This guy sold his company for $2B (and used it to buy Pokémon cards?)

- June 24, 2026 (about 2 hours ago) • 56:08

Transcript

Start Time	Speaker	Text
00:00	Shaan Puri	Sam, we've been doing it all wrong — this whole business thing, this building thing. We've been doing it all wrong. See, we thought you have to build a product, that the product has to do something, has to add value, solve a problem. And here I will read you this tweet — this is from Next TV: > "Dopamine websites are the new trend in South Korea. These services let users endlessly browse food delivery menus, read reviews, fill their shopping carts, and even track their shipment. But the only catch: none of it's real. You're not really placing an order for anything. There are also virtual smoke breaks where you can join anonymous people in chat rooms to recreate the feeling of taking a smoke break without having to smoke a cigarette. The idea is simple: give people the familiar dopamine hit without them having to actually spend any money, leave the house, smoke, or do anything else associated with those habits. And these are becoming incredibly popular in South Korea, apparently."
00:58	Sam Parr	Is this the same country that's having a massive birth-rate issue? Unrelated — it checks out. If they're going to create virtual smoke groups and fake-buy stuff... what the heck, guys?
01:09	Shaan Puri	So the trend started this year. It's basically Korean Gen Z — they realized that a lot of the fun in online shopping is just browsing. It's putting things in the cart and hitting checkout. Getting the actual product, sure, maybe that adds some value, but there's a lot of fun in just the other side of it. You can see here: I can pull one of them up. Let me open it. This is an app called "Food Never Comes." Alright, so check this out: you open up the app and you can select "rabbit" or "turtle" delivery — fast or slow. Do you want... should we pay for fast or slow?
01:50	Sam Parr	I guess we should pay for fast. I want to get it—yeah, want to get my face up.
01:53	Shaan Puri	Let's treat ourselves. Okay, so now there's a fried chicken restaurant. We can have the half-and-half crispy chicken. The cheese balls—gotta go with the cheese balls. Maybe the soy-glazed chicken; we'll go spicy. We'll add a cola. Add to cart. Then we can go ahead and check out. We put in our info here, and then we can watch this delivery make its way to our house... never actually come. And that's it. It's the blue balls of entrepreneurship. Sam, are you in or are you out?
02:21	Sam Parr	Dude, how can this group of people, who have brought us such amazing things like the Kia Telluride or Samsung, ...?
02:28	Shaan Puri	We pop demon hunters. </FormattedResponse>
02:30	Sam Parr	Yeah, like, "go and do something so stupid." They're the Koreans — you guys really are like the barbell strategy of life. They're bringing us such amazing, wonderful goodness and such silliness. I... I guess I don't get this. Why are people doing this?
02:41	Shaan Puri	On behalf of our huge—I'm sure—South Korean followership, I will defend this by posting a picture of the White House this weekend, where there was a giant motorcycle doing a backflip in front of the White House in preparation for UFC 250 to celebrate the birth of America: two dudes in their underwear beating each other up on the White House lawn. </FormattedResponse>
03:04	Sam Parr	"Yeah, you don't think that a fist fight on the White House lawn is appropriate—an organized fist fight?"
03:10	Shaan Puri	"Where a Frenchman beats up a Brazilian. Yeah, America. Yeah."
03:15	Sam Parr	"Look, I didn't say that we both can't be stupid. I'm just saying that this is... wild. Are these things actually popular?" </FormattedResponse>
03:22	Shaan Puri	No, I can't tell. So, obviously, this makes for an amazing headline. There's also a reason I opened up the show with it — it's just funny to talk about and make fun of.
03:30	Sam Parr	But there aren't a lot of Korean people on Twitter, so they can't exactly—well, we can't exactly refute this. It feels... it feels like Japan. It feels like Japan and America have separate internets. Have you ever gone to a Japanese website? It's kind of challenging to use, even if it's just translated. It's still totally separate and quite hard. So, are there any proper Korean people on Twitter to refute the story, or can we just make up falsehoods about...?
03:56	Shaan Puri	I think we just make it up. It's like the good version of the "Hunter Biden laptop" story — the South Korean fake DoorDash story. Have you ever studied, like, Eastern Internet? You know, people study Eastern philosophy. Have you ever studied Eastern Internet?
04:12	Sam Parr	Yeah, like Masa-san from SoftBank. I believe he's a Korean guy who lives in Japan... or is he Japanese who lives in Korea? Anyway, yeah, I've studied him, and I've studied some of the Chinese websites or the "super apps." They're so mega that it's quite hard to understand what they're about.</FormattedResponse>
04:30	Shaan Puri	Yeah, there's so many crazy apps and sites. Just for example: I remember when we were looking into live streaming. My first company that sold Bebo—it was in the live streaming space. We sold Twitch, which is the big American player. Live streaming is far more advanced in Asia than it is in the West. If you go look at— I forgot which ones it was — YY.com or whatever — there was a whole bunch of these where you would see somebody on video and then, horizontally from right to left, streaming across the screen would just be the entire chat. It was the most bizarre experience ever because you would see that 7,000 people are watching this girl eat noodles while text flies across the screen and people are spending thousands of dollars sending her virtual roses. We were looking at this, studying it like when you study a tribe and you're like, "So they just eat it," and you're just like, "Yeah, this is exactly what they do." Then we tried to recreate as many of those variables as we could because these sites were incredibly popular.
05:33	Sam Parr	Is it... is there one where, like, it's where it's like "fat people eating"? It's like "bang bang"? Or is this... isn't this like a...
05:40	Shaan Puri	Mukbang — they don't need to be fat.
05:42	Sam Parr	Oh, I thought there was one guy, like, named Nico Avocado or something like that. </FormattedResponse>
05:47	Shaan Puri	Yeah, yeah. He got really fat doing it, and then he lost a lot of weight and came back. He's kind of a weird guy. But yeah, the mukbang is basically watching other people eat — just like you watch other people play video games or watch other people play basketball. It turns out people want to watch other people eat, and they like having that high-definition sound, watching them slurp.
06:05	Sam Parr	And jump—get joy from that. By the way, I always buy candy and sweets that I want to eat for other people, and I just hand...
06:13	Shaan Puri	It's for other people.
06:14	Sam Parr	Yeah, I'll hand it to them — I'm like, "Eat it. Tell me, tell me how it feels." I definitely can get secondhand sugar highs from other people.
06:24	Shaan Puri	So you're in. We started out, and now... now you're in.
06:28	Sam Parr	Dude, there's this whole genre of Indian barbers who shave people's heads when they have dandruff. It's, like, the oddly satisfying moment — like, "Oh, we found it! Let's wipe it off the head."
06:40	Shaan Puri	Yeah, the "oddly satisfying" stuff is crazy. There are other sites that I think represent the current trend of what's big in the East that isn't yet big in the West. Before, there was live streaming — that was obviously a huge one — and mobile gaming. Internationally, the most popular games were all on your phone. They weren't Xbox or PlayStation; there really wasn't a big console or PC culture. Games like Free Fire or PUBG Mobile were huge, and then Fortnite became the US version soon after. You could sort of see these trends moving over. Live shopping has been huge in Asia for a long time now. Whatnot is the US equivalent of live shopping, worth about $10 billion. So you can look for products that are over there and try to see when and how they will translate. Right now, the big one — which we've talked about before — is the short serial drama. Basically it's like Netflix, but you watch on your phone vertically. Each episode is about 30–60 seconds, and it's basically soap operas across different genres that people get incredibly addicted to. It's huge in Asia — especially China, Japan, and Korea — and now it's getting big in India. It's only a matter of time until it's just as big in the US, in my guess.
07:56	Sam Parr	I just pulled up these notes that I have from, I think, 2016. There's this guy named Kevin Ryan — he's been on the podcast, "friend of the pod." He founded a bunch of companies, the biggest one being MongoDB, a multi-tens-of-billions-of-dollars company. He also famously co-founded Business Insider. I called him one time and he gave me some tips on how to start a media company, because I didn't know anything. I had emailed him so many times that he relented, and I have these notes. Something always stuck with me about this framework. > "On this show we have spent hours talking to some of the best investors alive. Well, lucky for you, the team at HubSpot have pulled out the principles that matter most and turned it into a very simple, easy-to-read wealth guide. It's 35 principles from the top investors. We're talking guys who have been on the pod like Howard Marks, Manish Pabrai, Morgan Housel, Cathie Wood, and a ton of others. These are all their frameworks, their mental models, their rules — basically how to play the long game and how to avoid ruin. You can get it in the link below." He didn't use all these exact words — this is me typing. This was before Granolah existed. He said the Business Insider strategy is sort of what Honda did in 1985 versus General Motors. He didn't say this, but these are my notes: "Start with shitty quality and get traffic to our website, and improve the shit quality — we'll improve," like he said.
09:30	Shaan Puri	It was his all-hands—inspiring to all of his employees.
09:34	Sam Parr	He didn't say it that way, but he was like, "Honda in 1985 versus GM." Honda was considered sort of a joke. GM cars were big, heavy-duty vehicles that made a big "thunk" when you shut the door, and Hondas were rinky-dink. But the difference is that with Honda, as well as with Business Insider, the quality of what they were making increased while their costs stayed the same. That's why Honda eventually won. At Business Insider, we make content a lot cheaper than The Wall Street Journal, but we think our quality is just going to continue to rise — that was his whole strategy. I always thought that was a really interesting, cool analogy: you can start kind of so-so and just slowly get better while keeping your costs the same. He kept referencing this on our call — "Honda did this, Toyota did this" — and it made me think about the strategy that a lot of Asian companies used. If you remember, do you know TCL TVs?
10:34	Shaan Puri	"I've never even heard of that."
10:35	Sam Parr	No, so TCL—if you were to go on Amazon six years ago and buy a TCL TV, they were the worst. Maybe ten years ago they were junky TVs. But you could get a 65‑inch flat‑screen TV for literally $200. I'm a gadget nerd, and over time TCL is now a baller TV company. You could still get a 65‑inch, highest‑def, fanciest TV for $200. I don't even know how this is possible. I've always thought about this strategy of Asian businesses. I've noticed—I'm not sure if it's particularly an Asian thing—but I often compare it to Asian car companies. Now I always think of it that way: they'll offer something where the quality is so‑so, but just good enough. Over time—it's like Hyundai, Kia, or Genesis—particularly Asian car companies. That's how I think of them: they're kind of crappy at first, but they just get so much better, and the prices stay the same.
11:27	Shaan Puri	What I like about this is it's the opposite of the normal white-guy referencing Asian-culture thing. Normally we take these amazing Zen practices and say, "the Japanese use the word kaizen for the continuous pursuit of perfection," and that's what we do here at our company. Or it's like "wabi-sabi" — the beauty in imperfection. It's always these high-and-mighty things that you're borrowing. Then he's like, "we use the term hundification where you start with shit and it stays shit for quite a while, but eventually the shit becomes a little less shitty," and that's what we do. Like, the first honest white guy — we give him an award for it. He's doing all the tone and the hand gestures, but he's just saying the truth. </FormattedResponse>
12:16	Sam Parr	We didn't stop there. We took the shit that we had, and the year after, a little bit less shitty, because they...
12:23	Shaan Puri	They don't know the difference.
12:27	Sam Parr	"We told them to sue Margie."
12:31	Shaan Puri	There should just be, like, a whole service that's honest business translation. You know, like "Google Translate" but for corporate translation. It's like: take any company—put their mission, values, and earnings calls into this generator—and it just tells you the truth. </FormattedResponse>
12:47	Sam Parr	Yeah, that's so funny. One of the greats, Kevin Ryan, is probably no longer a fan of the pie.
12:55	Shaan Puri	No longer a fan of the former friend of the pie, Kevin Ryan. I told you that in confidence, Sam.
13:04	Sam Parr	There was a statute of limitations on notes, by the way. Once it's been 10 years, I can talk about it. So anything that happened — or, you know, from pre-2016 — I'm allowed to bring it up.
13:14	Shaan Puri	Alright, so I was nerding out on something kind of related, so I'll segue to that. You were talking about how for the TVs thing they're like, they charge $200. At first it's kind of a shitty TV, but eventually it's kind of a great TV — and still for $200. That's different than, I would say, most companies, which assume, over time the goal is to raise prices, increase margins, and increase profits. So I was studying this investor called Nick Sleep, and there's "400" for those who weren't there. [Unclear what "400" refers to]
13:41	Sam Parr	Ever since you brought him up, I've been on him.
13:44	Shaan Puri	Yeah, so, you know, his story in short is: he was an investor. He basically raised money and was an investor for about 15 years, averaged more than 20% compounding, managing billions of dollars. He "won the game," shut down the fund, and moved on. Most of the fund was concentrated in three positions: Costco, Amazon, and Berkshire Hathaway. For the longest time he was just holding those. The interesting part isn't, "Oh wow, here's a guy who picks right." It's kind of like interviewing a lottery winner to ask how they guess the numbers — "this is his daughter's birthday" — it's not really that. If you ask, "What is Nick Sleep's philosophy? What is his core investing strategy?" he had this idea of "consumer surplus." His main realization was: look, there are many ways to invest. You could do what Buffett and Ben Graham were trying to do, which is buy a company that's trading for less than it's worth. Or you could look at some of these companies that today look overvalued — like Amazon at that time in the 2000s — and think, "Wow, this thing's got a crazy price-to-earnings ratio." He realized that the best predictor of long-term value for him was something they called "shared scale economies." Alright, so what do those mean? Economies of scale is usually when, say, you're Amazon: you have a large customer base, you're able to open warehouses in a bunch of different places, and you get what's called economies of scale — over time, your cost to serve each additional customer goes down because you're serving so many customers. You're able to almost amortize the investment cost across a large customer base. Now, what Nick Sleep identified was called "shared economy of sales" — [speaker alternately refers to this as "shared scale economies" and "shared economy of sales"] — and was that a...
15:16	Sam Parr	"Word that he did—he made this up?"
15:18	Shaan Puri	Yeah, so he... I don't know if he made it. If he...
15:20	Sam Parr	He invented it, but he was the one who really...
15:22	Shaan Puri	Yeah, he really bet on it. He made it the foundation of his investing strategy. He realized—let's take Costco. Costco's goal is to get economies of scale: they buy in bulk and have tons of locations, so they have a lot of pricing power. They're able to buy things at cheap prices. Instead of what most retailers do—buy wholesale and sell retail with a markup—Costco's goal was to make the markup as small as possible and pass all the savings of buying in bulk to the customer. He did the math. He realized, okay, let's say a Costco membership costs $100 (just using round numbers). He estimated that the average person who shops groceries at Costco is going to save on their grocery bill—let's call it $1,000 a year—just by buying at Costco because Costco is passing on those bulk savings to the customer. The customer saves $1,000 and spends $100, so the surplus they've generated—the $1,000 surplus—while they're only being charged $100, is a no-brainer proposition. What happens is, instead of increasing their prices and returning more money to shareholders, they pass the profits to the customer. That creates a juicier value proposition, which attracts more customers, gives them more scale, and allows them to create even more surplus. He realized that companies that do this early—start passing savings to the customer—will run away from the competition. They'll build such a compelling offer and so much trust with customers that they pick up market share. For example, Costco essentially makes no money on the food they sell; they make all their money on the membership, which is basically pure profit.
17:17	Sam Parr	How much? So... I'm just looking this up. I knew that they were — it was a baller stock. It does $300 billion a year in sales. How much in subscription, in the membership sales, do you know? $5 billion.
17:29	Shaan Puri	5,000,000,000 (five billion). So what he realized at that time was: let's just say it was a billion dollars at that time. He said when a traditional analyst looks at this company, they'll just see a billion dollars of profit. But what he saw was $5,000,000,000 of surplus that they're passing on to customers. They passed on $4,000,000,000 last year, $5,000,000,000 this year, it'll be $7,000,000,000 next year, $10,000,000,000 the year after, and they're just going to keep passing on so much surplus that it's going to run away from the competition. It will create so much trust and so much loyalty that they'll never have any problems attracting customers. He called that an invisible metric that doesn't show up on the balance sheet and doesn't show up on the P&L. You have to manually calculate the shared economies of scale — how much of the surplus they're giving to customers. If you track the growth rate of that, what you want are companies where that growth rate is increasing. He said Amazon was the same way for twenty years. Bezos basically did not try to extract profits; he just reinvested all the capital to give people wider selection, faster shipping, and lower prices — the three things consumers care about most. They also have the Prime membership, just like the Costco membership. So he invested heavily in that. I just thought, "Oh wow, this is a pretty brilliant insight" — a way of looking at businesses that I've never thought about. </FormattedResponse>
18:48	Sam Parr	Yeah, that's actually—sounds stupid, but that's sort of like a... I don't know if I need a lesser word, but a groundbreaking kind of stat, you know. That's actually very interesting. I've never, ever heard of a company that measures that—just how much savings we are passing on to [customers]. That's pretty interesting. But who else does that? You have to do it with a company that's huge, where there's mass appeal. And then you need a membership, right? Like a Prime-type thing.
19:13	Shaan Puri	Well, it doesn't have to necessarily be a membership—there are other ways to do it. The two biggest examples he used were memberships because it's a beautiful way to monetize. It's like: "I'm going to give you so much value in the thing you're buying that giving me an annual recurring revenue membership is a no-brainer for you." That's what Prime is, that's what Costco membership is. In those two cases it worked out beautifully. But it doesn't have to be that. For example, I was talking to AI today and I asked, "If there are these thousand companies, which other companies would Nick Sleep see as having a high surplus and how would he look at it?" AI is not great at doing analysis like this, but one of the examples it brought up was SpaceX. Basically, SpaceX has already lowered the cost to orbit by 100x. It reduced its cost by 100x but it didn't keep the same prices to the government or anybody else. It passed the savings on to the government, which is why it now takes about 80% of all payloads. It took market share by doing that. They're trying to reduce costs another 100x. They're putting up lots of satellites and trying, again, to pass the savings on to Starlink subscribers. Here you're going to have, again, an annual recurring membership with a no-brainer value proposition to a mass market—everybody on Earth wants the internet. As they improve their launch costs and launch rates, they're not going to raise prices; they're going to pass the savings on and create a membership. So in a weird way, SpaceX could look like Amazon today: highly valued on the surface but potentially undervalued if you could measure the surplus and see that the rate of surplus was growing every year. It might look like one of those businesses. I'm not an expert at this stuff—I'm just sharing my beginner learnings with you. I'm not saying this is or isn't the case. Not financial advice. I just find the idea pretty interesting; it's an idea I hadn't really heard popularized before.
21:23	Sam Parr	This guy is so interesting to me. He's—he's got everything that I want and...
21:28	Shaan Puri	Does he have, like, long hair? Nice calves.
21:30	Sam Parr	Yeah... if you Google his name—does he live? He's got a beautiful set of hair and only one photo. If you Google him, it's the same headshot used for everything.
21:40	Shaan Puri	"Nick Sleep, come on the podcast. I mean, how many times are you gonna let me make out with you on the podcast before you just finally get on here? Okay."
21:48	Sam Parr	"Yeah, do you want to break decades of being anonymous? Come on — there's literally only one photo of them. I'm for real."
21:57	Shaan Puri	It's like, I got to this hotel and I paid, like, a disgusting amount, but they had free snacks when I walked in. I was like, "Honestly, love this place — great value." They gave me, like, you know, cake pops for free when we walked in. This is incredible. My kids are so happy. I feel like that's our pitch to Nick Sleep. It's like, "Yes, you've been anonymous for 20 years and you value your privacy, and you've turned down, you know, every opportunity under the sun, but we got peanuts and snacks. If you want to come on our pod, it'll be great."
22:26	Sam Parr	He's 58 years old. He's not old—this guy's cool. There's an article called "How to Retire at 45" and it's about him. So I guess he's taking it easy. But I would love to have this guy on; that would be so fascinating—him and Paul Graham. There's something mysterious about people who claim, "I've had enough," and they opt out. I think that's interesting.
22:48	Shaan Puri	Well, one of the other takeaways, real quick, is you only need one or two—forget the word "inside." I'll call it secrets, in Peter Thiel terms. You only really need to understand one or two secrets in your lifetime to become fabulously rich, and this is one of them. For example, this is a good example of one. I think Peter Thiel did this with network-effect businesses. So understanding, you know, PayPal and Facebook early on and just understanding the power of a network effect and how unbreakable those monopolies become. Another example is Buffett. For example, he doesn't invest in network-effect tech companies or anything like this. What he looks at is what's not going to change. He's basically like: the moat is the pricing power. He gives an example—I'm not sure if you've seen this exchange—but Elon was talking about how lame moats are. He's like, "Oh, I don't like the idea of moats. If you need a moat, that's lame. You should be innovating faster than everybody else—that's how you win. And if you think a moat is going to protect you, that's not what protects you; fast innovation is protection." This is Elon's...
23:47	Sam Parr	You're like, "Elon, I don't think the word moat means what you think it means." You definitely have a moat.
23:53	Shaan Puri	Buffett replied: > "I don't know. Let's say you go to a corner store and you ask for a Snickers, and they say, 'Hey, I got a Musk bar for 10¢ less.' I don't think anyone's buying the Musk bar. In fact, if you go test this—if one place doesn't have a Snickers and they have an unbranded, unlabeled chocolate bar with peanuts in it, but the place across the street has a Snickers bar, the customer will just walk across the street and buy a Snickers. > > "So yeah. I look for Coca-Cola, Snickers, you know, Gillette, American Express. I look for these brands and franchises where you'd have to pay someone to switch—and even then they wouldn't want to. That was his core insight: you just need to find these great American franchises and invest in them."
24:40	Sam Parr	Did you see? I want to bring up a person we talked about somewhat recently but didn't dive into. Really quick: did you listen to the Lloyd Blankfein interview that we did — that I did with [name missing]? He talked about his family finances and stuff like that.
24:54	Shaan Puri	No. I only—I've listened to the first five minutes, but I'm on vacation, so I hadn't had time to get my phone and listen to it. Why? What did he say about his family? So, by the way, did you know this guy before? Am I dumb? I never heard of this person. And then... yeah.
25:07	Sam Parr	I knew of him. All about this.
25:08	Shaan Puri	Guy, suddenly.
25:09	Sam Parr	Well, when you and I were younger—probably in high school—that was his peak, his prime. And so... during the wall...
25:16	Shaan Puri	So, did you know him back then, or only now?
25:18	Sam Parr	I knew him as a famous—he was the face of banking. He was like the Jamie Dimon of ’08. Particularly when Occupy Wall Street was a thing, he was the face of evil because of the name Goldman [Goldman Sachs]. There was this funny line he told me. He said, “Yeah, they protested outside of my house and everything.” I asked, “How does that feel?” He replied: > “Well, two things. One: go and try to get a mortgage from Goldman—you can't. So I didn't cause the mortgage crisis; I don't know why they were so angry at me. And second of all, they were camping out outside of my house protesting, but that's what [unclear].”
25:57	Shaan Puri	I shouted out from the window on the fifth balcony in my house, "We wouldn't give you a mortgage even if you tried." That didn't seem to help.
26:07	Sam Parr	He was super likable—so charming and charismatic. Basically, Lloyd is... you could look up his career earnings at Goldman. When Goldman went public, he was about 42 or 43 years old. He told me his shares were worth about $160,000,000 at that time. He's 72 now, so that was roughly thirty years ago. The course of his earnings while it was public is all on record: many, many hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Presumably, I would imagine he's worth $2,000,000,000+. He grew up in a poor Brooklyn family. He's very self-deprecating. His father was a post office worker and his mother, I think, was a stay-at-home mom. He calls himself the "blue-collar CEO." He said, "I wasn't even that smart, but somehow I got into Harvard and they paid for my school." One time when he was at Harvard he went to the financial aid office and said, "I don't have any money to eat—can I please have money?" They gave him $500 back then, and it changed his life because he had food. He went to Harvard and got a job as a lawyer, but "this sucks, I don't want to do this." So he took a job at a ragtag subsidiary of Goldman. He said, "I don't even know what Goldman is; I don't know what banking is," but they saw him as this hard-nosed, blue-collar guy who went to Harvard and they checked the boxes. He was a commodities trader at this little ragtag group, which at the time was considered very low-brow. Over many years he slowly worked his way up to eventually become partner and then CEO of Goldman. When he was in my office he had a very blue-collar vibe that felt authentic. He looked me in the eye and could riff on silly stuff. At the same time I was like, "Dude, you're acquaintances with Putin..." and then the conversation trailed off...
27:58	Shaan Puri	Phone as putty... putty call, yeah.
28:00	Sam Parr	Yeah, like, I could see how this guy is charming and how he worked his way to the top...
28:06	Shaan Puri	He can imagine being "the shark" in the sharks — like, how, how insane it is to work your way up at Goldman among all the sharks and become the CEO. What does that even take? That sort of mind‑boggling level of difficulty. I know people who have made more money just building a company, but that's actually not as hard as playing the corporate game inside Goldman and rising up among all those corporate sharks.
28:33	Sam Parr	He's wild, but he came off—during the podcast I told him, "Man, you are making Goldman seem likable," which is not easy. You're making him seem relatable and likable. That's a very hard thing to do. For some reason, after talking to him I'm like, "Oh, I can do this," even though obviously I can't. He told the story. I asked him about personal finances: "Hey, how do your personal finances work?" He had told the story about how he grew up poor and that he's still cheap. He was like, "I buy the— is there a cheaper tier of Netflix that has ads?" He said, "I won't even pay for that. I do the cheap one, because there's something about it—because I grew up poor, it still bothers me." He said—I think he said—80% of his net worth is in public equities, of which 90% of that 80%... something like that. He still day trades and he was like, "I day trade. I'm obsessed with it. I love the game so much and I want to check my phone all the time." But when I do research on different stocks I'll get to a Bloomberg publication or the Wall Street Journal or something like that, and I don't buy the subscriptions because it kind of hurts me to pay for it. I just thought that was incredibly fascinating to hear—how a billionaire manages their finances.
29:41	Shaan Puri	"How a billionaire mismanages his finances is what I heard he..."
29:45	Sam Parr	Well, he did the right thing.
29:46	Shaan Puri	"None of that makes any sense."
29:48	Sam Parr	The top.
29:50	Shaan Puri	I wasn't there so I could talk shit. I was there; I would also be blushing and saying how great he is. But, you know, just hearing it from the outside—just to be the outsider for a second—you're day trading a billion dollars while not paying for Netflix because you're cheap. Like, why don't you even... understand what you're taught? You don't pay for, for, for, you know, premium news? [Sentence trails off / incomplete]
30:12	Sam Parr	It wasn't a logical thing, but it felt right. He was kind of saying, "Here's how I'm messed up," just like the average Joe. It was so fascinating. At the end of the interview—did I tell you what I tried to do with him? I said, "Hey, I have this Instagram. Do you want me to..." I was going to do a handshake. I said, "I have an idea: I can act like I'm reviewing your book and I'll just bring Lloyd in. Lloyd, just tell him what your book's about, will you?" He said, "I'm too old for that stuff. I'm not acting cute on Instagram."
30:44	Shaan Puri	"That's the most likable thing you said so far about him."
30:47	Sam Parr	I was like, "Oh, Lloyd—it's..."
30:48	Shaan Puri	Not like... none of the billionaires. They're just like us, but there's always that one who's like, "I'm not gonna do that."
30:54	Sam Parr	"I wouldn't describe it as 'cute'—I mean, it is cute, but that's not it. It's more like fun. You don't like... 'fun' goes, 'that's too cute, dude; I'm not doing that.' And I was like, 'Yes sir, I'll walk you to the elevator.' Yeah, it was pretty good. Very cool. But he was fascinating. And then another guy—Barry, who we had on the other [panel]—talked about David Rubenstein. Had you ever heard of him before David or Barry told you about him?"
31:22	Shaan Puri	From Carlyle Group.
31:24	Sam Parr	Yeah, do you know anything about this guy?
31:26	Shaan Puri	Only surface-level stuff.
31:28	Sam Parr	Yeah, I want to fill you in on a little bit about a story, because I've actually always been a fan of his. I mostly knew him as an author of history books—not particularly as a business guy. I was researching him; it's pretty fascinating, and he's kinda my new man-crush a little bit. He kinda got his foot in the door because when he was in his twenties and thirties—well, he was a lawyer—but he quit being a lawyer because he wanted to work for the Jimmy Carter administration. He made a joke: "When I joined Jimmy Carter, he was up by like 31 points and then he eventually won by one." Jimmy Carter went to David and was like, "So what contributions did you make?" He has this kind of funny, self-deprecating humor, but he worked for Jimmy Carter. Eventually Carter was a one-term president; he didn't get re-elected. David Rubenstein—he's 31 years old—was like, "Well, what do I do now?" There was this amazing article I found, written by Michael Lewis—the famous author. He wrote an article in 1993 called "The Access Capitalist." It's a ten-page or so piece written about David, and it's from a while ago. I love that. He said David got his start using what people are calling the "Great Eskimo Tax Scam of 1987."
32:44	Shaan Puri	"Tell me what?"
32:45	Sam Parr	So the story is basically: David had this amazing Rolodex. He was really well connected in Washington, D.C. He was known as likable, a great networker, and reliable—he just knew a little bit of everyone. He was out of work at the age of 31 and wondering what to do next. He heard about this weird tax loophole where, if you were a native of Alaska, you were given a certain amount of tax losses automatically. I don't know why—I think it was to incentivize people to live there. What he did was organize a bunch of buyers and sellers. Meaning, if you wanted, you could sell $10,000,000 in tax write-offs to willing buyers for $7,000,000 in cash. Thus the buyer got a reduced taxable income of $3,000,000. David heard about this and thought it was interesting. He and a couple of friends organized roughly $2,000,000,000 in transacting these tax losses, and after doing that for two or three years they had made something like $20,000,000. That money is what they used three years later to eventually start Carlyle Group [private equity firm], which is now one of the largest PE firms in the world. I believe they have $500,000,000,000 in companies that they own. David said he thought he had a pretty good IQ himself, but he was seeing a lot of people make a lot more money than he was—people he thought maybe weren't as smart as him—so he decided to try this PE firm. He raises a little bit of money and uses the money they made from the tax-saving "scam"—"scam," sorry—no longer. I guess he just canceled his booking with us.
34:28	Shaan Puri	Skeeb — never friend of the pod. Skeeb.
34:31	Sam Parr	I meant to say Skeeb. It was cold outside. I meant to say Skeeb, and he used this thing and he started in the PE business, which at the time in the '80s was just killing it. It felt like that's when all the big PE firms were built because the idea of a leveraged buyout was brand new. So he raised a little bit of money and did a couple of deals. It didn't really work that well. I think he said the first deal they tried to buy was a Mexican restaurant called "Chi-Chi's," and he said it wasn't going so hot.
35:03	Shaan Puri	> "He went from the Eskimo scam to Chi-Chi's, alright." </FormattedResponse>
35:05	Sam Parr	Yeah, he's not doing so hot. But then he had this idea: "I know everyone in DC, and a lot of jobs in DC are pretty cyclical. After four years you quit and you're like, what do I do?" He knew a bunch of interesting people, and those people knew a bunch of interesting and powerful people. You don't want to sell access to those people — that would be borderline unethical and sometimes illegal. So he thought, what if I just get all of these powerful people who no longer have government jobs to come work at this private equity firm? When we start buying companies, it would help to have friends in government so you can get meetings with big, powerful companies. Carlyle eventually specializes in defense-contractor–style companies, and that is sort of how it took off. The more interesting part is what he's done while building the company. He has five or six books, which is how I've met him or know of him. He's got a book called The American Stories, where he interviews historians. He's got a book called How to Lead, The American Experiment, How to Invest: The Highest Calling — which is conversations about different presidents. He has a show on Bloomberg called The David Rubenstein Show. He's got... </FormattedResponse>
36:17	Shaan Puri	Yeah, that's what I've seen. His interviews are amazing.
36:20	Sam Parr	But listen to this shit: he owns all this amazing stuff. He owns, I think, one of the last privately owned copies of the Magna Carta — which is one of the most historical documents of all time. He bought it for $21,000,000. He owns one of the last pieces of the Declaration of Independence. He owns a Lincoln-signed Emancipation Proclamation. He funded the Washington Monument when it needed to be rebuilt. He funded the Lincoln Memorial when it needed to be rebuilt. He funds all these amazing things. He helped with the Kennedy Center; he helped produce — and helps produce — a lot of Ken Burns documentaries. He funds them. He's just this crazy guy who does all of this interesting stuff. And his side hustle is basically buying these documents, meeting the people who are around the documents, writing books about the documents, becoming a board member of the museum to which he loans the documents, and he just has this, like, crazy...
37:14	Shaan Puri	Fascinating. I mean, that's an epic charcuterie-board career, you know what I mean? A little bit of this, a little bit of that — they work well together. He's kind of like the "white knight of Washington, DC." I kind of love it. I always love people who are not one-dimensional in the way they operate. The one-dimensional people I appreciate for their laser focus and obsession, and I take inspiration from that, but I don't take guidance from it. I take more guidance from people like this, who I think have a more interesting, varied career. Personally, I find that really compelling.
37:48	Sam Parr	I love this guy. Google—or go to his Wikipedia page—and look at the stings that he's contributed to. I mentioned just barely any of them, but it's like...
37:56	Shaan Puri	David Beckham's wisdom teeth. He's playing a game: "Two Truths and a Lie." Rubenstein's collectibles.
38:06	Sam Parr	"Dude, it's so awesome what he does. I just think that guys like this are really cool. He's actually coming on the podcast in August. Sorry, Dave — I didn't mean to insult you if I got any details wrong."
38:21	Shaan Puri	"Wait—he's coming on. Okay, I'm so excited now. That's amazing."
38:23	Sam Parr	Yeah, it's amazing. I think that he's been doing this kind of baller-style giving—philanthropic stuff and history stuff. I think he's been doing it along the way, and not just at the end of his career, which I find really fascinating. He makes this joke where, first of all, he says: > "My whole shtick is I love self-deprecating humor because it disarms people." He's kind of a self-deprecating guy, which makes him very likable. But he was like: > "I'm not really that good of an investor. I just work pretty hard, I know kind of everyone, I'm pretty good at connecting people, and I also have really good business partners who've helped me start Carlyle, and that's one of the reasons why it's the way it is." I thought that was really fascinating.
39:01	Shaan Puri	I like that a lot. It also sounds like he had a, you know, a cool second act to his career—maybe a second or a third act. Can I tell you about a business that I think is really cool that is someone's second act? I think you know the person, but I don't know how much time you've spent thinking about this business. So, the business is PSA. PSA is—if you ever want to buy a rare Charizard, well, you want to know the PSA grade of that card. So we've gotta get this.
39:33	Sam Parr	Guy on.
39:34	Shaan Puri	Yeah, so Nat Turner bought this business. I think his last company was in health care or something; he sold it to Roche. He's always been a nerd, a collector. He raised some money and he took the company private—or he bought this company, I think it's called Collectors Universe. They own PSA. [PSA = Professional Sports Authenticator] I just found this category of business to be pretty fascinating. Let me tell you a little bit about it. Here's one way of looking at it: it's a business that controls something like 70% of its market—absolutely dominant. They have $400 million of orders just sitting in the queue that they haven't even gotten to yet. $400 million. If I'm wrong, we'll fire our researcher, but that's what we have here.
40:19	Sam Parr	"What, are you going to cancel your Claude subscription?"
40:24	Shaan Puri	Oh, cute, Claude. I'm nasty talking to, basically—they've dominated this space of grading cards. And if you think about what that is, the broader category of problem they solve is something called credence goods. So I was kinda nerding out on this. What a credence good is: basically, it's a good that even after you've consumed it—even after you have it—you still don't really know the quality of it. Medical care is a good example. You have surgery and you ask, "How'd you like your surgeon?" I don't know. I have no idea; I have no way to assess the efficacy of my surgeon. If they're terrible, I could probably tell, but I can't really tell the difference between good, great, and world-class. The same is true for collectibles. Let's say somebody had an original Sammy Sosa rookie card. The big home-run boom was happening when he and Mark McGwire were hitting a bunch of home runs and people were buying up these cards. The problem, without a trusted third party, is: one, the owner says it's in excellent condition and then shows it to a buyer; the buyer says, "I don't know, it seems fair," then the buyer owns it and later says it's mint condition. There's all this arguable— and that's just the condition. Let alone: is it even authentic? Is this real? Was this actually a first edition or a second edition? Does it actually have that feature? So you need third-party trust in these systems where there was no structure. Coins were like this; cards were like this—Pokémon cards, sports cards. There was an entire industry of collectors who were very passionate but had no structure, and it needed third-party trust. This exists in many industries. For example, if you ever go through an M&A process, you'll have to get a QoE [quality of earnings] or a third-party audit. Deloitte, Ernst & Young—they built multi-billion-dollar businesses just doing attestation: just saying, "Yes, this company's financials are sound," so the seller and the buyer can do a trusted transaction because the buyer knows they don't have to go verify the company's books themselves. So attestation and credentialing—these are huge businesses. They are some of the most beautiful business models because you become basically a trust tax on an entire industry. You don't have to be the best buyer or seller; you don't have to own anything. It's super capital-light. All you have to do is become the trusted third party. That's hard to do, but once you do it, it's an incredible position to be in. And I think what Nat Turner did buying this company is absolutely brilliant.
43:00	Sam Parr	I think they.
43:01	Shaan Puri	Bought it for $809,100,000,000. This is going to be a multibillion-dollar company because it's taking the dominant market share and there's a network effect. If I have a card that I think is valuable, am I going to go to a third-rate grader because I can save a little bit on grading my card? No way. I'm going to go to PSA, because if it's PSA 10—PSA-certified—that makes my card more valuable. So the trust sort of compounds and it becomes the known unit of account on the street. You see it everywhere you go; you're just going to keep seeing PSA. That means when you need to get your cards graded, you go to PSA, and then they add on top of grading—they have a vault. They store a million cards in their vault because they're basically a hybrid: one part Moody's, where they're grading an asset class, and on the other side they're Fort Knox, where they have this giant vault storing a billion dollars' worth of cards or whatever it is in their vaults.
43:57	Sam Parr	With this business, I'm just looking it up. It's called Collectors.com now. It's like a portfolio—I think they own the ones you mentioned plus three or four others. They have this cool Jackie Robinson card in their photos, and it's created by Topps. I bought so many of those Topps cards. Topps is owned by Fanatics. Because it's not a regulated thing—it's not like money or gold—what's to stop Fanatics from making more? It's not like a limited supply, do you know what I mean? And it's not.
44:31	Shaan Puri	So, it's not like there's nothing stopping them. Yes, it is a limited supply. If Topps can't be trusted to not flood the market with more cards, people will stop buying Topps. The more supply there is, the less valuable each card becomes. Topps has an incentive to control the supply tightly — to manipulate the supply artificially. That incentive aligns with the incentives of buyers and holders, because they need scarcity for this to be valuable. PSA (Professional Sports Authenticator) sits as a layer underneath both. PSA grades and authenticates that a card is real, not a fake, and that it's in good condition. Because PSA sees so many cards, they know the absolute scarcity — how many of these cards really are out there circulating in the market. They know the liquidity of each card market. So there's like a market cap for Charizard cards; there's a market cap for Jackie Robinson cards, because PSA knows how much liquidity there is and how much circulating supply there is. They also know the relative value of a card, because they can tell, “Wow, this is mint condition” versus “this is good condition.” In that way, they're all kind of in cahoots with each other — in a symbiotic relationship.
45:49	Sam Parr	It's sort of like—have you ever seen how McDonald's does the Monopoly game? The way the Monopoly game works is there are only two or four winning pieces, and they guard them pretty crazily. Although they were scammed once. There was a whole documentary about it where one of their janitors... [sentence trails off]
46:06	Shaan Puri	"One side, yeah."
46:07	Sam Parr	Yeah, they took them. It would be very interesting — they found the corner of the office where they kept the cards, and they're like, "Yoink, it's mine." I would have loved to know: when they're making these cards, they must know in advance which ones might be valuable and how they place them in a pack, because they're just in little bubble-gum $5 packs, right?
46:27	Shaan Puri	See that? Yeah.
46:29	Sam Parr	Dude, Nat Turner was 35 when he did this. He had recently sold Flatiron Health — I think that's what it was called — for $2 billion in 2018. So he must have sold... I think he sold one company for $40 million when he was...
46:42	Shaan Puri	20 company.</FormattedResponse>
46:43	Sam Parr	Yeah, it was an ad-tech company. I forget what it was called, but it was a cool thing. He sold it to Google for $40 billion, I think. Then he starts this cancer thing because someone in his family, I think, was sick. He and his partner — I think his partner is Zach — they're whip smart. I could tell by the way Zach is: he's kind of a feisty guy online and he's very sharp with his words. When you see guys talk like this, you're like, "That's not someone I want to argue with," because not only is he sharp, he's argumentative and he won't back down.
47:12	Shaan Puri	"Yeah, he calls bullshit."
47:13	Sam Parr	Yeah, and so this guy Nat seems like a slightly nicer version of that, but he still has it. He seems so smart and wise at a very young age. I've been very fascinated by him as well. I also thought, when he did this, I was like... it was totally— I don't know, like, that's... And then you go to the website and you're like, "This is awesome. This is good for the soul."
47:33	Shaan Puri	I mean, the math on this — there's just the queue alone, right? 14 million cards in the queue. The cost to grade a single card is, you know, about $20 on the low end, [interpreting "thousand+" as $1,000+ on the high end] — let's call it $30 on average. So 14 million cards in the queue times $30 is $400,000,000 sitting in the queue. It's probably more if you think the average cost per card is higher. And so that's if that's just their backlog. By the way, this is one of the reasons he bought it: there was a one-year wait to grade cards. He was like, "Dude, this is terrible." So he bought it to try to modernize it with technology, with efficiency, with intensity, and to say, "We have to be able to do better than that." He'll take it public again once we've implemented a more tech-forward approach to doing this, because you can't just have a multiyear backlog and cards waiting to be graded.
48:22	Sam Parr	If you go to his Instagram, it's called Nat Turner's Cards. It's just photos of him showing off his card collection. He owns what looks like a Yao Ming rookie card, and it's just him showing it off: "This is so cool." I wonder what their office is like. This is awesome.
48:44	Shaan Puri	It's the Yao Ming—the Yao Ming rookie card. Just for some reason, it got me. Yeah... I don't know. I don't know what their office is like. I don't know what they're... I don't know what any of it's like. I just think this... have you?
48:54	Sam Parr	Ever talked to him?
48:54	Shaan Puri	Kind of an amazing move. No, I've never met him. I would love to have him on. I think this would be really fun to...
48:58	Sam Parr	Yeah.
48:58	Shaan Puri	I think this would be great. I also just think this is my sickness, my disease: anytime I discover a great business model, the envy in me is like, "How do I have one? I want one." So there's a question of where else businesses like these exist, or where you could build a business like these. My brain goes to human capital. For example, could I create a PSA-style grading system for the top 1% of Ivy League graduates? Could I basically score them in some way? Could I do this for sports—just like they do with the combine in the NFL or NBA? Could you do this with youth athletes? Basically, where would there be an aligned set of incentives and demand for it? They want structure and a scoring system that can be trusted by all parties. And where's the economy big enough? Collectibles was a big enough economy; I think it's like a $10 billion-ish industry. It was big enough to support these types of revenues. So I wonder where else you could build one of these—third-party trust, third-party grading systems.
50:08	Sam Parr	Dude, but there's also... I mean, you're just scratching the surface with different collectibles. If you want to get really nerdy, I'm part of all these vintage denim communities online, and people will post, "Yeah, look..." For tens of us, if—if you're gonna say this guy who's got an Instagram, who's 38 years old, dedicated to...
50:26	Shaan Puri	This was magic for me. It was cool when he did it, but when you said it...
50:30	Sam Parr	"Felt differently. Wait — you don't like Lee Jeets from 1947? But there are all these... they do this for purses."
50:42	Shaan Puri	Wait—Amex, tell me: when you appreciate denim, is it like with wine where you're tasting it? With colognes, you're smelling them. What do you even do? Is it a feel, a smell, or a look? What do you even look at? What traits do you evaluate—the premium, the best stuff?
51:01	Sam Parr	Or, worse, there are all types of terminology. You want to look at the honeycombs, which are the fading on the back of the knee. You want to look at the back patch near the butt. Ask: is this patch made out of cardboard and paper, or is it made out of leather? Has it shrunk a little bit or not? You also want to look at the copper rivets. Are they a little green, so you know it's real copper? Are they hidden or visible?
51:25	Shaan Puri	"Famous pair of jeans — like the Jonas Wagner baseball card or the rare Charizard. What is the most valuable collected denim?"
51:34	Sam Parr	Yeah, so Levi Strauss was invented — Levi Strauss was a man; he invented it in the 1800s to help gold miners in San Francisco (California) and Nevada. If you can find what's called a buckle back — where they have the buckle on the back, called a cinch — and you can find any of those in an old mine and date it to the 1800s, those could be worth $20. Collectors, particularly Japanese collectors, love them. But then there's this whole subgenre of people who make reproductions, predominantly Asian companies — Japanese companies — they're the ones who make the best ones. Japanese replicate American shit so well. I'm wearing a pair right now of Levi's.
52:18	Shaan Puri	"Stand up. Stand up. Let's see it. Let's see him."
52:21	Sam Parr	Look at this high-rise.
52:21	Shaan Puri	Give us.</FormattedResponse>
52:22	Sam Parr	"A twirl."
52:22	Shaan Puri	"Give us a twirl."
52:23	Sam Parr	"High-rise. Look at the roping—the roping. These are beautiful roping fades. That's what you're looking for. You're looking for that chain-stitch hem. That's not made by a normal sewing machine; that's made by a Union machine. They don't even make those anymore. You've gotta find— you've gotta find these."
52:39	Shaan Puri	Dyed hemming that.
52:40	Sam Parr	"Yeah, you gotta find that — costs $70 to get hemmed. Okay, you gotta find that. Good, good. It's actually quite challenging, and so..." </FormattedResponse>
52:49	Shaan Puri	Think: what is the most expensive denim art piece you've bought? Are you a buyer, or are you just a casual?
52:57	Sam Parr	I'm... you're a voyeur. I'm... I'm a voyeur, but I like $500 for a vintage jacket. Have you considered...?
53:03	Shaan Puri	Have you been tempted to be like, "Oh, $15, Sarah—do we need that? Do we need to go?"
53:09	Sam Parr	I don't have... So there's, like, a 90-a-pair of 1947 Levi's that use the green for the pockets. Back then we were provisioning materials, so every material was green for the war. Getting some of those real-deal, you know, the real-deal holyfield ones—yeah, I want that stuff. But my thing is that there's this whole subreddit dedicated to two things. One is looking at the fade of your denim. It's called "Reddit Raw Fades"—so that's raw denim that fades nicely. I swear to God, it's literally just photos and photos. Photos would be hard to make, but yeah—it's beautiful. I do know there are people who do this for other types of clothing, which are far more desirable, like purses. [Note: the phrase "90-a-pair" and the word "holyfield" in the original were unclear.]
53:49	Shaan Puri	"So you're saying you could do niche PSAs if you specialized in different clothing — clothing and bags, yeah?"
53:58	Sam Parr	Denim is too niche, but... maybe there's a long...</FormattedResponse>
54:02	Shaan Puri	Tail of things like denim.
54:03	Sam Parr	Well, particularly the handbags. I've seen this all the time—handbags on eBay and stuff. I bought my wife a vintage one for $2 or $3, and I'm just trusting the person's eBay profile that they have 5 out of 5 stars. But yeah, there's a bunch of cool collectible genres that are still really prime for some of this stuff. By the way, I know it's amazing that a woman decided to marry me even though I'm still into this stuff, but we exist, guys. Oh my God, I [unclear: "nat turner"]—obviously we are nerds as well. You'd like to come on? Would love.
54:43	Shaan Puri	"To Rubenstein: have Nat Turner come on the podcast, guys. Don't we seem like a good hang?"
54:50	Sam Parr	Look, we're not weird. We've insulted ourselves just as much as we've insulted you, so it's like we're good. That's something—you should wear a white tank top more often. I think it brings out something special in you.
55:07	Shaan Puri	"Should I just go skimpier and skimpier with each episode?"
55:14	Sam Parr	"Just saw the flex on the shoulders — congratulations. It seems like, by the way, for the past two years everyone has been commenting on your body every single episode, yeah."
55:23	Shaan Puri	That's great — love it.
55:24	Sam Parr	"Yeah, all right."
55:25	Shaan Puri	Keep it coming to Spotify. My good friend in India keeps commenting on how—how—how much better I look and how I'm getting in great shape, and it shows. Keep it up.
55:35	Sam Parr	Yeah. Working PSA is going to grade you. They're going to give you a... they're going to give you a "it's fine." Fair.
55:43	Shaan Puri	Condition, yeah.
55:45	Sam Parr	That's fair. That's fair. Alright, that's it. That's the pod.

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This guy sold his company for $2B (and used it to buy Pokémon cards?)

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