Unbundling Disney, Why CNN is Just Like the WWE, YouTube Creator Camps, and More

Shaan Puri

The only thing I think people love nearly as much as their kid is their dog. And so, I am surprised that there's not a place like Disneyland for dogs that is basically "the happiest place on earth" for dogs.

Sam Parr

dude nick's thing is kinda weird let's see if it works

Shaan Puri

Yeah, what's your prediction? Let's do it. Let's predict it now. Do you think this goes anywhere? Do you think it becomes worth something or no?

Sam Parr

So, the background here is our friend, this guy named Nick Hubert, who goes viral all the time for writing about storage units.

Shaan Puri

self self he's a self storage guy on twitter his handle is sweaty startup

Sam Parr

I'm an investor in his [project], so I'll disclose that. I don't know what that means here, but I'll say it. He created this thread like as a joke where he made a joke about tomatoes. I don't even remember the joke... how he could grow tomatoes and sell them or something. People made fun of him and it went crazy viral. Then he created a tomato NFT project called "Bromatoes" as a joke, but kinda not a joke. Do I think it's gonna go anywhere?

Shaan Puri

kinda like well executed where you're like this isn't a joke the art is amazing the art is great

Sam Parr

It's great in the sense that it's like well-executed bad art. Like, it's a tomato that's a bro, that's a guy. So do I think it's gonna go anywhere? Of course not. No, I don't think so. Do you?

Shaan Puri

There's a chance... like, I don't know if you saw that he posted a tweet from this account that's called, I think, Cosmo Davici or something like that. Did you see that tweet that he posted where somebody had... he's like, "Oh, this just got interesting." That is one of the most popular NFT curator accounts. They own tons of Punks, Bored Apes, and whatever. It's supposed to be Snoop Dogg. Snoop Dogg is the one who... I don't think it's him who writes the tweets because it's like a totally different writing style. But he says it's Snoop Dogg. Snoop Dogg says it's him, and they funded it obviously with like $1,000,000 worth of NFT purchases. So, I thought that was kind of interesting that he's got some heavy hitters in this NFT world, the NFT collector space, together.

Sam Parr

How did he do it? So, like, he told me that I think there's either 1, 2, or 3... like there's 4,000. I don't remember, some like single-digit load, 1,000.

Shaan Puri

Usually, it's 10,000 or 8,000, but it doesn't matter. Let's just say 10,000 because that's what most of the projects are.

Sam Parr

How do you literally make an image? Because, like, his images are all different. Is it like some code where you have, like, 18 different features and it swaps them?

Shaan Puri

Yeah, exactly. So you have all these traits like hair, eyes, nose, mouth, body, shirt, pants, whatever. Each one might have 10 variations, 12 variations, or even 25 variations. For example, there might be 25 hairstyles. You have an artist create 25 hairstyles, and it's just the hair part. Then you specify the rarity. You say, "Okay, this is the most rare hairstyle, the golden mohawk. I only want that to appear 1% of the time." So you put all that into a program, and it spits out a collection of 10,000 variations—10,000 combinations of these traits, with the rarity included. Some of them have super rare attributes, while others have very common attributes. So that's how all these work. What program?

Sam Parr

do you use for this

Shaan Puri

I don't know what people use. I think it's maybe just one smart contract or maybe there's a special app for this. I'm not sure what people use.

Sam Parr

damn I mean that's crazy that that's that's crazy to me

Shaan Puri

But it's gotten so easy that, you know, Nick can take his tomato meme and get it done now. He hired a good artist because the art he has is like actually really good. It's 3D art, it's really nice. But you know, you see a different 10,000 art collection drop, you know, every 4 hours or something in the [NFT] space.

Sam Parr

it okay

Shaan Puri

So, I bought one yesterday. If you go to OpenSea.io, I saw this... it's really funny. These are such a... it's such degenerate gambling, but I saw this thing go: if you see it on Twitter early, you should basically go mint the thing or buy the thing. I saw this thing called Chain Runners. It took off right away. I saw people... I saw interesting people on Twitter talking about it. I think... what do...

Sam Parr

you have

Shaan Puri

now the first guy who really I I think I the guy who kinda think kicked out kicked it off in the tech industry was the founder of figma who this guy zoink and so the founder of figma which is like a multibillion dollar design company he is a big nft collector he he owned one of the most rare cryptopunks so he changed his profile picture to this or or like you know posted about it and immediately like I start I start seeing every vc doing it so I bought in and you know I made double my money in a day and you know you can get in and out of these things very quickly there's another I'll tell you about another one of these this is kind of in the weeds so I almost regret doing this early on in the show but let's do it there's this thing called wolf game so go to wolf.game and I think this is kind of a sign of something that's to come it's a little confusing when you when you first go to it I only understand let's say 30% of it right now but I the part I understood made me think oh shit this is something new so what is this so crypto is now going into gaming and what does that mean it means like in the old way of gaming you would put like let's say a game like world of warcraft people who played world of warcraft would spend thousands of hours grinding that game playing that game leveling up their characters earning new stuff and they would get 0 economic value for it so you would you would put you know 1,000 of hours in and you would get $0 in return but hey you got the shiny helmet and your character now says level 60 congratulations and it was that was still good enough people did that people all around the world do that then games like fortnite come out fortnite says hey you can play this game it's about shooting each other but you can have your character have all these special costumes they do nothing for you in the game it doesn't make your character any better but if you buy our in game currency called v bucks you can buy these special like capes and swords and helmets for your character alright great people spent 1,000,000,000 of dollars on v bucks and and bought tons of stuff in the game and if they decide like many many people who were 12 years old playing fortnite and dropped you know $180 in the game buying stuff now if they're tired of fortnite and they wanna go play a new game that that money is lost you cannot take your items to another game so why is crypto gaming gonna be big it's gonna be big because when you buy an item in a game you're gonna own that item and then other games will allow you to bring that item in so it'll make it'll make it way more valuable to buy things in games because you're gonna be able to use them you're gonna be able to resell them later if you get tired of the game and some date you wanna sell it that doesn't exist today in most games and secondly you'll be able to take it with you to other games alright so now let me tell you what this wolf game thing is what a wolf game is is it's almost like a gambling system so you imagine if you go to the website it's like little pixelated art

Sam Parr

8-bit art... it looks neat. It looks kind of punk rock a little. This whole genre of people online, it totally is like the freakers. What was it called? You know what I'm talking about, like the steampunk type of vibe.

Shaan Puri

yeah yeah that's definitely like this big overlap of like steampunk and crypto so

Sam Parr

that's neat

Shaan Puri

Here's how the game works. I don't even understand the full game, but here's how it worked when I went to it. You could buy a sheep. So, let's say you buy a sheep. If you stake the sheep in the barn, meaning you put your sheep in the barn every day, you're going to get... every sheep produces 10,000 wool. Your sheep is kind of like working for you; it's like farming wool for you. Okay, and wool has some value. Wool is like the in-game currency; it's like V-Bucks. So, you buy a sheep, and the sheep produces wool for you. That's interesting. You could also buy a wolf. If you buy a wolf or you own a wolf, here's how a wolf works. The story of the game is that if you put your sheep in the farm, they're safe because the farmers have made a truce with the wolves to say, "Do not attack the sheep in the farm." In exchange for the safety—it's like a mafia— you get 20% of the wool as a wolf, as a bribe, as a payoff.

Sam Parr

this is so crazy

Shaan Puri

If somebody ever takes their sheep out of the farm, they can keep 100% of the wool for themselves. However, there's a random chance that a wolf will come and eat your sheep, taking all of the wool and maybe even your sheep. In this case, the wolf would then get 100% of the wool. There's a small chance that you might lose your sheep. You could play it safe and pay the tax, or you can risk it for a bigger reward and potentially lose your sheep. The whole game is basically about owning these sheep, owning these wolves, and the random chance or probabilities of certain things happening. The entire time, you're accumulating wool, which has some value in the game. It's the in-game currency. I thought this was very interesting. It's kind of a stupid, silly game, but it's interesting because it didn't just add crypto at the end. It kind of started with this concept. The game is designed around a character that earns you money, while another character steals money or collects a tax. It's basically a game that's made to make you money. I don't know if you know what's going on with Axie Infinity, but this is like a kind...

Sam Parr

Of a problem... Yeah, I mean, the infinity thing is like the biggest money maker in the world right now, it seems.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, they've made like, I don't know, over $2,000,000,000. The game has made over $2,000,000,000 in like a year. It's this new model called **play-to-earn**. Play-to-earn basically just means that normally when you play the game, you play it just for fun. But now, if you play and you do well in the game, you actually earn in-game currency, which can be cashed out at any time. We have a friend who has a team of people in the Philippines just playing the game full-time. He pays them a salary, and they play the game for him. It's like an investment property; they make back a 25% yield on top of the salaries that he pays them. He pays them to play this game all day.

Sam Parr

do I I think I can I I I can imagine who

Shaan Puri

It is right because, you know, people who obviously see this as kind of messed up. I think a lot of people will have a bad reaction to that. So, I don't want to say their name because...

Sam Parr

oh my god

Shaan Puri

I didn't ask them in advance

Sam Parr

Alright, that's amazing. Do you want to... Alright, well, so like right now I'm looking at a sheet and you've got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 things here. Honestly, they all seem pretty good. Do you just want to like start banging through some stuff?

Shaan Puri

Yeah, let's do it! Your boy went to Disneyland last week. Had a ton of fun. We... I had to skip one episode of the pod, but that made me get exposed to a bunch of new ideas. And then I got sick, so I haven't been able to work. I've just been sitting there, you know, doped up on Benadryl. So I got all kinds of crazy ideas that I wanna bounce off you. Do Disneyland is about Disneyland?

Sam Parr

Okay, so I saw a tweet from Sean saying, "I'm at Disneyland." And all I wanna do is land on... [unintelligible]. [It seems the speaker is struggling to recall or articulate the exact wording of the tweet. The following is a best attempt at interpreting the unclear parts:] "I'm at Disneyland and all I wanna do is... Dad... I wanna... [expletive] ... Disneyland."

Shaan Puri

yeah have you ever seen this instagram account dilfs of disneyland

Sam Parr

no but I understand it

Shaan Puri

It's basically just like hot dads that they take pictures of, who happen to be at Disneyland that day. They're always doing something that's attractive to the moms, like, "Oh, he's wiping the daughter's mouth because he didn't just leave it dirty." Or he's changing a diaper or whatever. It's like, that's what's hot for them. So that was my goal. I did not make it on the deals with Disney. I'm pretty upset about it, but you know, I will recover. Okay, so Disneyland is kind of amazing. When I was there, I was pretty blown away, and my wife was blown away too. My wife doesn't really care about business; she's interested in it, but she's not like a nut about it like you or me. She basically grabbed my arm halfway through the thing and said, "This is amazing." She was like, "I'm kind of blown away by this guy's entrepreneurship to create this place." Disneyland is kind of a one-of-a-kind type of idea. It's meant to be "the happiest place on earth," and it really is for a lot of people. When you're there, you can really see how happy people are. In doing research for this, I watched a documentary about the start of Disneyland. At the end of the video, he says, "That's the backstory of Disneyland, but it means something different to everybody." The comments say what it means to them, and the YouTube comments are like eulogies—it's like essays about what Disneyland means to these people. It has a huge emotional register. Alright, so let me break down some of the numbers. Let's start with the numbers and then the backstory. Disneyland does about $3.8 billion a year in revenue. Every day, about 50,000 people come to the park. So, roughly speaking, they make just over $200 per guest per year. And that's not counting the hotels, the flights, and a bunch of the auxiliary stuff. A ticket into the park is about $120, and then you spend another $100 on food and merchandise while you're there.

Sam Parr

man I feel like it was a $100 when I was a kid

Shaan Puri

Yeah, actually it started when I went back to check the initial price of this because Disneyland prices have been inflating like crazy. There's a chart showing the inflation of Disneyland, and it's just going up into the right. Disneyland started at **$3.25** to get in back when it launched in **1955**. The minimum wage back then was **75¢**, and I think the average person's income was like **$4** or something like that. So, you know, everything has gone up. Now, they basically have off-peak and peak times. If you go during peak time, it's going to be **$200** something bucks. Normal is around **$150**, and low is about **$100**. So, what happened? Walt Disney's story is kind of amazing. He grows up, and he's actually from your hometown. I don't know if you know this, but he's from **Missouri**. I didn't know that! Apparently, there's a place in Missouri called **Electric Park**. Have you ever heard of this? No? Because this is the inspiration for Disneyland. When he was **8 years old**, he went to this place called Electric Park. Electric Park was known for two things: one, it was an amusement park, and two, it was really clean. That's one of the biggest things about Disneyland; it's really clean. So, imagine having **50,000** guests over to your house, but somehow everything stays really, really clean. He was fanatical about this.

Sam Parr

designed the park electric park in in kansas city yeah I see it

Shaan Puri

when he when he designed the park he made it so that I think every 30 feet there's a trash can because he watched guests at amusement parks and he would see that if you if the trash can was further than 30 feet away or whatever they would just be like ah fuck it they would just leave it on the ground or it on the ground or whatever just dispose of it in a bad way but if there was a can within 30 feet they would like make the effort to go toss it and so he made it so that at any? And I tested this out when I was there I was I would often like check okay am I 30 feet within a trash can and sure enough like it's actually like legit there's always a trash can near you and this place is super clean so he goes to electric park and he wants to be a cartoonist he ends up working at an ad agency and then he creates his first business it's called laugh o grams and he's basically doing these like kinda like animated cards but you know a bad business deal leads it starts working but then he cuts a bad business deal where he's owed a bunch of money by one client and then they don't pay him and the business goes under and so he says okay let's go to hollywood and and he tells his brother let's go to hollywood and let's create another business and so they go and they create disney brothers cartoon studio and this is where they create mickey mouse this is where they create snow white that's the first big hit so the company goes from like in debt where it's making no money to making 1,000,000 of dollars off of snow white that was like the big win and so he's like okay this is kinda working and the business is doing alright it's not going gangbusters but it's afloat and he's working on his next story he's working on pinocchio he's working on a couple other stories and he's always had this crazy idea about amusement parks ever since electric park and he takes his daughter to the local merry-go-round and he's like ah this is like so boring like why isn't there something more grand than just this merry-go-round like my daughter loves this but like this is so boring for the parents and this is just one ride like what if I made a place that was you know what if I made a place that was fun for both the parents and the kids to go to which is like a similar theme with all pixar movies and disney disney movies which is like the movie is enjoyable toy story is enjoyable to an adult and a kid it has like 2 layers to it both can enjoy a different piece of it and so he's like and so what how did they actually come about this how did they actually like figure out the idea so they started by doing research they went to every theme park they could find they went to the world's fair they went to a whole bunch of places getting inspiration and ideas and mesh and thinking about what is bad about this experience what can be made better so things being dirty blah blah blah and he's like okay and he starts thinking about the design of the place an electric park had this train that went around the whole park and so if you go to disneyland that's still the thing there's right when you enter there's a train and the train will take you around the whole circumforts of the park and he's like alright I'm gonna build and he used to tell people one of these days I'm gonna build an amusement park and it is gonna be clean and he takes 2 guys off of pinocchio and he says hey listen I want you guys to start start working on like secret project x and he's like you know it's a shame that when people come to hollywood there's nothing to see here like people all around the world have heard of hollywood they come here there's the sign where it says hollywood in the in the letters on the hill but there's nowhere to see hollywood hollywood is on

Sam Parr

I'm I'm so out of it is disneyland in la

Shaan Puri

it's in la yeah oh it's in like anaheim

Sam Parr

anaheim okay I for some reason I thought it was in florida

Shaan Puri

that's disney world

Sam Parr

got it

Shaan Puri

Oh dude, you're like not in Disney. You're not in the Disney world at all. Okay, so he... I mean, I...

Sam Parr

know a little bit but I come on disney world or disneyland that's an easy confuse

Shaan Puri

No, no, no, that's fair, that's fair. So, Disneyland came first. He basically said, "Guys, if anybody came to see our animation studio, they would just see a bunch of dudes hunched over drawings. It's not very impressive. Let's build something amazing in Hollywood." The guys get super excited. They start doing research, but then reality hits. They have to ship *Pinocchio* and *Fantasia*. Then World War II happens. So, all of World War II happens, and then he comes back because he hires this guy, Kimball, to work in his studio. Kimball's like this junior animator guy, and he invites all the coworkers over to his house for a barbecue or a birthday party or something like that. In the backyard of his house, he's like, "Oh, by the way, you guys don't know this, but my hobby is I build these little trains, almost like the steamboat-style train, but it's like a life-sized thing. It was very small. It's like, you know, one link of a train basically." Have you...?

Sam Parr

have you his this guy's name is ward kimball if you Google him he looks like a cartoon

Shaan Puri

And you could see his train too. So, Walt goes to this thing, he's blown away. He's seeing the train up close and he's like, "Dude, Ward built this thing!" When he comes back to the office, he sends a memo saying, "Mickey Mouse Park is back on." He tells the shareholders, but they say, "Don't do it! The movie studio is already on edge. This sounds like a big distraction. It's against the charter of the company. We don't want you doing this." He says, "Okay, no problem. I understand. I'll create a new company." So, he just creates another company to create the park. He's like, "I'm still gonna do this, but if you don't want in, I will. I'll do this myself." He calls it something like "Redlaw," which is "Walter" backwards. He starts working on it and thinks it's gonna take $5,000,000 to build Disneyland. In actuality, it ends up taking $17,000,000 to do it. So, he's like, "Alright, how do I fund this thing?" He takes his life insurance policy and takes a big loan against that, which gives him about $100 to go do this. Then, he sells a house that he had in Palm Springs, so that's like the next seed money. He goes through that pretty quickly. Then he thinks, "Alright, well, I need some bigger money. How do I go get $1,000,000 for this?" He goes to ABC, the TV network, and says, "Hey, ABC, you're struggling right now. You don't have much TV programming. I will create this program called 'The Wonderful World of Disney' or something like that. I'll create a TV show for you that'll air every Sunday if you invest in my park idea." So, Disney basically puts down half a million dollars plus another about $6.5 million in loans and bonds, and they own 34% of Disneyland. That's how he got the next $7,000,000. Then he did the same thing with two other companies and sold some sponsorships. He accumulates together the $17,000,000 he hustled.

Sam Parr

his way

Shaan Puri

He hustled his way to doing it. The other thing that he did was, he was like, "Alright, you know, this thing works because I gotta have the rides work automatically." So, he created this system where, if you go to Disneyland now, you sit in a ride and it’s sort of like a stage play that plays out, but it’s all synchronized. When your little roller coaster cart enters a room, the lights go on, the character makes a sound, and then when you leave the room, it all folds back into its thing. That’s called animatronics. Basically, audio animatronics was the thing he wanted to do. He wanted live animals, but it was too much work. So instead of live animals, he created these robotic animals. He said, "I’m gonna synchronize the movements to music on a loop." There was this one guy who was just working on this, and he was kind of in front of a green screen trying to make this puppet do this thing synchronized to music. Eventually, they finally figured it out, and that was the big breakthrough. So, okay, let me fast forward a little bit. They opened the park. They built the whole thing in less than one year. They opened the park and he only invited about 1,500 people to it, or something like that—an invite-only launch. But somebody counterfeited the tickets, and so double the number of people showed up with counterfeit tickets on day one. Because double the number of people showed up, everything broke. The plumbing broke because there were too many people using water in the park, more than the load was able to handle. So they came to him and said, "Walt, we got a problem. The plumbing is broken. You have to make a choice: toilets or water fountains?" He said, "Toilets for sure." So, there was no drinking water that day. The asphalt was still so freshly poured that women’s high heels were getting stuck in the cement.

Sam Parr

oh no

Shaan Puri

Because it was like caving in. It was basically a giant disaster. He does some PR and basically says, "Look, we had to work out the kinks. Give me a month, and this thing will be smooth." Sure enough, within a month, the baby is, you know, humming. In 7 weeks, he does 1,000,000 visitors. So it was kind of an immediate hit once he did it because it was such a...

Sam Parr

Great idea! Was Disney right off the bat, or at this era, how famous were they? They were like... I mean, they were a big deal. They weren't like a...

Shaan Puri

They were semi-famous. They hadn't had... I mean, nowhere near what they are now, but they were semi-famous really. The ABC show, which he was doing while he was building the park, was almost like the hype video for the park launch.

Sam Parr

was he just grinding the whole time

Shaan Puri

Yeah, crazy amount of work. So he creates this thing, and you know, it's basically the 6th or 7th most visited tourist destination in the world now. And you know, it's kind of becoming this crazy place.

Sam Parr

I think, which is kind of shocking, Disney's theme park division prior to COVID was the most profitable part of the company, wasn't it?

Shaan Puri

Except, well, not profitable because it had a lot of expenses. But in terms of gross profit, yes, because it had a lot of revenue and a lot of expenses. But now, Disney+ is like the bigger thing because Disney+ is like pure profit. Disney+ basically took all that IP that people loved and created a streaming service that's...

Sam Parr

But before that, before COVID, I liked Disneyland. It wasn't a project; it was a major value creation. A lot of value was created there.

Shaan Puri

I wanted to know, is this a loss leader or is this a cash cow? It's more like a cash cow. It's hard to tell because every company's accounting makes everything look like it's losing money, you know what I mean? Accounting can make something look amazing or terrible, regardless of the reality. But you know, the Parks Division, Parks and Resorts, was doing about $1,000,000,000, like $30,000,000,000 a year or something crazy like that. So it obviously became a smash success. When he wanted to do Disney World in Florida, he created five stealth companies because he knew Disneyland was a hit. He was looking for the second location, and if anybody found out where he was looking, the price would go up. So he created five shell companies and started buying up land in Florida. Sure enough, it leaked out, and the day after it leaked, the price per acre went from about $180 an acre to $18,000 an acre. Basically, he couldn't...

Sam Parr

that's crazy

Shaan Puri

He couldn't buy anymore once the news leaked. And, you know, he had this kind of inspiring vision. So he's like, "Disneyland... I want this to be the happiest place on Earth." And he's like, "I want people to have no problems with their hair. I want this to be an escape from your problems, you know, in real life." And Disney World, he created this thing called EPCOT, which I don't know if you've ever heard of. EPCOT is basically... it stands [for something].

Sam Parr

for government agency

Shaan Puri

No, it does sound like it though. EPCOT is right next to Disney World. It's this huge dome-looking thing, and it stands for... it's an experimental... what is it? It's **Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow**, something like that. That's what it stands for. And so what he [Walt Disney] did was... EPCOT is basically like it takes the cutting edge of what the future looks like and it creates like a mini simulation of the future. So you could go and see the latest... what the future is gonna look like in terms of technology.

Sam Parr

you go

Shaan Puri

I've been once when I was a kid, and it's kind of amazing. So, he's like, you know, with all of these projects... I'll read you some of the quotes that I thought were pretty great for him as an entrepreneur. He goes, "I want this to be the happiest place on Earth. I want parents to kiss and have fun together." When it came to EPCOT, he was saying, "I want this to be a living blueprint of tomorrow. I want this to be an always evolving thing. EPCOT is never gonna finish because tomorrow will always be different than today. Disneyland itself will never be completed. It will go on as long as there is imagination left in the world." Since then, you know, they built the park for $17,000,000, but obviously, they pour in like $100,000,000 every year to upgrade the parks, changing the rides and the themes and all that stuff in order to keep it continuously evolving. So, it does sound amazing.

Sam Parr

I originally brought up Six Flags to you a while ago. Do you remember when I mentioned that? Yeah, so the guy who invented... I don't know if he invented it, but he inspired me and he kind of invented the genre a little bit of email newsletters. It's this guy named Bob Pittman. He had this accelerator called the Pilot Group, and basically, he funded a bunch of entrepreneurs. He taught them, like, "Here's what I think you should do." Like, 5 or 6 relatively big-name companies came out of it, like PureWow, Daily Candy, and Thrillist, which is a multibillion-dollar media company called Group 9, and like 2 or 3 others that someone here would recognize. I forget what they're called. He did this newsletter thing and he made it huge. Prior to that, he was the CEO of Six Flags.

Shaan Puri

oh really

Sam Parr

Yeah, which is kind of interesting. Before that, he was on the founding team for MTV. He helped... he was the first CEO and president of MTV. His big thing, prior to starting newsletter businesses, was being the CEO of Century 21 Real Estate, which is a multibillion-dollar company. He was also the CEO of: - Clear Channel Outdoor - AOL (for a brief period) - Six Flags

Shaan Puri

super impressive

Sam Parr

And it was a killer company when he ran it. I think pre-pandemic they raised... they had too much debt, but it was making good money. So these companies, I think, are pretty badass actually, and they're gonna roar back. Right now, if you started working on this 2 years ago, you'd be in an awesome position.

Shaan Puri

Right, and so I wanted to talk about some of the spin-off ideas. That's the backstory of Disney, but when I'm there, I'm thinking, "How could this be better?" I have one tip for Disneyland itself, which is obviously the absolute worst part. The only thing that takes away your happiness at Disneyland is waiting in lines. The average ride has you waiting 30 to 45 minutes just to experience a ride for 90 seconds. Especially if you're waiting with a little kid, they don't understand that you're waiting. They're like, "I want to go now! I want my turn!" My daughter just says, "It's my turn now! It's Blushie's turn now! Let's go!" I feel like they do kind of nothing to make the line experience better.

Sam Parr

well don't they have a fastpass that everyone buys

Shaan Puri

They used to, and they got rid of it for a bunch of reasons. I think, a) everyone was buying it, so it became less useful, and b) they got a bunch of criticism for it, like, "Oh, you know..."

Sam Parr

kind of elitist

Shaan Puri

It's elitist, exactly. So they had to kind of back off that. They do have this thing called the VIP tour that you can pay for that basically takes you to the front of the line of everything, but you have to pay. It's... what is it? It's basically you pay $6 to $10 a day for a group of up to 10 people. Got it. And so if you're willing to drop, you know, $1,000 per person, you can... dude, you probably just...

Sam Parr

feel like a huge douche though like doing that

Shaan Puri

totally totally yeah because you're just looking at a bunch of sweaty crying babies

Sam Parr

yeah you're like get out of the way plebs

Shaan Puri

Yeah, exactly. So, I gotta say, it probably does feel good. I think the thing that Disneyland needs is related to the psychology associated with this. There was this TED Talk that got popular back in the day. I don't really remember it exactly, so I might kind of butcher it, but this guy was discussing a problem with a subway station or train station. Everyone was so annoyed with how long the train took to get from one place to another. People hated riding the train. So, they commissioned a bounty and issued a request for proposals. They said, "Guests are not happy because the trains are running too slowly." Most people, the common way to solve this, was for engineers to say, "We have to do a massive engineering overhaul to make the train go 20% faster or 30% faster." They estimated it would require a billion dollars and the trains would have to be shut down for two years while they rebuilt the infrastructure to make it faster. Then one guy, who was a psychologist, suggested, "Why don't we just make the ride more pleasant so that you don't feel the slowness of time?" He pointed out that there were no food carts on the train. He proposed that there should be a food trolley walking through the train with pretty cheap snacks. He explained that when people see the trolley, their focus would shift away from just waiting for the train to arrive at their destination to waiting for the trolley to get to them. They would buy from the trolley, and while eating the snacks, it would improve the rider experience significantly. This was like a $2 solution that actually made a huge difference.

Sam Parr

I think it's rory sutherland who created this

Shaan Puri

that's his

Sam Parr

Roy Sutherland, if I remember correctly... Yeah, that's right. Alright, I knew I recognized this guy. He was... so he's a marketing agency guy, and he was the boss of Ogilvy, one of the big advertising firms. Their whole shtick is just like perception. Interesting. And I think the talk is all on perception.

Shaan Puri

And this exists everywhere. For example, Instagram... I remember when they first came out, one of the things that was a magical experience about Instagram was, aside from the photo filters, that when you would take a photo and say "post," it would instantly load and post. People were like, "How did you do this? That's incredible!" You know, back then iPhones were so bad and the connections were so poor that it would take multiple minutes to upload a single photo onto the internet. These guys [Instagram] were doing it in a few seconds... it was like 2 seconds.

Sam Parr

so they weren't probably actually uploading it

Shaan Puri

Well, there's no... no, they actually were. So first, he was like, "Dude, why don't we just say it's done and then it'll happen in the background?" But people would go check and say, "Oh, it's not posted here. This app doesn't work." So what they did was realize that everybody waits until the caption's done to start uploading. They wait until you have the photo, the filter, and the caption before they start uploading the photo. What they did was separate it and do it all on one screen. So what Instagram did was let you take the photo and filter it, and then they would say "Next." You would hit a button and then start to write your caption. They knew people take about two minutes to write their caption, trying to think of what to say. During that two minutes, they would just upload the image in the background. So the image was already uploaded back then during that wait time. Instead of making you wait, they did it while you were already doing something else. That was a big thing. So this perception stuff actually does have an impact on products. That's what I think this thing needs to do.

Sam Parr

They need to do it. Another example of that is when Uber first came out, and maybe they still have this. When you pull up your phone, or when you used to pull up your phone, they would show you all of the cars in your area.

Shaan Puri

crawling around the map oh they're so close to you and I think that was faked actually initially

Sam Parr

And it was fake. It wasn't real. Yeah, and it wasn't real, but it would make you feel like they're everywhere and if you just click it now, it's about to be here. Sometimes I don't remember why, if it was random, you would open it up and there'd be no cars around, and you're like, "Oh f***, that! I'm gonna go to Lyft." But it was fake. This idea... There's this great book called **"The Design of Everyday Things"** by Don Norman.

Shaan Puri

yep

Sam Parr

It's a famous book, and one of the principles of great design is you need a feedback loop. For example, if you were to click a button on your computer, like a submit button, and it wouldn't tell you it was submitted or something like that. Or when you close a door and you don't hear a click. That lack of feedback... it's annoying and disturbing. It bothers you. And so, this is kind of in line a little bit with that.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, totally. I think what Disneyland needs to do is implement line entertainment. They need something to happen in the line to keep you occupied. They need to extend the ride essentially into the line. There should be things built into the line, like little characters that come out, things that drop from the ceiling, you know, little magical snowflakes that fly out every two minutes, or candy that gets thrown into the crowd. Whatever it is, something needs to happen in the line. That's my one tip for Disneyland. Okay, besides that, I was thinking, why aren't there more of these? Disneyland was built in 1955, and you have Six Flags and kind of smaller adventure parks, but what are the other opportunities here? If you take the elements of it, you have a target, which is, let's say, kids. You have IP that they love, so they’re excited to go see Mickey Mouse, The Lion King, Aladdin, and Buzz Lightyear from Toy Story. All these characters that they've seen in the movies, they get to see them in real life. That's the big thing. Then you have rides, food, parades, and entertainment. So, what other niches do you think there are? Do you think there are other business opportunities for someone who is like Walt Disney, someone who is a creative mind, to build today? What do you think is out there?

Sam Parr

Yeah, I think there are many, and I think that we've actually talked about a few. The first one, which people laughed at but is kind of amazing, was the Museum of Ice Cream. I thought that was amazing. Another one is Meow Wolf. Meow Wolf is this business that has locations in Arizona, New Mexico, and Vegas, I think, and I don't remember where else. Supposedly, they do north of $100 million in sales. It's basically like if Cirque du Soleil was a museum, and you could walk around and touch different art. It's kind of like all in your face, and it's kind of interesting. I think you can do that. There's one thing that I think is kind of amazing that's out right now, which is called the Van Gogh Experience. I like Van Gogh's stuff; my wife is huge into that. So we pay money and go to the Van Gogh Experience. I do think there are little niche things that you can do related to this. What I would do is look at what the most popular exhibits of science museums and art museums are, and I would make something special out of it. For example, do you remember like 15 years ago, the Body... what was it called?

Shaan Puri

yeah yeah bodies I think it was called

Sam Parr

Bodies. I think that's all it was. It was like a huge hit success. You would go to all the science centers, or whatever they're called, science museums throughout the country. They have real-life bodies, like cadavers that were donated. They dissected them and then they tell you how the inside of the body works. I mean, I don't know if that's a mainstay somewhere, but that's a good example. What I would do is look at all the science museum and art museum exhibits that are the longest lasting, as well as all the Broadway stuff that's the longest lasting. I'd be like, "Alright, well those are all hits. Why are they hits?"

Shaan Puri

Right, right. Things that people love... Yeah, I think the trick here is **unbundling**. I don't think you want to make the full theme park; I think you want to unbundle components and either just remix those or just do only that thing. So, I'll give you some of the ideas that I had while I was waiting in line for 45 minutes for a ride. I came up with all these ideas while I was sitting in line. The first one was **target market**. The only thing I think people love more than their kids, or nearly as much as their kids, is their dog. I am surprised that there's not a place like Disneyland for dogs that is basically the happiest place on earth for dogs. I would take my dog there if I could just give my dog an amazing day. I would do it, you know? I don't know about you; you're a dog guy too. I don't know if you have that pull. Ideally, it would be local, not like, you know, having to fly to LA to go do this.

Sam Parr

so

Shaan Puri

Maybe it's more like a traveling circus, but why is there not just an incredible set of experiences that dogs love? You know, dogs have a blast in... and you can see your dog doing it and take pictures of them and give them what they deserve. What do you think?

Sam Parr

dude it sounds like an insurance nightmare

Shaan Puri

any more than an amusement park with like chased on roller coasters

Sam Parr

Yes, so much worse. You have a fufu dog that won't hurt anyone. I've got like an 80-pound pitbull who's well-behaved, but if he ever wanted to hurt something, he'd kill it. It sounds like it'd be so challenging... I mean, I would be stressed out about that constantly.

Shaan Puri

Okay, fair enough. We've got some liability concerns. Alright, what else? We've talked before about IP. How do you get great IP? So Disney obviously uses the Disney portfolio of IP: Mickey Mouse, Goofy, Donald Duck, whatever. What are the new forms of IP? I think if you ever use YouTube for kids, you're like, "Cocomelon, Blippi..." These are characters that they watch just as much as, you know, Disney movies. Because some of...

Sam Parr

them do too

Shaan Puri

So they're on YouTube, they're invented by kind of individual people there, and then they got all rolled up by this thing called Moonbug. Moonbug owns a bunch of this stuff, and then Moonbug got rolled up by that thing that Kevin Mayer is doing. Kevin...

Sam Parr

1,000,000,000 I think

Shaan Puri

He was the former CEO of Disney. Then he partnered with Blackstone, and Blackstone gave him $2,000,000,000 or something like that to go buy all this intellectual property (IP). So, he bought Reese Witherspoon's movie studio for $800,000,000. He bought CookaMillion, he bought Blippi, and he bought all these different forms of IP. I think that YouTube channels have IP that people care about. If you combine them all together, and there was, you know, the way that Disney does it—like there are different areas of the park for each world and each character theme—I think you could do it that way, dude.

Sam Parr

yeah I'm on board with this keep going

Shaan Puri

religion is another one so take

Sam Parr

Isn't there... doesn't that exist? Isn't there like a Muslim version of this? I don't know. I've...

Shaan Puri

never heard of it

Sam Parr

I thought that there was, but in the South, they have their... maybe it's Christian. There's like a Christian theme park. Have you not heard of this?

Shaan Puri

exactly what I had in mind no

Sam Parr

It's like a Bible... I think it's like a Bible theme park. There is... it's in the... Yes, it's like a Christian... I don't... The **Holy Land Experience** is one of them, and then there's a Holy Land, and then there's **Ark Encounter** where it's like a real-life sized Noah's Ark. But there is this thing called the **Holy Land Experience**; it's based out of Orlando, Florida.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, okay. I don't know if that does well or not, but I could see a religious-themed park doing well, right? The merry-go-round, that's Mary, you know? You've got Jesus' jumping ride, whatever. You just go totally fun with religion and...

Sam Parr

Try not to be lost. It's a nonprofit, so you could actually go in and look at all their expenses and revenue. It looks like it brings in $10,000,000 a year in ticket sales.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I think it could do... I think you could do a lot better than that. The fact that they are setting it up as a nonprofit tells me that, you know, their ambitions are probably not huge there with it. So, I think you could do that with any different religion. Okay, what else? The other side of it is like you unbundle parts of the experience. So maybe the parade is amazing, and like, you know, the parade is one of the experiences that you could just offer individually. Or maybe like the Museum of Ice Cream. I think that's a good example. It takes you to go take cute photos in front of all these different backdrops and with you in some costume. I think it unbundled that and just offered that. There's no roller coasters; it's just the photo part. So, I think there's a whole bunch of things here, and I think this is going to get bigger because as the world gets increasingly digital, there's going to be this demand for real-world experiences. But the real-world experiences can't be something that I can do digitally just as well. It has to be unique, and it has to be sort of exhilarating in a way that is a reason to get out of the home. It's a reason to get away from a screen. So, things like we've talked about in fitness, like Tough Mudder or Spartan Race, things that are like, you know, photo opportunities like the Museum of Ice Cream. And now I think that theme parks are another one where there's a big opportunity to do this well.

Sam Parr

So, I used to work for that TV show I've talked about a bunch, *American Pickers*. We had this store in Nashville. It was a really small store, maybe 4,000 square feet or less. It wasn't very big at all. People would complain all the time, saying, "Oh, I thought this was gonna be huge!" But it was tiny. People would come from all over the world—Australia, Europe, all over the South. I mean, people from the South loved this stuff. They would come, and it was free to enter. They just wanted to look at all the items they had seen on TV. I remember correctly, around 2010, on a good day, we would sell $30,000 in T-shirts and mugs just at that store. We would crush it just off that store. If I were MrBeast or someone who wanted to partner with MrBeast, or one of these other YouTubers who do a lot of interesting things... There's this one guy, I think his name is *PewDiePie*—I forget his exact name. He's this older guy on YouTube with 15 or 20 million subscribers, and he shoots every type of gun you can imagine. He has shot everything from an old revolutionary gun to some weird experimental shotgun, and he has a huge following. He's in the middle of owning a plot of land where you can do anything you want. There are a couple of other guys too. There's another YouTuber named *Roman* who's based out of Ohio. He has this massive plot of land and is always inventing all these weird go-karts and stuff. MrBeast always does these epic things. If I were a YouTuber, I think you could create these epic experiences. Do you remember that thing called... do you remember *Woodward*?

Shaan Puri

no what is that

Sam Parr

So, Woodward started out, I think, in Pennsylvania. It was called Woodward Camp, and it was a sleepaway summer camp in Woodward, PA. It featured a huge outdoor skate park with bunk beds and other amenities. As a kid, you would pay $2,000 or $3,000—I don't remember exactly—but it was expensive enough that my parents never would have done it. It's in this rural area, and you pay all this money to go to this sleepaway camp to skateboard, BMX, and do all this crazy stuff that you see on shows like *Rocket Power* or whatever. It was a big deal. Eventually, it was sold to Powder... what is it called? Powder... it's like the largest, or Vail Resorts—one of those. It's one of the largest private equity land-owning and resort companies in the world, and they eventually bought it for a lot of money. So anyway, I think there is a lot of movement here.

Shaan Puri

You saying the MrBeast thing just reminded me... Have I talked about this movie, this documentary "Boys State" on here? Did I talk about this? No? Have you watched this thing?

Sam Parr

no boys

Shaan Puri

**Boys State**: Unbelievable documentary. Gotta watch it! It's on... I don't know if it's on Hulu or Apple TV+ or something like that. It got recommended to me, I watched it, I loved it. So, what Boys State is: it's a camp. It's a 1-week camp, I think in Texas, and...

Sam Parr

it's austin

Shaan Puri

It simulates Texas politics. So you get there and on day one, you get divided into their version of the Democrats and Republicans. It's like you join Team Blue or Team Red, and immediately they become super tribal and hate the other side. Which is hilarious because it's arbitrary... it's completely arbitrary. So what this documentary is, is it follows one session of Boys State. Hold on one second...

Sam Parr

If you... and you could... I'm actually looking at the notable alumni. It's like everyone... I mean, there are hundreds of famous people who went there. Famous politicians who went to it...

Shaan Puri

yeah exactly so you go there and you you get divided up so you're on the blue or the red team democrats or republicans they call it something else I forget and then the documentary follows what happens that week which is you you run the party basically nominates people so you can say I wanna be governor I wanna be treasury I wanna be you know vice governor or whatever the whatever the offices are so like there's a handful of roles you first you first you know debate or you nominate yourself and then you give a speech you debate in your party to be the nominee for governor and then you run against the other the other side and so it's kind of an amazing documentary because it just shows how instantaneously these games these politics games just completely infect your brain and change the way you act and like these kids who are like I don't know how old they are they seem like they're in like 8th grade or so I could be wrong on that but they're like they're acting just like a politician acts they're like making promises they're talking about what's wrong in the country and one side loves guns and the other side hates guns and it's literally such a simulation and then at the and then it follows the the election and the election happens and it kinda culminates in like you know it follows these 5 characters and it culminates in one of them winning the thing and it's just a crazy documentary so I think that that experience of a camp is kind of interesting too to me I think this has been going on for like 70 years and like you said a whole bunch of like famous politicians went and actually did this when they were kids and when you said mister beast that reminded me of like why isn't there a creator camp like okay what what we talked about boy scouts going under and like who's gonna replace boy scouts if mister beast basically said come to this 1 week sleepaway camp and create become a creator like create your channel and like it's all about you're gonna be here we hand you a little selfie stick with a camera and you're gonna create your vlog content you're gonna create your channel you're gonna create your brand you're gonna have your fans you're gonna follow each other's channels and like it's just a place to like come to learn how to be a creator

Sam Parr

And that's actually a fantastic idea because if you look at the stats... I think that either you or me or one of us shared something where they asked 15-year-olds what they want to do when they grow up. A shocking large number, like 20 or 30%, said they wanted to be a YouTube creator. The second largest thing, I think, was a Twitch creator. It was still the same thing.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, basically, it's a video. Like a YouTuber is basically number one, and that's just kind of all-encompassing of an online content creator. It used to be, back in the day, like an athlete, musician, politician, scientist, or astronaut. About 10 years ago, it flipped, and YouTuber became number one. People look at that and shake their fists, saying, "This is what's wrong with the country." Other people realize that you can't pass judgment like that. It's sort of like, "What if that's what people want? That's what people want." You just have to...

Sam Parr

To hide what the kids... If kids are actually going to follow through on what they said when they were younger, there would be a whole lot more marine biologists in the world.

Shaan Puri

yeah exactly

Sam Parr

like I

Shaan Puri

would be a dinosaur right now

Sam Parr

yeah it doesn't seem like there's exactly that many vets out there

Shaan Puri

Exactly! So I think that's a great idea. It's like, you know, if a couple of YouTubers got together, I think they could have... and I think it's fan service too. So I think you would just become more famous if you build fan love, and you'd print like, I don't know, $20,000,000 every summer running your camp. It's a pain in the ass, but you could do that. And I think... like, I went to a Space Camp from NASA when I was in 5th grade.

Sam Parr

did you really

Shaan Puri

the state of texas sent every 5th grader to it so it's kind of amazing

Sam Parr

what

Shaan Puri

yeah and they only did it once so I was just lucky to be in that timing

Sam Parr

oh I wanted to do that when I was a kid so badly

Shaan Puri

It's an amazing thing. You go there and you get to be in a rocket ship, and you get to play commander and do all this stuff. But I feel like for many jobs, there's a version of that. I think people are fascinated with prisons, they're fascinated with the police, they're fascinated with the army. And if you could create amusement parks or simulations of that where you get to: - Take your pictures - Touch the stuff - See how it works - Learn some things People will pay for that. I think we're going to see more out-of-home experiences like that get built.

Sam Parr

can we move on to the shitty billy of the week

Shaan Puri

yeah or do we

Sam Parr

have a different one

Shaan Puri

no it's good it's just a crazy story I don't even know what the. Is. Of this one is let's

Sam Parr

go to a different one let me give you a different one

Shaan Puri

Alright, let's do a quick one. I saw this and it kind of caught my eye. This guy—what's his name? I'll give him credit real quick. Somebody sent this to us in the Facebook group, and I thought it was interesting. So, it's specialnames.cn. The guy's name is Mike Benitez, who shared this. What is it? Basically, there's a story that came out about a girl who paid her way through college. She basically made a few hundred thousand dollars, and all she does is name Chinese babies with American names. In China, every Chinese person typically has a Western name. You know, if their name is hard to say, they kind of know that for business purposes and travel purposes, it's just easier to say, "Yes, I also go by Mike," or "I go by Emerald," or "I go by Samantha." But the problem is, you know, it's not your native thing. So, if I tried to pick a Chinese name right now, I might pick something that's really weird or off—it doesn't sound quite right. You see these things where Chinese people name their baby something like "Rolex" as their Western name. It's like, "No, no, no, you shouldn't have picked that one." You know, that's kind of a strange name if you were trying to have an easy Western name. It actually backfired. So, what this woman's service is, you could go to specialnames.cn, and the site is hilarious. If you go to the website, it's like, "Are you on the website?" It's... it's like, yeah.

Sam Parr

I'm looking at it now. Look at the counter; it says the baby we named, and it says a million. They've named over 1,000,000,000 babies, but the English is off.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, and well, the actual site's in Chinese. I think it's a Google translate that you're looking at. You just say "boy" or "girl," I think. You submit some information or a picture of the baby, and she just closes her eyes, basically, and says "Jasmine." And then it...

Sam Parr

So, you pick 5 attributes like nice, honest, kind, eager, keen, and I did that. It gave me the names Zachary, Caleb, or Harvey. It says the famous Harveys are Harvey Firestone, Harvey Ball, and then Caleb... Caleb Carr. I don't know who that is. Is that a famous actor?

Shaan Puri

I don't know

Sam Parr

I know zachary taylor I guess the american president yeah it's pretty funny

Shaan Puri

And so this site, I thought, "What an example of 'niches make riches'!" It's like just solving a simple problem for people. You know, this girl's made hundreds of thousands of dollars just off this website, and I thought that was... [impressive]

Sam Parr

how does it make money just through ads

Shaan Puri

really cool side hustle for a college kid

Sam Parr

it just make they just make money through ads

Shaan Puri

I think, yeah, I don't know exactly. I thought you pay her to do it, but maybe you're saying you just got a name right away.

Sam Parr

I just got a name

Shaan Puri

I was doing it on my phone so it might be ads or it might be a premium upsell

Sam Parr

And the logo is just this generic-looking white lady. That's like the spokesperson.

Shaan Puri

if that's her or not

Sam Parr

that's definitely not her

Shaan Puri

so let me do this oh yeah I know it's like a cartoon

Sam Parr

this is awesome

Shaan Puri

So, there's a hilarious little side hustle that I loved. Okay, let's do the "Shitty Billy of the Week." I read the story and I was blown away. This is not really... this is interesting only in that it's a train wreck. Did you see this story about this venture capitalist that came out?

Sam Parr

just now

Shaan Puri

So, there's this guy named **Michael Goguen**. He used to be a partner at **Sequoia**, right? Like, one of the biggest venture firms ever.

Sam Parr

is he the one who stole money from them

Shaan Puri

No, he got fired because his girlfriend came out and accused him—she sued him for sexual abuse. She said, "I've been in a relationship with him for 8 years or 10 years or something like that, and he's extremely abusive sexually to me." Blah, blah, blah. She's a stripper that he met somewhere, and then she became his girlfriend. As for the suit, he didn't lose it; he got acquitted or whatever. But still, Sequoia was like, "We decided it's best to part ways." A story came out in the Daily Mail. You know, it's good because it's in the Daily Mail, which is like the trash of the trash, but it's the junk food you can't resist. Basically, there was some wild stuff about this guy. Here are the allegations that are in the article: Michael Goguen, after he left Sequoia, goes to Montana and sets up his estate there. He owns, like, I don't know, 100,000 square feet of space in houses in Montana. He is like the big fish there. He owns a bar, and under the bar, he created this thing called the "Boom Boom Room." The Boom Boom Room is where he takes girls that he meets. This guy's on his fourth wife. The article talks about a spreadsheet of 5,000 women that he slept with, and it's just full of... have you heard?

Sam Parr

you done the wait say that again say the 5,000 thing again

Shaan Puri

a spreadsheet of 5,000 women that he slept with is okay what the article says

Sam Parr

do the math if you so if you if this has happened over a 20 year.

Shaan Puri

Yeah

Sam Parr

365 days times 20 is 73,100. Divided by 5, that means he had to have sex with a different woman every 1.5 years.

Shaan Puri

yeah every day and a half

Sam Parr

is that crazy what I don't believe that that doesn't make sense to me

Shaan Puri

I don't know if he did it or he didn't. It's sort of like the Wilt Chamberlain claim where he said he slept with 10,000 women. People were like, "That means you slept with 2 women a day." This doesn't make any sense.

Sam Parr

yeah his response by the way he was like yeah sometimes it was 3 though

Shaan Puri

exactly most pimp response ever so this guy this guy's wild so so he basically he there's tons of so so what happened was he had created this like security company to cover his tracks and it's like a private security company and he hired these like ex military people to run it for him and they were kind of like his fixers they're the ones who came out and exposed this whole thing and are now suing him for $800,000,000 and they're suing him because he basically made them do a bunch of stuff that like got them in trouble so he'd have to pay off women that he would sleep with and they would have he'd be like you need to do this like go I'll put money in your account you pay her off and and eventually 1 guy so he had a friend who the story is he he brings his daughters over to the friend's house with their babysitter but then he leaves with the babysitter has sex with the babysitter and the friend is like dude what the hell are you doing you just have sex with the babysitter in my house like this is messed up and he's like he calls him a pedophile and he's like dude like don't you know don't bring up my flaws and like know there's a one time thing and blah blah blah and the guy's like oh this messed up and he's like starts threatening the guy he threatens the guy and says if you come out and say this I'm gonna like ruin you and the guy's like you know if that he then sleeps with the guy's wife as like you know part of this process and the guy gets really pissed and he's like threatens to basically expose him for all the stuff that he's doing while he's meanwhile like an investor and all this stuff you know leading this professional life the guy's worth $5,000,000,000 by the way so he's a multi billionaire himself so the guy goes to his like security guy and says we need to kill him we had this guy's getting too he's too big of a risk he threatens to bring everything down we gotta kill him and don't and then and then basically like in the article it's like don't like communicate anywhere except for wickr this like self deleting text messaging app and the guy goes to him and says hey hey like talk him off the ledge no let's not kill this guy whatever but that that was like one of the allegations and and so people have come out against this guy but he bribes the police and so like multiple police chiefs have like lost their job because they failed to investigate this guy because he basically bought them off and he

Sam Parr

Claimed, think about it. How much do you think you'd have to bribe a Montana cop to shut up? Like $1,000,000? I mean, yeah, I think 9 out of 10 police officers would take $1,000,000 to shut up.

Shaan Puri

Oh, in my deep experience bribing cops, I mean, I have no idea. Yeah, I think like half a million dollars would do, right? For a lot of these women, it's like jewelry. He slept with one woman, and then her husband found out, got divorced, and he paid for it. He bought her a five-bedroom home and also paid for her side of the divorce. You know, that was like one of the things that he did. He just had this elaborate web of, you know, crazy sexual life layered onto crazy payoffs, bribes, and cover-ups. Then, like, a whole company dedicated to this private security company, whatever that means. And then police bribery. This is like a crazy three-part movie. You look at this guy, and he's just like this, you know, cookie-cutter white VC-looking guy. It was such a wild story, I thought. And yeah, sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.

Sam Parr

So, I've read a little bit about odd billionaires, and I've maybe interacted with one or two before. Have you ever met someone who's in the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars who has some weird quirks? For example, this is public knowledge: Peter Thiel basically employed three big-shot lawyers. When he was outed as gay by Gawker, he hired these three lawyers. This is discussed in a great book by Ryan Holiday, but I forget the title. He employed these lawyers, and I forget when he was outed, but it was something like in '09. He said, "However long it takes, this is your full-time job."

Shaan Puri

decade yeah

Sam Parr

Yeah, he goes, "Just wait for Gawker and those guys to screw up. When they slip up, tell me and we're gonna pounce." He employed these guys the whole time. There's some crazy stuff about Peter Thiel. For example, in the book, they said that he has a black Mercedes with the engine on everywhere he goes in the world. So, like, that's what it is. He always has a team, and they have to have a car at all times. He also has land in New Zealand because he's a little bit nervous about the apocalypse. So my question is, do you think you've ever met a billionaire or someone like that who's got some of these weird things, like a security force that does exotic things like this?

Shaan Puri

A fixer? Yeah, I think so. So, I worked with this guy. I talked about him before. I worked with this crazy kind of...

Sam Parr

with the filipino guy

Shaan Puri

Yeah, in Indonesia, there was this crazy guy I talked about before. I mean, he was like a dropout in grade school and self-made. I think he was worth $500,000,000 at his peak. In Indonesia, $500,000,000 is like $10,000,000,000 here in America. He had a crazy, elaborate business. Having him as my boss was really weird; he was an insane boss. I told you he had a giant projector in the office, like on the wall, that tracked everybody's computer activity. Your productivity was displayed like this. He bought the software from Boeing and basically used it to show that your little square would flash red if you weren't being productive enough. I don't even know how it was measuring that—just how much you were typing, I guess. It was like this intimidation tactic. He had four women who just managed his email. If you did well in a meeting, he would walk in the next day and just hand you the keys to a new Mercedes parked outside, saying, "This is yours. Drive it around." He did crazy stuff like that. I remember one meeting where a friend of his came in from Singapore, and they were openly talking about an insider trading/pump and dump scheme they were doing. I was like, "Whoa, that's like crazy illegal!" And they were like, "Yeah, it's great! We're gonna make so much money. This is gonna work!"

Sam Parr

about you said that you said this is illegal

Shaan Puri

I didn't say it, but I was sitting there in the room thinking, "I think this is wrong." I was 21 years old at the time, and I didn't know much about anything. Every day after work, he would take his insider crew to the bar. There were two girls there; those were like his escorts for the day or whatever. This was the way he did business. He bribed officials and did all kinds of stuff. He ended up in jail and actually died in jail this year. It's a pretty crazy life. I worked with this guy for only about three months before I left and came back to start a startup here. That guy was wild; he lived a wild life.

Sam Parr

That's awesome! Yeah, I don't know if I have any firsthand knowledge of this, or if I've been friends with people who maybe have been involved. They just haven't told me. But I do believe that people like this guy, this Goguen guy... I don't know, I've heard this.

Shaan Puri

Other, this Goguen guy is like on some **Jeffrey Epstein** shit, right? Like, this is a modern-day **Jeffrey Epstein** situation. Maybe I guess it's not underage girls; I guess that's the difference. But basically, you know, just like a harem of women, cover-ups, bribes, and intimidation. He's got this bunker and he's like bribing police. If these things are true, which you don't know if they're true or not, but this thing came out. It's pretty crazy. It's a wild story.

Sam Parr

Yeah, this is crazy. I didn't know about this. I would believe, just based off what I believe, this could be very true. This doesn't shock me, knowing what I know a little bit. And I have heard rumors of people who I'm... secondhand or thirdhand connected with, that they're freaks. I hear some stories about what they do to cover it up, and I 100% believe this.

Shaan Puri

Silicon Valley, you were very successful. There are things that I didn't realize until I kind of got closer to it. I'm not inside that circle because I'm not in that tier, but I had a couple of friends in that circle. It's like two things that are way more common than I ever would have thought. **Swinging**... swinging is like super common in Silicon Valley. Dude, it's the swinger lifestyle. It's weird.

Sam Parr

it's weird

Shaan Puri

you know about this pineapple thing by the way

Sam Parr

tell me

Shaan Puri

So, I learned this from TikTok. I don't know if this is real or not, but basically, the silent symbol for signaling to others if you're a swinger or not is apparently an upside-down pineapple. So, if you go to a house and they have a picture of a pineapple that's upside down, it's a wink to anybody else who's in the lifestyle that, "Hey, we're down." I had no idea.

Sam Parr

dude that's crazy

Shaan Puri

or if they're wearing like pineapple earrings or something at a party

Sam Parr

I've got a girlfriend who does it, and she tells me about it. My wife and I were like, "I was like, Sarah, you know, I'm not interested in this, just so you know. I don't want to do this." And she's like, "Yeah, me neither, but it's so fun to hear about."

Shaan Puri

yeah exactly I'm like uber uber bored

Sam Parr

I've got a couple friends that are into it down here in Austin where I live. These guys have this company, you know, **On It**. Aubrey Marcus and then he's got this other guy named Kyle who is a friend or works there - I'm not sure the relationship. But they... they mix work and play, and they're open about how they have open relationships. They talk about it on their podcast. Kyle Kingsbury, I think his name is. And they talk about it on the podcast that they share... they share relationships.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, it's... I mean, you know, more power to you if it's your thing. What I'm saying is I didn't know how common that was, like, "sui" or that lifestyle. But it is very common among successful Silicon Valley people. The same thing goes for drugs, you know? Either microdosing or normal dosing of certain drugs. I guess there's a certain level of partying that I just never did and never had the urge to do. I think it's pretty common among this group of people. And, you know, good for them.

Sam Parr

Dude, I'm such a prude. I've been out with some really powerful people who I looked up to, and whenever I've seen them do coke, I'm like, "Oh, I don't really like you as much as I used to." Exactly. It just made me uncomfortable. I didn't feel good about it; I didn't like it. But this is crazy, and it is way more common than I thought living in Silicon Valley. I think what it is, is if you're a nerd and you're now worth a billion dollars or a hundred million, which is basically the same thing, you can do anything you want. You want to do stuff. Also, if you are young and you have money, you have to up the ante consistently. So, Dan Bilzerian has this new book out, and either in the book or in an interview about the book, he was saying how he's like, "Man, I've had every woman that I could ever want. I have private fancy chefs. I drive the best cars. I fly private. I do the fanciest stuff. None of it makes me happy anymore because I have to go bigger and bigger and bigger in order to help my dopamine and make it work." And now, none of it makes me happy. So, I just try to be simple now, although it's really hard. All the items, they don't bring me joy.

Shaan Puri

Speaking of making me happy, there was this thing that I saw that I thought was pretty cool. It's not really like a business idea necessarily, but I think it's worth a read. So let me put a link to it. Worship at the link... one sec, let me grab it. Basically, there's this guy—I want to give him credit because it's a very interesting read—and I'll explain it while I'm looking for the link. So basically, there's this guy, Dan Lou, I think is his name.

Sam Parr

how do you spell it

Shaan Puri

Dan, normal. And then, uh, go to this link. So, just search, or never mind, I'll just Slack it to you. So, go to this link and this guy in this post, and basically what he did was, he's like, "Hey, you know, there are all these claims that you'll hear commonly. You'll hear them over and over again, and they're referencing studies. They have fancy names, and then they reference studies, and people take them as facts." Then, he's like, "Turns out, if you actually go read the study, the claim is either way weaker than what people use it as, or it's literally the opposite." He gives four examples, and I loved reading this, so I want to go through them real quick. So, one is on happiness, which you just mentioned. We had talked about this before, which is that people have this thing where they say there's a link between happiness and income. Basically, the thing you'll hear in pop science is that beyond $75,000, your happiness doesn't go up beyond that amount. So, what does this mean?

Sam Parr

and it's total bullshit

Shaan Puri

Don't chase money. It's not going to make you any happier. So, he goes and says, "It's become common knowledge that money doesn't make people happy. How much is enough?" You know, people have different things. If you Google it and say "happiness income," it'll say that a household income of $75,000 is where your day-to-day happiness doesn't rise. He goes on to explain that this happiness-correlated income study was actually done multiple times, not just once. The problem is that when people look at the graph, it looks like happiness goes up, up, up, and then it flattens out. The issue is that it's on a log scale, and most people just don't know how to read a log scale graph. A log scale graph means you're going up by a factor of 10 every time. So, even if it looks like it's flattening out, that might be going from 10 to 50. It just doesn't look like as big of a jump because the increments are on a log scale. If you actually look at it—and you know this got published in Dan Gilbert's book on behavioral economics—if you look at the chart on a non-log scale, it shows that the more money you have, the more your satisfaction goes up. There’s no flattening out. It doesn't go up at the same rate, though. Yes, it's true that going from $0 to $30,000 to $75,000 gives you a bigger jump in happiness than going from $1,000,000 to $2,000,000 or from $2,000,000 to $4,000,000. But happiness does keep going up. Your satisfaction does keep increasing on all the reported scales. It's basically like... you know, there may be some...

Shaan Puri

Where you stop getting returns, but we haven't found it yet. You know, like on average, people have not found that yet. And actually, there are things like that. If you dig in, he actually pointed out some that contradict this claim. So what people used to say is, "Oh yeah, you'll get that money, then you'll return to what they call your set of happiness." So you get all this money, you win the lottery, and within a few months, you're back to your set of happiness. If you were depressed before, you'll be depressed after. And he's like, "You know, it turns out that that's not true. Winning the lottery actually does make you happier." If you actually look at the study, the second thing is the reverse. They also say is true: something bad happens to you, and people will say, "Oh, you're so resilient; you'll bounce right back to your previous level of happiness." And he's like, "Actually, if you go look at the study, it shows that disability, divorce, loss of a partner, and unemployment actually have long-term negative effects on happiness." Even like unemployment, after you get reemployed, it still persists. And that's what the studies actually show. He's like, "It's kind of amazing how this can happen. The study literally says what the answer is, and then people will summarize it as something completely different." Like they'll either take a very weak effect and make it sound like it's a total strong effect, or they'll take something that said no correlation and say it's a correlation. He has four examples of this.

Sam Parr

Or usually what happens is like there'll be a time where someone has one cute line in a study, and then a news article cites it, and then a thousand things cite that. There's another example of that... Yes, have you heard that? It's a crazy stat. I don't remember exactly, but it's something like "half of Americans can't afford a $500 bill."

Shaan Puri

if an emergency came up

Sam Parr

So, I went and read... I was curious. I was like, "I don't believe that that's true." I looked into it and researched this a while ago, and it's bullshit. What happened is there was a study done, and there was a line in the abstract saying something like, "This could be as bad as..." It was noncommittal, like "perhaps" or "maybe"—something like that. I forget exactly how the scientist phrased it, but it's not true. It's not a fact; it was just a line. So many people cited that and ran with it until you believe it's true. Another example is the food pyramid. If I remember correctly, it was like a hypothesis or something. They were just saying, "We think this might be true." Some people were just kind of tinkering with it. I think it was the World Health Organization that took it and ran with it, saying, "Well, you know, we don't know if this is real." In fact, in the '90s, they had to change it because they realized they had put all fats and all carbs in the same category. It was just an oversimplification that some people were tinkering with, and someone ran with it. There are loads of examples. We should actually do an entire podcast just on examples of that. Another one is, dude, have you ever heard that you could see the Great Wall of China from space?

Shaan Puri

heard that is that not true

Sam Parr

it's of course it's not true if you could see the great wall of china from space why couldn't you see like a highway

Shaan Puri

yeah it's true the height the height wouldn't really matter

Sam Parr

Because it's so easy to get these one-liners and run with them. They’re really cool, and you can find a lot of them in interesting studies. I've actually been learning from Peter Attia. This guy named Peter Attia has this really good blog post on how to read studies. I read health studies all the time, and you can go and read them. They’ll make these broad claims, but you’ll say, "Oh, well, you tested this on only 20 people." These 20 people called you or checked in with you occasionally for like three weeks. They called you every other day. We don’t know what they were doing throughout the day. There’s just so much information going on. Who knows exactly what happened? It’s not good enough to say it’s a fact.

Shaan Puri

There's a name for the effect; I don't remember the name of it, but it describes this phenomenon. The name doesn't really matter.

Sam Parr

is it dunning kruger

Shaan Puri

Dunning-Kruger is a good one; that's in this thing that he talks about. But there's an effect like this, which is that there's something that happens when you read a newspaper story. Let's say, day to day, you read the newspaper and you say, "Okay, this is good. It's informing me. I trust this; this must be true if it's here." Then you read about something you know about, and you actually see, "Oh my God, I actually know about this," and this is actually either not quite right, totally off, or misses some important information. You would think that people would, once they have that experience, readjust their trust in the rest of the newspaper. The name of the effect is some kind of amnesia effect, where you turn the page and then you resume trusting the next thing that you didn't know about that's in the newspaper. It's like, even though you just sort of proved to yourself that this should not be the record, the canon of what's true and what's not about a subject, there's this common effect. People will experience it on something they know, and then as soon as they get back to something they don't know, they sort of rebound back. I forgot the name of that, but I've seen this to be true. For me, I hope at least, you know, that was one of the biggest changes of my childhood. I used to think if something was in the newspaper or on CNN that...

Sam Parr

yes

Shaan Puri

that's what it is

Sam Parr

And you know what changes it? When you become the person writing it. So, I became the person writing it. I created a website and I would write stuff. I saw people cite it sometimes. You and I will say things, and we're saying, like, "I heard this crazy story about X, Y, and Z." Hopefully, we think that people are saying, like, "You know, this is just banter." When we do know the facts, we'll say it's a fact. But oftentimes, we're like, "You know, I think it's around blank." I'll see people cite us, and I'm like, "Well, you took that out of context." I was just... that wasn't well researched on that. I was just kind of... I kind of knew it. Once you become the person making the news, you see that it's bullshit. That's why I believe that fake news, even though people are criticizing Trump for that, I'm like, it is actually real. It's very easy to make fake news.

Shaan Puri

This... you know, what's the difference between, you know, CNN and the WWE? There's not much. They make up storylines for entertainment. And so, like, you know, all these three-letter acronyms, the NFL, same way. It's storylines for entertainment. If you say that the news is just reality TV, right? It's storylines loosely based on reality. That's very different than, you know, getting your information from it. I get it; it's tiring to try to get accurate, firsthand information a lot. People use shortcuts, and that's why the system is the way it is. But, you know, the sooner you realize that the news is just entertainment, the faster you'll either stop consuming it or consume it with, like, a very severe filter that says, "This may or may not be true." I'd like to cross-check this again. If it's important, I should go dig into it. If it's not important, you know, I should kind of like, you know, take it with a grain of salt.

Sam Parr

this is great