How Beachbody Makes Money, & Brainstorming "HackerNews for X" | My First Million #173

Shaan Puri

In this class, there was one guy who was always talking. He would raise his hand first thing for every single question. He had a big opinion on all these topics. I’m like, “Dude, how does this guy know about all this stuff?” He was just super into the internet. At the time, I labeled this guy as a loser. I was like, “Wow, this guy's like this overeager student.”

Sam Parr

dork

Shaan Puri

Who's like kind of a know-it-all and like kind of sucking up to the teacher? Why is he so into this? Wow, what a loser! He spends his nights researching the pros and cons of net neutrality. Okay, now fast forward. Now that's me. I'm that loser. I was just late to the game, and that guy, Dan, ended up joining Coinbase as one of the early employees.

Sam Parr

abreu what is your rating of today's episode I'd go a -

Shaan Puri

we rambled a lot but I

Sam Parr

kinda like that that we go into different topics

Shaan Puri

I mean we're everywhere

Sam Parr

**Podgrant, Hacker News stuff, crypto for Hacker News, the origin stories of Product Hunt, 75 Hard, Tony Horton, Sean pouring his heart out at the end. We got everything in there.** What were your top two favorite things? I like talking about the origin story, like how Ryan kind of hacked his way to growing Product Hunt. That was kind of cool. The P90X origin story as well; that was kind of cool. I have to look up that YouTube video that Sean mentioned. That was definitely interesting. Listeners, let us know if you like having this up front. Let's get to today's podcast. Alright, what's up?

Shaan Puri

what's up

Sam Parr

sorry I was late I was sitting here working

Shaan Puri

podcast bro nobody knows you were late

Sam Parr

I'm never the late one. I take pride in that. I was just literally sitting here working. I had no idea; I didn't even look at the time.

Shaan Puri

The funny thing is, I was also 2 minutes late, but when I saw your message that was like, "Hey, sorry I'm running late. I'll be there in a minute," I was like, "Boom! I need to hop in there now!" So I'm there first, yeah.

Sam Parr

I'm not typically late, but I was. I will tell you a few things that I was working on, so just a quick recap: I'm working on some growth stuff, so I want to run a few quick ideas by you. This will only take a second.

Shaan Puri

but first yeah

Sam Parr

So, in the last... whenever we launched, however long that's been, not including month 1 to month 2 because it was like a 500% growth rate. So, I'm not including that. We have grown, on average, 10% a month.

Shaan Puri

okay

Sam Parr

This month, April's not over, but if you take the average of the trailing three weeks and give it a fourth week, it's going to be about 400,000 downloads—maybe a little bit over. So, if you take that and multiply it by then to January, we're going to hit 1,000,000 downloads a month by around January at a 10% growth rate.

Shaan Puri

If we keep going at this rate, yeah, so right now we're on pace for about 5,000,000 downloads a year. And then, no, what you're saying is...

Sam Parr

well it's it's more 400,000 downloads a

Shaan Puri

month that's 5,000,000 a year

Sam Parr

that's a that's assuming 0 growth

Shaan Puri

Right, right. With the growth, it'll be like $6,000,000 or something like that. More like $8,000,000. Okay?

Sam Parr

Great! Because the end of the year is going to start getting 800,000, 900,000, or even 1,000,000 downloads a month.

Shaan Puri

And dude, if people start commuting, they need a little good, good, good in their ears while they're commuting. That's what we needed. We took a 20% cut, I think, when COVID happened.

Sam Parr

yeah

Shaan Puri

I saw the numbers dip and then we rebuilt from there

Sam Parr

So, the current growth rate is actually quite good. It's just... this is the same thing of like if you just focus and just do the same old, same old over and over and over again, it's gonna work. But of course, we want to expedite that. The things that we're working on... we've already talked about what we worked on, but let me bring up a few things: First, I actually think that we need to be a little bit tighter with our content. Meaning, what are the... I don't watch sports, but I know you do. What are like the sports shows where they go through topic by topic and they have like a time limit?

Shaan Puri

Yeah, like "Pardon the Interruption." They do that where it's like 5 minutes. It's like, "Alright, we're talking about..." and they always have, you know, the stuff people care about. Or, you know, they have these little names on the side, and it's like you kind of want to tune in to hear what they're going to say about X and what are they going to say about Y.

Sam Parr

So, I think we should start doing that. I'm trying to figure out how to do it, but I would like us to. We're going to start; I'm going to try it for an episode, and I'll coordinate it. Everything that is on Instagram and on YouTube, we have to drive all traffic to iTunes, not to Spotify. Even though a lot of people say they listen to Spotify, the numbers show that more people will just barely listen to iTunes. If you click subscribe on iTunes, it automatically downloads, and we get credit for that. Whereas with Spotify, it doesn't do that. So, gaming the system and playing within the rules—that's the way to go. Currently, we are not linking to any of our iTunes stuff. Finally, or no, the second to last thing is recapping old stuff. We have 170 episodes. Did you know that? I didn't know that.

Shaan Puri

that's a that's a lot yeah

Sam Parr

And so what I'm going to do is go through all the old ones and bucket them into categories. We could re-release them just with the new intro because, right, I think they'll be great.

Shaan Puri

Even that's really smart. If we basically take our best episodes from earlier when we had half the size of the audience, and maybe we cut off some bullshit if there was something dumb, but we just take the... you know, in the month like last year this month, if we had 3 good episodes and we just say: "Boom! We're bringing back those business ideas and repackaging them in a way that's better." And we sort of re-release our greatest hits. I think that's a good idea. Oh, that's not what I was thinking...

Sam Parr

Trims the fat. I think that will work. But what I was thinking of is grouping it. So, let's say that in episode 5, then 34, and then 8, we had a religion-based theme, like a church. Right? We could make a religion app, then composite the episodes. The reason why is so you can create a "how-to" title. Because what I've looked at in all the data is that anything that's "how-to" related gets more views than other stuff. Speaking of which, smart... and this is one of the last things: we can retitle old ones to be more clickbait headlines. And then, last but not least, Alex Garcia on my team, who's been going wild on Twitter, is going to join the podcast team a little bit for growth. We are also hooking up with HubSpot. They've got a team or an outsourced production company that I want to look into. They have claimed that if you significantly increase the production value, even on content like this, it increases downloads. I don't believe it, but it's interesting.

Shaan Puri

Right, well, we're going to throw it all at the wall and see what happens. Speaking of growth, can I transition to an app that's growing that I want to talk about? Or we can actually do your rundown of the topics we're going to discuss in this episode. So, I'm going to talk about some things in the fitness space, specifically the app **75 Hard** and how it relates to **P90X** and a whole bunch of different fitness trends that I've seen. I'm going to break that down in detail. We're also going to talk about **Hacker News** and basically niche news websites. You have an opinion on that, so do I. And then we might talk about **MVNOs**. I'm not sure if I'll get to it today. Did you have any other topics that you wanted to discuss?

Sam Parr

and what was your last one

Shaan Puri

MVNOs. This is when you can basically start your own cell phone carrier company. It's pretty cool. There's a lot of stuff on it.

Sam Parr

I think that actually might be a lead for the next one because that's a pretty big idea. I think it's really interesting. What I did this week is I actually researched everything you had, and I have points and counterpoints. I didn't research that one because it's very interesting. Can we wait for the next one instead?

Shaan Puri

it it takes a lot yeah

Sam Parr

Right, and instead, go to this "Teachable for Devs" thing because I have some intel on that. So, I went and got some intel on "75 Hard," and I think the most interesting part is the Hacker News stuff. I went and talked to a friend, Andrew—your friend, our friend—who owns a company in the space, and they got all of his numbers.

Shaan Puri

okay great alright where do you wanna start we can start on any of those topics

Sam Parr

hacker news

Shaan Puri

Okay, so I was looking at... I saw this tweet from this guy Dan Romero. And Dan Romero, actually, it's kind of a funny story. I'll just lead in with a personal story: When I was in college - I don't know when you were in college - were you trying... what was your strategy? Were you trying to take the hard classes, the easy classes, or what you're interested in? You see, some people do the hard ones, some people do what they're most interested in, and some people, like me, were just looking for the easy way out.

Sam Parr

yeah

Shaan Puri

and it sounds like you're the same and so I took

Sam Parr

rate my professor

Shaan Puri

I used Rate My Professor to find the easiest classes. I would look for the classes that football players and basketball players took because those were the easy classes. For example, "Rocks for Jocks" was the code name for this geology class. It was the easiest class ever! I got into this class, and I was genuinely trying to take an interesting class about sports psychology or sports medicine or something like that. It turns out this class only had the female basketball players at Duke in it. There were 10 students, and they were all female basketball players at Duke. When I looked at the schedule, I was like, "Oh, there's no classroom. Where do I go for my class?" I emailed the teacher, and he said, "There's no physical meetings for this course. I don't know how you got into this."

Sam Parr

oh my gosh

Shaan Puri

But he's like, "You just need to read this one book." It was the Lance Armstrong book, whatever his book was called. At the end of the year, you read that one book, which is like the easiest book to read, by the way. Then, at the end of the year, you write a 2-page report on it, and that was the whole class. No, you're kidding me! Sorry, Duke, you know you definitely do the thing that all schools do with education.

Sam Parr

I get that it's cool when you're a kid, but also, as a kid and now as an adult who's going to send his kids to college, I'm like, "What a waste."

Shaan Puri

waste of money

Sam Parr

what a waste of shit dude I would take I thought

Shaan Puri

I had hit the lottery

Sam Parr

I was the only athlete in college, and they made me take gym class. I was a runner, mind you, and the gym class was aerobic walking.

Shaan Puri

it's like if you got to the classroom you're done you did it you show up

Sam Parr

And then you go for a walk. It was called an aerobic walk, and I was a Division One athlete.

Shaan Puri

So, like I said, in that process, one class that I took while trying to find an easy class was called "The Internet" or something like that. I thought, "Oh, bingo! I know about that one. Let me take that." At this time, I wasn't thinking about who I am today. I didn't think I was going to go into the tech space; I thought I was going to be a doctor. I was a pretty average student, like a B- student, very lazy, and that's who I was. I go to this class, and I'm basically just there again because I'm trying to coast to an A in some easy class called "The Internet." It can't be that hard, and it really wasn't that hard. It was a discussion about internet topics like net neutrality and stuff like that. I didn't really care; I just sat there, finally doing the crossword puzzle in the school newspaper, eating Chick-fil-A in this classroom, hoping the professor never calls on me. But in this class, there was one guy who was always talking. He would raise his hand first for every single question and had a big opinion on all these topics. I thought, "Dude, how does this guy know about all this stuff?" He was just super into the internet, and at the time, I labeled this guy as a loser. I was like, "Wow, this guy's like this overeager student."

Sam Parr

dork

Shaan Puri

Who's like kind of a know-it-all and like kind of sucking up to the teacher. And like, why is he so into this? Wow, what a loser! He spends his nights researching the pros and cons of net neutrality. Okay, now fast forward. Now that's me. I'm that loser. I was just late to the game. That guy, Dan, ended up joining Coinbase as one of the early employees. He basically helped Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, who was kind of like... did this tweet storm the day they went public. Right? They go public at a $100 billion valuation, and he's talking about the journey. He's like, "When we started this, you know, it was such humble beginnings. Nobody knew about this space." Blah, blah, blah. He's telling the story, and then this happened. Then Dan Romero came on board and helped bring us into Europe. That was a pivotal moment for the company where we became the only crypto company that was partnered with banks in Europe. I was like, "Oh my God, it's that guy from my classroom!" Like, oh, holy shit, he made it! And you know, I bet this guy banked tens of millions, if not over $100 million easily, just on Coinbase. And if he owned any Bitcoin along the way, which of course he did because he joined in 2014, and if you're a believer at that time, you probably grabbed some. So anyways, that's my short story of like, wow, if you're a college student listening to this now, just be the nerd. Now trust me, you're gonna want to be that nerd later. Really think through what you're optimizing for: ease or learning something interesting and making people...

Sam Parr

I think we have to send this podcast to dan I think you should apologize

Shaan Puri

I will issue... he doesn't even probably know who I was because, again, I was this **silent guy** eating Chick-fil-A in the back of the class. I never said a word; I was just judging him in my head. I do apologize to Dan for judging him, and clearly, I was wrong. He's done amazing.

Sam Parr

exactly dan

Shaan Puri

He put out a tweet - I follow him - and he was like, "Why isn't there a Hacker News?" So if you don't know, Hacker News is this website where people just post links. It's like Reddit, but it's just for engineers.

Sam Parr

Reddit, but only one forum. Well, it's not a forum; it's like you post links, and it's all about nerd culture, internet culture, and startup culture.

Shaan Puri

We, you know, back in the day, used to get the newspaper every day and open it up. My dad would go to the business and politics section, I would go to the sports section. Well, the internet just made it so that there's an infinite number of sections. So now, if you're an engineer, you would wake up and you would maybe go to Hacker News.

Sam Parr

I go to hacker news

Shaan Puri

Every single day, same. And so, anyway, it's a cool website. It's, you know, started by Paul Graham and sort of baked into Y Combinator. I've done an exercise, by the way, of trying to think about what I would value Hacker News at, and I think it's sort of priceless. I pretty much think there's no price at which Paul would sell Hacker News. No, he would not sell.

Sam Parr

It’s probably because he’s a billionaire and he loves it. But if you were just like a normal guy and you had a valued-off revenue, I think it’d be worth $50 to $100 million. I bet you it can make $8 million a year in revenue with no employees, and I bet you it’s been capable of doing that for about 10 years.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I would say easily **$100,000,000** because it's also the category leader. It's the end of one in its category. Anyway, Dan tweeted this out. He goes, "Why isn't there a Hacker News for crypto?" You know, like any discussion for all the interesting things that are happening besides the price. I think that's the key distinction here. Almost all the conversations about crypto are just tracking the daily price moves. For example, over the weekend, crypto went down like **17%**, and so everybody was talking about the price. In reality, there's a whole lot of other interesting developments and technologies happening that are not price-related. You almost need a firewall to say, "Look, in this forum, you don't talk about price," because otherwise, price is always going to dominate the conversation. That's just the nature of crypto. I thought that was kind of interesting. I started looking into some of these, and I guess for me, I would say there is an opportunity for somebody to create the Hacker News of crypto. So I'll throw out a couple that were pretty cool that I found. One is **casebitcoin.com**. This is basically a website that's just a dashboard of stats. It's not like news and links; it's just a dashboard of stats that basically says, "This is the case for Bitcoin." For example, "Bitcoin is now worth 10% of gold's market cap." Here are the top headlines about pro-Bitcoin. It's just a pro-Bitcoin dashboard. Do you...?

Sam Parr

Remember that time you made Bitcoin headlines because you tweeted that you were putting 20% of your net worth into Bitcoin? Someone wrote, "Entrepreneur and investor Sean Perry," and then you didn't... I don't think you actually put 20% of your net worth into it.

Shaan Puri

No, no, I did. I tweeted I was putting in 25%. I ended up putting in 20%, and then the price started going up so fast that it quickly became almost 50% of my net worth or something. So, you know, it ended up being more. But it was ridiculous that there was news about it because I think they thought I was much wealthier than I am. I'm not going to move the needle in crypto. I could put 100% of my net worth, and it was not going to move the needle in crypto. Crypto's too big. That was funny. My college friends texted that news article to me this week, and they're like, "Whoa, what is this? By the way, what have you become?"

Sam Parr

Yeah, and that was like before you actually got famous. Fame... I mean, you're like kind of a big deal now, and that was like pre-big deal.

Shaan Puri

Well, that part of the strategy of becoming a big deal was "carry yourself like you're a big deal," right? Me announcing how I'm moving my net worth around is sort of like carrying yourself like you're a big deal even before you are. And people started... they just accepted my implication that I'm a big deal for tweeting the thing.

Sam Parr

I was gonna like start calling like my car my furniture assets and just start using words like that

Shaan Puri

right exactly that's what I'm doing in liquidation it's like no you're doing a garage sale bro

Sam Parr

well we we're gonna yeah we're having a a fire a fire sale on some of the assets

Shaan Puri

exactly it's

Sam Parr

not the garage sale

Shaan Puri

Anyway, so I was looking at some of these websites. **Cryptopanic.com** is a cool one. There are some of these, but nothing I would say has broken through as the place where people who care about this long term can go. They don't want to get caught in the price roller coaster day to day. So, I'm going to pause there. That was just the idea. I think somebody can create this. I think maybe **Pomp** or somebody who's like a central figurehead in crypto, similar to **Paul Graham**, should be creating the hacker niche for crypto that is specifically not about price. I think that would be a smart move. If I were Pomp, I would consider doing that. But you had some thoughts on these types of businesses, and I think that's where more value will come. So, go into that.

Sam Parr

So, let's call these **aggregators**, I guess, because you're not actually creating anything; you're aggregating. The hustle is a little bit of an aggregator. We create stuff, but we aggregate a lot. I know a little bit about aggregator businesses, and I think that they're really, really great if you can have them and if you can make them. I was with Ryan... what's his name? Ryan Hoover, the day before he was launching **Product Hunt**, which is ultimately kind of like an aggregator. He was telling me about it, and I thought, "Oh, this is really dumb. This is not gonna work." I was wrong. It worked out wonderfully. He did a really good job financially; it was mildly successful, but it was culturally incredibly successful and could have been even more successful if he owned it for a long time. Anyway, now I went and talked to Andrew Wilkinson, who's going to be on the podcast actually tomorrow. I don't know for the people listening when that actually airs—tomorrow, the next day, something like that. He bought this thing called **Web Designer News**, so it's actually just web design.

Shaan Puri

I think it's just designer news

Sam Parr

oh just is it just design are you sure

Shaan Puri

think it's just designer news.com yeah I'm pretty sure it is

Sam Parr

Let's see... oh yeah, sorry, not web designer, designer news. Okay, so basically, this was a Hacker News thing. It was just for designers.

Shaan Puri

It's like it was literally a clone. It looked almost the same, except for the Hacker News kind of ugly. They just cleaned up the design a little bit, but it's the same idea.

Sam Parr

Yeah, and it was pretty good when he bought it. I asked him, "How's it going?" and he said, "It's basically dead. It's done." So, I think he got the money back from what he paid for, as in he earned that much back. But I don't think he anticipates making a lot more money. What I thought was his case, his opinion, and what happened—my opinion and what happened to his site—is actually kind of the same. Basically, here's what he told me: "The issue was you have to get a whole bunch of people to visit daily, and you're only as good as your posters because it's social news. There are endless amounts of ways to game the system with a bunch of bots, which oddly people do a lot. So, you need constant moderation and algorithms, which is very expensive to hire the developers to make that. Then, you also need real live moderators, which is also expensive. If you have any content that gets bad, then everyone just moves to Reddit. So, it's a little bit like lightning in a bottle. It has this kind of magical network effect, but it's hard to catch lightning in a bottle," is what he said. I actually agree with that.

Sam Parr

I actually think that if you can build this, it is one of the greatest things that you can own. There are a few examples of this. So, there's Tech Meme, which is... all these are things I'm a fan of, so it's all going to be a little...

Shaan Puri

I can't submit to it as a user, right? It's not social news. They curate it themselves.

Sam Parr

well it solves the same problem

Shaan Puri

Yeah, it solves the same problem for the end customer, which is that you go to a place and see all the interesting links of the day in my niche that I care about.

Sam Parr

Same habit. And the reason why it's important to mention Tech Meme is because, with Hacker News, as with Reddit, the creators or the owners of the site can actually just submit a ton of fake stuff that you wouldn't even know they submitted. It would look populated, and that's in fact how Reddit got started. So the hard part is...

Shaan Puri

There's a great video, by the way, on YouTube if you want to see how Reddit got started. Their "fake it till you make it" strategy involved creating about 20 accounts with different names. They were posting every day on the subreddit from these 20 different personalities to make it look like there was this great young community of interesting people. They described doing this for, I don't know, a couple of months or something. Then they recounted the day when they logged on and saw that it was all happening without their fake accounts. Real people had built up enough steam and learned the "monkey see, monkey do" behavior. They were just posting links and commenting, and it was like, "Wait, dude, that's not my account; that's a real account!" Holy shit, this is actually working! And so, that's how they started.

Sam Parr

It takes a lot of time, and Reddit is 10 years old. So when they were getting started, I mean, the amount of websites that existed then versus now... they had a lot less competition. It was still really hard, but what I have found with this... Okay, so there's **Techmeme**. Techmeme just automatically pulls headlines based off what's most shared on the internet. And then another example is **LetsRun**. LetsRun.com - the owner of LetsRun.com is actually a listener of our podcast, and I'm a big fan of LetsRun.com. It's basically the same thing: people submit articles and they comment on them.

Shaan Puri

that's in the running niche

Sam Parr

yeah is that

Shaan Puri

why you're you're going to

Sam Parr

dorky runners long distance runners very dorky

Shaan Puri

So, let me tell the story of Product Hunt and how Ryan did it right. I think for a lot of these social news sites and aggregators, it's one thing to hear about them. I would agree that they are amazing when they work, but they usually don't. So, how do you get it to work? Well, I actually got to see Ryan build Product Hunt from the inside, from day one. If anybody doesn't know, there's a funny article about how Ryan was interviewing to come work at Monkey Inferno, where I was the CEO at the time. I was trying to recruit Ryan because I loved his blog posts. He got to the final interview but didn't make it. I kept in touch with him and said, "Hey, you know, sorry it didn't work out, but I'm still a big fan of yours. I want to give you feedback on why it didn't work. I hope that's not salt in the wound, but if I have you, I'd be curious why I didn't get it. I really do want to keep in touch." Then, the next week, he was starting Product Hunt. Literally, I think one week later, he launched Product Hunt. I remember thinking, "Oh, this is cool, but this is just some pet project. It's not going to go anywhere. Why doesn't he come work on the real stuff?" In reality, Product Hunt was more successful than anything we did in the lab. So, he won in the end. What worked for him was that he started it on this thing called Linkydig, which was like an off-the-shelf little social news tool at that time. I don't even think it's still around.

Sam Parr

it's not even we

Shaan Puri

started it there

Sam Parr

yeah it was like an email it was so weird it was like a so

Shaan Puri

The way it worked was, it was like Hacker News. It was a list of links, but then it would send a recap to all the subscribers of that board, like an email recap. So even if you forgot to go to the website, you would get the wrap-up automatically. That was kind of like a killer feature there because you're trying to build a habit of people coming. But first, if you could just deliver them value through email, this would work. So I would say that was one nice thing he did. He didn't need a tech engineer at the beginning; he used Linkerdink. The key was that they would email the recap. Then he only invited friends that he had developed relationships with, who he knew were as nerdy about products as he was. I think I'm user number 15 or 17 of Product Hunt, and it's because I was one of his nerdy friends who really geeked out about new apps and new products. Right? That's what this podcast kind of is. It's been a long way.

Sam Parr

Right, this word "product" or like, now you'll see people say, "Oh, I'm a product guy." I'm almost...

Shaan Puri

it wasn't that popular then

Sam Parr

I'm almost positive people didn't really use that word or phrase or if they did people were like what are you talking about

Shaan Puri

Well, it was around the time when "product manager" was obviously a phrase people talked about regarding products. However, it wasn't seen as something like being an anime fan or a sports fan; it didn't seem to be a thing. He really emphasized it a lot, saying, "This is for people who geek out on a product." That was his tagline at the beginning. That's why he should join this.

Sam Parr

Crazy! I knew what he was talking about, but I had never heard anyone say that. So, he definitely kind of created a little bit of a category.

Shaan Puri

he made it cool I would think of him I I think that he made it cool to do this thing

Sam Parr

that's what I mean

Shaan Puri

so then he he curated the initial people and they were cool people so it was like because he'd been blogging for 4 years before that he had built up a nice network in silicon valley so that again that's the hard work that happened before that prepared him to succeed so then he invites kevin rose he invites you know a bunch of interesting people onto this thing and so people are share and he he set out set out some rules so just like I was saying for crypto hey this is for all crypto news except price he said that for product hunt he's like this is for cool new products don't post facebook and instagram like we all know about that this is for the shit that you don't think the rest of the group has seen yet so that's where the real value came that's where you would get here that was different than going to techcrunch or going to the app store charts or wherever it's like here you were gonna discover the new thing first and not gonna see shit that everybody already knew about so it kinda made it an insider like it set the level playing field of like it's like if you were creating a wine club you would say like you know this is for people who actually know about wines don't bring you know the $7 yellowtail you know wine here and so anyways I thought you got that right then he made it where you had to be white listed to participate in the community meaning the average person could not just go post so that solved the bot's problem and the moderation problem because he was only letting trusted people post and anybody could view and that that had this double effect of it was now exclusive people wanted to get in they would beg to get in they would prove themselves and they if they got in they would be on their best behavior so they wouldn't get kicked out and the last thing he did was he was pretty maniacal about curating the the community and the products like every morning he would wake up I don't know he's like kind of a robot he like wakes up at 5 am or 6 am every day like he's one of those guys who's like super productive yeah type of person and good habits you know he would go to phil's coffee shop he would sit down on his laptop and then he would immediately be scouring twitter anybody who mentioned product hunt he would thank them anybody who posted a cool product he would say hey I'd love for you to post this on product hunt he wouldn't do it he would tell them hey this would be really cool if you post a product hunt I just gave you access and so that like built this habit and he did that every goddamn day for like I don't know 9 months or something like that before he hired a community manager

Sam Parr

And it still probably crushes. I use Product Hunt regularly. I don't actually know the numbers anymore because I'm not sure, but I bet you it's still quite successful. It could potentially be successful for 10 years or more.

Shaan Puri

Right, if you've ever seen somebody build a fire without matches... I watch *Survivor*, so that's my only reference. I'm not a camper; I don't know how it works. But on *Survivor*, this is like one of the mainstays: building a fire. When you build a fire on *Survivor*, first, you're going to take the flint and shave the magnesium off the flint. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom! Alright, now you've got enough of that. Now you're going to add the next piece; you're going to try to get that to catch. As soon as it catches, you have to be very careful not to let it extinguish. It's so fragile at that time. You have to start adding the little brushwood or whatever. I don't know the words, but there's a certain type of thing you add next. Then you add the sticks, and now all you have is a raging bonfire. To me, that's what building a community is like. I've seen the people who actually do that hard work of shaving the flint first, and I'm like, "Oh shit, that's what it takes!" Once these communities are actually up and running, I've seen it once or twice now. I've seen you do it as well with trends, where you were posting every goddamn day in the trends group for... I don't know how many months.

Sam Parr

a lot

Shaan Puri

that was your flinch phase where you were just shaving magnesium out of the the wood

Sam Parr

So, let me tell you about something that we're launching at The Hustle. You guys can use it or not; I don't care. I'm not pitching it out right now, but it's related to this. What we are launching on Tuesday—this podcast comes out on Wednesday—so it's actually already live. I don't even know if you're going to be able to find it yet. But anyway, it's called **Hustle +**. What we're doing is we're kind of launching something just like this because I'm obsessed with these types of products, and I love these things. When a user signs up, or they can click out of the email once they're already a subscriber, they can tell us either explicitly what they like or implicitly, we can see some of their behavior. Then, we're going to have a section of headlines. In order to get those headlines, we built this tech that crawls the internet and finds the most shared stuff and shared headlines. Let's say that you tell us or you click on a bunch of articles related to media, and we've tagged all the links—like, "this is media," "this is a media and bootstrapping story," whatever, right? You're going to get those links in your email. So, you're going to get The Hustle, which is like 2,000 words of editorial stuff, but you're also going to have one huge section with 10 or 20 just headlines. Then, we're hiring a team of editors to write a one-sentence description of each article. So, it's part human, part machine, telling you interesting stuff.

Shaan Puri

right

Sam Parr

Very similar to Hacker News, TechMeme, things like that. So that's actually... we... that's cool, yeah. And so we're... I'm doing that because I love these types of things. It's basically very similar to Hacker News, not so much user-submitted right now, but kind of a similar idea. I love these businesses, and we've talked about Drudge Report. I think that if you can get this to work, it takes a ton of work upfront, [but] very little work to maintain.

Shaan Puri

yes yes exactly okay so let's let's switch topics let's do one of the other ones

Sam Parr

75 Hard... "Hard 75"... You want to...? Okay, so you've done a ton of research about 75 Hard. I've had so many friends talk about this, friends that mostly are not fit, and this has inspired them to get fit. It's... okay, so tell...

Shaan Puri

tell me about that part I I I haven't heard any but only ben has told me about this

Sam Parr

Oh my gosh, everyone is talking about this man. So, do you remember Van Trump Report, the newsletter guy?

Shaan Puri

van trump

Sam Parr

I told you about this guy who's got this newsletter that crushes it in AgTech. I became friends with his son. His son lives in Kansas City. He kind of talks with a southern accent; he's not like a techie. He came over to my house because he was visiting in Texas. He's like, "Hey, I know you have a gym. I'm on my last workout. I need to come use your gym. Can I use it?" And then another friend, Sujan Patel, has been doing it. **75 Hard** has taken over like my friends, and they commit to it like a religion. They don't miss it.

Shaan Puri

right so describe what it is to somebody and I'll and then I have a bunch of thoughts around this

Sam Parr

So, "75 Hard" - I think what it means is... It's only got like 6 rules. It's basically: You have to do for 75 days: 1. Two workouts a day 2. Each workout needs to be 45 minutes 3. One workout needs to be outside 4. I don't think either workout needs to be particularly hard; the only rule is that you have to sweat The second main rule is: 5. You have to have a diet for all 75 days. It doesn't matter what diet, you just have to do it. And that might be it. Is that the only rule?

Shaan Puri

I think that's it. So, I had heard about this... Ben told me about this a little while ago, and then today he's like, "Check out the app charts." It's the number 3 paid app in America right now. I said, "Wow, that's kind of amazing." So I started looking into it, and I actually didn't do a ton of research on 75 Hard, but I researched this category. I'm very interested in this category.

Sam Parr

Let me finish the story on 75 Hard. It started by this guy Andy (I don't know his last name, you wrote it here, I don't want to... everyone makes fun of me because I can't say stuff). He's actually based out of right near me, Fenton, Missouri. He has a supplement company called, I think, 1st Phorm, and it does about $200 million in sales. He was in my local newspaper because they bought a $20 million building and invested in it, made it nice. So I think they're... it's legit.

Shaan Puri

He's had several supplement companies. I was like, "Who is this guy?" Because if you Google him, he's one of those red flag type of profiles: entrepreneur, speaker, best-selling coach to celebrities. You know, it's like, "Oh, fuck! What have you done? Who are you?"

Sam Parr

it's not legit but he is legit

Shaan Puri

Exactly. I mean, I can't sit on it too much. I'm a big Tony Robbins fan, and if you were to describe Tony Robbins, it'd be very, very similar. But you kind of have to dig and be like, "I definitely... what I don't do is take that at face value." Right, cool. So what are those businesses? Okay, great. What is this book like? You know, let me check this out. Let me get a sense here. So this guy's got actually one of the top podcasts in our category, in the business category, as in "MF CEO" or something like that.

Sam Parr

oh my gosh

Shaan Puri

As you know, "Mother Effing CEO" or something, he's got a big Instagram following. So, who is this guy? From what I know, which I just did a very quick dive on, I’d love to have this guy in the pond. He basically started a couple of supplement companies. I think the first was like a brick-and-mortar supplement company called something like "Super Supplements" or something like that. He's done that two or three times. His third one is called "Form 1," and I think that's the biggest one. It's been the most successful, and the hook or tagline is like, "These brands do over $100 million a year." So, okay, he's in the supplement space, he did well with that, great. Then he translated that into a life philosophy. I think he preaches kind of like a bit of the Jocko Willink school of thought, which is just like, "You know, it's hard, man up, you gotta work hard." Yeah, man up, do it, grind, hustle, blah blah blah. Those are the words, right? So, he's like Gary Vee if Gary Vee was like jacked, you know? And so he's in that fame. That's the outsider perspective. I have not drank the Kool-Aid of what his stuff is. That's my outsider quick take.

Shaan Puri

Of view okay great when I started thinking about this category by

Sam Parr

The way I... I just want to... I'm gonna cover your ass here, Sean. [We] sounded, and so did I, a little dismissive of this guy. I... yeah, I don't think you were trying to sound that way, and neither am I. I think this guy seems like a good dude.

Shaan Puri

I view it very much like this: I can have two thoughts at the same time. One thought is, "Oh, when I hear this stuff, it's usually a bit hand-wavy, and usually these people are kind of stereotypes or caricatures." But also, they're probably actually giving out good information and inspiring a lot of people. Many have had great success in their lives and live up to a lot of these things. I think both of those are kind of true. I make fun of Gary Vee, but I think Gary Vee has built an awesome brand and an awesome company. He's an awesome guy. I don't know him personally, but I can simultaneously make fun of the character while also saying, "You know, respect! You did your thing. You did the thing you wanted to do, and that's not easy. Most people do nothing." So, you know, props for not just doing nothing but for doing something very unique.

Sam Parr

there's space

Shaan Puri

So, there's space. I'm very interested in this for a kind of reason. I've actually considered launching something like this, so that's why I looked into it. I'm very interested in these time-bounded challenges and time-bounded programs. The big one that I personally had experience with was P90X. I don't know if you ever did P90X, of course, Tony. P90X.

Sam Parr

what was his name

Shaan Puri

what was

Sam Parr

the guy's name

Shaan Puri

tony horton

Sam Parr

tony horton of course I love

Shaan Puri

it so many kinda backstory of p 90x I think is interesting there's this company called beachbody and what beachbody did was it was started by this guy carl dichler I would consider him our billy of the week so he's a ceo he's he's worth about $600,000,000 and this guy is kind of the king of infomercials and the king of of of of of sort of at home fitness so he created 8 minute abs yeah he he created 8 minute abs which is like he was inspired by buns of steel he like loved this like branding of a fitness program and he he it was pretty early and jumped on in the kinda early nineties this time really started hammering infomercials on tv that was his main channel like today facebook ads is I think the infomercials of today but he was really the master of infomercials back then and so he's like alright I'm gonna do I'm gonna create this company and originally he wanted to call it I think like he so he he's like I wanna start this company he goes to his friends and family he raises $500,000 from angel angel investor friends and family he says alright I'm gonna test 5 products and I'm gonna see what sticks and they're gonna be in this like fitness space and the whole idea was like I'm I have this distribution channel infomercials and I'm gonna create products that are sticky that people that help people lose weight essentially get more fit and so he starts with the very first one I think was tony he goes to tony horton tony horton at the time is a celebrity trainer so he's training bruce springsteen and like all these kinda like musicians and actors and actresses to hollywood so so he goes to tony and he says let's create a product called great body guarantee and he's like oh I love it great body guaranteed how can it miss and he goes to he tries to get great body.com and it's taken and so he's like doing his thing he's walking around on the beach in la walking home one day and he's like he's on the beach he just thinks beachbody beachbody.com he runs home checks at checks beachbody.com is available so he grabs it and so he starts trying to produce these infomercials with tony for this program and they've produced many many programs and he and he he realized at the time okay like I can't afford celebrity endorsements right like that's why tony had a good name was because he was trying it for celebrities but he couldn't really afford celebrity endorsements so they start just trying to do like like kinda like infomercials without that so customer testimonials so he he comes up with this idea that the customer is the celebrity how do I make the customer a celebrity and so what he the initial batch of infomercials had all actually failed where he was just saying you know get a great body and it's just super jacked people on screen saying how jacked they are basically and so instead the the you know the it's kind of just money down the drain during that part and instead they try one version of the infomercial where they took a few testimonials that had been sent in from their buyers that said hey look at you know this was me before and this is me now and me now wasn't like didn't look like a greek god but just like definitely looked better than the out of shape overweight person you know in the before photo so they slap those into the infomercial like real customer testimonials and boom this thing starts selling like hotcakes and so he realizes oh wait the more authentic these look and so he started curating he goes I want the the customer testimonials to almost look like america's funniest home video footage like somebody at home their cat's jumping on them while they're doing a sit up their plant is you know dying in the background they can barely hold their balance while doing the pose and then you see the after photo 90 days later that they look great and that was his kind of core insight that was working really really well and he was very differentiated because everybody else was who was doing at home was really at this time was doing like some gimmick product like thighmaster abroller bowflex like selling some equipment this equipment will solve your problems and instead he was like no no no I'm gonna make a promise you do my program for 90 days you get this result and that promise marketing was much better and that's what 75 hard is too it's another variant of this promise marketing well there's a tight box

Sam Parr

I think there's a difference. If I... I don't know, I don't think it's like this anymore, but when "75 Hard" first started, it was around as a free movement. So basically, this guy would say, "Alright everyone, it's that time of year. We're doing it," and he would do it.

Shaan Puri

it's like no shave november

Sam Parr

Yeah, I forget the months, but I've seen it for a couple of years now. He would basically, I guess, Instagram like, "Now is the time for the challenge." I think he did it for maybe four years before it even became a thing. So, P90X, I think you enroll and you have 90 days to get it done. This 75 Hard thing was, you know, November 1st, get ready, like, you know, time to get started.

Shaan Puri

seasonal thing

Sam Parr

yeah and it worked really well I guess is 75 hard now like a rolling 75

Shaan Puri

I I think it's I I think so because they have this app so I don't think it's just one time of the year but and if it's number 3 right now and we're in june or you know we're in april so I think you know it's it's definitely not the november thing as it was before and so just to go back to beachbody so beachbody the company does over a $1,000,000,000 a year in revenue and just to break down their business they basically so he he comes up with this concept of gym at home instead of a home gym so it's like how do you do the gym workout at home and he's like okay we have we're gonna use infomercials and we're gonna use dvds dvds are gonna be great because you're gonna be able to put it on your tv and you do it whenever you want sort of on demand great and so he starts selling dvds and the dvds do well and programs like p 90x are are part of it and for p90x it was actually a little bit of a pivot for them there's actually these cool videos on youtube of them in their meetings and he's pitching this he's like okay look right now we're all about losing weight it's all weight loss it's all like kinda like belly fat that's the market we go after for beachbody but for p90x I wanna do something different he's like we need like an extreme program for the muscle builder he's like I noticed there's all these magazines like men's fitness and muscle muscle monthly and all this stuff where people are really trying to like build huge muscles and so let's set out the tenants for this thing and he's like doing a presentation he's like this is not for beginners this is at home this is meant to build muscles get shredded you're gonna get shredded in 90 days and he's like that's the promise we're gonna make to people and so he you know I like seeing these meetings where people are like coming up with the the the concept that they know you know takes over the nation type of thing and so their model is you have the dvds and then he's like okay cool distribution through infomercials was good but we've kinda hit our limit there so then he took a page out of the amway mlm playbook he's like here's what we'll do we'll get our our most successful customers we'll become our coaches we'll teach them how to sell this program for themselves how to be their own mini tony horton so they go and they build this nationwide network of 400,000 coaches and then of course the coaches can train other coaches and they can keep a share of their revenue right classic mlm multilevel marketing some people call it a pyramid scheme or a ponzi scheme but there's a there's a legal way to do this and he's doing it the legal way and so the top coaches that need I

Sam Parr

I think in his case it's an MLM [Multi-Level Marketing], but it's not... I don't find this to be unethical or bad. I mean, it's just... he's making customers salespeople for him.

Shaan Puri

So, I was once talking to a friend, and he was like, "Dude, we need to create this product and we'll sell it as an MLM." I was like, "Dude, MLM? Isn't that like, you know, a sin?" He's like, "Why?" He's like, "It's basically you get your hardcore believers..."

Sam Parr

know the friend

Shaan Puri

them with the ability to sell it you know the friend

Sam Parr

Yeah, I think I know. I think they love MLMs because an MLM almost bought them. MLMs inherently are not wrong now.

Shaan Puri

Exactly the way he described it, he goes, "Look, there's a knob. Think about it this way: this is a model just like affiliate marketing or any kind of viral marketing. You basically give people products and let them sell it." It's like there's a knob, though. The knob is kind of like your evil knob, and you could turn it down to 0. When you're at 0, you're basically saying, "Hey, if you're a fan of our product, you can become one of our coaches. There are no minimums. You don't have to subscribe to this monthly thing. You don't have to do this the wrong way." Or you turn it up to 12, and you go super evil. You basically say, "Hey dude, you can become a millionaire if you become one of our coaches. Look at this guy; he's a millionaire! Don't you want to be a millionaire?" Then you get them to sign up for this thing where they have to pay you $100 a month. They have to buy $10,000 worth of product, and now their kid's bedroom is full of this hair loss shampoo treatment that they need to sell. They can't sell it, but they bought $10,000 worth, and you made your money anyway. Then they go broke because they try to become one of your reps. That knob is in your control to turn how screwed up you want to be with it. So anyway, I think Beachbody is somewhere in the not-so-evil category. From what I know, their coaches and trainers make about $2 to $3 million a year, and a lot of that revenue again comes from the coaches that they brought on board. They get a percentage of their sales.

Sam Parr

And the company, by the way, Beachbody... I'm reading all about their CEO, and he's giving an interview. He says they'll do $1 billion in sales this year in 2020, and they do about 10% EBITDA, so $100 million in net profit.

Shaan Puri

on

Sam Parr

a 1,000,000,000 in sales

Shaan Puri

yeah I'm surprised it's not better the way that they

Sam Parr

they describe their model ads

Shaan Puri

The way they describe their model is like this: they have the DVDs, which have now become streaming. They have the coaches to distribute those; that's their sales force. They make all their profit on the shakes. So, the whole thing comes down to this shake product they have called Shakeology. Basically, it's like, okay, the streaming or the DVDs—the content is good, but it doesn't cost that much to market it. It's not that good, okay? You know, the coaches? Well, you have to recruit them, you have to train them, and they have to sell. They're good, but they're not that good. The shakes are about $130 for one month of nutrition shakes, and that's like pure margin. It goes back to the Andy Fishillen guys, like the supplement company. They make all their money; the profits come from the shakes. The whole thing with the coaches is like, cool, we get you hooked on this program, and then if you want better results, you have to trim up that diet. Hey, here's what I do: I drink these delicious shakes. They're so tasty, and they are...

Sam Parr

I didn't know they are in the technology I did not know that

Shaan Puri

Yeah, so that's their model. I think Beachbody is a pretty fascinating company. I believe that marketing your product as an "X days promise" is a very smart idea. You're basically saying you're going to get this result in this much time, whether that's "8 Minute Abs," "P90X," "75 Hard," or the diet "Whole 30," where you're going to do 30 days of eating whole foods only. I've seen this work so many times, and I'm very fascinated by it. I don't know why it works in the psychology of the customer, but it definitely does work. One of the reasons I think it works is because customers can sort of commit to, "Well, I can do this for X days." That doesn't sound too hard. "90 days? I can do anything for 90 days." "30-day diet? Okay, maybe I'm not going to change my diet and become a vegan, but can I eat whole foods for 30 days? Alright, that's a challenge." I thought it was very interesting the way he talked about this. There are two ways to market it. He said they've always marketed their products as, "You could do it. This is so easy, you can do it." What "75 Hard" and "P90X" do is the opposite. They say, "Can you do it?" It's a challenge to you. "I don't know if you could do it. This is just hard." So then they started creating all these marketing strategies. They have two versions: the "You can do it" marketing and the "Can you do it?" marketing. I love that! I thought that was such an interesting way of thinking about your business. They have a program called "Insanity." Why is it called "Insanity"? Because it's meant to sound super hard and too crazy. And why is "P90X" called that? It's the extreme whole workout. It's not just easy beginner sit-ups and push-ups; this is the extreme. So I thought that was pretty cool to do.

Sam Parr

so what are we gonna launch in this space

Shaan Puri

So I've been working with my trainer now, and I've actually hit some tipping point where I'm starting to get results. Like, I look at my body during our sessions in my garage... There's this one area where the sun comes into my garage and the shadow is just perfect, and I look *fucking great*. And I'm like, "Dude, this... I need to stay in here. Can we do my set over here?"

Sam Parr

works with exercising it's like no results no results no results boom it all kinda it feels like it happens

Shaan Puri

Dude, that's how everything valuable is—like, slowly, slowly, slowly, but suddenly. So it's like, "Oh, business success works that way." And I'm now saying even fitness success works that way, where there is this tipping point. Now, the workouts—I don't dread them; I enjoy them. I'm looking forward to them. I feel bad if I ever miss a day, whereas before I was like, "Sweet, snow day! Don't have to work out." You know? I was looking forward to missing it. Now, I'm looking forward to doing it. So anyways, I was talking to my trainer, and I was like, "Dude, I'm gonna help you." I'm gonna help you create... because he's always hearing me talk about business. It's like he's a black belt in fitness, and I like to consider myself really good at business. We're trying to help each other out. So I told him, "Dude, why don't you do this? Why don't you create..." He's a gym to me; he's not like a normal trainer. I've told many stories about how he helps my mindset and all this stuff.

Sam Parr

and he's really teaching me too

Shaan Puri

I'm like, "Dude, you're a cut above most people." I was thinking we should create one of these programs where it's just with my friends, like the people I know in my life. If I post a photo of me today and then a photo of me from a few months ago, before I started working out with you, I'm going to post that before-and-after photo. That's my own pride moment of like, "I did it! I actually turned the corner on this thing that's been really hard for me." I've never really considered myself fit or shredded, or been proud to take off my shirt, but I think I'm going to get there pretty soon. Within a few months, I think I'm going to get there. When I post that after photo, I'll say, "We should open up something that says if you want to do it, let's create our own 90-day program and let people in." The way I was thinking about it was he has this philosophy, which we talked about: how do you feel when your friends get successful? I told him honestly, "Yeah, it's been hard for me. When my friend Sam sells his company for $10 million, and all of a sudden Sam's got tens of millions of dollars, I'm happy for you. Yes, I'm not unhappy for you, but there's a bigger part of me in that moment, right when the news hits, that's like, 'Oh, fuck, I'm behind.'"

Sam Parr

and I

Shaan Puri

Was like the honest truth was like I get kinda jealous or like I'll get kinda envious. He helped me sort of reframe that in my mind. This is not about you, but like it's been this way for decades. You know, like I always felt this way: if somebody's successful, like good for them but bad for me. He's like, you know, it doesn't have to be that way. Good for them, bad for me? It can be good for them, and it's good for me. He's like, it's just this philosophy you gotta have. Where do you carry yourself where you say, "It's not just that I'm gonna win; I'm gonna help bring up all the people around me. We're all gonna win, and it's gonna be more fun that we're all gonna win." He's like, you do this with investing, right? You share your deals and you co-invest. You let your friends invest in your companies because when you win, it's more fun to toast together and drink together. He's like, same thing with all aspects of life. You should be thinking about, "I'm not just gonna win; I'm gonna win so much. There's gonna be so much success around me that all the people around me are gonna be successful too." So anyway, long story short, I heard him tell me about that, and I took it to him. I go, "I'm gonna help you build a business that does this." I'm gonna take the thing you're really good at that you're doing for me, and now I have him working with my sister, my mom, my sister's kids, my sister-in-law. I pay, you know, like we do all of their fitness now through him. He's like my family's personal coach, really. And so I'm like, yeah, he's doing that. We're his only clients anymore; it's just my own family.

Sam Parr

and what can you like tell me what you pay this person

Shaan Puri

no I don't wanna put him on blast like that

Sam Parr

you wanna talk about his name you wanna say his name or do you wanna even hide him

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I mean, I call him Ja. Yeah, that's his name. It's John Alexander, so it goes short for Ja. He's not big on social media, nothing like that. He doesn't try to be like some influencer guy or whatever.

Sam Parr

a trainer

Shaan Puri

yeah he's he's a trainer that's what he's been doing he's been you know fit his whole life and you know he's he's really good at that so

Sam Parr

see him a shaved head white guy

Shaan Puri

No, I'll send you his Instagram later. But basically, I want to help him be successful. I think we can use one of these models, like P90X or 75 Hard. Let people commit to something that's reasonable for them. That's the way I did it with him. I was like, "Alright, I'm going to commit. I don't know how good you are or how bad I am. I don't know if I can do this long term, but I'll commit. I'll give you 30 days to get my ass off this couch. I'm just sick of this. Get my ass going for 30 days. I will do anything you say, one hour a day. I will sweat my ass off." And like that got me hooked. So, I think we're going to come up with some program like that. We're months away from actually launching something, but I want to do that because, A, I want to share him with more people, and B, I just think this is a cool business model.

Sam Parr

Why do you do everything you do? Why... like, why do you not focus more on 1 or 2 things? And I criticize you—I don't criticize you, I... I challenge you often. Why continually do this, do that, do that, do this? Why not just do one thing and crush it? Because... and your answer might be, "Well, because I just want to explore and see everything out there." But it's pretty obvious what you're good at.

Shaan Puri

which is what

Sam Parr

I have a feeling that your rolling fund is going to be wildly successful. I have a feeling that you pull a lot of the weight on the podcast because you're very good at content. Why do everything instead of just being the best at this... in this little lane?

Shaan Puri

I do think about that. I think I've graduated out of being an operator. I no longer want to operate one entity. The only entity I want to operate is, you know, SeanCo—my life. When I think about what would be the most exciting version of that, how do I marry this part of me that's just super curious? Every day, I want to go down the rabbit hole and learn how **75 Hard** works and not, you know, how **P90X** works. Right before this podcast, I would do that anyway. I just didn't have an excuse; I didn't have an outlet. I would just do the research, shove it in my head, and then I would go about my job and my life. I would keep running my company, which had nothing to do with fitness. This podcast was a cool thing because it gave me an excuse to do more of that thing I'm interested in and do well at. Now it's a win-win. I go down those rabbit holes, I learn those things, I come here, I share the learnings, and cool—we get to go on with money.

Sam Parr

Step 3, which we're both doing, is... and then you're like, "Oh, I think this is actually a really good idea. Let's go put money in again."

Shaan Puri

And then I see the company, and I basically say, "Cool, now I'm gonna invest my money. I'm gonna share my knowledge with an operator who can go start that business." So, this will be my trainer's business. It's not gonna be my business, but I will plant the seed with them that, "Hey, this would be great," and I'll do everything in my power to help you be successful. This means I'll give you seed funding, and I'll be your test customer testimonial. That's on me to make my after picture better than my before picture. Lastly, I'll spread the love. I'll spread the word about your thing when the time comes, whenever you're ready. I wasn't planning on talking about it today; it just coincided with us discussing Beachbody. So, anyways, I would say that to me is a more fun life. I basically decided, "Alright, I want my life to be where I wake up and whatever I'm most curious about, I go do." Because I have a way to monetize my own curiosity. I have a way to monetize my own learnings. Okay, so how do I...? That's what I've decided is my thing for the next decade.

Sam Parr

I'm going to push that there a little bit because I actually think that your premise might be a little flawed here. Which is, I'm going to wake up and I'm going to do what I want.

Shaan Puri

I'm going to learn about what I'm most interested in and what I'm most curious about.

Sam Parr

And I would actually challenge that a little bit because it's like, well, you're kind of implying that each day you're going to do a new thing, and I would...

Shaan Puri

Not necessarily. Like, I've spent months in crypto, right? Because, you know, years of curiosity. But then, like, months of pretty hardcore curiosity around that.

Sam Parr

I think that's good

Shaan Puri

And it's become a bigger part of my portfolio of time and money. You know, the same thing with e-commerce; I got more interested in e-commerce. Right? The same thing with live streaming. For many years, it was all about live streaming. These don't have to be every day; it's a new topic. I think that would be a big stream. But with the podcast, yeah, you know, we do two of these a week. We talk about three different topics each time. We're by no means experts at any of those. It's like a very off-the-cuff type of conversation and research. But I think about it like Tim Ferriss has done this. If I've seen anybody do it, I think that Tim Ferriss has done this. He's very curious about certain things that he wants to learn. So then he goes to talk to people in that space. He does experiments on himself, reads books about that topic, and reads research papers about the topic. Then he packages it up into something that's sellable sometimes, and sometimes it's not sellable; it's just for him, just for his own curiosity. I think I could do that. I think I can create the new business model of being Tim Ferriss. So that would be my one thing. I think it's that. But to the outside, it looks like a lot of variety, and to me, that's good. It's... well, I'm...

Sam Parr

Not trying to criticize it here, I'm just trying to bring in a different perspective. I was thinking about this guy I know who's getting something off the ground. I see him constantly talking about side projects, day trading, Bitcoin, yada yada yada. This business is related to something totally separate. I'm like, "What are you doing, dude? Just lock yourself in a room. Don't do anything except for be with your family, exercise, and work on your thing." It seems almost impossible—well, not impossible; some are really good at it—but for most, it seems almost impossible to create anything meaningful without a maniacal amount of focus, at least early on, for an extended period of time. More likely than not, though.

Shaan Puri

I think that's true. I think that's true, and it would definitely be true if I said, "Oh, I'm gonna go start a company, I'm gonna raise a bunch of money, and this is gonna be a huge company." I'm not doing that; that's not my thing right now. When I was doing that, I didn't have a podcast, I didn't have a fund, I didn't have a blog, I didn't have a girlfriend. I sacrificed many of those things because I was all in, sleeping at the office, working 365 days a year. I just know that that's not what this next phase looks like for me. I couldn't do that again, and I don't really want to. So, I'm trying to see if there is a better model for me that feels more effortless. That always felt like a lot of effort, and I think there is a version of life that doesn't have to be so hard. I think it can be speedy and easy. I think it can be effortless if you're doing the thing you really enjoy doing.

Sam Parr

I agree with that

Shaan Puri

on a day to day basis

Sam Parr

I wouldn't use the word effortless but it's it's it's rewarding

Shaan Puri

When you play, do you feel like you're working hard? No. Like, I can go play basketball... I could be really tired by the end of it, so I mean fatigue because I've played basketball for 3 hours. But at no point would I feel like I'm having to do something I don't want to be doing, or maybe I'm making this huge effort, I mean...

Sam Parr

If you want to use that play thing... like, I don't always want to go do it. I love to exercise, but I'm always happy that I did do it. And, like, I don't want to...

Shaan Puri

Do it because, to me, working out is not like play. "Play" is a really specific word. Play is like, you know, I could be tired from my job, and I'll come home and play video games. Video games actually take, you know, focus, hand-eye coordination, strategy, talking to your teammates, all that stuff. But because it's fun, it doesn't feel like work to me. Right? So I'm interested in play. Now, I'm not interested in hard work.

Sam Parr

so where do we go from here

Shaan Puri

I think we might wrap it as there's been a little I we went on kind of tangents there