Solana Billionaires, MFM Goes Viral on TikTok, Right to Be Forgotten, and More

Shaan Puri

It's almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. There's so much talent being sucked into this thing. These guys are going to build things that actually have use cases, and it's actually going to make it all work. You can't have this much talent spend all day thinking about this and building in this and have nothing come from it.

Sam Parr

alright alright we're live what's going on

Shaan Puri

I'm self-conscious now because we're blowing up on TikTok. I just look at myself and think, "I should've shaved." Now that I have to see myself and I see people, the TikTok comments are brutal. They're good, but they just want to argue with everything that gets made.

Sam Parr

so let's let's talk about this

Shaan Puri

now when I see myself I'm like shit this is going on tiktok I better I I need to shave for the next one

Sam Parr

So basically, 10 to 15 days ago, something like that—not long ago—we told everyone that we're going to do this contest. We're going to give $5,000 to three people who take our clips and turn them into videos. The best people are on TikTok. I actually posted the tags down there for you. I must have made a mistake. I told people to use the hashtag **#MFMClips**, but then I also must have said **#MFMClip** as well, without the "s." So people are using two hashtags: **#MFMClips** and **#MFMClip**. Some aren't using both. But if you use those links, I showed you we have in the ballpark of around 15 million impressions from these videos. It's mostly young folks who created these TikTok handles from scratch, took our content, and some videos have over a million views. Some of them have hundreds of thousands of likes.

Shaan Puri

they're great and do you read the comments

Sam Parr

no what do they say do they make fun of us how do we know

Shaan Puri

As a content creator, you go through a cycle. You get excited, and you read the comments. The early comments are good, but then, as you become more popular, the comments start to turn mean. Eventually, everyone reaches a point where they say they don't read the comments, but they secretly do. Finally, you reach a stage where you stop reading the comments altogether because you realize it's just too toxic. They basically just criticize us for whatever we say. For example, if we mention putting down 20% to buy a house, all the comments are about ways you can avoid that. They say, "Oh, you can also not put down 20% if you do this, this, and this." It's like, "Alright, okay, TikTok commenter, you got me. You are smarter than us." You are constantly going to find some edge case, loophole, or mistake in what was said.

Sam Parr

do they make fun of how we look or talk or anything like they insult us

Shaan Puri

No, they don't really. They're either like, "These guys are annoying." For example, let's say somebody cuts a clip of one of us breaking down our monthly expenses or something like that. Then the comment would just be, "But they don't know the vibe of the pod." They don't understand why someone would just say that out of the blue. It's not something that people normally talk about. So they're just like, "Why did he feel the need to tell us how much he's spending on eggs?" or "Why is he telling us his body fat percentage?" Whatever. There's that kind, which is like, "Dude, what a douche. Nobody asked. Why are you doing that?" Then there are the comments that are like, "Actually, it's this other thing." And then there are some comments which are like, "Bro, I don't want that future. No, I don't. No thanks." You know, because we'll be like, "Here's how things are changing," and it'll be like, "Dude, companies just only think about money." So those are the three flavors of haters we get so far. Luckily, so far, nobody's just shitting on our face and body.

Sam Parr

oh that's good that's a that's a surprise

Shaan Puri

that's a win as far as I'm concerned

Sam Parr

yeah I and in general

Shaan Puri

sticks and stones may break my bones but words about my appearance do hurt me

Sam Parr

Yeah, just like... don't make fun of my teeth or hair. You can make fun of my brain. This promotion has been a home run. I thought it was gonna be pretty good, I didn't think it was gonna be *this* good. So what we'll have to do is... there's like a couple people who I'm recognizing, because I watch them, that are killing it. We're gonna have to have them on the pod and explain how they got so many views. It's pretty amazing.

Shaan Puri

Right, and let's talk about this for a second because I think there's something interesting to learn here. You have said many times, "I've grown a lot of things. I've grown an email newsletter to multimillions. I've grown a subscription business to multimillions. I've, you know, grown whatever." You're like, "A podcast is the hardest thing I've ever had to grow." And you say that, and I think it's just kind of a cool thing to say in general. Do you agree?

Sam Parr

with that

Shaan Puri

I agree with it in the sense that there are no easy growth hacks to growing a podcast. There's no button you can push. Paid ads don't really work; nothing really works like that. The good news is, once somebody actually subscribes to your podcast, they become a really loyal fan and feel like they know you. So, it has a lot of value, but it's hard to achieve that easy growth. This is the first thing. Oh, by the way, we also tried making our own clips, paying an agency tens of thousands of dollars a month to create really awesome animated clips of our content. We tried a bunch of things. Initially, we did nothing. Then we tried placing it in our email newsletters. We brought on big-name guests, tried paid ads, and experimented with a whole bunch of different strategies. None of which really felt like it was working, but the podcast kept growing organically.

Sam Parr

and they were great

Shaan Puri

And they were high-quality clips, but it didn't lead to this. This was different. This was, "Hey, anybody, open playing field, just go for it, and we'll give out prizes to the people who are actually good at it." Merit-based, right? What they're good at is they understood TikTok, whereas we suck at TikTok. We don't know how to create content there. They pull the right clips because they're actually listeners and fans of the show. So they know which clip is actually going to be interesting versus, you know, some random employee at our company being like, "You know, at the 42-minute mark, let's use that one for the clip." These guys will pull like 10 that they think are interesting and put them out there. They're motivated because they're like, "Shit, if I do this good, I can get a million views on this, and I could go get, you know, $5 from these guys." That's a pretty sweet deal for doing something, you know, pretty fun. So this has actually worked.

Sam Parr

Yeah, it's pretty wild. Like, there's one guy who basically took our Rob Dyrdek episode and... I looked at his feed, and I don't think I'm exaggerating, it's 50 clips in a row. He basically just took it and divided it up, and like 3 of the 50 clips...

Shaan Puri

Did he just take our talking out? And just after that, Rob talks. He grabs the clip, which is smart.

Sam Parr

Yeah, and his whole feed... I looked at his feed, and it was all that one episode. Like, 3 of them had like 500,000 views.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, so go follow them. I think **MFM Cuts** is #1 on TikTok and Twitter. There's also **MFM Clips**, and then there are a bunch of other variations of that name.

Sam Parr

Alright, I'm going to tell you about something interesting. I have a few interesting things to talk to you about. So, let me share something I was thinking about this weekend. I have a buddy—you kind of know him—and I'm not going to name him. A few years ago, he was accused of committing a horrible crime, one of the worst crimes you could commit. At the time, he was an executive at a company, and it made the news. Six months later, after he went to court and went to trial, the government dropped the case because it was a horrible misunderstanding. He didn't do what he was accused of doing, and they exonerated him. They said, "We're sorry, we were wrong. We called this one wrong." The first time the story went out, it made all the headlines. If you Google this person's name, it comes up on top. However, what didn't come up on top was the fact that six months later, it said "charges dropped." The misunderstanding came about for this reason: this person lost their job because of that and obviously lost a lot of money. I've always thought about this, and I listened to a podcast this weekend called "The Right to Be Forgotten" by Radiolab. This idea of the right to be forgotten is actually a law in Europe. I don't know exactly what the law says, but it states that if something isn't particularly newsworthy but you're writing about it anyway, and it really hurts that person more than it provides value to the common reader, you have to take it down. There are a couple of newspapers, like the Boston Globe, and in this particular podcast, they looked at a newspaper in Cleveland, Ohio. There are stories of a cop emailing them, saying, "Look, you wrote about this time that I lied about some paperwork. I ended up getting fired. I didn't hurt anyone, and now I can't get a job as a police officer anywhere else."

Shaan Puri

can I fill in the gap on the right to be forgotten for you here

Sam Parr

yeah

Shaan Puri

So, basically, it's a law that says search engines should have to remove links about your past under certain circumstances. It came about because there was a woman, an actress, who was in a movie that got dubbed. The film was called *The Innocence of Muslims*. Her original line got dubbed over, and they made it look like she was saying, "Is your Mohammed a child molester?" That was the clip, and she started getting death threats. People went crazy about this, and she was left wondering, "What is this? Why?" Okay, this thing got dubbed, and now this clip is showing up in search engines when you search my name or certain things. It's causing harm to me in my personal life. So, she sued Google in 2014, and ultimately, they upheld it. She wanted to have the film forgotten and removed from YouTube. Unfortunately, the right to be forgotten, which is recognized in the EU, is not recognized in the US. The EU respects this as they are tighter on privacy with GDPR and things like that, while the US does not.

Sam Parr

So yeah, in the U.S. we don't have that, but it's kind of interesting because I personally have seen this hurt people. You think, like, right now, let's say that you're at a bar and you're drunk. You call someone a really bad word, and it's on Reddit. They find your name, and you're screwed. The impact on your life is going to be meaningful for like the next decade. You should suffer some consequences for calling something rude, but not like that serious, you know? I've been thinking a lot about this business, about this reputation management business. Have you ever researched it?

Shaan Puri

yeah my former cofounder used to work there so he used to tell me stories all the time

Sam Parr

Great, I want to hear all about it. I know a little bit about this because... listen to this: One of the companies is called Reputation.com. So, there's this porn star named Sasha Grey. Do me a favor, type in "Sasha Grey" on your Google and click images. This Sasha Grey... she's not an actress anymore, or not a porn actress anymore, but she was like a very prolific porn actress. When you click images, what do you see?

Shaan Puri

Here we go, I'm here. Okay, so I see a bunch of headshots of her. I see no real porn. Well, I guess some scandalous stuff, but...

Sam Parr

mostly porn

Shaan Puri

yeah mostly just pictures of her fully clothed or like in a bikini

Sam Parr

So, one time at The Hustle, right when we first launched, I helped write this article about Sasha Grey. She hired a firm called Reputation.com because she basically wanted to retire from pornography and become an actor, or do something different. She hired Reputation.com to hide, or basically blog a bunch, and write a lot in order to push the porn images down in search results. I remember when we wrote this article, Reputation.com did something kind of funny. If I would go on my Google Analytics at night, I would look at real-time data and see thousands of people reading this article. I noticed that they searched "Sasha Grey," and Reputation.com manipulated it so that the article we wrote about Reputation.com and Sasha Grey came up as number one if you Googled her name. At night, when people were looking for porn, they would Google Sasha Grey and land on our article. It was pretty wild! I would see it go up every week or every night. I became crazy fascinated with Reputation.com. For this segment, I wanted to talk about Reputation.com. I think there's Yext and there's Sprinklr, and these are businesses that do like $400 to $500 million a year, and all they do is reputation management. What do you know about Reputation.com?

Shaan Puri

So, he used to tell me stories. I asked him, "Oh, what did you do before this? What was your job before that?" Eventually, he said, "Reputation.com," and I got fascinated. Like you, I was like, "What is that?" He told me, "Here's a scenario: You're a senator, and your son, who has the same name as you—basically, John Chambers Jr. Sorry to any John Chambers out there, it's hypothetical—gets a DUI or gets arrested for battery or something like that. Now, anytime somebody searches 'John Chambers,' this mugshot's going to come up or this bad news story's going to come up." So, they basically go to Reputation.com and say, "I would like this to disappear off the front page." Reputation.com responds, "I can't make it disappear; the internet sort of is uncontrollable. But I can get you off the front page of Google." And they're like, "That would be amazing!" Then they say, "For the low, low price of $120,000 or $75,000, whatever."

Sam Parr

it is it's expensive

Shaan Puri

Expensive because they know people are, by the time you're at Reputation.com, you're bent over the barrel. They can charge pretty much whatever they can get away with. So, like, you know, a NASCAR driver, a politician, whoever—people of interest—people who wanted their names or their kids' names to get out of the bad news. They had a team of engineers that were just... it's a constant cat and mouse game to figure out how to beat Google. So, my co-founder told me one of the biggest days at the company was when we figured out, you know, Google has the autocomplete, right? So you go...

Sam Parr

yeah

Shaan Puri

You type "Sampar," and it's going to be "Sampar the Hustle," "Sampar net worth," "Sampar wife," "Sampar is gay." It'll be like all these same 10 queries for everybody, right? What he figured out was that when you type "Sampar," if it used to say "felony," like "F," it would now say "friend" instead of "felony." They figured out how to even finish the autocomplete. Because even when they were good at getting you off the front page by blogging or promoting other articles to get them higher ranked, if the autocomplete was still always suggesting "felony," then people would click it and search for "felony." It would be reinforcing, and then Google would search for it more. So, they needed to clear that. There was just a constant cat-and-mouse game to understand how Google is doing this, how Google is deciding what goes where, and then how do we content farm or manipulate this in some way that will change what the first page results are. Because 98% of people don't go past the first page or something like that.

Sam Parr

Yeah, and so it's amazing to hear about that. There's a company called Yext (Y-E-X-T). They're publicly traded, and I think they are just a direct competitor to Reputation.com. They did $390 million last year in revenue. Their market cap is not very good; it's like 4 or 5 times revenue. Are you looking at it?

Shaan Puri

I'm on Reputation.com. I just wanted to see the latest. You wouldn't even know what they do when you go to this site because it says, "This is their headline." At first, it looks like a hospital website or a nice health tech website or something like that. Then it says, "A world of interactions demands a platform of action." It's like, "We're a fixer," is what it should say. But here's the problem. By the way, maybe they changed what they do. I don't know.

Sam Parr

I think they still do it. I think they offer a smaller package. When we wrote the Sasha Grey article in 2016, they had a $13,000 package. But the problem is, there are kind of two problems with this. The first is that the results aren't guaranteed. You can't guarantee that it's going to work, which I guess isn't a problem, but that's just how it works, you know? When someone calls you—I get these calls all the time because I own domain names and I forgot to hide my name—it's like, "Hey, we'll put you on the first page of Google." That's a scam. You can't just promise that.

Shaan Puri

but the

Sam Parr

The second thing is that if you're an individual, if you're just someone who said some stupid, drunken thing to someone one day and now your name's all over the place, it's really, really hard to manage your reputation. Unless you're willing to pay $100,000, which is what a lot of this stuff costs, it's incredibly challenging if you're just a regular person. So I was thinking about whether there's anything interesting in that space. I actually think that there could be something. I like this company called DoNotPay. Do you know what DoNotPay is?

Shaan Puri

yeah I love do not pay the guy is the guy behind it is awesome and it's a great idea

Sam Parr

So, do not pay... It started by this guy, and I actually didn't research this, so this is off the top of my head. It started by this guy named Josh Brouder, I think. Brouder. And he's young. Like, when he started it, I think he was 21.

Shaan Puri

maybe yeah

Sam Parr

oh 25 okay

Shaan Puri

well no no now I think he's like 25

Sam Parr

When he started, he was even younger. Yeah, he was obviously like a prodigy type of thing. Originally, the business existed to help you fight parking tickets automatically. But now, they have a bunch of features. It's basically all about sticking it to the man. Another feature is, "We will sue cold callers on your behalf" or something like that, right?

Shaan Puri

They'll also do things like, you know, unsubscribe you from stuff that you're not using that you pay for. You know, just ways to save you money, which is why it's a great name and a great idea.

Sam Parr

And I think there's a world where you could use a "Do Not Pay" service like this to help manage your reputation online. This is a need that I think we're actually going to see more and more of. It's like a very exponential thing where more and more people are going to be written about, and more and more people are going to need this. I don't know, it's just something I've been thinking about. Do you have any... do you have an opinion?

Shaan Puri

On that, I don't know where the new opportunity is in this one because I think it really depends on... it's kind of like you need Google to exist for Reputation.com to exist. So really, it's about thinking, okay, there was a version of this on social networks that people were doing. I remember this one guy came to me, and he was a great entrepreneur. He ended up not doing this idea, but I always thought it was a great idea. Others have done it, which is when everybody has social media where they post stupid stuff when they're younger or when they're just drunk or whatever. What they do is they go to companies and they say, "Hey, we ran a check on all your employees, and we found these red flags. You should be aware of who you're hiring as well as what they're saying and how they represent your company elsewhere." So they end up getting contracts with companies to monitor and clean up. They're not like tattletailing; they're sort of like an insider helping you out, saying, "Hey, you have this employee who's saying this. You may want to take action." But the action might just be to let the employee know that we flagged this as potentially controversial, and maybe they want to delete it. So it's a monitoring service for social media reputations and social media controversy, which I think...

Sam Parr

is a

Shaan Puri

great great idea

Sam Parr

it just sucks that you gotta do that

Shaan Puri

Well, it sucks that the world is the way it is. It sucks. Some people think, "Oh, it's good to hold you accountable," but in reality, it's just a bunch of... you know, "Don't say what you really feel" is really the result of most of this. People just get afraid to say anything because they're worried about getting canceled.

Sam Parr

so and your buddy liked working at reputation.com were they like they were by the book

Shaan Puri

He was like, "Technically, it was super interesting to figure out how we do all this stuff." You know, he always says this thing like, "At one point, we had indexed every person on the web, and we had them and their cluster and their reputation." So I think it was technically very interesting, but obviously... sort of soul-sucking and boring as well. So he, you know, bounced.

Sam Parr

Yeah, I think I can see that. But it is an interesting problem I've been thinking about. Alright, let me tell you about one more thing. I was reading The Information [website], theinformation.com, and they had an article about Solana. I told you about this on Slack. So this is Solana... Sorry, I don't know anything about it really, other than... don't... don't...

Shaan Puri

out yourself here as a

Sam Parr

as a yeah

Shaan Puri

I'm not crypto nobody

Sam Parr

Yeah, I don't want to act like I'm an expert here. I'm not. I just... I've read a lot about it, though, from news articles. So, Chris McCann. I knew this guy named Chris McCann because he had this thing called *Startup Digest*. That's one of the reasons why Hustle Con became popular. I would email Chris and say, "Hey, can you please put this in the email?" He had this email called *Startup Digest* that started in San Francisco. He would email each week about different events happening in San Francisco, different startup events. This was when the startup community was much smaller, and everyone wanted to go to events. It was just a roundup of cool events happening. He eventually expanded it to different cities and sold it, not for a lot of money—probably around $100,000, I bet. But he kind of worked his way into Benchmark, where he was just an employee. Somehow or another, he invested $250,000 into... what's it called? Is it Solana or Solana? Solana! Dude, I'm a fucking noob. He invested $250,000 into Solana, and *The Information* wrote an article about how that $250,000 turned into $1,000,000,000. Is that crazy?

Shaan Puri

In probably... I think 3, maybe 4 years max. Yeah, it's insane. I sent you... I sent you somebody else who also has made multiple billions of dollars from their Solana investment. I sent that last week to you. But basically, Solana has gone from...

Sam Parr

like the fund

Shaan Puri

Yeah, so Solana has gone from... let's see, I mean it was like sub a dollar not long ago, and now it's $200 per coin. So, what is Solana? Solana is a competitor to Ethereum. If you know what Ethereum is, just fast forward this segment; you probably don't care. As recently as this time last year, Solana was $1.54. When it launched, during its ICO, it was just under a dollar, I think. That was only a couple of years ago, about two years ago or something like that. So basically, if you take last year's price of $1.54 and put $100,000 into that, now you have, I think, $20,000,000... something like that. I'll actually do some public math here for our buddy. Yeah, $20,000,000. So Solana has had this insane run-up. It sounds like he... I think he's in this fund called Red something, Red Circle or something like that. A race... yeah, race something. They were like the seed investors in Solana. You know, that's the right project to be a seed investor in. It's a crypto project that becomes a multibillion-dollar crypto asset. And sure enough, you could turn $250,000 into $1,000,000,000. That's kind of insane. I don't think it was a personal $250,000 necessarily, but even if it wasn't... fun.

Sam Parr

the the article made it sound like it was but even if it's not that doesn't change much

Shaan Puri

it should be insanity

Sam Parr

Yeah, it doesn't change much because he’s still going to walk away with $9 over $100,000,000. I was reading this article about it, and they’re basically saying there are a lot of really high-profile tech folks at traditional tech companies giving up amazing things in order to flee to this crypto thing. I want to ask you a question about that. For example, this woman, Sandy Carter, VP of Amazon's Cloud Computing, left to join Unstoppable Domains. Brian Roberts, who was the CFO of Lyft, left to join OpenSea. He said, "I've seen enough cycles and paradigm shifts to be cognizant when something this big is just emerging and that we're only at the beginning. It's just going to get bigger." We had David Marcus, who basically led Facebook's cryptocurrency initiative; he bounced to start his own thing. This one dude left Google to become Coinbase's Chief Product Officer, and when it went public, his stake was worth $600,000,000. And then, of course, Jack Dorsey left Twitter to work at Square, and it definitely involves crypto.

Shaan Puri

they renamed it block because they're focusing on blockchain

Sam Parr

But it's crazy, and my question to you is this: Have you ever seen someone create that much wealth that fast? Do you have any stories of people who you know, or know of, that are doing this? What are their stories? Because this is crazy.

Shaan Puri

well I'll say the first thing is that you're right that there's basically a giant black hole that's sucking up all the talent in the world and it's called crypto and it's almost a self there's a lot of people who don't believe that crypto is a thing or they think it's massively overhyped and they say you know give me one example of a real use case of this thing nobody's actually using it for payments or web 3 there's no real web 3 products and it's sort they they're they're there's some truth to what they're saying I I wouldn't say that they're completely off base it's like a valid critique I don't think it's true but it's a valid criticism but the it's almost a self fulfilling prophecy there's so much talent being sucked into this thing these guys are gonna build things that actually have use cases and actually it's actually gonna make it all work you can't have this much talent spend all day thinking about this and building in this and have nothing come from it that's like the biggest like takeaway for me of like even if you're the biggest crypto skeptic there's a self fulfilling prophecy here which is that it sucked up all the dev talent sucked up all the smartest people sucked it sucked up like $20,000,000,000 of venture capital every year now and all that funding all that talent is gonna is gonna create things that actually do work and do hit beyond what's already there today so there's that now to your question have I seen somebody get ricks this quick I wanna have my buddy on I have a friend who used to work work with me and I caught up with him and his story he basically went from like average like an average job to like you wouldn't look at this person and say oh that's a star career and they were good they were doing well obviously but they were doing like normal person well and they went from normal person well to making like to personally making like $15,000,000 in the last year just by they they basically quit their job and they went down a a crypto rabbit hole and started betting on things in defi and they started playing with all the defi projects investing their money in defi and they didn't have a huge base of capital they had you know call it half a $1,000,000 that they put in and to turn a half $1,000,000 if and if you have no path in your career to being like you know a decamillionaire right like if you don't have a path where you're like yeah I'm gonna have fuck you money to go from no path no no like reasonable storyline that makes sense there you have a job at a company that pays you good salary and that's that to that is amazing to me and awesome and like you know just like blew my mind more so than these guys who become multi billionaires who were like prodigies and like invented the protocol or invested 250 ks in a random token it's like this is somebody who just took their own money out of the stock market I was like ah instead of investing in apple Google and facebook I'm gonna invest

Sam Parr

in crazy

Shaan Puri

[Someone] turned a normal amount, a normal life savings amount of money, into a life-changing amount of money through crypto. I want to have him on to tell his full story because it actually has a bunch of twists and turns that are kind of amazing. So I'm going to ask him if he'll come on and share it. "Do I know them? Are they willing to?" Yeah, you know them. I don't know if they're willing to share, but if they are, it's going to make for an amazing episode. I'll ask him if he'll do it next week.

Sam Parr

Did they earn the... Did they sell? Do they have USD or some type of stable currency?

Shaan Puri

No, they're still in crypto, like a 100% or a 100+% because they, you know...

Sam Parr

but but but is it stable like a bit like a a popular thing

Shaan Puri

it's a mix of popular things and like how do they sell

Sam Parr

and stuff

Shaan Puri

Yeah, they could. Everything's liquid if they wanted to cash out and say, "I'm done. I'm going to Malibu and I'm gonna chill. I'm gonna pretend that this year never existed and I basically won a lottery." They could do that.

Sam Parr

Because we have a buddy in our chat group who said he made all this money in some crazy coin, but he's like, "I can't sell it." So it's like $4.

Shaan Puri

Of us, that’s like... those are either illiquid, like, “Oh, there’s this coin, but it’s not listed yet,” or it’s liquid, but there’s like no trading volume whatsoever on this coin. So, like, yeah, if you have $10,000,000 and you go to sell even $100,000, it’ll crash the price of the coin. That’s not what this is. That’s a different thing. What that is, is I make 1,000,000 coins, I keep 999,000 for myself, and then I sell one of them for a dollar. Oh, now the total value of my thing is $1,000,000. It’s like, no, it’s not really. There’s such a small amount of the supply out there being sold; it’s not indicative of the true price. This is what I’m talking about, not that situation.

Sam Parr

Is there any other person? Alright, so you have a story of someone who went from $500,000 to $15,000,000. I just told you about this guy who, in like two or...

Shaan Puri

3 years... This person, non-technical, never was a trader or a financial person. Like, they would own an index fund or mutual fund before that. Didn't know how to spell blockchain, you know? This person is... that's why this blows my mind. It's not just this... Like, I know that amount is not the craziest amount of money. It's an awesome amount of money for anybody, but what's crazy is...

Sam Parr

this guy.

Shaan Puri

A to B... it makes no sense. It's like, how could those two points connect in that amount of time? It's mind-blowing to me.

Sam Parr

So I told you a story about this dude Chris who went from $250,000 up to $1 billion. You just said $500,000 to $15 million. Do we know anyone else that has this kind of crazy, crazy journey?

Shaan Puri

personally you've talked about this guy you talked about somebody right that your

Sam Parr

friend yeah the friend that that they they did 1,000,000 to a 100,000,000

Shaan Puri

yeah so

Sam Parr

at its peak when bitcoin was 60,000 so I don't whatever is that discount it

Shaan Puri

Okay, I have another one. There is a kid—well, I call him a kid because he was actually a kid. I built this product called Blab back in the day. It was kind of like Clubhouse; you could basically go hang out and chat with people. This kid used to come home every day from school. He would get on and chat, but he didn't chat in the other rooms that had 13-year-olds. He came to our rooms because he loved technology startups. I think he was maybe 13 at the time. Fast forward, it's been like 6 years since then, so now he's like, let's say, 21 or something like that. It's been a while. He created something—he's a technical guy. I asked him, "Oh, what have you been up to? How is your startup going?" He said, "Yeah, the startup's okay. We haven't been focusing on it for the last few months." I was like, "I know it, man. It's tough. Just hang in there, buddy. You know, just pivot and find somebody." He said, "Actually, we ended up creating this thing anonymously on one of these random side chains." It was like, "What up, blah blah blah," some bunch of terms I don't even understand. It's a derivatives perpetual contract for adding liquidity to this blah blah blah. I'm like, "Okay, I don't even understand what you're saying." He continued, "Yeah, the market cap of it is like $900,000,000 right now. I think I cashed out $10,000,000 from this." He was like, "Dude, it's been insane. The market cap went up like crazy; now it's at $200,000,000. I was able to take out a life-changing amount of money. I took out $10,000,000." He was asking me because he said, "I heard you guys talking about charities and Charity: Water. You told the Charity: Water story; I was really moved. I've set aside 7 figures to donate."

Sam Parr

you're like what

Shaan Puri

I was like, "You've set aside 7 figures? Are you 7 years old? How did this happen? Where... what has happened to this amount of time?" Like, I used to talk to you when you would come home from 8th grade and get online. You're donating *millions* of dollars to charity now? What is... again, A) and B) it broke my brain. And I don't mean this as an insult to them.

Sam Parr

like if they're if they're only 15 then so they're still only like 19

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I think they're 20 now or 21, something like that. It's been like 7 years since we've made that thing. So, you know, it's not mind-blowing to me that this person is successful. In both cases, I really like this person. That's why I used to hang out with them and why I used to work with one of them. I think they're really smart, and we're going to be normal, successful people. It's like when you know, oh, my sister went to high school with this girl, Lily Galici, who's like this super famous Instagram star now. She has her own TV show on Bravo, and it's like, wait, that's the Lily girl who used to come to our house after school? She was just like a normal girl. Like, wait, that's her? That doesn't even look like her anymore. Yeah, she's had some work done, right? It's just mind-blowing to know a normal person who's like, "Yeah, that's a cool normal." They'll do well in life. But to be like, "No, actually, they're like one of those crazy outlier stories," in a way that you wouldn't have otherwise predicted. You know, it didn't make any sense. It's not that that was their skill set and they tried, tried, tried that thing for 10 years and finally hit. It's like just out of nowhere, they just did this thing, and it hit. Crypto is this amazing thing like that.

Sam Parr

the way

Shaan Puri

I'm gonna say something... When I first talked to my friend, I caught up with my friend, I felt insanely jealous. I was happy for him and I like him and all that, but I was also... in my head I was just like, "What the f*** have I been doing with my life?"

Sam Parr

wait with the the friend that used to work for you

Shaan Puri

both of them both the same reaction

Sam Parr

Yeah, because it feels weird. You're like, "Oh wait, you kind of looked up to me," and I was the pastor.

Shaan Puri

Now, I'm like, you know, way less successful than you. So, like, what just happened? You just catapulted really crazy. We're like, yeah, between the last time we caught up and now.

Sam Parr

there there is jealousy there it's easy

Shaan Puri

And I just want to say, like, an interesting thing to observe is: what is your reaction to hearing stories like this? There's a part of me that I'm not proud of, which gets jealous of it. But that used to be... I would feel that and I wouldn't really acknowledge that that's what I was feeling. I would kind of find reasons why it was like, "That's just luck," or, "Well, they probably are taking a bunch of risks and they might lose it all." And I'm kind of secretly rooting for it to not work out just so perfectly as it has. That's gone, but I still have a little bit of that jealousy pang left. The interesting thing is, my coach said this to me: "You'll encounter people in your life where your success just reminds them of their failure. They're not focused on your success; they're focused on their failure. Your success has reminded them of their failure, or your abundance has reminded them of their lack." If you notice that in yourself, you want to be aware of that and change it. And if you find other people and you're like, "Oh, these people are haters," just understand what's going on. They don't actually hate you; it's that your success has reminded them of some failing that they have in themselves, and that's where their attention has gone. So, yeah, I wanted to share that because I definitely felt this crazy feeling that I hadn't felt in a long time. But these stories were so mind-blowing that I was like, "Wow, I don't even know what to say."

Sam Parr

I feel lucky to know who I know. We have basically the same group, and I've heard these stories that sound unbelievably true. I'd be like, "Yeah, I know that person. I saw it. It was wild." So, like an example is Moiz Ali selling Native Deodorant for $100,000,000 two years after starting it. I was in the same office when he was starting it, and I saw him try to learn Facebook ads. I saw the thing come to fruition right in front of my eyes every single day for like 6 or 10 months. That was almost half the journey. It's actually pretty amazing. You know, I think about this, and this isn't like a one-to-one correlation because there are other components here. But I was thinking about Jamaica. It's a very small country; there aren't a lot of people there, but they just dominate the 100 meters. Obviously, there are some genetic factors at play, but it can't be significantly different from America. I was thinking, one of the reasons they excel is that they are surrounded by greatness. It's just normal to be great at something, and that makes it normal to work hard. You're like, "Well, I should be running these times in practice," and you don't freak out; you just get it done because that's what's expected. I kind of feel that way in terms of making money. Because of our friends and who they are, it's like, "Well, you just want to spin something up." If you're willing to dedicate three years, you can definitely add eight figures of net worth to your portfolio. For sure, it's easy. It's not easy, but it's simple. It's kind of cool to be around people where you start seeing, "Yeah, look, it's really simple. You just do this, this, and this." Of course, you have to dedicate every...

Shaan Puri

right

Sam Parr

You have to dedicate tens of hours, you know, 50 to 60 hours a week for many years. But yeah, it's very simple. It's straightforward.

Shaan Puri

Well, the first example you gave with Moyes was starting literally at the table. I think he sat at the table next to you, right? Like in the Founders Dojo or whatever that was, Hacker Dojo, Founders Dojo.

Sam Parr

Founders Dojo. I think he was interested at first. If I remember correctly, he was like, "What should I sell? Should I do mattresses?" He was ordering mattresses and measuring them, seeing like, "Oh, that's too much work. Mattresses are too big. What else is there?"

Shaan Puri

By the way, the public story is like this: my sister was pregnant and she couldn't find a deodorant that didn't have chemicals which might harm her baby. So, I wanted to create that product. It's like, dude, I know you were like, "Alright, how do I build? I want to make a business. I want to sell some stuff. What do people want?" Oh, people like Kleenexes. Mattresses? Too big to ship.

Sam Parr

yeah

Shaan Puri

Scratch that off the list. Deodorant: small, under 1 pound, ships easily, people will use it every month, it's renewable, and there's a niche. There is a genuine problem for it. But like, I know you dude, there's a real story and then there's the narrative. And I like stories, not narratives.

Sam Parr

it's not bad he was just like seeking problems to solve he's like boom found it

Shaan Puri

And I respect that. I like that, and that's how I think. So, you know, it's normal to me. There's something to when you see it being built day by day, brick by brick. You're like, there's just a respect and, for me, total joy. I never feel the jealousy in that case. For example, I remember when you started The Hustle. I remember when you were doing just the event, and then you were like, "I'm gonna do this thing." I came to your office with you and John, and it was like we went into a room that was the size of a bathroom. You had a presentation, and I listened to it. I was like, "Okay, this is cool, but what about this, this, and this?" You guys were like, "I don't know, we'll figure it out." Then you started with these long-form stories. Your original thing was long-form stories, and it kind of was working, but not really. You were like, "I am thinking about switching to this newsletter thing. Just daily news. Scim is doing it, it's working. These guys are doing it. I think we could do it in our niche. I think it'll be even better." So seeing that, then it's like, cool, seven years later... Sam, whatever, I don't know how long it's been. Seven years? Was it seven?

Sam Parr

we sold it about 5

Shaan Puri

Okay, five years in, Sam sells the thing and is successful. Nothing but props, respect, and joy of like, "Wow, that was so cool! I got to sit there on the journey with you." There's a difference between watching somebody build it brick by brick and the difference of actually seeing this happen in 12 months. You didn't get to see the hard work that was obviously going in and the risks that were being taken. So all you hear is, "I tried this thing and it just hit a 100x, 200x!" Like, what? You know, it feels more like a lottery and less like the hard work thing. I think that happens a lot in crypto. There's a little difference there. The second part is, I remember when I moved. I moved from Australia to Silicon Valley without having a game plan. I think you were kind of the same way, didn't you just come to Silicon Valley like... just?

Sam Parr

showed up

Shaan Puri

I just showed up. I did the same thing. I was sitting in Australia, and I remember specifically that I went to a meetup. They asked me to speak about lean startups and startups in general. I went and spoke, and everybody at the end was like, "Yay! Great talk!" People afterward were saying, "Wow, that was a really great talk." But in my head, my buddy was like, "What's wrong?" because he could see I was just kind of upset. He asked, "What's wrong? You didn't like it?" I replied, "I don't know anything about startups, and I'm like the thought leader here. This is like... I'm doing something wrong. I feel like not imposter syndrome; I feel like idiot syndrome. It's the blind leading the blind. These guys know zero about startups, and I know one about startups. But if I'm the smart guy here, then where are the actual smart guys? They're not here." I asked, "What are the success stories in Brisbane about startups? Is it you guys?" They said, "Yeah, these guys did great." I asked, "Oh, where are they?" They replied, "They don't come to these events. No, they moved to San Francisco." I thought, "Oh, all the smart people move. Okay, maybe I should move." So, I changed my phone number first, just to mentally be like, "Alright, I have a Silicon Valley area code." I don't know why, but for me, that was just a statement. I think I could just do it. I did it in one night before I could move. It was faster than moving; it was just to change my phone number. Then I remember thinking, "Alright, I'm going to move there. I'll figure it out." I quit my job on the spot and said, "I'm just going to move there." I played poker for three months to hold myself over while I applied for a job—literally one job—and they didn't hire me. They kept stringing me along, and I was like, "Stop talking up. This is the one." I ended up working at Monkey Inferno. It was a slow process, a two-month process. Finally, I was just like, "Alright, I'm just going to move there. If this doesn't work, I think I'll get this job, but if it doesn't work, I'll do something else."

Sam Parr

what was the title

Shaan Puri

Just a product manager. I was the first PM there. So, I finally came, and when I arrived, they were like, "Alright, why'd you move? Why'd you come here?" I was like, "Well, you know, I wanted to see what's in the water here, right? If this is where all the smart people are, this is where the little startups are. What do you guys know that I don't?" I was thinking it's about tactics, it's about operations. Maybe people are just, like, literally the cream of the crop. These are just the smartest people. And there's certainly some of that. But I'll tell you what to me was the actual difference—the thing that made coming to Silicon Valley work. I went to this coffee shop. Do you remember the Creamery? It's like this...

Sam Parr

yeah that's where everyone would be ice cream or whatever it was at it's in south park second in brandon I think

Shaan Puri

yeah exactly so this place called the creamery it's kinda famous for where people take meetings and I went there and I just sat there for like half a day I was just eating I didn't I didn't have anywhere to go I didn't have an office I didn't have an apartment so I was like well we'll sit here and then I'll go search for apartments later and I remember just seeing table after table next to me somebody would come in and they'd be like just pitching their idea to either an investor or a buddy like trying to make a co trying to like a co founder or 2 friends catching up or an investment pitch and it was always like these like harebrained ideas it's like oh you know linkedin but for you know cat doctors or whatever these are these stupid ideas and I remember just sitting there thinking oh that's a stupid idea that's a stupid idea and then I was sort of realizing like oh that's actually kinda cool like the normal conversation here the coffee shop conversation here is I get to I got this idea I'm gonna change the world I got this idea it's gonna be huge I was like everybody kind of has bought into this and that like if you go to hollywood that's what happens like the waiters and waitresses I'm gonna be a star and yeah yeah yeah yeah it's a different thing and it's it's silicon valley it's basically I get those I got this idea it's gonna be big and that's normal whereas before everywhere I lived if you were the guy who's got an idea and you're gonna quit your job to go do it you're crazy you're the crazy guy here you're the normal guy here if in silicon valley if you're like I work at jpmorgan you basically have to like bow your head in shame you have to like come up with some excuse it's like you know because my wife is pregnant with twins and I really gotta pay the mortgage but as soon as that's over you know like I'm back in the game I'm gonna go back into the startup game like if you're a cons if you work for mckinsey anywhere else that's great if you work for you know mckinsey or deloitte in san francisco you're like the low class person you're not the high class person because the high class person is the founder with the idea or the angel investor who's betting on ideas so the just that culture where that's normal and possible to just constantly quit your job have an idea throw everything into it maybe get rich that's what makes silicon valley so awesome or at least that's what it did and what you're talking about where like if your friend's group has these types of success stories and is doing this type of shit your brain will just automatically change into thinking that's possible that's normal that's super doable for me too and that you can't underestimate that I think for some people that's what this show is it's like if you hear us 3 times a week at least that's like part of your friend group that talks that way thinks that way and will make it feel normal to have ideas to bet on ideas to make a bunch of money to make huge investments whereas in your your geography may not be people around you and your neighbors and stuff like that may not think that way

Sam Parr

Yeah, and it basically changed my perspective from "this only happens to other people" to "obviously, this is happening to me."

Shaan Puri

better time

Sam Parr

Yeah, I'm going to achieve the desired outcome. It's just a question of: a) On which swing am I gonna get my hit? b) Which thing do I wanna dedicate 5 or 10 years to?

Shaan Puri

right

Sam Parr

Because if you work 8 years on something and you're around the right people, and you've been... like I felt like living there, I was like I was in school. So it's like, "Well, I'm in school." I know... I know it when I see it, and I can just keep working on something. Then I'll see right away that it's working, and then I just spend time on it and just give it time. It will always work. That's kind of like the attitude.

Shaan Puri

There's... I think I've told the story. Have I told you why I did the eCommerce thing and why I think it worked?

Sam Parr

no

Shaan Puri

So, I was sitting with our mutual friend (I think I can say his name, maybe we'll bleep this out later) in his backyard. He had this... you know, he has that awesome... When he lived in California, he had this awesome backyard with a basketball court and like a putting green and pool and... and chickens, stuff like that. We were just chilling for the day, and his dogs are running around, and we were talking. While we were talking, the Shopify [app] kept going off on his phone.

Sam Parr

and he would have that thing all the time I used to yell at him like go turn that shit off

Shaan Puri

Yeah, so it was like... and then like 2 minutes later, it'd be like... and then I was like, "What is that?" He's like, "Oh, oh my bad. I'm sorry, I totally spaced. I didn't realize... I'm so numb, I didn't even realize that was happening. That's obnoxious, my bad." I go, "No, no, no. Leave that on. What is that?" He goes, "That's a Shopify [notification]. Every time we get a sale, it does that." I said, "Leave that on." He goes, "Did you share?" I was like, "Yeah, leave it on." So we...

Sam Parr

go after the same amount

Shaan Puri

It goes off the whole time. By the end of the hour, we were talking about some other things completely. We were discussing dogs, family, kids, and whatever. By the end of the hour, I was like, "Alright man, I gotta go." But I'm definitely starting the Shopify thing. I want my phone to do that. He's like, "Yeah, you still should." I was like, "Just literally that experience." If I did not have that, and the jealousy worked to my favor, right? The jealousy was a signal that if I want that more than what I have, maybe I need to make a change. I was like, "I'm gonna go back to the office where I earn a fixed salary." It's great; I was making good money, but it's capped. I will make the same amount whether I do a good job or a bad job. Whereas for him, it was like he got to chill and was making money passively. If he did a better job, he was going to make more money. So that was the first thing that made me decide, "I'm gonna do this." Then I started thinking, "What can I sell? What can I sell? Alright, alright, what can I sell?"

Sam Parr

what were the other options

Shaan Puri

Of other ideas I had to sell... Yeah, I remember going through candles. Candles are kind of an amazing business, but very competitive. Candles are the same thing as deodorant: you use them and they burn out. They literally melt away, and you have to buy another one.

Sam Parr

so expensive I just bought a $100 can't candle for

Shaan Puri

You know, they're high AOV (average order value). They're super high margin, so they're not expensive to make. You could charge a lot for them. You can have a whole bunch of SKUs very easily that are all the same; they're just different scents. There are high-end, middle-end, and low-end options. There are candles that are like, "Oh, this smells like your hometown of Missouri." There are a bunch of gimmicks you can do. So, candles were definitely one that was on my mind. I told you about the crystal story. I was basically like... because I asked my buddy. I asked that friend and I asked others, "How do you think about this?" They gave me some frameworks of how to think about it. Right? Like, look, the reason this whole thing works is Facebook ads. So that means you're going to acquire customers. So something like this dollar amount... alright, so you need to...

Sam Parr

how much was that dollar amount so like $20

Shaan Puri

at the time it was like 20 $25 something like that

Sam Parr

but now it'd be higher

Shaan Puri

Now it's higher; now it's like $40 to $45, something like that. But it's like, alright, let's just say in a best-case scenario, you're going to break even on the first purchase. So, you want a product that's going to have **65% to 70% gross margins**. That means, let's say, the cost of goods for a candle is $5. You want to make sure that you could sell that candle for $30 or whatever to have that type of gross margin. Then, you're going to have, you know, let's call it **15% to 20%** as your cost of fulfillment. That's like packaging it, picking it in your warehouse, and then shipping it to the end customer. Okay, cool. So then you take all that out. Basically, you end up with a breakeven point. The question is, if you can break even on the first purchase, meaning it costs you $25, let's say, in Facebook ads to get a customer, then you want that to be your net profit on a single order. Then, you're basically in a great position because you're breaking even on day one, and then every repeat purchase is profit.

Sam Parr

purchase customer base yeah

Shaan Puri

You build up your customer base by recycling that cash flow. Every month you're not going deeper and deeper in debt. As you build your customer base, you want them to come back and repeat purchase. You want that repeat purchase rate to be high. For example, one of our friends has a product that doesn't have a high repeat purchase rate. The other one has deodorant, which has an amazing repeat purchase rate. If customers repeat purchase, that means your lifetime value will be higher for your customer. All that extra... every next purchase will be much more profitable.

Sam Parr

alright so and the best business would be more valuable

Shaan Puri

And then the little things, like, "Hey, do you know the way that the shipping works in the country?" Things that are under 1 pound ship at a low rate. Once it's over a pound, shipping is much more expensive. There's a normal USPS priority mail that if it's under a pound, it's like $5 or $4 or whatever. So there are certain little things that help. If you've talked to Moyes, he used to change his packaging so that he would be at £0.99. He was like, "I want to be just under £1," and that was one of the key things that helped control costs. So anyway, there's a whole bunch of frameworks. I went through a bunch of product ideas to figure it out, and the one...

Sam Parr

thing what

Shaan Puri

would be

Sam Parr

the other ones

Shaan Puri

You're gonna like, you know, the easiest thing to sell on Facebook is stuff that appeals to like white women in middle America. So, how do you sell to a 35 to 65-year-old woman that lives in Texas? That's the persona that's the most easy to fish for on Facebook. You can obviously sell anything to anybody; Facebook's huge. But if you can get one for white women in middle America, like you're gold. Because...

Sam Parr

that something the majority of your customers are

Shaan Puri

yeah ours are a little younger than that but like yeah that's like the thing

Sam Parr

for white ladies

Shaan Puri

White women in middle America are a great market to sell to. Most of Silicon Valley makes a mistake by going for what is in Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco. Yeah, millennials, single millennials like me, want...

Sam Parr

and that's such a expensive customer

Shaan Puri

It's an expensive customer. Their lifestyle changes very quickly, and they don't need your shit anymore.

Sam Parr

just sitting with uber and lyft and shit like the ad spend is just too hard yeah

Shaan Puri

Well, everything is very competitive. It's just like, I guess the way to think about it is not necessarily that one is that much better than the other. I wouldn't actually say that. It's just more like, don't narrow your scope to your single lifestyle as a 25-year-old dude in San Francisco who orders every meal on Postmates. You're not representative of the world. So, you know, don't limit yourself to just that because there might be truckers in middle America who love, you know, that buy X, Y, Z or whatever. There might be just a different market that's really lucrative that you're not really paying attention to right now. So, pay attention to other groups. Anyways, the second thing that happened was I asked them. We had two buddies that were doing the same thing. Two was enough where I was like, "Oh, if he can do it and he can do it, I can do it no problem." So, I asked them, "What are your sales?" And, you know, it shocked me. It was like, "Oh, you know, the business, we did $7,000,000 our first year, $21,000,000 our second year, and $41,000,000 our third year." I was like, "What the fuck is going on?" And they're like, "Oh yeah, we didn't raise any money. It's just profitable. You know, I just take a dividend out." I'm like, "What? Like, what are these words? Profit? You know, where I come from, Silicon Valley, we don't say that word."

Sam Parr

what's that what's that p word yeah

Shaan Puri

Like, you know, the prophet... like Jesus, like Muhammad. Who... what are you talking about? So, when I heard that, I was like, "Alright." And then that became my normal. I was like, "Okay, I'm gonna do $7,000,000 my first year. I'm gonna do $20,000,000 in my second year." That became what I thought was achievable and normal. If I hadn't heard that from them, I would have never scaled as fast. And sure enough, we did $7,000,000 in the first year. Now, in our second year, hopefully, we'll get to $20,000,000. I hit this exact... I hit the exact thing to the point where I'm like, "Maybe I should have shot higher." Maybe just hearing their number created an artificial ceiling, but I definitely created an arm.

Sam Parr

and a half foot are you how many people work there full time at yours

Shaan Puri

that's just a

Sam Parr

couple right

Shaan Puri

yeah like 4 or 5

Sam Parr

are you happy with e commerce I've asked you this like every quarter are you happy with that

Shaan Puri

Same thing. It's a great business in one way, and it's a terrible pain in the ass in another way. You know, like, right now, everything is... there are a lot of headwinds going against e-commerce. So, Facebook's getting more expensive, shipping anything around the world is getting super expensive and slower. Those are the two core costs: getting a customer and then fulfilling your product. If you're doing physical products, guess what? With inflation, everything gets more expensive. So, there are a lot of headwinds against e-commerce right now, and it's very competitive. There are a bunch of reasons why it's bad. Then again, it's working, and I'm happy with our business. So, it's good. But would I recommend it to the next person? Not necessarily. I think if you can do software, do software. If you don't really want to do real work, don't do e-commerce because e-commerce has real work. We have a warehouse, you know? It's annoying.

Sam Parr

Let me tell you something really quick before we wrap up. I just invested in... I don't ever do D2C (direct-to-consumer) companies like these consumer shipping companies. But this guy, listening to our podcast—I bet you he reached out to you too—it's called The Good Crisp Company. Yeah, so he sent me... I guess on the podcast I mentioned that I love snacks or something. I don't know.

Shaan Puri

Well, we were talking about better-for-you snacks, right? So, junk food that's like keto—keto cookies, whatever. He's got Pringles that are better for you than regular Pringles, but they taste like Pringles. Yeah.

Sam Parr

They're awesome! I ate this entire box of chips, and it was a lot of chips. It was kind of messed up.

Shaan Puri

it's a it's kinda pringles yeah

Sam Parr

And I was like, "Dude, this is awesome!" The valuation was like 2 times sales. I ended up investing in it.

Shaan Puri

I really wanted to invest. I told the guy, "You have an amazing business. I would totally invest in this." I'm just completely obsessed with crypto. Every extra dollar that I could put into something speculative, I just want to put into crypto. I don't want to put it into anything else.

Sam Parr

what's your crypto stuff that you're that you're doing now then

Shaan Puri

dude I bought luna luna's just been like on fire I don't know if you follow luna

Sam Parr

how much did it go up by

Shaan Puri

Well, it depends on which time horizon. But mine is basically, I don't know, up 40% in like 2 months or something, right? It's amazing. And I think it has a long way to go still. Not, again, not financial advice. I'm just like gambling. So, imagine me saying, "Here's what number I'm betting on in roulette." Just take it as that; don't take it as, you know, my word. But I think there's a lot of interesting things about it. I'd heard about it from a few interesting people, and then I was like, "Alright, what is this thing actually?" I can explain it if you want, but basically, I'll refrain for now. That's the thing I've been interested in.

Sam Parr

good and you did do good chris that it's a cool company man

Shaan Puri

The problem with all e-commerce is that our mutual friend has this great phrase: "E-commerce businesses are great to own, but horrible to invest in." Now, I wouldn't say it's horrible, but it's great for the owner of the business. It's not great for the investors, and that's only because the upside is somewhat limited. Even Native, which sold for $100 million, it's like these almost never go for multiple billions. But they're often valued at the same valuations as a software company, which can become a multibillion-dollar company. So, you know, you invested... I think, you know, I don't know about that one, but I was looking at another good deal that was in e-commerce that I liked. It's like, "Oh, we have, you know, we're doing $10 or $20 million in revenue. You know, 20% of that is profits or EBITDA." You know, we're valued at $50 million or $60 million. It's like, it was a good company. It was definitely going to work; the business was working and was probably going to keep working. And, you know, the reality is that it's unlikely that that will ever even sell for $600 million, let alone $6 billion. Right? So, it's like you get these 2x, 3x, 4x of revenue, like sales or, sorry, evaluation sales, and that's just not super compelling when you have better options. If you can invest in software, do it.

Sam Parr

And in a couple of weeks, we're going to have this guy on. I landed Aj Patel from High Key Cookie and Zesty Paws. That guy's amazing! He's one of the most impressive people I've ever read about.

Shaan Puri

And he was an owner of one of those businesses. By the way, I should say two other things. There are obviously exceptions to every rule. So, you know, there are definitely some e-commerce investments that are going to do awesome. Like Native did awesome because it sold for $100,000,000, but he'd only raised, I think, $2,000,000 or something like that, or $1,000,000. So, you know, he was super capital efficient, whereas most of these are not. They burn a lot of money on marketing and inventory. The second thing, the only other bad thing about e-commerce is that even when I say, "Oh, we did $7,000,000, $10,000,000, whatever this year," that doesn't mean that, A, that's revenue, not profits, and B, almost whatever you do have for profits gets reinvested back into the business because you're buying inventory for the next four months. So, if you're buying ads for the next month, you're always cash poor until you finally turn the corner. And there is a corner that you turn when you're a good business, but early on, you don't pay that.

Sam Parr

have you turned it

Shaan Puri

We have not turned that down because we're like, "Oh great, we need to buy double or triple the inventory for the next season and for the next season after that." So, you know, it's going to...

Sam Parr

stressful as fuck

Shaan Puri

Yeah, like, it's cool. It works, but it works if you don't need a bunch of cash to pull out and you're okay being cash poor for a while. Real estate's like this often too. You could be cash poor in real estate but have a lot of value.

Sam Parr

Yeah, but it's not gonna go to 0. Yes, real estate is slow... way slow, but it's more liquid and it's not gonna grow fast, but it won't go away. So it's a little different, whereas your thing [e-commerce] can go away.

Shaan Puri

In the sense that if the valuation drops, then you know you're more... You don't make a profit. It's not that it goes to 0, but what you owe the bank is now the value of the company. So your equity can go down, right?

Sam Parr

Yes, but an e-commerce business can double or triple in a year. Real estate likely will never do that. However, that e-commerce business... let's say that something's made illegal or there's an embargo, who knows? There's a world where it can go out of business.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, for sure. I have a couple more. I don't know if you want to just stay on. We could split these into, you know, we talked about just releasing these as segments instead of hour-long episodes.

Sam Parr

do you

Shaan Puri

have time or no

Sam Parr

yeah I have time

Shaan Puri

alright have you seen this thing that happened called sos sos token

Sam Parr

no what is it

Shaan Puri

Alright, I gotta tell you about this. This is genius! Okay, so there's an app called OpenSea, or a website called OpenSea. You've heard of OpenSea, right? It's basically... yeah.

Sam Parr

not that big of

Shaan Puri

It's eBay for NFTs. So, it's a place where you go to buy and sell NFTs. OpenSea is in crypto, but it doesn't do some of the things that crypto people like. For example, it's not fully open source. You know, like all the code is not open source. They like the way the website works; I think it's proprietary. You can't just fork that code and put your own name on it. The second thing is that they don't have a token involved with it. The third is that they raised a bunch of money from traditional venture capitalists, and in the crypto world, that's like a sellout type of situation.

Sam Parr

yeah

Shaan Puri

so andreessen horowitz I think put money in it's a multibillion dollar marketplace and I think it's gonna be like it's gonna be huge I think they did like ben you can look this up but they did like I don't know $8,000,000,000 of transaction volume in like 1 month this year so it's been it's been growing like in this like crazy it is one of the best startups you can invest in right now would be opensea now what happens so they their cfo they hire this hotshot cfo cfo goes on some show some some either podcast or some talk show and he says you know we're looking at potentially going public and he's saying it because that's a good thing for the company and immediately the users are like oh you're using the old route of like getting liquidity that's gonna make you guys rich but all of us users who have built this into the most popular nft marketplace we're gonna get nothing from that like we don't own stock in your company so you go public we don't get anything we built this thing and again that's against the that's against the core the ethos of of your everything yeah ben just found it 10,000,000,000 and 10,000,000,000 in trading volume in in august alone so that's insane same same numbers so or sorry I think it's yeah I don't know whatever so basically so what happened so this group of people got together I think the guy the guy who is behind it his handle is like 9 x 9 x 9 x or something like that right so this guy come they create something called the opendao if you go to the open dao dot com and they say they created a token called sos so opensea is the name of the platform so this is like sos like save our ship he creates this token called sos he creates a 100,000,000,000,000 tokens and he gives them out and what they did was kind of genius so on like 2 days ago anybody who was in crypto twitter anybody who buys nfts started seeing oh there was an airdrop which means if I look in my wallet I'm gonna have tokens it's like finding $20 in your wallet and so they did an airdrop to all the users of opensea based on how much you use opensea

Sam Parr

so how did they get that information

Shaan Puri

it's it's the block it's all that's the beauty it's like this can only happen in crypto so because I

Sam Parr

know but I would have thought that like I guess you could just scrape the website and just get a list of everyone's wallet

Shaan Puri

On, no, no, no. Stop that! Not the website. All OpenSea is just like a website that accesses the Ethereum blockchain. So, all the transactions happen on the Ethereum blockchain.

Sam Parr

got it

Shaan Puri

the buying and selling of the nft the minting of the nft is on the blockchain the buying and selling is all there and the blockchain again again is this open source public public record basically that you can go access you can go I can go type in your wallet address like your public wallet address and I can just go see how much money is in your account right now if I just go into etherscan and so now you might have multiple wallets but like that's one thing you can do so what they did was they went they looked at every every transaction on opensea all the wallets and they said okay sean's wallet has spent 10 eth he's done 5 transactions so he should get x percentage of it so they took of the 100,000,000,000,000 they said half of it we're just gonna drop to all the users of opensea so I woke up and I had 58,000,000,000 of these tokens in there at a. O whatever price my total was whatever like $300 whatever it's like $500 because I don't use opensea a ton I didn't do too many transactions but if you're one of these people who's like an nft collector or a flipper who is very active on the platform who buys and sells you know you know bored apes and things like that people made like $3,000 $5,000 $15,000 so it's like finding $5,000 in your wallet and you're like what is this I got this for free money and it's money that they minted and they basically it was almost like it's a marketing step but it's almost like a hostile takeover so they basically went out there what they were saying was here's what opensea should have done they should have given all the users some tokens proportionate to their usage based you know so based on how much you've been using the platform you get some of the opensea token and that and then the opensea token will be publicly tradable so you get to benefit and the core team will keep some of the opensea token like the the company will keep 20% of this that's how that's like the normal way in crypto so the the genius part of this is that some third party just did this on their behalf and it's like and now what and they so now there's a liquid market of like 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars I think it was like $300,000,000 the the group okay so here's how they did it they said 50% goes to the users 10% goes to the stakers and the liquidity pool 30% goes to the stakers and liquidity pool and 20% will stay with the treasury of our of our foundation and we are gonna build an open source version of opensea we're gonna build a competitor to opensea and all you users who are power users of opensea you now have a stake in our new opensea that's to come that's gonna do things the right way

Sam Parr

but they've gotta build I mean building out the now

Shaan Puri

they have to build

Sam Parr

is is fucking hard

Shaan Puri

so I

Sam Parr

mean how how many people work there 500 people

Shaan Puri

No, no, no, dude. These things can be built by, like, you know, four motivated developers if you needed to.

Sam Parr

then why the hell does airbnb be 5,000 people

Shaan Puri

It'll take a lot to maintain it and do customer support and all those things. Yes, that will take time. But just building the actual product that will start to get people to shift off of OpenSea to do this, a team of 5 to 10 contributors can actually do this if they're great developers that are focused. Now, that's to be determined. It's like a Kickstarter. It's like, "Hey, we give you money in a Kickstarter. Are they ever gonna build a thing?" Well, it kind of depends. Are they honest? Are they gonna work hard? I don't know. We'll see. But these guys basically, they essentially raised... it's like they hijacked OpenSea and they raised their share, which was $20 billion out of the $100 billion, 20%. They have $130 million now in their treasury that they can pay their development team to build the open-source competitor to this.

Sam Parr

who's who's the guy behind it the people behind it

Shaan Puri

This 9 x 9 x 9... and then someone else who's x.xyz, that's his handle. I think that's who's behind it. I don't know if this is going to work, but I think it's something that's only possible in the crypto world. Again, this is one of the reasons why people are like, "You know, decentralization is cool." It's cool because the users can always pick up their ball and leave; they can go to another court. So, OpenSea does not own their wallets. It does not own their NFTs. They have no lock-in to keep the users there except for behaving well and treating them well. If somebody else says, "I'm going to treat you better over here," it is very easy for me to take my wallet, take my NFTs, and go over there. Even better, that other group can incentivize me to come over by saying, "Hey, here's some free tokens that we minted out of thin air." So, I think this is a huge marketing move. It's like a hustle takeover. It reminds me of a buddy who was going to do this to a company called Ripple. Have you ever heard of Ripple?

Sam Parr

yeah but they they're shady right

Shaan Puri

Okay, so Ripple was this thing that kind of started pretty early on. They had this, you know, honestly not a bad idea. They were like, "Look, you know, the way the international banking system works today is off this thing called the SWIFT standard." Ripple was like, "We are going to be a bank-to-bank communication layer that uses blockchain." So, they were going to use blockchain technology with a real use case, which is banks sending money back and forth to each other. That was their idea. They got a bunch of funding from Founders Fund and others, and they released this thing called XRP—that's the name of their token. Alright, so whatever, nobody cares about how it works. Nobody cares. But the interesting part is that XRP was worth a lot. The founders of Ripple became billionaires overnight. Before, like, the best thing with crypto is you can get rich. Before, like, this Open DAO has $130,000,000 before they have a product. In Ripple, those guys became billionaires before banks ever used their product, which is like a really messed up incentive. This is why sometimes things don't actually get built in crypto. Because, hey, I already got the millions. I could just run away. I could just do a half-ass job. It doesn't really matter at this point.

Shaan Puri

I went public on day one. So, Ripple has a market cap right now of **$44,000,000,000**. I think I'm reading this right... **$44,000,000,000**, right? That's like the market cap of, you know, Bank of America or something like that. So, obviously, Ripple is not actually valued at that, but Ripple had believers and they had early momentum. They were very early in the crypto game. They had a lot of PR, and the CEO would go on CNBC and talk about how this is going to change the game. What happened in the crypto community? People were kind of like pooh-poohing Ripple. They were like, "This is centralized. They took way too much share for themselves. They didn't give enough to users. That's why these guys are billionaires. Their product kind of sucks, and they're kind of shady." Whatever, whatever. So, the reputation was that Ripple was full of it. Anyone who was in the know in crypto pretty much had the general consensus that Ripple was full of shit. So, my buddy had this idea. He was like, "I'm going to do the first hostile takeover of a crypto network." I was like, "What do you mean?" He goes, "Look, I can see every single person's wallet who owns Ripple." I was like, "Okay, that's kind of interesting." He goes, "But you don't know their name." I was like, "You don't have their email address." He goes, "I don't need their email address. I could just put something in their wallet, and they'll wake up and they'll open their wallet and they'll see that they have something in it." I was like, "Okay." He goes, "So, I'm going to go out there and say XRP is stupid for these five reasons: number one, the founders..."

Sam Parr

took away can you message these people anything

Shaan Puri

You can include a message in the transaction of giving the thing, like in the memo of the transaction. But the way you do it is you first drop the token. You tell people, "Hey, if you held Ripple, you got this token today." Then, you write your manifesto on your Twitter or your website about what this is all about. It's kind of like somebody put a $50 check in your wallet. You're like, "What's this all about?" It says, "Go to this website to explain why you just got this $50." So that's how this marketing mechanism works. He was like, "I'm going to put some money in there. I'm going to put my currency in all the Ripple holders' wallets, and then I'm going to tell them Ripple is stupid for these five reasons: the founders took too much, this other problem, this other problem..." You know, the right...

Sam Parr

the

Shaan Puri

Token is inflationary... blah blah blah. So, I'm going to change all that. We only take 10%. We are not inflationary; we do not do this sketchy stuff... blah blah blah. Find my 5. Plan of how to make Ripple better, and we're calling it our own thing. Here's the deal: if you own Ripple and you send your Ripple to my wallet, I will send you back 5 times your value if you're in the first 1,000 people that do this. Then, for the next 10,000 people that do this, you're going to get 4 times your Ripple back. For the next 10,000 people, you're going to get 3 times your Ripple back. So basically, there's this urgency of like, "Okay, if this is going to become the next Ripple, if I send my money in now, I'm going to get a 5x multiplier on my money." What he was going to do was just... he goes, "When you send it to this wallet, we're going to just dump it. We're just going to sell it, and we're going to put so much sell pressure that we're going to crash the price of Ripple." So, if you do it early...

Sam Parr

and then do they do this or so let

Shaan Puri

Me finish the story. So, he goes, "If you do this early, you're gonna get 5 times your amount, and you're not gonna sit there holding the bag while we dump this thing." It's like a prisoner's dilemma, game theory. It was so genius. He's like, "Here's the math. If you're holding this thing, you have to assess: are other people gonna take them up on this offer? If they do, then the ripple I'm holding is gonna go down like crazy. I'm gonna go down like 5 to 10 times."

Sam Parr

golly

Shaan Puri

If I jump ship, I get a 5x multiplier on my money. I don't want to sit there holding a sinking ship. The game theory of this, I think, is going to work. So he has this plan. He starts, and he's like, "Okay, well, I need to be credible." He went to some very, very wealthy people and got about $50,000,000 lined up to do this hostile takeover. He needed it to be like $200,000,000. So he's like, "I need to create this huge war chest so I can tell people, 'Look, we have this much money. This is backed by something. Come on board.'" He's basically going to these investors and saying, "If you give me $200,000,000, I'm going to take down this project. I'm going to absorb all the value of this project that's currently worth $40,000,000,000." Right? So he's like, "It's a huge return for those investors." They also don't even believe in Ripple, so it was this high-stakes, James Bond shit. What the problem was, one of the investors he had went to leaked the plan to a journalist. This guy, Dan Primack or whatever, he's like a pretty famous journalist.

Sam Parr

yeah from axios

Shaan Puri

Axios... Axios writes the story ahead of time. He says, "Hey, there's somebody planning a hostile takeover of XRP, and here's how it's gonna work." The XRP team, obviously, sees this and they're like, "Okay, just in case." So, they sold some amount of their Ripple to create a buffer of a few hundred million dollars. This way, if somebody tried to do this and tank the price, they had enough liquidity to buy back the tokens and keep the price high. So, it kind of foiled his plan. The only way it would have worked is if he had caught them by surprise. He could have tanked the price of Ripple in like two days and created this competitor, having all the momentum on his side. But because they had a heads-up, they could create enough liquidity and support their price before someone could do this to them. But how crazy is that, dude?

Sam Parr

This is like some "barbarians at the gate" shit. This is like 1980s Drexel, like a hostile takeover where they were... what’s it called? Like greenmailing. Have you ever read these 1980s finance books?

Shaan Puri

I have I have the book barbary I haven't read it yet

Sam Parr

yeah that's basically what they did like it was like it was like warfare

Shaan Puri

I was like, "This is some George Soros shit." You know, George Soros broke the Bank of England. I was like, "This is some George Soros shit," right?

Sam Parr

he was

Shaan Puri

That's actually what he was telling me. He goes, "This is some George Soros shit." I was like, "What do you mean?" He goes, "George Soros broke the Bank of England by doing something very similar to this." As he was explaining, I was like, "There's no way this works." He's like, "Well, you know it's risky, but if it works..."

Sam Parr

who who did it

Shaan Puri

and so he he didn't he didn't end up doing it

Sam Parr

but I mean who who's the it's an article it's is it public

Shaan Puri

I don't know if it's public but I'll tell you

Sam Parr

ask yourself a friend

Shaan Puri

friend who remember we went to dinner after our live show in miami it's our friend we went

Sam Parr

together with okay

Shaan Puri

yeah

Sam Parr

that's crazy I thought if if dan would have wrote about it he would have named him

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I think he didn't know the name, or he... I don't think he included the name of the thing. But how **fucking nuts** is that?

Sam Parr

That's crazy! If that person could have pulled it off, that's wild. This is "Bavarians at the Gate" shit—hostile takeover stuff.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I love it. Alright, I have a couple more topics if we want to do them, or if we want to go, we can go.

Sam Parr

alright I got I can do 15 more minutes

Shaan Puri

Alright, let's do one more. Okay, I got two random ideas for you. Here's the first idea: this idea is my gift to the Chief Marketing Officer of Gucci. You're welcome, courtesy of Shopify.

Sam Parr

I see this headline

Shaan Puri

Alright, so I was thinking the other day. I was sitting at a restaurant, and as I do, I'm just people-watching. I'm just watching these crazy creatures called humans. What the heck are they doing? I saw all these people with fancy bags—Gucci bags, Louis Vuitton bags. It's very different from my world. I don't give a shit about that, but they obviously do. Then I came home and started watching the show *Selling Sunset*, a funny show on Netflix about a real estate team.

Sam Parr

I watch it too man you know I watch all that shit

Shaan Puri

Yeah, so, you know, I dabble. If you notice, every day they come to work, they're wearing like the craziest outfits—like what nobody wears to work. They're wearing...

Sam Parr

like like $5,000 $5,000

Shaan Puri

Dress with like a $5,000 bag, and they put the bag right in the middle of the desk. It's like there's no laptop, there's no computer. It's just a desk with a chair and their purse on top. Then, they just gossip with each other, right? That's where the show is at this point. So, I was thinking about this luxury thing, and luxury just caught my eye. I said, "What else? What else could you do?" I don't know how this came to mind, but here's a crazy idea. It's really a marketing stunt; it's not a business idea, it's a marketing stunt for Gucci. So, here's what you're going to do: every year, there are over 1,000,000 joint replacements in America. People getting hip replacements, knee replacements, or if they fracture their foot, they get a steel rod put in. There are over 1,000,000 people a year that get this done.

Sam Parr

I got it done

Shaan Puri

you got that done what'd you get done

Sam Parr

I've got screw I broke my leg I've got screws and a little I got metal on my feet

Shaan Puri

Now, you're not the right person to ask, but is there a version of Sam that might have paid an extra $500 to have that be a Gucci nail?

Sam Parr

The answer is, yeah, of course. The answer is, yeah. The answer is, yeah. So, we're talking about... I thought you were gonna go with like Gucci prosthetic legs. Yes, but you're talking about like...

Shaan Puri

just brandon on the inside that's actually a cool idea dude like inside

Sam Parr

and you only see it on the x-ray like only

Shaan Puri

See, you have the picture before it goes into your body, right? So you get the Instagram porn of, "Oh, okay, hey guys, I'm doing well post-surgery. Here's my pics." As you're swiping, it's an awesome flex. It's a fucking Louis Vuitton hip that's coming into your body. It's an awesome flex. It's an LV knee, dude.

Sam Parr

you can

Shaan Puri

only see

Sam Parr

it in air port scanners

Shaan Puri

They do something so that, exactly in X-ray, you'll always see an emblem on the thing. Now, I don't know how doctors will figure out the science of how this works without... well, that's pretty great.

Sam Parr

that's good

Shaan Puri

How good is that, dude? That is amazing! This is just an extra little revenue line. Tons of news because everyone's going to say, "This is what's wrong with the world. You're going to take over." And guess what? There's going to be a bunch of people out there who are going and getting surgeries done that are going to say, "Yeah, okay." It's the average knee replacement that is like $25,000 to $30,000 all in. I think that maybe it can be as low as $12,000 to $15,000. You tell him in the actual part itself that goes in, I think it's a $5,000 part that the hospital orders. You're telling me I wouldn't get the $750,000 supreme knee?

Sam Parr

nike logo

Shaan Puri

nike the just do it hip come on

Sam Parr

yeah come on

Shaan Puri

Yeah, that's just licensing revenue for them. Air Zoom Hip, it's influencer candy, dude. If people get grills, if rappers go get diamond grills, if there's someone out there like me, some guy like me out there who's like, "Yo, diamond braces? What?" Yeah, diamond braces. Actually, forget braces, just diamond teeth. Diamond teeth work. If diamond teeth work, the Louis V Hip could work.

Sam Parr

dude this is a good idea this is pretty funny this is brilliant this is actually a good one that one

Shaan Puri

was for you for tiktok that's for you tiktokers out there that was my tiktok segment

Sam Parr

That's actually... this is a fun idea! Alright, I don't know. Wait, who? Hey, did you research this? Is that even possible?

Shaan Puri

I I have no idea if it's possible I've been

Sam Parr

I've got... I don't think you get it. I don't think you could see stuff like that. I've got X-rays of my screws, and you can look at them, but I don't think I... I don't know how that would work.

Shaan Puri

It might have to be a striping. It might have to be dots... polka dots. It might have to be something that will show up there. It might be an emblem that's just on it, a tiny emblem. But you know, like the red bottom shoes for... what's it called? You know, like where the balance... [trails off]

Sam Parr

Don't know what it is. Yeah, we're *fucking nerds*, but the black or the red bottom shoes... I've heard they rap about them.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, exactly. Whatever. People will find a way to see the stuff. If that's the only problem with this idea, we’ve got a good problem to have. Also, by the way, tattoos. I think you could also do this with tattoo parlors. I think you could drop branded, official licensed designs of tattoos for brands and be like, "Yeah, if you get this one, it's actually the brand." Because people get tattoos of brands, like, yeah.

Sam Parr

like a louis vuitton tattoo

Shaan Puri

I think jake paul has a nike swoosh where his like sock would be on his on his calf I've seen that

Sam Parr

that's hilarious actually

Shaan Puri

That's funny. He got a brand tattooed on him. I also thought, you know, why wouldn't brands actually drop tattoo designs just like they drop bag and shoe designs? I feel like that should happen.

Sam Parr

that's interesting that's another interesting idea alright 2 for 2

Shaan Puri

Alright, I have one more for you. Okay, this one's less fun, but I think it's still good. Do you remember glamour shots?

Sam Parr

love them

Shaan Puri

did you your mom have glamour shots do you know anybody who had

Sam Parr

Glamour shots! I didn't do it, but my sister did. It's hilarious. It's like *Napoleon Dynamite* shit where you go to the mall, wear stupid makeup and a bad haircut, and take these awesome pictures, of course.

Shaan Puri

do you know the business behind glamour shots

Sam Parr

no okay

Shaan Puri

so

Sam Parr

is that the is that the name of a brand glamour

Shaan Puri

Glamour Shots was the name of the company, I think. Okay, so here's the quick backstory. I did like, you know, two seconds of research on this, so it could be wrong. It was started by a frat party photographer who was taking pictures at frats. I was like, "Alright, what else have I got?" So initially, he calls it Party Pics. Then, when they were looking at trends, they noticed that people were liking this high glamour style—big hair, loud clothes, certain backdrops. So they were like, "Alright," and he renames it to Glamour Shots. It's physical locations, and within the first year, it already starts working. By year three, they had $7,000,000 in revenue, and copycats were popping up everywhere—Hollywood headshots, Freeze Frame, you name it. There were different portrait shops popping up. He expands through the franchising model, growing to 380 stores in Taiwan, Japan—everybody wants a piece of Glamour Shots. And the trick, the thing that really made it work was most...

Sam Parr

great name

Shaan Puri

Most professional photographers would say there are a couple of things that made it work. One was the style; it was iconic. It wasn't just, "Come, I'll take a picture of you." It was, "Come, I'll make you look like a Hollywood star," with the hair, the makeup, and the clothes. It was only like, you know, top half up, so you would be wearing your jeans underneath, and then your top would be like this denim studded jacket or whatever, with the collar popped. Backdrops with the colors—everybody knows the look. A fan blowing your hair, that whole thing. So that was one innovation. The other was **instant gratification**. You would take the photo, and for most photographers, they would say, "Great! I'll go get these exposed, then I'll add whatever touch-ups, I'll pick the best ones, and I'll get you some options in a few days or a few weeks." Glamour Shots used a special kind of camera technique. It was actually taking a video, I think, and it would grab an image. You could see it right there on the screen in real time, and you could pick and be like, "Oh, I want that one! That one's so good!" They got you in the heat of the moment when you were in peak state, already caught up in the frenzy. People were dropping $300, $400, $500 (inflation adjusted) on their glamour shots. The average customer spend was highly lucrative because, for like a 30-minute shoot, you were making huge profits. They had these six categories of styles that you got to pick from, and the names were hilarious. One was "Can't Wait to Be Touched."

Sam Parr

oh my god

Shaan Puri

Another spontaneous, tailored, elegant, and bold... That's where these classic looks come from. There was some genius behind the person who really understood what the customer wants behind it.

Sam Parr

whatever happened to the company

Shaan Puri

So, it gets to $100,000,000 in sales by 1994. By 2001, it's now dropped back down to 93 stores. Now, there are like 40 stores left. It's basically withered away and dying. It didn't last; it didn't keep up with the times. Here's the idea: we're rebooting Glamour Shots.

Sam Parr

and

Shaan Puri

we're rebooting glamour shots

Sam Parr

everything nostalgic from the nineties is crushing

Shaan Puri

Oh, you're rebooting *Spider-Man*, *Batman*, *X-Men*. You're rebooting *Home Alone*. *Home Alone* is getting rebooted. We're rebooting *Glamour Shots*. That's what I'm telling you.

Sam Parr

I'm on board. So, I'm looking at it now. There are only 5 of these locations left.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, we're down to the last... you know, remember the Alamo? We're down to the last stand. So the question is, how would you actually review glamour shots? I wanted to brainstorm with you for 2 minutes. How would you review glamour shots? I got a couple of ideas. I don't know if you have one off the top of your head; otherwise, I'll go.

Sam Parr

You gotta do it in person. I think that's part of it. What do you need to do that's different? I mean, you could just do an ad campaign with really cool celebrities or some celebrities, and you'd be like, "Here's what they would have looked like." You know, a modern person—what they would have looked like with a glamour shot. What would you do?

Shaan Puri

So, I'm going to reboot it. I'm not okay. Nostalgia is one angle you could go with. You could just say, "This look will come back," but I think that's short-sighted. What you've got to do is work backwards. My mom had glamour shots on the wall. The end product was a framed picture of her looking like an '80s or '90s soap opera star, basically with the hair blown out, crazy lighting, and a wild dress. So, what's the end product people want today? Instagram, baby! They want epic Instagram content. We've talked about the Museum of Ice Cream and some of these other places. I think those are secretly glamour shots reboots. You’ve got to go all in on the glamour shots reboots. You're going to make somebody look amazing for social media. I know how people out there are throwing up in their mouths, thinking, "Oh, this is everything that's wrong with..." Well, guess what? People care about how they look and how they come across on social media. If you hate that fact, cool, delete Instagram. But if you still have Instagram, you're still in on this idea. So, how are we going to do it? One idea was: could you get Airbnbs and convert them into basically dope lifestyle-looking Airbnbs? Instead of renting it out for $700 a night, you could rent it out for $100 an hour or $200 an hour, and do shoots for people where they get to look like they're living a dope lifestyle.

Sam Parr

that's that's different than a glamour shot a glamour shot is like supposed to be funny

Shaan Puri

It's not supposed to be funny, dude. It looks funny now when we look back. Like, look back at your dad with an afro or whatever. Actually, you had an afro in high school. So, look back at your own high school. That's supposed to be funny at the time. I don't know if you were trying to be funny, but for glamour shots...

Sam Parr

They are trying to be grammatically correct, but that's different with these Instagram things. You're talking about being... lying.

Shaan Puri

you're talking about looking cool yeah so so that's one one angle to it

Sam Parr

I think you're lying you don't live in that fancy ass house

Shaan Puri

yeah but you're not saying I live here you're just posting a picture like people do the

Sam Parr

so we're gonna have like

Shaan Puri

a people rent fancy cars and they take pictures with it and then they return the car do you

Sam Parr

know anyone who does that

Shaan Puri

Personally, thank God no. Have I seen people who do that on Instagram? Yes, I've seen people do that on Instagram. Tons of people do that on Instagram.

Sam Parr

it's like what you would need is people rent

Shaan Puri

dresses for the day you know dude you

Sam Parr

would just need like a like one airline seat and like what looks like an airline seat

Shaan Puri

Dude, you've seen that, right? Private... the half private jet. It's like a movie set. It's like a jet... a jet.

Sam Parr

where they film pornos

Shaan Puri

Exactly. So, there's that. I think, okay, but that's a little capital intensive to get Airbnbs. Maybe you could do it with a green screen. One way you could do this is to have someone come take pictures with a green screen. It's very cheap to do. Then, you CGI them into a whole bunch of different looks. That becomes their collection. They could be in power suits, boss mode, party mode, or whatever. You just have green screen props and scenarios, and you show them exactly how to pose to look good. Most people don't even know how to pose, myself included. When you meet somebody who knows how to pose, you're like, "Oh, that's half of it." The other half is lighting, props, and editing. Do you remember when the guy came to take photos of us at the Miami thing? He was like, "Alright, stand here, half squint your eye." You're like, "Why?"

Sam Parr

yeah I was like this I was like dude this is

Shaan Puri

Down center. What do you mean? He's like, "No, trust me. Kinda squint your eye." He's like, "Then, you know, protrude your neck forward." I was like, "No, this looks like a turtle." He's like, "No, look, watch. I got rid of your double chin. You know, you look sharper and more powerful. Okay, look at this angle. This gives you confidence. Look from this angle specifically." Whereas for me, I'm like the *fucking nutcracker*. If I take a photo, it's like, "Stand straight, look straight, hands to my side, smile, cheese." That's how I take all my photos, right? But there is an art to posing, and most people don't know how to do it. So I think there's a version of glamour shots that somebody could reboot that just gives you an end product that you want for social media.

Sam Parr

I don't know exactly what to say. I would just say, **bring back the classics**. I think that you could just do it as is. What happened to the company? So, did it... did you just...?

Shaan Puri

Do this with dating profiles and stuff. Whatever. I don't know if the company still exists, but I think it's kind of like just gone down the drain. I don't know the ending of that story.

Sam Parr

I wonder what happened to the founders. Does he have, like, some huge mansion now in LA? Like that glamour shot money?

Shaan Puri

1000% he's going to have a huge mansion in LA. Yeah, it would take 2 seconds to just Google that. I bet you this guy's got to have a place in LA. And if he doesn't, we're just going to edit this part out.

Sam Parr

I can't see, but is it actually Bob? Oh, he lives in Texas, in Dripping Springs, Texas, which is near Austin. It's where, like, it's like where moms who get glamour shots live. Dripping Springs is like the suburbs of Texas.

Shaan Puri

Way, that's the glamour shots. It's still thriving in Texas. I think that's the only place where it's still a thriving business. I think I read that.

Sam Parr

dude this guy is awesome his name is bob

Shaan Puri

that's all I got those are my topics

Sam Parr

this is awesome we gotta get bob on here alright that's the pod