, but I remember seeing the stock and every once in a while I'd be like... I just want to know what that feels like, you know what I mean? Because there's been days when it's gone way up and there's been days it's gone way down. I'm always curious, and I think, "He knows what's going on." I want to... I'm gonna stay out of his hair on this one.

Andrew Wilkinson

It's really weird. I mean, Warren Buffett has this great anecdote or metaphor where he says owning a business is like owning a farm. Let's say that your farm makes $1,000,000 a year in profit. If some yokel comes to your fence and starts yelling, "I'll buy your farm for $100," if you know your farm is worth $1,000,000, you just ignore the yokel. There are all sorts of different people shouting different offers on your farm at all times. So that's kind of the approach I try and take. I just go like, you know, I know my business, I know what it's worth. But yeah, it's pretty weird seeing big swings like that.

Sam Parr

My worst thing this year was my biggest lesson. I was partially inspired by Andrew. Andrew, you make a huge mistake when you're talking to me. The mistake is you say, "Oh, it's just easy. You just hire a CEO." You miss out on two things: 1. It ain't easy. It's always harder than you think. There are always more challenges than you anticipate. 2. Managing them. You know, how should they manage you? How should you manage them? The thing with my company, Hampton, is that my CEO, Jordan, is awesome, but it's heavily based on my reputation, and I'm heavily involved in the product. When I want to be involved in the product, I've made mistakes where I'll just go directly to certain staff instead of understanding the chain of command. So, just understanding how to work with the CEO effectively has been a little bit of a challenge for me. It's going great, and things are good. I've made a lot of really good decisions, and he's wonderful. But learning how to understand that relationship has been a challenge. I've gotten in trouble a few times, and I take blame for a lot of the instances. I wish we would have talked more about how to manage them tactically. We've talked a lot about how to hire and fire and things like that, but not about how to work with someone on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

Andrew Wilkinson

Yeah, and I had lots of learning there because I think it's very tempting to see a mistake and jump in. But it's similar to delegation, right? When you first start delegating to an employee, you want to correct the errors as you see them. At the end of the day, the hardest part about having a CEO is that they can ruin the business if they're not careful. You ultimately have to let them make their own mistakes and learn from them. I think I've shared on the pod that we've had a couple of instances where a CEO wants to spend $1, 2, or $3 million on R&D, and we don't believe it's going to work out. But we let them because we go, "If we don't, they're going to resent us. They're going to say Andrew and Chris were holding us back. We couldn't make our bonuses because we couldn't execute on the strategy." So we always say we want non-fatal errors, not fatal errors. We'll intervene when they're fatal, right? For you, intervening when it's something that's going to ruin your reputation, you should jump on that. Or if it's going to ruin the business or imperil it. But otherwise, the hard part is you just kind of have to watch them make mistakes and realize that over the long term, they'll make more good decisions than bad.

Sam Parr

Yeah, and it's just an emotional... these are emotional issues. But that's mine. Sean, what do you want to do now? Which one?

Shaan Puri

Let's go to one of my favorites: unsexy businesses. So, what is an unsexy, kind of under-the-radar, maybe simple business that stood out to you that you really liked?

Sam Parr

Let me go first on this one. I've got one that's interesting. So, there's this guy I went to high school with named Chris Hoffman. He just started posting content on Twitter about three months ago. He posted a story, but I had known what his father did. His father owned a heating and cooling company called Hoffman Bros Heating and Cooling out of Saint Louis, where I'm from. He posted, "In 2016, we took over my father's company. I bought it from him, and it was doing $13 million in revenue." He goes through 2016 all the way up to 2023, where he explains the changes they made and how much revenue the business is now doing. So, in 2016, it was $13 million. By 2020, it was $40 million, and in 2023, it's going to be like $140 million in revenue from an HVAC business that he owns. He tweets out all these interesting bits of content about things he's doing. For example, "We're giving an additional holiday off, and here's how I think that that's going to impact the business." Or, "We created this thing called Hoffman University, which teaches people. We had to buy a whole building for this much money." It's been very, very fascinating. Heating and cooling companies are going to be the new storage business. We're going to see lots of people going on and doing that because of this guy, Chris Hoffman. Really fascinating stuff.

Andrew Wilkinson

Yeah, so mine is really, really boring. In every fashion house or graphic design studio, there's a book of colors called Pantone. You might see these; they're these big fat books, and you could literally just flip through them to look at different colors and what they've done. What's incredibly smart is they've trademarked colors, so they have intellectual property where it'll be like burgundy, blue, sapphire, orange, you know, whatever. This company, I found out, makes over $100,000,000 a year in revenue. One of the most genius things about it is they give you that book and they say you need to buy a new book every year because the colors fade from being in the sun or whatever. So they're just constantly reselling these books. People are licensing these colors, and the entire fashion and graphic design world is standardized on Pantone. It's just so boring and wonderful.

Sam Parr

Well, we talked about WGSN, their competitor, and how I think it's publicly traded. But they're trying to sell it for like, I think they're trying to sell it for around $800 million because...

Shaan Puri

But I don't think their competitors do this. This is like the lower level. This is literally the colors. It's not saying which WGSN is like, "We're gonna research and report. We'll tell you which color to have." This is like...

Andrew Wilkinson

Pantone does that too. They do color forecasting and trending, and all that kind of stuff as well.

Shaan Puri

Where do they make the money? Is it on the books, is it on the dyes, or is it on the reports? Do you know?

Andrew Wilkinson

All of it. And then if they use the color, they'll say, "This color of red is going to be in next season" or whatever. If you want to use it, we have some IP around.

Sam Parr

So, WGSN did $50,000,000 in EBITDA last year, and they've been around for like 30 years. I've been obsessed with this space for a minute. I remember, Sean, you remember I used to bring this up at our old office? Yeah, I've been loving this stuff. Pantone's a good one, and I think WGSN and Pantone own this space. It's basically like when Starbucks is going to come out with their new uniforms or their new Christmas sleeves or the cups. They refer to each of these companies to figure out which colors are going to be popular in six months. Yeah, it's a really fascinating company, and they've been around for a long time too.

Shaan Puri

Love it! Alright, let's do the next category. The next category is **Content of the Year**. What are the best books, blogs, TV shows, or podcasts? What was the best of the best? We're all inundated with so much content, and we all kind of want a little bit less content, but we still want the best. So, what was the best content that you consumed this year? What was yours? Okay, I'll give you one. On the TV side, **The Bear**, Season 2, Episode 7. Have you guys seen this?

Sam Parr

this show stressful but that's a great episode

Andrew Wilkinson

I've tried to watch it so many times, Sidejacks. I liked Breaking Bad, I love stressful shows. There's something about the way that show is cut where I just can't watch it. I get too stressed out and I have to turn it off.

Sam Parr

it's like uncut gems

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I heard about this show so many times. I started it, and I wasn't stressed. I was actually just kind of like, "Cool, it's kind of slow." You know, I'm not like... there's not really that much going on. It's almost so real; it's like a restaurant is not that exciting. But I kept hearing about this episode, so I powered through. I watched the whole first season and the whole second season just to get to this one episode. By the time I got there, I was like, "There's no way this is worth it." Totally worth it! That is one of the best episodes of television I have ever seen. It is such an emotional high. I love that episode! I remember where I was sitting when I watched that and just thinking, "Whoever made this, you are incredible."

Sam Parr

And it teaches you a ton about business. Like, everyone after watching that episode went and read the book. What's it called? *Great Hospitality*?

Shaan Puri

yeah yeah yeah

Andrew Wilkinson

it's an on something unbelievable hospitality or something

Sam Parr

right it's so there's a lot of business takeaways what was the other one sean

Shaan Puri

I'll give you one more. I have a book that I like this year. It's called, "Talk Like Churchill, Stand Like Lincoln." Have you ever read this?

Sam Parr

no what is that

Shaan Puri

So, I go down these random rabbit holes while I try to get better at storytelling, public speaking, or things like that. This is one book on speaking and storytelling that I really liked. I didn't expect to like it, but I liked the title: **"Talk Like Churchill, Stand Like Lincoln."** It's a very simple book, and a lot of it is kind of obvious things, but I found it to be very useful. It's about how to speak better and how to carry yourself better in different situations. Sam, you'll love it! There's a whole chapter on dress—how you should dress and why you should dress the way you do. The chapters are very short and focus on simple principles with a ton of examples. It's a very old book, so I don't think a lot of people will read it in general. All of the examples are from old presidents and events that happened before 1950. I think it's just an old book that uses old examples, but it's a good one. I recommend it. It's not the best book I've ever read, but I found it to be a very simple and useful book for anyone who wants to get better at how they carry themselves and how they present themselves.

Sam Parr

That's a good one! Alright, so there's this idea with **stoicism**, the philosophy of stoicism. I forget the exact term, but basically, it's where you imagine all the worst things have happened. They say, "You've got cancer, your kid's sick and dying, your parents are dead." Now, open up your eyes, and none of that's true. You're grateful. I love that idea. This year, I went on a spree where I read books about people's hardships. I read *The Wager*, which was a 10 out of 10. It's about a shipwreck, and these guys are stranded for two years. I literally read four different shipwreck books. I also read about Lewis and Clark and how they spent two years going through America in order to find the other side of the country. All these hardships make my life feel better when I'm just complaining about, like, a blog post. Another thing that I really got into is on Netflix. It's called *World War II: From the Front Lines*. There are two things that I've been obsessed with this year: hardship and seeing these soldiers and the Jews and what they went through during the Holocaust, as well as the soldiers on D-Day. It makes me so thankful that I don't have to do that. I'm like, "Oh, this shit's easy. This money stuff's way easy." The other thing that I'm obsessed with is **charisma**, even in evil charismatic people. I read all these books about Charlie Manson, about Hitler, about Lincoln, about George Washington. I love seeing this, and you see that in the *World War II* documentary. What they do is take real-life footage from that era and colorize it. You see, you know, Joseph Goebbels, one of the folks who led propaganda for the Nazis, giving a speech. You literally see a million people in the crowd being convinced to do all these evil things. I find it so fascinating how cult leaders use their charisma to force or convince people to do bad stuff. So, *World War II: From the Front Lines*—it's on Netflix, and it's awesome. That's probably the best thing that I've consumed this year. What's yours, Andrew?

Andrew Wilkinson

So, like everyone else, I've been freaking out about AI. I go through these phases where I try not to think about it too much, and then I go down a rabbit hole. I decided to read two books at the same time that kind of counterbalance one another. One book is called *The Coming Wave*. It's by one of the co-founders of OpenAI, and it's really fascinating. Usually, you get these kind of think-piece analysis books by academics or professional authors. This guy, however, has been on the front lines for the last 15 years, built DeepMind, and has been at Google working on their AI programs for years. He has a very extreme view that effectively AI will disrupt all work, and that the second and third order consequences are just endless. We can't really contemplate them. He kind of argues for regulation and containment. On the flip side, to counterbalance the anxiety of reading that, I've been reading Morgan Housel's new book, *Same as Ever*, which is about how things don't change. It discusses what things stay the same over the long term. You know, people still eat the same candy bars, they still enjoy reading a book, and they like going for a walk in nature, etc. So, those have been two books that I've absolutely loved. I also read *The Wager*. Like Sam, before I go to bed, I always read books about people in terrible situations or in worlds that are very different from the world I inhabit. *The Wager* is amazing! I'm just at the part where they're going around the horn, so I'm pretty early, but oh my god, it's amazing!

Sam Parr

it's hard to put down isn't it that's one of the only books I've ever read in one sitting

Andrew Wilkinson

wow

Sam Parr

Sean, you gotta get on that shipwreck train. I've got about three more shipwreck books if you want. I never...

Shaan Puri

I bought into the stoicism and the negative visualization stuff. I didn't enjoy that. I do like reading about hardship or people who went through things, just to give myself perspective. More than to make myself feel good—although that's a good side effect—I think it's more important to have a broader perspective than just the little narrow stuff you see in your day-to-day life. But doesn't that stuff just kind of bum you out? I feel like I get the same effect of feeling good just by being thankful for what's going well and imagining things going well. I can sleep easy doing that. Am I at least...?

Andrew Wilkinson

One of the most relaxing things for me is when I'm really, really stressed. I watch a show called *Survivorman*. Have you guys ever heard of this?

Sam Parr

yeah the guy who like just is on his own for 7 days and he's gotta figure it out

Andrew Wilkinson

This poor bastard, they put him in like... you know, the Antarctic. With no... he doesn't even have a hatchet or anything. He's like, a harmonica to himself. He doesn't even have a film crew around. He's got an emergency beacon if he's almost dying, but he films himself surviving. You see this guy like drinking his own urine and eating rats and digging... you know, digging shelters under the ice and all this stuff. Every time I watch that, I just think how remarkable it is that I live in this amazing, warm structure.

Shaan Puri

and he's got like

Andrew Wilkinson

go to bed very quickly

Shaan Puri

Up on his forehead, his toes are tucked into the duvet as he's watching "Survivorman." I'm read.

Sam Parr

reading his printed emails

Andrew Wilkinson

asking in the glow of my peter atia red thumb

Shaan Puri

Right, he's like, "Oh shit, I saw a blue light two hours before bed." No.

Sam Parr

these guys

Shaan Puri

eat the rats and drink the piss

Sam Parr

And you're reading *The Wager* and thinking, "Don't these pussies know that they'll just have to eat a lemon and they won't get scurvy? What a bunch of morons." Alright, wildest predictions. What's yours?

Shaan Puri

dude I didn't I didn't do any here andrew you gotta carry us

Andrew Wilkinson

Yeah, so mine is that I think assistant and admin jobs could go away or change radically. I think that if you consider a lot of the tasks that personal assistants do, a very well-trained Google AI that understands your Google Drive, your calendar, and your email will be able to do probably 80% of those tasks, maybe more. I think that's coming in the very near term. You know, these things are just progressing at such an exponential rate. So that's something I've been thinking a lot about, and I'm excited. I think it frees up a lot of people to do more interesting work, but it's going to be pretty wildly disruptive.

Shaan Puri

Well, we've got to read our predictions from last year, right? I think that's where we've got to start for this one. Andrew, your prediction for 2023 was that we would see a lot of copies/competitors to GPT-3/AI. Correct? You said: - Google jumps in (correct) - AWS has something - Azure has something Azure did the big... you know, Microsoft did the big deal with OpenAI, so you were pretty spot on. Sam, yours was: 1. Elon dies or gets canceled in a serious way 2. [AI] overnight gets regulated

Sam Parr

the inputs happened the inputs for elon musk were there the output was not

Shaan Puri

Dude, he's getting kind of like a long, slow cancellation, you know, progressively through.

Sam Parr

By the way, that's my same prediction for the next year. I think Elon will admit that buying Twitter was a mistake, although I think he's already acknowledged it. He's like, "This is a hardship that I didn't necessarily need." But I think that with all the advertisers leaving... I've been buying ads on Twitter. I tested it, and the cost per click is... like, stupid cheap. I don't even want to mention that on here because it's... yeah.

Shaan Puri

yeah cut that shit out

Sam Parr

But basically, I think that the Twitter experiment is going to live, but not under Elon or something in a drastic way. So, I'm extending my 23 into 24.

Shaan Puri

Okay, I like that. My prediction was selfish. I said, "This is the year that I turn the corner and actually get shredded up." I guess I'll get ripped, get in great shape. I also said I'd start a company that's, you know, special or maybe a legacy company. I definitely did not do the second one. After that podcast, I stopped thinking about it completely. I actually made my goal to not start a company this year. As for getting ripped, I actually got to my fattest this year. But then, before the end of the year, in the fourth quarter, the clock was draining, and I came through in the clutch. I'm now down about, let's see, 13 or 14 pounds. I've been eating clean for about 45 straight days—like perfect, perfect eating, exactly what I want to be doing. To put that in perspective, 45 days probably doesn't sound like much. It's a month and a half. It's probably the longest I've gone with actual perfect eating, where I'm not eating a bunch of chips or ordering a pizza or something like that, you know, one night when I'm tired or stressed. The last time I did a stretch like this would have been about 7 days, which was the longest I had gone with actual clean eating. Now, I'm at 45 days and going great.

Andrew Wilkinson

with ozempic or without

Shaan Puri

he's he hates it ozempic baby I'm on that ozempic plan daddy

Sam Parr

Hey, and in the YouTube comments, every video is commenting either on your skin or your look. So it's working; people are loving your glow-up. What about the coolest moment of your year?

Shaan Puri

I have a fun one so last year my coolest one was all about me this year it's all about somebody else so I have a buddy who I went to college with my buddy dan and dan we started our first business together straight out of college so we were like the 3 amigos but then we you know that company wasn't really working out and 2 of the 3 of us went to australia and had this really cool opportunity but like there wasn't really a spot for dan on that boat meaning like you know I got a spot and I was able to get one of the guys spot but it was really too much for me to like convince this australian billionaire why I need 2 of my friends to come with me to go do this thing that was like kind of this unspecified project and I felt bad about that and I felt bad about that for like a decade and I was like damn I really wish like even if he didn't come that we had gotten him into a good landing spot before we made that decision I felt like we kinda left you know no man left behind we kinda left a man behind and I felt bad about that I carried that guilt he did totally fine by the way he went and got a job at facebook and he when he was at facebook he went from like the bottom to the top the bottom was his job at facebook initially was to like make sure that like no penis will show up on our news feed so he's like building like penis detection like systems to like make sure that you and and by the way you ever logged into face wings get a penis never he dan did a great job and so while he was there he went and enrolled in the facebook developer boot camp and like taught himself to code and then he became then he went out in the marketplace did a genius thing his job application he's like well I could say that I've been an engineer for 2 years that's not really gonna get me that good of a job so he's like instead he went out he he reframed it he goes I'm a facebook trained engineer I know how to do engineering at facebook I can make your engineering team run like a facebook engineering team people loved it he got a job as cto of a startup that went on to raise you know b round c round d round but unfortunately the startup fizzled out and I catch up with dan and I say he's like hey man you know unfortunately my options I thought were gonna you know make me a bunch of money didn't really work out you got any other like kind of I'm looking for a job let me know and I said yeah I met this guy andrew wilkinson and then I met this guy sahid balke and I've been listening to this podcast that I create and it's all about there's a bunch of these people that are buying businesses I said dan have you ever considered buying a business he's like I don't even know where I would start and I was like I'm gonna help you and I was like I'll I don't I don't know a ton about it but I know more about it than you do so you know like let me be a blue belt and help a white belt here and so I basically helped dan do this search process I had no stake in it no investment in it except for this is one of my best friends from college and dan bought a business he bought a so after 6 to 9 months and several like close calls but you know last minute we said no no this is not a great business don't buy it he buys this business and he buys this bag manufacture a bag like bag sales company I don't even know how you describe it they don't make the bags they they they get them made but they sell them to big retailers so like if you go walk into like a like a ulta all the bags at ulta that's my boy dan's company and this guy had been running it for you know years he had no contracts with any of these companies he kind of ran it off pen and paper and so he my my friend dan was able to negotiate and buy this business at a great price and he just texted me yesterday saying that he's only owned this business now for like 3 4 months that in the just in the the sort of 5 months that'll be this year he will out of the profit of this business after paying all the debt that he used to buy the business he will make more than he made at his highest paying job as cto already in the 1st 5 months and he's like dude the lifestyle is great he's like I'm kinda working more but it's totally different the totally different field right like I own my own business I come in every day I'm excited he's like I see this path where we're gonna grow he's like I'm the bag I'm dan the bag man and he's like I can I could do this and this can be like my you know like my asset that I build because like he's like you know even though I'm making more than I did at my job it's even better because you can't ever sell your job but with this I know if I build this business up and it's making more profits one day I could sell this business and cash out like a life changing sum for me and I feel so good that I got to you know sit shotgun for him while he went on this ride

Sam Parr

kudos to dan what's the name of the company can you say

Shaan Puri

I don't know, but if you email me, I'll introduce you to Dan. If you need bags for your business, Dan's got you.

Sam Parr

Mine's a bit... mine doesn't have any great story. So, Andrew, I saw what you put. That is also mine, but...

Shaan Puri

I'm not gonna say that one I'll go

Sam Parr

To the next one, which is actually the most important one: **I had a kid this year**. That was the coolest moment this year. I think, Andrew, you told me... What did you say? You said, "You're gonna feel so much dopamine every morning when you look at your kid." And I get it now. So now it's my turn to gatekeep people and tell them...

Shaan Puri

like oh you'll understand when you have kids

Sam Parr

you'll understand it I understand a little bit and it's when you have kids

Shaan Puri

you'll understand it

Sam Parr

I understand a little bit and

Shaan Puri

it's been awesome

Sam Parr

so that's mine but andrew you do yours I think I said it's like liquid mdma gets shot into your brain every time you

Andrew Wilkinson

look at your bay

Sam Parr

Yeah, it's awesome, man. It's brought me closer to my wife too. I have more... you know, I've always respected her, but now there's more of a spiritual respect. It's kind of funny. But what's yours?

Andrew Wilkinson

Totally! So, yeah, we had our first ever live MFM in Vancouver. What was that? February, I guess, this year. I kind of put it on like... I texted you guys and I was like, "Hey, we want to do this event. Let's do it in Vancouver." We rented this huge theater, and I remember getting the photo of the theater and sending it to you. We were just like, "Holy shit! How are we going to fill this thing?" I was really nervous about it. I remember we were backstage, and we were peeking out. The entire theater was packed! There was a line down the street. It was really, really crazy. This was a massive, multilevel theater.

Sam Parr

and see like 1200 people

Andrew Wilkinson

1200-1300 people or something, and I remember Sam was like... we're backstage and he goes, "I don't use Facebook, but I do today because I want everyone in high school to see that I filled a theater." And he posted a photo of [the event].

Shaan Puri

of of the theater

Andrew Wilkinson

I just love that. That was such a great moment there. I remember, Sam, you posted this photo of Alexis Ohanian with Serena Williams, and he just looks like a pasty white nerd with this beautiful... like beautiful amazon. And you go, "The nerds win!" And in that moment, I was like, "Okay, the nerds won."

Sam Parr

he didn't like when I said that by the way

Andrew Wilkinson

no he was

Sam Parr

Not a fan, but it was awesome that we sold out that theater. That was a really exciting thing. You did the dumbest thing ever, though: you made people pay, but then you gave the money back if they showed up. People would have just paid!

Andrew Wilkinson

yeah I know in retrospect we should

Shaan Puri

have charged

Sam Parr

let's go to breakout of the year sean what do you what do you have

Shaan Puri

Mine's real simple: the breakout of the year, I think, has to be **Ozempic**. I feel like Ozempic kind of changed the world. It's not just a tech thing or a business thing; Ozempic is everywhere. I don't know, the jury's still out on it, but there's a lot of evidence that even if Ozempic has, you know, maybe side effects or you have to stay on it to maintain the gains or whatever, like, people not being obese and people not being sort of controlled by their cravings—whether it's for food or even seeing maybe effects for alcoholism—seems like a really, really big deal. It's kind of the cliché idea: what if there was the magic weight loss pill? And now there kind of is. That's mind-blowing to me that we did it; there is a magic weight loss pill.

Sam Parr

Well, I was picking between Brett Taylor and Ozempic. So, Sean, do you remember how you first heard about Ozempic? I think it was June of 2022. I texted you and I was like, "There's this drug called semaglutide. I'm in New York and it's kind of popular amongst a small group of weird biohackers. I'm going to try it." I tried it, and I remember messaging you—or maybe I even said it in the podcast—I'm like, "For some reason, I feel like this might cure my drinking issues." I had drinking issues a long time ago, but I was like, "For some reason, I think this might help with that too."

Shaan Puri

You called it a 100%. Not only did you show me a picture, and I was like, "Wow, that's incredible." You go, "I started this semaglutide thing." I was like, "Dude, you like never heard of this?" You know? Yeah, I just inject this thing in me. I'm like, "Bro, you just inject random stuff into you? That's not smart." But you were totally on it. Then you said, "I think this is gonna cure alcoholism." I remember literally not wanting to laugh in your face, but I was laughing inside, thinking, "Dude, that just sounds like a crazy leap. You know, you can't just say that. There's no evidence of that."

Sam Parr

I just felt it. I could feel it when I... So, I don't use it anymore, but I tested it for a small amount of time. This is **semaglutide**—that's the name of the drug, or the... I don't know how you even explain it, the root drug. Then there's **Ozempic**, which is the brand name. But I remember putting that in my body and thinking, "I think this is gonna cure alcoholism," because you don't crave anything. I think what's gonna happen is, in 10 years, we're gonna see downsides to this drug because right now, there are very few, or at least it's impacting only a small amount of people. So, I think that there are still gonna be downsides. But I think that what **Galloway** said—he goes, "It's not ChatGPT, it's GLP-1." That's the big thing. GLP-1, this drug class, is gonna be way bigger than ChatGPT. I agree with him. I think that's a breakout of the year. What's yours, Andrew?

Andrew Wilkinson

Yeah, that's like antidepressants or something. So, mine is pretty boring. It's a company called **Snippd**, and it's a podcast player. I don't know if you guys have this problem, but often I'll be driving—that's when I listen to podcasts most—and I'll hear something incredible, like a great quote or just a great line, or something I want to follow up on later. Until recently, I've either just forgotten it; basically, it goes out the other side of my head. Occasionally, I would pull over my car and make a note or something like that. **Snipp** basically solves that. What Snipp does is it has an AI that takes the transcript, does voice recognition on the transcript of the podcast, and pulls out all the key moments. So, let's say that you want to listen to a Joe Rogan interview, but it's 3 hours long, and you only really want to hear them talk about stuff that isn't MMA. You can jump in or whatever. But then also, when you hear something interesting, you can tap a little button in CarPlay or on your phone, and it'll actually grab the text for whatever was just said. I've found that incredibly useful, and all my nerdy friends who are into journaling and Readwise and all that stuff are going crazy for it. So, I love that product.

Sam Parr

you're on the home page a a testimonial from you that's

Andrew Wilkinson

oh really

Sam Parr

yeah they apparently you must have

Andrew Wilkinson

I haven't invested or anything

Sam Parr

You've tweeted it out, and they used their tweet. I think MFM is... yeah, MFM is on here too. That's pretty cool.

Shaan Puri

Sam, you had a snippet moment last pod where somebody was like, "Yeah, Varda is this crazy company," and we were like, "What do they even do?" They go to... yeah, they're manufacturing drugs in space. And Sam goes... there's a pause... he goes, "**Why?**" Like he goes, "What? Like, what's the point of manufacturing drugs in space? What's wrong with Massachusetts?"

Sam Parr

I still haven't gotten a good answer I'm sure it exists

Shaan Puri

what's wrong with massachusetts is just that is incredible incredible content

Sam Parr

This is the end of the Milley Awards. Congratulations, folks! This is the end of 2023. It's already 2024, which is crazy. I saw someone say a professor was like, "Hey, you can use sources in your paper from the previous century." This student wrote in and she goes, "Hey, I was gonna do something from the late 20th century. Is 1996 too old to use?" So, if you're born in 2000, you're already 24. I can't believe we're going to that year, dude.

Shaan Puri

that's us now too old to use

Sam Parr

yeah it's crazy well that's it that's the pod congrats fellows