We Bet This App Idea Could Be Bigger Than Reddit

Shaan Puri

Sam, I want to start with an idea today. I have an idea that I genuinely believe is going to be big if somebody does it. I've tried to convince one of my smartest friends to do this, but they're already a little too rich and too happy to try something new. So, I'm putting this out there to the universe. If anybody does this, more power to you! The funny thing about this idea is that it started off on one of our "drunk idea" episodes, which we do from time to time. We take, like, I don't know, half-baked ideas—kind of bad ideas—but maybe there's a nugget in there that's interesting. We call it "drunk ideas" where we both get a little tipsy, we pretend to be at least, and we pitch each other ideas.

Sam Parr

What was the drunk idea?

Shaan Puri

So, the drunk idea was called "Better Than Google." Do you remember this one?

Sam Parr

Is that the Facebook group?

Shaan Puri

It's the Facebook group.

Sam Parr

I joined it. I love it. I joined.

Sam Parr

**Yes, I love it.**

Shaan Puri

They didn't accept my request. Oh man, I'm sitting here pending still.

Sam Parr

Here's an example: Yesterday, there was this woman who wasn't particularly attractive. She was about 23 years old, and she asked, "Should I get Botox now? Will I look prettier?" She posted a picture of her face along with the question.

Sam Parr

There were all these very positive, not necessarily positive, aspects. You do or do not need it, but you know, we're not going to make fun of you. Here are the pros and cons.

Shaan Puri

The premise of this... there was a backup. A second, there was an Instagram influencer. I think her name is Amber Lancaster. Amber Lancaster is an Instagram mom; she's got, you know, a million followers or whatever. She had created this group, and I think she kind of created it, but she's very hands-off with it. It's not like a very calculated thing that she did. The group is called "Better Than Google." The premise is that inside this group are about 17,000 millennial moms, like her audience. People who, you know, because I was asking my wife, I was like, "What is the group?" And she's like, "Well, it's just a bunch of moms who are all kind of in our thirties. We all want to have a good life, be a good mom, be a good spouse, watch good TV shows, be healthy. We just have a certain set of things we're trying to achieve for a certain quality of life." In doing so, if you put a bunch of those people together, then they could really help each other out. It's better than Google. If you ask a question here, you're going to get better-than-Google type of answers.

Sam Parr

Here's an example question: "Has anyone found an effective way to get rid of cellulite?" I'm pretty petite and I work out daily, but my legs still have cellulite. It has 30 comments from people discussing how they did or didn't get rid of it.

Shaan Puri

**Cellulite** is 100%. It's like a media company; it's got juicy content, just like clickbait—click-worthy content. But there's no editors, no writers; this is just people's real lives. So, a woman went on there and she was saying, "My husband was cheating on me. I found out, I confronted him about it, and he got really defensive. I want to file for divorce." But then, over the last few days, I noticed he referenced things that were in my private messages—my messages to other people. How is he reading my iMessage? Then, the world's greatest tech support was in the thread, where it was like, "Alright, you need to log out of your iCloud. You need to do this, you need to do that. You might have a second iPad that's connected to your thing, and that's how he's being able to read this." They really helped her out. She's like, "Oh, thank you! I figured it out. There was this iPad, and whatever, that's how he was reading my messages." So now, I can do whatever. That's a better answer than you would get if you just Googled the same thing, and it's more trusted. Trust is the keyword here. When I originally came on this "drunk ideas" thing, I was just laughing. It's better than Google! It's just a funny way to create a Google competitor. It's like, what's better than Google? Machine learning? Artificial intelligence? It's like 10,000 moms who are bored and scrolling on their phones. And it's kind of true, though. The wisdom of the crowds is actually a very strong force. The more I thought about it, the more I realized this is actually a really good potential business idea. Here's why: I've long since had this theory that whenever one thing gets really popular, it creates a craving for the opposite. We see this in many ways. A classic example of this was when Facebook became the biggest social network in the world. Facebook was basically photos, but it was permanent and public, right? You would post your albums there; everybody could see them, and they stayed there forever. Well, as Facebook got more popular, it created the need for something like Snapchat, where you would have photos that are impermanent and not public—private, right? Snapchat succeeded, but it wouldn't have succeeded unless Facebook had already shifted the way that culture was working, creating a craving in people for the opposite. I think you see that today, where the more the world got woke, and you know, you can't say this and you can't say that, and you have to use these pronouns, do this, do that, it creates a craving for a character like Andrew Tate or even Donald Trump—somebody who's a straight shooter, who's just going to call it like it is. Those people become very popular because they're a counterpunch to the way that things are going, or the other strong opposition. Similarly, I started thinking about this. I said, "Man, in an AI world, a lot of shit's gonna change." If you're just going to type into a box and it's just going to give you the answer, and it's going to scrape the internet, it's going to give you some generic answer that's going to be big.

Sam Parr

For sure.

Shaan Puri

There's definitely a market for that. But what's the opposite of that? What craving does that create? What I realized is it's going to create the craving for almost like the old village wisdom. How can you get answers from a bunch of humans whose names and faces you can see? They could tell you things based on their personal experiences rather than just generically providing the right answer. I think that if somebody made an app with the same premise—the "better than Google" premise—and it was a community of, you know, 10,000 to 20,000 moms who were going to answer questions, that would be a really powerful app. I think it would be really addictive because you would get the type of content, like the Botox question. By the way, one key thing is you could share anonymously in the groups. So you go anonymous and then you post about infidelity in a marriage, and that's part of why it works. I think you would need those features. But think about how valuable that would be for a second. If I could pick any one customer segment to have a rabid community of, it would be moms. They are the people who control the household budget in America. That would be the most valuable audience segment you could have, and I think this is the way to get it.

Sam Parr

Do you remember Chacha?

Shaan Puri

Chacha, was that like the old search engine that was kind of like this Yahoo Answers type of thing?

Sam Parr

Yeah, so I'm just pulling this up right now. But basically, I remember it when I was in high school, and that was about 2008. It was launched in 2006 and went bankrupt in 2016. So, basically, it was a service, and I didn't actually realize any of this, but it raised $6,000,000, including from Jeff Bezos. They had 5,000 freelance guides, meaning people who they hired. I would send a text message to ChaCha. I remember this was during the World Cup, and I was testing it out. I asked, "What's the tallest and what's the shortest player on this particular soccer team?" because I was just testing it out. I think I paid them 2 or 3 cents or something like that, and they would message me back in like 3 minutes with an answer. At the time, it was amazing. I'm just reading their page now, and it looks like they actually raised up to $60,000,000. They had something like 1,700,000,000 questions a month that people were asking. It was like magic back then because we didn't have Google on our phones. I didn't have a smartphone, and I remember this being amazing. Eventually, it went out of business because Google is just better. But I just don't know if it could ever make any money. I think I paid like 2 cents or something like that for text messages.

Shaan Puri

Well, that's the beauty of it. You don't need to actually pay for an expert answer. So, here are some different analogs to this.

Sam Parr

So you...

Shaan Puri

Have Quora, which is a community I would call more tech nerd-oriented. Then you have GLG, which provides highly paid intellectual information. The customer for that is going to be a hedge fund or some sort of investment banker, or something like that. Then you have Google, which is the general search engine. You know, Google's market cap today is, I think, $2.3 trillion. If you think about search on the internet, the big general search engine is Google, with a market cap of $2.3 trillion. You can also silo that data into different categories, like searching for restaurants, which is where Yelp comes in. I don't know what Yelp's market cap is, though.

Sam Parr

I mean, it's billions, but it just hasn't grown in years.

Shaan Puri

2,000,000,000. Right, so you know the search for restaurants and handymen in your area became 2,000,000,000 out of the 2,000,000,000,000. Then there's Glassdoor, which was like a search for good places to work. And then you have the search for jobs, and then you have the search for whatever. There are about 1,000 tiny search engines, and these are all like single-digit billion companies for the most part that got created. And then we have DuckDuckGo, which is kind of like the search engine for the tech-savvy person who cares about privacy and likes to avoid the mainstream. We've talked about them before and the insane amount of traffic that they have. So I think that while search and this kind of question-and-answer thing feels like a solved problem, even the community questions and answers, you would think, "Well, why not Quora? Why not Reddit?" Dude, my wife is not getting on Quora and Reddit. Reddit is just like... it repels women. Like, dude.

Sam Parr

Isn't it funny how Reddit works? Reddit is... I don't remember what they are now, but 2 years ago they were like the 6th or 7th most popular website. And yet if you asked people, "Do they use Reddit?" a very common answer was like, "What's Reddit?" It's a very strange thing. I love Reddit, by the way. I use... like, invite [possibly meant to say "I use it a lot"].

Shaan Puri

Do it's made for dorks like us, right?

Sam Parr

Yeah, yeah.

Shaan Puri

Guys with body odor, right? It's not made for the millennial mom who wants to go into a high-trust place and not get trolled, spammed, or made fun of. She doesn't get all the weird memes, and it's just a different culture. I think that this "Reddit for moms" angle—if you had pitched me that generically, I wouldn't have believed it. As soon as I saw "better than Google," I thought, "Man, if somebody really created an app that's supposed to do this and they seeded it correctly..." The beauty of this was that it was seeded with only followers of a certain type of Instagram influencer, which created a like-minded community of members and excluded the general trolls of the internet. If you could find a way to do that again, I think that thing would scale, and I think it would be really, really valuable. The value per user would be really, really high.

Sam Parr

Alright guys, really quick. Back when I was running The Hustle, we had this premium newsletter called **Trends**. The way it worked was we hired a ton of analysts and created this sort of playbook for researching different companies, ideas, and emerging trends to help you make money and build businesses. Well, HubSpot did something kind of cool. They took this playbook that we developed and gave to our analysts, and they turned it into an actionable guide and a resource that anyone can download. It breaks down all the different methods that we use for spotting upcoming trends and identifying different companies that are going to explode and grow really quickly. So, if you want to stay ahead of the game and find cool business ideas or different niches that most people have no idea exist, this is the ultimate guide. If you want to check it out, you can see the link down below in the description. Now, back to the show. Let me play the pessimistic person right now.

Shaan Puri

Are you going to devil's avocado?

Sam Parr

I'm a devil's advocate. I've built a handful of things, and one of the hardest things that I've tried to do, but have not been able to pull off, is getting people engaged. I own a variety of Facebook groups. Some of them have 80,000 members, while most have around 2,000 to 5,000. One has about 80,000 members. When we started these groups, I wanted to create a Facebook community because Facebook is where the person already was. When I started a lot of these groups, it was around 2014 or 2015. My reasoning was that getting someone to go specifically to a website, like, for example, if you had a food recipe website, and then you thought, "Let's create a community for our readers to talk," is challenging. Getting people to visit myrecipes.com/forum and actively participate is one of the hardest things I've ever had to do, and I've never actually pulled it off. I think there are people who know how to pull it off, but those people are rare. Getting people to come to a destination, type new content, and register for something is one of the hardest things to figure out, especially when it comes to mostly internet-based companies.

Shaan Puri

I agree. I'm not saying it's easy; I'm just saying I think there's a **$1,000,000,000 idea** here. But like most **$1,000,000,000 ideas**, it requires threading the needle. I'll give you one other analogy to this. In terms of shopping, you have the big retailers. I could go to, you know, **Target.com** or **Macy's.com**. Then **Amazon** came out. Amazon was like, "Cool, we'll just aggregate all the products," and Amazon's the Google of that space, right? It's the general shopping search. Then there's **Etsy**, which is like a complete counter to Amazon. It's never going to be bigger than Amazon; it's always going to be some tiny fraction of Amazon. But a tiny fraction of a giant number is still a pretty damn big number. What Etsy did was say, "Cool, we will do basically moms buying from other moms." So how do we do handcrafted goods? How do we do things that are personalized—kind of the non-scalable, non-generic products only? You could see the maker; here she is, you could trust her. She's got her little shop, and so let anybody create a little shop and sell to other people who like to shop—kind of that same flea market vibe. Etsy's totally succeeded because it was so different. I think in a world that's going at hyper-fast speed towards AI, which just tells you the answer—it's hyper-intelligent, this is generically the answer for things—I think it's going to create, more than ever, the desire for more of the Etsy feel. Where it's like, "Yeah, cool, but what if I just wanted a hundred other people like me who might have been through something like this to tell me their recommendations?" Another thing that's really popular in this group will be like, "Hey, I got an Amazon gift card. What are your best finds on Amazon for me? Here's my waist size, here's my chest size, here's whatever—what will fit me well?" And they'll just be like, "Oh, here are some really good Amazon finds that are clothes that actually fit well and are still good on a budget."

Sam Parr

How are you seeing this stuff? Are you like, "Hey, wife, give me your phone," and then you scroll on hers? Or is she like saying, "Oh, hey..."?

Shaan Puri

The "show me things," right? So first, it was her showing me, and me swatting away the phone like, "I don't care, who cares about this?" And she's like, "No, like this lady was looking for somebody, and then she asked the group, and then the group found that person that she had bumped into at the bus stop. It was crazy! They knew it because of the description of the shirt that he wears, and somebody said, 'Wait, I think I know that guy.'" I'm like, "Alright, whatever, who cares about this story." And then the 4th or 5th time, I was like, "Okay, every time I paid attention to what my wife is really into, I'm early to something that's actually like a very valuable investment."

Sam Parr

What's another example of that?

Shaan Puri

You mean the e-commerce brand that I started was very much in this vein. But in general, this is not new. Take Stanley mugs, for example. Stanley mugs are now all the rage. About two years ago, she kept talking about them and was so excited to show me this jumbo oversized, overpriced mug that she bought. This is just one of a thousand examples of these types of things. So, anyway, I've learned that I should not ignore this because she is really high signal when it comes to consumer trends. She is a specific type of consumer that is the opposite of me. I am an internet-native person; I am the early adopter of products. She's the opposite. But the things that do kind of pass her filter? There's something there.

Sam Parr

Are you still you?

Shaan Puri

Is that still the same way, by the way? Like, is that a signal for you?

Sam Parr

No, no, it's not.

Shaan Puri

And why is that?

Sam Parr

I mean, my wife is a young millennial or an old Gen Z, I guess. She's 31, and so typically it's with TikTok trends. For example, remember the "He's a 10 but..." thing? I had to be like, "Dude, what the hell is this about? What is this thing?"

Shaan Puri

She's like your urban dictionary.

Sam Parr

Yeah, if it's like there's some new singer named Charlie XCX, she's going to be a huge deal. I'm like, "Why?" She's like, "Well, just all my friends are talking about it and it's popular on TikTok." So, yeah, we do it like that. But not like business stuff.

Shaan Puri

You know, like those Golden Goose shoes? Do you know those shoes?

Sam Parr

Those are so stupid.

Shaan Puri

Was like... like **fucking** dirty shoes that are $700.

Sam Parr

No, they're so dumb.

Shaan Puri

It was really early on that I was on that train, and then there was another thing. No, because she's vegan. That was like another thing; she was vegan a lot earlier before plant-based became a bigger deal. So I used to be like, "Okay, you know, great, high maintenance. Where do we find milk, butter, or any of the things that you need to do stuff?" She would find these niche brands. She'd be like, "Oh, I really love Oatly. Oatly is really great." This was before Oatly was in coffee shops and all that stuff. Oatly is this brand that's, I don't know, like a Swedish brand or something from Europe. Nobody had ever heard of it. It's got this funky bottle. I remember, you know, whatever, like seven years ago, she was showing me all these plant-based products and then these creators who were really small at the time. But there are plant-based creators that are now all huge because plant-based recipes became very popular. Another version of this was Kayla Itsines, who we talked about on here. I don't even know how you say her last name, but she's like the fitness influencer. So when I was like, "Hey, do you want to like, I don't know, should we get a trainer? Let's work out together."

Sam Parr

My wife was doing that too. Did she buy the PDF?

Shaan Puri

First, she bought the PDF. I'm like, "You're using a PDF to work out?" She's like, "Yeah, it's great." And I'm like, "A PDF? You paid for a PDF? You don't pay for anything!" She's like, "I just really trust her." I'm like, "Who is this random woman in Australia? Who is this person?" Then, sure enough, she creates the Sweat app. The Sweat app then becomes like a multi-hundred-million-dollar app. Again, I was kind of like, "Dude, why are you paying attention to this random Instagram influencer? She's not even a real trainer! Why don't you watch these videos or go to this official certified thing?" But no, her trust was in a certain type of person. I kind of wrote that off, but then later I learned that actually, that's just the way the world is going. That's where people are going to get their information.

Sam Parr

That's where people are going to get their trust from in a kind of noisier and noisier world. Sarah was like that with me with Emma. Do you watch Emma Chamberlain?

Shaan Puri

I don't, but I know about her.

Sam Parr

Dude, this woman is the best! I'm like, "She's like Casey Neistat for chicks," and I'm going back and watching all of her old stuff. She is so darling... I'm all about it. By the way, are you still using OpenAI every day as a search engine?

Shaan Puri

Yeah, not just as a search engine. Can I tell you about a crazy thing that I did with OpenAI ChatGPT? Basically... yeah, what like nobody else is gonna care about this, but I think... whatever, I give a shit, and I think you will find this interesting too. So I've been playing around with the idea of writing a movie, and... I've never done... I've never made a movie before. [I'm] not a filmmaker. [Maybe I should] do a play?

Sam Parr

Do a play.

Shaan Puri

Never in a script, never in a screenplay. I thought about a play, but I had a specific idea for a movie. There's a book that I want to buy the rights to, to turn into a movie. So, I've been down this rabbit hole trying to do that.

Sam Parr

Do I know what book it is? You don't... don't say it, but do I know what?

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I can't say it, but yes, you would definitely know it. It's like the rights have bounced around from big studio to big studio, and it just never got made for one reason or another. Oh, COVID happens and then production dies, or this person's on board and then they get canceled, then the project stalls out. I'm like, I can't believe this has not been turned into a movie yet. So, anyways, I'm in this really interesting path right now where I'm trying to acquire the rights to create a movie. But along the way, I was like, "Hey, maybe I should figure out how movies are even made and how this works." So aside from normal ChatGPT stuff, where I'm like, "How do movies get made? What's the name of the person who doesn't know how to do anything but provides the money and the will to make it happen?" They're like, "That's called an executive producer." I had a kind of amazing magical experience with GPT. So here's what happened: I've used ChatGPT to question and answer, like, "I don't know this, tell me," or "Do this or explain this to me." What I hadn't used it for was as kind of a creative assistant. Have you ever used it in that way, or should I describe what I mean by that?

Sam Parr

Yeah, like sometimes what I'll do is I'll upload... I use this tool where I can download content. For example, Scott Galloway - I love his writing. He's got about 100 blog posts. I got this tool where I downloaded all of his blog posts as a PDF. Then I uploaded it all to ChatGPT. I created a voice called "Scott" and I'll write something and say, "Rewrite this in Scott's voice." I won't use the whole thing, but I'll just pick one or two nuggets. I'm like, "That's a cool sentence. I'm gonna be inspired by that." So I'll use it a little bit like that.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, that's sick! So, I did the same thing. I was like, "You know who I love? I love Aaron Sorkin." Aaron Sorkin wrote "The Social Network," "The West Wing," "Newsroom," and a bunch of cool things. He's known for his snappy, fast-paced dialogue that's witty. Specifically, there are a bunch of nuanced things he does where one character says something to the other. For example, in the beginning scene of "The Social Network," Zuck is talking to some girl he's on a date with.

Mark Zuckerberg

Did you know there are more people with genius IQs living in China than there are people of any kind living in the United States? That can't possibly be true.

Sam Parr

Be true.

Mark Zuckerberg

It is... what would it count for that? Well, first, an awful lot of people live in China. But here's my question: how do you distinguish yourself from the population of people who all got 1600 on their SATs? I didn't know they took SATs in China. They don't. I wasn't talking about China anymore; I was talking about me. You got a 1600? Yes, I could sing in an acapella group, but I can't sing. You actually got nothing wrong. Had Roku rented a $25 PC, or did you get into a final club?

Shaan Puri

Or I get.

Mark Zuckerberg

"Into a final club, you know?" From a woman's perspective, sometimes not singing in an a cappella group is a good thing. "This is serious." "On the other hand, I do like guys who are crew..." "Well, I can't do that." "I was kidding." "Yes, I got nothing." "Wrong with the test?" "Have you ever tried..." "I'm trying right now to row crew to get into a final club." "To row crew? No. Are you... like... whatever... delusional?" "Maybe it's just sometimes you say two things at once. I'm not sure which one I'm supposed to be aiming at." "But you've seen guys who were crew, right?"

Shaan Puri

It's.

Sam Parr

An awesome first scene. She's still...

Shaan Puri

Catching up on the SATs in China, but he's moved to the next part. It creates these little misunderstandings and a bit of tension. It's part of why the dialogue really keeps you engaged.

Sam Parr

Yeah.

Shaan Puri

It doesn't feel rehearsed. It feels genuinely like two people kind of in a quick rally, a conversational rally, with the ball going back and forth.

Sam Parr

It makes a non-fast-paced scene feel fast-paced.

Shaan Puri

Exactly. The whole scene is like 7 minutes or something long. It's a long scene, which is a long time in a movie for just two characters to be talking to each other. That usually breaks a rule of film where you want to break it up with action and movement and all these other things to keep people's attention. But he doesn't do that. Anyways, I upload that scene and I say, "Here's the screenplay for that."

Sam Parr

How did you upload it? You upload the screenplay.

Shaan Puri

It turns out all movie scripts are available online. The actual original script is just there, so I go and grab the PDF. I put it into ChatGPT and say, "You're my creative assistant. We're writing a scene for this movie. Here's the situation: two characters in a coffee shop." At first, I said, "Explain to me what makes Aaron Sorkin's dialogue so good in this first scene," and then it explains it. I said, "Great! Using those characteristics, write a new scene for this." What it did was spit out a scene. The scene kind of sucks, but it spits it out instantly. There’s this trade-off between speed and quality. Even though the quality was quite bad, the speed was incredible; it took like two seconds. Then I could start to check the quality by giving it feedback. I said, "Cool, but I don't think it's believable that the character would say this for the first line. I think you should do this." And then it goes, "Sure, I've taken your suggestion and wrote it again." I said, "Okay, cool, but maybe instead of a coffee shop, put it in a restaurant." It changes the restaurant because I want the waitress to say this, and then it does it again. I say, "Cool, but give me an alternative. Just like, no, not that, but I don't really know why. Just give me another alternative." It gives me another alternative, and I say, "Okay, cool, but make it faster and snappier. Actually, I want one character to be a little bit of an asshole." It tries again. What I realized was, as I stepped back for a second, I said, "Wow, this is amazing. What do I have here? I have an on-demand creative collaborator." It was 1 AM when I was doing this. I couldn't have called somebody and said, "Hey, do you want to just wake up real quick and start writing with me?" So in the moment where inspiration struck, I was able to have a genius creative collaborator who spit out instant first drafts. This let me avoid the blank page, which is the biggest enemy to any creator. Instead of being the author, I got to be the editor. Now ChatGPT is the author, and I'm just the editor, saying, "No, something else. Try again. Tweak this a little bit this way. Give me another variation with this happening." It would instantly give me another one back. I thought, "Wow, the difference here would be if I had a human doing this. They wouldn't have been online. Let's say I caught them the next day when inspiration was half as much as it was in the middle of the night. Then I would say, 'Can you write a draft of this?' That would have taken a week. They would have come to me after a week, and now I'm out of flow. I'm worried about ten other things in life. Then they would have given it to me, and now I would have to, as you say, bubble wrap it for them. I'd have to give them feedback, but I can't bruise their ego. They just worked so hard all week giving me exactly what I asked for. So now I have to say, 'Hey, I really like part of it, but I just think maybe we could try something like this.' Not to say this is bad, but I just want to try, you know? And I'd have to do all that, bubble wrap it, and then give them the advice. Then it would take another week to get the second draft. Now on the second draft, I have to give half as much feedback because if I really push it even further, or if I say, 'Nope, still try again,' bruised egos. So I'm like, "Wow, you have an on-demand creative assistant who can instantly mimic and learn from any input I give it. Like, 'Write this in the style of this. Write this in the style of that. Pretend this person is a director.' It has no ego, takes feedback instantaneously, and creates the revisions instantaneously. By the end of it, I actually had a dope opening scene for a movie, and I'm a guy who's never written a screenplay before. For me to have done that without AI would have been impossible.

Sam Parr

I don't know, a hundred times harder. So, I thought that was pretty cool. How was the output? The final product, the...

Shaan Puri

The final product is pretty good. It's like... I mean, of course it's not, you know, Aaron Sorkin, but it's a hell of a lot better than Sean. So, you know, I got a superpower to be able to do that. I would say it is on par with, like, the average or slightly above average from a professional who I would have paid tens of thousands of dollars to write me a script.

Sam Parr

Man, that's like... I guess when I watch a movie, I kind of take for granted that someone had to sit down and write all that out. That's so much work! Like, that's so much work that would be so much... And so when we tell that story of Sylvester Stallone, how fast did he do *Rocky*?

Shaan Puri

He wrote the first draft for three and a half days.

Sam Parr

That's insane to me. That's insane.

Shaan Puri

But also, if you watch *Rocky*, you're like, "Okay, this is not rocket science." The script is not super sophisticated either.

Sam Parr

It's still a lot. You're making a whole world, but let...

Shaan Puri

Let me tell you two other things. On that note, you had... so writing the thing, the other cool thing I got out of it. You know, when I wasn't writing, I was watching videos of Aaron Sorkin talking about his process. One of the things he says is, "People don't understand to get one good idea." He's like, "My brain is a Rolodex flipping through 50,000 bad ideas." He explains that he has exhausted so many dead-end paths to find the one path that kind of works. I thought that's such a good analogy for how all creation works. I'm sure you feel the same way about marketing ideas or business ideas. Your brain flips through 50,000 permutations of what you could work on, how we could work, and what the business model could be. Then, in the end, it pops out and it's like, "Oh, Hampton's a great idea, dude! You know, congrats!" It seems like it just worked right away. It's like, "Yeah, it worked right away because my brain went through the idea maze on a speed run." I bumped into so many walls and flipped through so many ideas and permutations of what this could and could not have been until I finally figured out one that would work.

Sam Parr

Yeah, and it's like magic how it comes up. It's crazy that, you know, we talk about shower thoughts. It is weird how I spend so much time thinking about something and all the permutations. Then, when I'm out on a bike ride, it just hits me: "Wait, why didn't I think of that?" You know, it just kind of all comes together. It's like a magical process. If I had to do that for a script for money, that would be very hard. Do we have to do a show real quick?

Shaan Puri

Yeah, let's do it. Speaking of writing.

Sam Parr

Speaking of writing.

Shaan Puri

Speaking of writing, if you're trying to get your writing out there the way that Sam did it, the way that I did it... The two businesses that we built that we sold and... probably, I don't know, some of the simpler, easier... Would you say some of the simpler, easier businesses that we ever made?

Sam Parr

The simplest.

Shaan Puri

The simplest was a newsletter business. If you're going to do a newsletter business, back when we started it, back when you started The Hustle, for sure you built a bunch of things for both.

Sam Parr

I had three engineers on staff. We had to build everything. Then, I had two or three growth people, and they spent half of their time filling out Excel sheets to try to track all the information, right?

Shaan Puri

Or build a referral program. You know, go and then you had 20 people in ad sales, right? Like, go, going, just trying to generate revenue.

Sam Parr

We had, I think, like 15 people in ad sales, and then we had like 3 people supporting them all. So, basically, when we sold the company, we were going to do about $20,000,000 that year in revenue. We had something like 35 people, but only 2 writers. It was insane... it was actually only 2 writers!

Shaan Puri

The writer was just in case the first writer got sick.

Sam Parr

Yes, it was 1,500 words a day. It was not that hard. So, we had to build all of these tools. It was a pain in the ass.

Shaan Puri

Let's do a little bit of math on this, just real quick. Do you remember what your OPEX or payroll costs roughly were for writing that one newsletter? It had 2 writers but also had 33 other people in the company that were doing all the other functions.

Sam Parr

So, 2 riders probably each made $150,000. Add about 20% to that for healthcare, so we'll just round up to $200,000. So $200,000 for 3 riders is $600,000. And then we had roughly 30 people beyond those guys, so what's that... like $8,000,000?

Shaan Puri

Yeah, something like that. So $8,000,000, and that's just even the engineers' part, right? Because I remember you were building: - A tool that would segment the audience - An A/B testing tool - All these little features to be better at your newsletter You lived in San Francisco at the time. A San Francisco engineer, even with the "San Francisco special scrappy find somebody, convince someone this is the dream" [approach], [would cost] $200,000 each, right? So you're paying basically $600,000 just on product cost.

Sam Parr

And the products weren't even that good. You know, I'm not a tech company, but I had to... it was hard.

Shaan Puri

Not your core competency? Well, instead, how much does Beehive cost a month? I think Beehive is like **$99** a month or something like that, and they have a free plan too. So instead of spending **$600,000** a year, you could have spent **$39** a month. That's the price of the most popular plan, the Scale Plan. With that, you get the ad network, so they'll do your ad sales for you. You also get subscriptions, so you can put a paywall in and actually do subscriptions without having to build that feature. You get a website builder and all the email automation. For example, when somebody signs up, you can send them an email 60 minutes later, then another one a day later. After they refer a friend, it automatically sends them a message. You have the referral program, which was huge for you and huge for us. It required basically like 1.5 to 2 people to run on our side.

Sam Parr

You didn't have an engineer, did you?

Shaan Puri

We didn't have an engineer because Beehive was out when we started The Milk Road. So, we just used Beehive. But half of these features didn't exist when we did The Milk Road. I remember when we were building it, we were like, "Hey, do you have this automation feature? Do you have analytics that will do this, this, and this? Do you have surveys or polls?" At the bottom of the email, we would always write, "How was it?" and it was 5 stars, 3 stars, or 1 star. We used that to basically give feedback to the writers on what worked and what didn't in each newsletter. We could actually measure the quality of the writing and the quality of the content. Now they have all those features. So, if you want to do a newsletter today, it's a no-brainer: use Beehive. It's beehive.com. The only downside is their name spelling is really hard, but everything else, once you get past the name, is gravy.

Sam Parr

Alright, let me tell you a quick story about someone who I spoke with the other day. It was kind of a life-changing conversation. So, for Hampton, we have this podcast called *Moneywise*, where we get people to come on and explain all their finances, whatever they...

Shaan Puri

Beans... about the beans. You know what I mean?

Sam Parr

Yeah, I'm stealing that one. Thank you, that one's now mine. They like to break down their whole portfolio. Whatever. But this woman I talked to, have you heard of this company called Solidcore?

Shaan Puri

No, I've been described as that.

Sam Parr

**Person, but never at the company level. I bet your wife has heard of it. Her name's Anne Maloom. So, Anne is probably 41 right now. Let me tell you her story because this was mind-boggling to me.** Anne started her career at the age of 25. She started a nonprofit because she was out on a run and ran by a homeless shelter. She thought, "You know, I would love to figure out a way to help these people." Running has helped her get over a lot of issues in her life. She decided to start a running club for these individuals. If she could encourage them to get up early at 7 AM to come to this run, maybe that would help them make the rest of their day better. Hopefully, they would get jobs, whatever. So, she starts this thing called "Back to My Feet," and it's a nonprofit that generates about $6,000,000 a year in revenue, primarily through corporate sponsors. She does that over the course of five years. At the age of 31, she goes to LA and takes a Pilates class. Have you ever seen a reformer Pilates? It's like this weird machine where it's kind of like yoga on a machine, sort of. I've heard...

Shaan Puri

It's... I've never done one, but I've heard it's incredibly challenging.

Sam Parr

It's awesome! They're really awesome. It's mostly what women do, but after talking to Anne, I'm actually going to start doing it because it sounds pretty great. She goes to this class and she's a pretty intense runner. I think she did weightlifting too, but she kind of got to the point where she was like, "I get hurt every six months. I just expect that that's part of the process of being an athlete." Then she starts doing these classes and she's like, "This is awesome!" The class was really cute and darling, and she was like, "I want to do this." Up until that point, she had saved $175,000. So, she moves back to her hometown of Washington, D.C., and she says, "I want to start a studio. I'm going to retire from my nonprofit." A lot of people called her crazy because they were like, "Why do you want to start a gym? Gyms suck; they're horrible businesses." But she was like, "No, no, no. We're going to do a studio business." So, she quits her job, I believe in August, and by November, she started her studio. She started with $175,000. She said she transferred her $175,000 in savings, put all of it into the business account, and spent basically all of it except for $10 over two months building up the studio. So, she launches it, and Solidcore is the name of the business. It's like that Pilates thing, but it kind of has a Barry's kind of edge to it, you know? Like Barry's Bootcamp, where it's kind of cool with all black letters.

Shaan Puri

The music is just like **40% too loud**.

Sam Parr

It's intense.

Shaan Puri

Like a nightclub.

Sam Parr

Yeah, yeah, it's like cool. She starts this thing and in month one, does $90,000 in revenue. The reason she started it was she was just doing the math. She's like, "Look, the way that this business can work is I have my Pilates instructor. I don't even need a front desk person. The front desk person doesn't need to be there because we have classes going throughout the day." If I have like 15 of these reformers and I do 8 classes a day, that adds up to $3,000 a day. I think I could fill this up 7 days a week and get the $90. And she does that in years.

Shaan Puri

Did she tell you how she did that? Kind of $90 month one. Was there like, how did she get the customers to come to this new place?

Sam Parr

Yeah, just like flyers and stuff. It was super grassroots. If you do the math, it wasn't that crazy. I think her math was something like, "I need 15 people in every class" or something like that, and it wasn't that crazy. She was also really good at branding. These women would go to these classes and say, "This is awesome! I'll see you guys next Tuesday." You know what I mean? They wanted to do it over and over again. So, in month one, it did $90,000 in revenue. She says that she kept growing it, and by year two, she was able to pay herself a $1,000,000 salary. She said, "This thing took off because my costs were so low." I basically just had to build out the studio, which wasn't terribly expensive, and I had to buy these reformers, which are like the machines. She said, "Our cost basis was awesome. We are a very efficient operation." So, by the year 2013, she launched it, and by year 2016, she had 11 studios. Still to this day...

Sam Parr

Has not taken any outside funding, keeps growing it. In 2020, shit happens where everything hits the fan. COVID happens, and they have to pause the whole business for a couple of years. However, leading up to that, she had taken a little bit of funding. Along the way, she had taken private equity where she took a little bit of money off the table. So, I think it was something like she was paying herself around $2,000,000 a year. But then she raised $18,000,000, of which $6,000,000 went to her. Then she raised another $20,000,000, and another $10,000,000 went to her. Finally, after 10 years, she eventually sold the whole business for something like $250,000,000. Across all of the rounds, she had taken off the table something like $90,000,000. This woman is crazy successful. However, the big takeaway that I had from this lady, Anne, is that I have never met someone with such a great growth mindset. Let me give you an example. After I sold my business, I was interested in real estate. I learned everything about real estate, or at least enough to feel confident investing in it. I started investing, and I got scared. I got really nervous. I thought, "Man, I just put down a lot of capital. This isn't exactly working like I thought it would." It's not always up and to the right, and I bailed. I've done this many times. Have you ever done this? You learn about something, like fitness, and you think, "If I do this for 6 months..." but then you're in month 1, and you're like, "This is never going to work." She did not have that. I've never met someone like her who trusted the process so much. She would tell people, like in year 2 or 3, "I'm building this business to sell, and we're going to do this. By year 5, we're going to be here. By year 8, we're going to be here. Year 10, I think we're going to get like $200,000,000." Here's an example of what she said: when she originally took out, she had saved $10,000,000. She bought a piece of land and developed a home in the Dominican Republic for like $4,000,000 in total. She sold that property after like 2 years to Albert Pujols for around $9,000,000. I was like, "That's crazy! You did half your net worth on this?" She's like, "Yeah, well, I just studied a bunch of experts, I read a ton of books, and I felt like I knew how to do it." I've never met someone who has such faith in the process, and I was so inspired by that. Now, she's got over $100,000,000 or around $100,000,000, and she's investing in all these interesting deals. She's like, "Yeah, well, you want to allocate 10% of your portfolio to this, this, and this because I need a little bit of high-risk stuff in order to off-balance my conservative stuff." That sounds very logical, and academically, it makes a ton of sense. But when 10% is $10,000,000 and you're doing $2,000,000 bets or whatever, that's a very nerve-wracking thing. But she was so good at dividing her emotion from her logic side of her brain and trusting the process. I was incredibly inspired by this woman. You have to follow some of the stuff that this lady has to say; she's so interesting.

Shaan Puri

Also, she looks very cool. She's got a cool haircut. She's like a walking brand.

Sam Parr

She will kick your ass is the vibe that I get from her. She's a very strong-looking woman.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, very cool. So, crazy story. I didn't realize how big this is. I mean, it's crazy that there's a fitness chain this big, this successful, that I just never heard of.

Sam Parr

Dude, it's even bigger now, by the way. I believe it was KKR, I think KKR bought it, and now there are rumors that they're going to try to sell it for **$800 million**. So her business... I guess it's not hers anymore. She sold it. In 2024, they projected to do $150 million in revenue and $50 million in profit. And Anne on the podcast, she was like, "I have the most profitable fitness studio because we... we just kept it lean. We just don't have too much excess stuff."

Shaan Puri

Well, it just seems like they must have figured something out on the marketing side. They're just not spending a lot on marketing, right? We should...

Sam Parr

We should.

Shaan Puri

Be like... and of course, the annoying answer everyone gives is, "Oh yes, it's got a lot of word-of-mouth." It's like, "Goddamn it!" Word-of-mouth is like the worst answer to hear because you're like, "Great, nothing I can do about that." Alright, I have to go back to the drawing board and create a more viral concept. I have to create a more remarkable concept. I have to make my product so much better. It's like the last thing you want to hear as a marketer is, "Yeah, it's just really organic." It's like saying, "I was genetically blessed." Unfortunately, that's how it feels to me, at least on the other side, whenever I hear that.

Sam Parr

Well, we don't talk too much about getting customers on the Moneywise podcast, but we should have her on here. I did, off air, ask her, "How did you do that?" She responded, "I am world-class at branding and community. That's what I do. I know how to do that; I was built to do that." She didn't tell me all the tactics, but I believe that's how it grew— that classic answer of word-of-mouth. We should actually have her on and ask her all about this. She's super fascinating. If you Google her name, you'll find that she's very transparent about finances because she believes young women aren't taught this. So, she's committed to being transparent about it. She's under-talked about; she's not discussed a lot.

Shaan Puri

I never heard of her. I never heard of Solid Course. I was super good, so I'm glad you put her on my radar. This is really cool. The question I have is, it seems like your takeaway was, "I've never seen somebody have so much..." What did you say? Like, so much faith? Or what did you call it? First, you said "growth mindset," then you said "trust the process." But okay, the business made $95,000 the first month. The process was trusted. What do you have to trust? It's working right away. To me, "trust the process" means it's not working, it's not working, it's not working, and then month 29, it finally turns the corner. That's "trust the process."

Sam Parr

But that's not how people truly feel in reality. So, like with my hustle, when we were doing over $1,000,000 a month, I still felt fairly uncertain. If you talk to... I mean, I talked to a lot of people. You could have a big business and you're still like... it's still teetering. I don't know if this is gonna work out, you know what I mean? You still have that feeling, but...

Shaan Puri

You still kept going. It's not like you abandoned ship, right? So I think it's pretty... even if you have doubts. Doubts, to me, of course, you're going to have random doubts that creep in or you're going to have some uncertainty. Will this work? If it starts working, will this last? Those are natural questions. I guess, like, I think a lot of what she did is awesome. In fact, the first thing you said about having a growth mindset made a lot of sense to me. She just had the confidence and faith in herself to go do something completely different. She put her entire life savings into it and trusted in herself that she would make this work. I think maybe that's more what you mean.

Sam Parr

No, I mean that. When I was asking her about new initiatives and things that she would get into, she said, "Well, I wanted to learn a little bit about stock investing." So, I started. I studied all the earnings per share and learned what all that meant. I bought Nvidia a while ago, and it worked out. What I mean is, she was quite good at acquiring information and then trusting that the information was good. She trusted that the way she learned was effective and that the process she learned about would give the outcome that hopefully she wanted.

Shaan Puri

Okay, that makes more sense to me. I like that. In fact, I had a kind of similar idea. So, I'm writing this essay.

Sam Parr

By the way, you had this in one of your emails. Your... what's it called? Tuesday after Tuesday? Yeah, where that guy Hoffman—his last name was Hoffman—said something like, "No good business is a good business," or what did he say?

Shaan Puri

Orin Hoffman, yeah, he basically was like, "I forgot the exact wording of the tweet, but it was: every business looks like a shit show on the inside, the successful ones and the unsuccessful ones." Right when you...

Sam Parr

I think he said, "There's no such thing as good business on the inside."

Shaan Puri

Yeah, every business looks incredibly messy and like it's upside down on the inside. I found that to be true, at least in my experience. I've never been a part of a company where I'm like, "Wow, it feels buttoned up. It feels figured out. It feels like this is just firing on all cylinders. This is just a well-oiled machine." You didn't feel that.

Sam Parr

That way with Twitch.

Shaan Puri

Dude, no. Twitch was... Twitch. Honestly, this is going to sound a little bit bad, but you know when Twitter started getting big and Zuck came out? It was a little bit of jealousy or haterade. But he was like, "They drove a clown car into a gold mine." That was Twitch.

Sam Parr

Wait, Zuck said that?

Shaan Puri

Yeah, he never heard this.

Sam Parr

No, that's awesome.

Shaan Puri

It's one of the first non-politically correct things he ever said, which is just the honest thing: these guys drove a clown car into a gold mine. Twitch was very much the same way. Twitch could get a hundred things wrong internally, but it didn't matter because they had a network effect. They had a moat, and basically, once you build a marketplace, once you get a marketplace to work, you can now screw up so many things. They just got more popular as gaming grew. I would see just bullshit going on internally—wasted efforts here, wasted efforts there, bad strategy here. Then COVID happens, and everybody's at home playing video games online. Boom! Business takes off. We were trying this thing to create growth, trying that to create growth, but nothing was even working. Nobody had any clue how to grow this thing. Fortnite becomes the biggest game in the world, played by everybody, and Twitch grows like crazy on top of Fortnite. What Emmett and the team had done early on, they got right. Even then, I'm sure many things felt broken or unfigured out at that time, but they got the core thing right: they created the biggest marketplace of supply and demand for content creators of video gaming content and consumers. That gave them the privilege, the right, to be wrong. They got to fire so many shots on goal after that that didn't even have to work out or be well executed. The more popular gaming got, the more people were online, streaming, and being content creators, the bigger Twitch got. The analogy we used internally was: we don't create the waves. Every time somebody did the growth analysis, it was clear that all the things that caused growth were exogenous factors. It wasn't some feature we created that drove growth necessarily; it was the popularity of a specific game, or a new device being released, or the new PlayStation driving a big boost in whatever, or the new gaming PCs, or the chips getting better, which made it easier to stream while you're playing because the graphics cards could now handle both. There were always these exogenous things. The analogy we used internally was: we are the surfer. We are out there paddling, waiting for waves. When the wave comes, it's our job to be ready to surf it and not wipe out. But let's be clear: we don't create the waves. Internally, we all wanted to create the wave because you want growth to be a button you can push, but in that business, that's just not how it worked. By the way, a Twitch diehard person would totally disagree. I'm sure they would be shaking their fist, saying, "No, no, no! We were great internally! We improved the conversion rate, the discovery rate, and the retention rates, and that all caused growth." So there is a counterargument to it, but I think on the whole, I know what I saw. I know what was going on inside of there. It's not like I thought I would find. I thought I would go from my messy startup, where I'm an idiot and I created a huge mess over here, and I got 20 people and I don't know how to do anything. I thought, "Oh, I'm going to go to this company that got bought by Amazon. It's a multibillion-dollar company with seasoned executives. Now I'll go learn how a business is supposed to look on the inside." Instead, I was like, "Man, this is not it."

Sam Parr

We're on a tangent. What were you originally going to say? Do you remember?

Shaan Puri

Oh, I'm writing this essay called "Who's Your Elon?" I wrote this because I have this philosophy that you are what you admire. So pick and choose what you admire carefully, because your body will start to gravitate towards that. I think as founders, the default... the factory setting that you get wired with when you decide "I'm gonna be a founder" is: cool, then you should want to be Elon Musk or Steve Jobs, right? Those are the North Star. Would you agree? For most people, it's just the default factory setting for entrepreneurs.

Sam Parr

Yeah, and before Elon, it was Zuck.

Shaan Puri

And before Zuck, it was Steve Jobs. Before Steve Jobs, it was Bill Gates or whatever. That's kind of like the transition here. So, Elon today, he's the GOAT. It makes sense; he's built badass companies that change the world: Tesla, SpaceX, PayPal, OpenAI. He even actually helped create [something]. He's the richest entrepreneur in the world and the most famous entrepreneur in the world. He seems like a badass because he goes after these hard problems in big markets. He's just doing cool stuff: electric cars, launching rockets that will land themselves on a tiny boat in the middle of the ocean. Like, he's incredible.

Sam Parr

Convincing dozens of women to have his children.

Shaan Puri

And then convincing the rest of the public that it was cool that he was just doing his part to save civilization instead of, like, just impregnating everybody around him. So, he's incredible, but also I don't want to be him, right? Because, like, his family life is a mess. He seems super stressed. His schedule is not the schedule I would want. If you want those trade-offs, great, more power to you. It's not the trade-offs I would choose. And so, I think...

Sam Parr

It is, you see, when he tweeted out where Zuck was doing like the surfing thing on the 4th of July. Yeah, Eli was like, "That's cute, I'm busy working."

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I prefer that. He could have his parties on his yachts; I prefer to work.

Sam Parr

Oh my god.

Shaan Puri

That was the lamest shit I ever heard. Also, somebody replied with a great tweet. They posted the analytics of how many tweets and likes he had done that month, and it's like, "I prefer to work." He tweeted it like a thousand times that month. It's like, "Bro, you're not working." Anyways, I think that Elon is great in many ways. If he's your north star, more power to you. But if he's not, it's important to pick who your north star is. I guess you were talking about this woman and how we kind of admire that she was able to just fearlessly go in and learn new things. She had the confidence to learn just enough to be dangerous but also move on and have multiple chapters in her life. I realized that that was my answer: someone who's more of a polymath. Somebody who walks into Disneyland and says, "I want to ride all the rides." They don't spend all their time just perfecting one ride. They're like, "I only have a certain amount of time on this earth. I want to go ride all the rides."

Sam Parr

Who are examples for you?

Shaan Puri

So, like, the historical example is Benjamin Franklin. He had a scientific era where he invented things like bifocals and the Franklin stove. Then, he created the best newsletter of its time; he invented a newspaper called the Pennsylvania Gazette. He was also a Founding Father, involved in politics, and helped write the Constitution.

Sam Parr

And then he convinced many women to have his babies.

Shaan Puri

Of course, that's a prerequisite. He then was the CEO of the U.S. Postal System for a [period] of time. And then in music, he invented like a musical instrument. He influenced many people; Mozart and Beethoven said that Ben Franklin influenced them.

Sam Parr

No way.

Shaan Puri

What a guy, right? Like, what a... what a fucking legend! So I hear that, and I'm like, "Dude, that sounds epic!" If I could think of what the top of the top looks like, that's really cool. There are some modern-day examples. We had Jesse Itzler on the podcast. When you watch Jesse's episode, I don't know what episode number it is, but just go on YouTube and write "Jesse Itzler My Fish Million." This is a guy who was like, "I'm gonna be a rapper." He's a white Jewish rapper, and then he becomes a corporate jingle writer. After that, he's an entrepreneur who creates a coconut water brand and a private jet brand. Then he's like, "Fuck it! I'm gonna get really into health and fitness and running," and he becomes an endurance athlete. He lives in a monastery with monks, has David Goggins come live in his house, writes books, and marries Sara Blakely. He has four or five kids and seems like a good dad. When I called him to prep for the pod, he was like, you know, wrangling and herding sheep, trying to get to the soccer game or soccer practice that day. I just find that really interesting—people who have had these multiple different arts and careers in different zones and genres. There's a guy, Neil Santuria, who I really admire. He's in San Diego.

Sam Parr

How do you spell his name?

Shaan Puri

Neil, and then Centuria, is spelled C-E-N-T-U-R-I-A. He's got a great book that is not popular, but I met him and he gave me a copy of his book. It's called "I'm There for You, Baby." You know, Neil's story is interesting. He was a Hollywood scriptwriter, and then, to try to make a buck, he thought, "Dude, San Diego's booming." He got into the real estate development game and helped fund and build a skyscraper in downtown San Diego. Then, he met a kid in an elevator who had a good startup idea, and he invested in it. That idea became Chegg. After that, he started a dozen companies. Some of them worked, some of them didn't. Some were in biotech, some were in consumer goods; he started a whole bunch of different things. He's also into art. You know, he's got multiple chapters in his life. When I met him, we went to his house, and he said, "Oh yeah, I'm writing this book now about this woman who created the biggest Ponzi scheme. I think this should become a movie." This guy is in his seventies, and he says he's still going. He's still got ideas, energy, and a zest for life. He doesn't count himself out of any pursuit. I think I like that. I like people who don't count themselves out, who don't feel like, "I can't do it because I haven't done it." That limiting belief is just one I don't want in my life.

Sam Parr

If you Google this guy, there's not a lot of news or information about him, but there is a San Diego Tribune article. Its title is "Why Having Fun is Good for the Soul." Yeah, it's about him.

Shaan Puri

I'm down with that.

Sam Parr

I'm down with that. I'm very down with that. Have you seen the Ben Franklin TV show on Apple?

Shaan Puri

You know, I watched the trailer of it, and then I just didn't feel it hooked. Is it good? Should I watch it?

Sam Parr

If you're a history nerd, it's awesome. Oh, okay, but he just... *freaking* partied. He was like, just like they're trying to convince the French to join the American Revolution. Do you know that scene in *The Office* where Michael Scott and Jan go to this dinner at like an Applebee's to convince that man to do their business? Jan wants to get down to business, and Michael just talks.

Shaan Puri

For like 2 hours, right?

Sam Parr

Yeah, he's like, "Hey, you guys wanna get some baby back ribs?" Then he starts singing the baby back ribs song. They all get drunk and he's partying. At the end, he does the deal and Michael's like, "I fucking told you, Jan, this is how it works."

Shaan Puri

That's.

Sam Parr

That's what Ben Franklin did. He basically went over there with James Madison. James is all buttoned up, and they're like, "Let's do our thing." But he's like, "No dude, we're gonna party! Let's go to the parties." They get wasted, and there are scenes where he and other diplomats are like, pissing together at a party. While they're peeing, he's like, "Hey, so the American Revolution, you know, we could use your help." It's things like that that show he was a pretty smooth dude, and it's pretty awesome. It's a great show. All I thought about his biography by Walter Isaacson is that I thought it *sucked*. I'm one of the few people that thought it would suck; it sucked. But his autobiography is pretty good. But yeah, Ben Franklin's alright.

Shaan Puri

He's the man. Okay, what else we got?

Sam Parr

I'll do one more quick thing. This is just a quick, funny thing. I don't even want to say it's funny; it's interesting. So, **Rejuvenation Olympics**—do you remember when we talked about that?

Shaan Puri

Is that the steroids allowed in the Olympics? That one?

Sam Parr

That's the enhanced games, which is also...

Shaan Puri

Got it mixed up.

Sam Parr

Which is...

Shaan Puri

The... oh no, this is for freezers. This is the reverse aging Brian Johnson thing.

Sam Parr

Yeah, so the leaderboard... We originally found Brian. I take pride in that; I've said that many times. We kind of got in on a couple of people early. Brian's one of them.

Shaan Puri

Dude, you keep saying it, and it actually destroys the value that we had in finding them early. It's kind of like Jason Calacanis, the third investor in Uber. It would have been cool if someone else said, "You know, Jason was actually the third investor in Uber." But when Jason says, "You know, as the third investor in Uber," a thousand times, it's like, "Dude, we get it." Now you're overcompensating. I think that's what's happening here with "we discovered Brian Johnson."

Sam Parr

Look, I don't have that many discoveries, so I feel good about this particular one. But Brian Johnson, we talked about him a bunch of times. We had him on the podcast. He's a really interesting guy. Originally, when we talked to him, we brought up the Rejuvenation Olympics. We discussed it, and this website was super janky. Now, if you go to it, it's much better. It still honestly sucks. I just DM'd them and I'm like, "Dude, your website... I don't know how to use it," but it's a lot better than before. The Rejuvenation Olympics is this leaderboard. Before, he didn't have a partnership, but he would say, "Go and buy this $800 blood work and upload your results here." If you do it three times, we take the average and we're going to create this thing called the Rejuvenation Olympics, where they use this one blood work to decide how slow you're aging. So, the people who are aging the slowest, based off this—I think it's True Diagnostics—based on their test, they have this thing called a Dune Pace Score, and it measures...

Shaan Puri

Let's explain the simple concept: Normally, you would expect that in 1 year of chronological time, you would age 1 year of biological time. The idea with the Rejuvenation Olympics is this: In 1 year of chronological time (one calendar year), can you age less than 1 year biologically? Can your body accumulate less than 1 year of cell damage, basically? Yeah, and the top guy here... his average pace is 0.56. So every year, he's only aging half a year biologically.

Sam Parr

Yeah, and so it's like an interesting thing. It's actually a super interesting business for a few reasons. One, he actually has a partnership with True Diagnostics. But in order to be verified on RejuvenationOlympics.com, you have to take the average of three tests. Each test is very expensive. Then, in order to stay on the leaderboard, you have to continue doing averages. So, you have to do this freaking test every quarter. The expenses actually add up.

Shaan Puri

**But true diagnostics: $500. Living forever: priceless.**

Sam Parr

Well, it definitely has a price. If you look at some of these guys, I got curious and went through the list of the people who are top in the rejuvenation Olympics. Most of them are like... you'll see, like, what's that dude's name? Peter Diamandis or whatever. Do you remember? Like, rich guy Brian Johnson is near the top. It's all like these healthy people or healthy rich people who are spending a lot of money. Or it's like a biohacker—someone whose job is to do this stuff. They blog about it and make money doing it.

Shaan Puri

I was gonna say this right now, Brian: I love you, but I will not use this website until you link their names to an Instagram. This website is useless to me unless Craig McCall is included. I need to be able to click and go see who this guy is. I can't use the site until that happens. That is your only feature I need.

Sam Parr

We are on the same page, my friend. If you look at the Instagram of the link, there's a woman named Julia Gibson Clark. Roughly 8,000 people have done this test, and at the time when I was doing research... if you go to "View All Rankings," let's see, is she still up top?

Shaan Puri

She's in the top 8.

Sam Parr

Yeah, okay, so she's...

Shaan Puri

Number 2

Sam Parr

I did research on this woman. She's just a lady who's fit, and someone else picked up on this and said, "Who's this Julie Gibson Clark woman?" They did an article about her. She's like, "I make $100 a year. I exercise five days a week, but I just eat vegetables. Sometimes, I'll go for a walk or a run. I just live a decently healthy lifestyle." She's number 6 or number 7 on this list, and I thought it was awesome that this 57-year-old woman, who isn't a very wealthy person and isn't a professional at doing all this stuff, is just living a pretty well-balanced life. She's number 7, and she's kicking ass. If you click on some of the photos, she's a very attractive woman. She looks healthy and doesn't appear to have any plastic surgery. She makes $100 a year, eats vegetables for snacks, so instead of eating potato chips, she'll just eat carrot sticks. She takes a couple of vitamins in the morning, and that's basically it. She lifts weights twice a week, goes for runs twice a week, and on the other days, she's just walking a lot. Right? And she's killing it.

Shaan Puri

By the way, I have to apologize to everybody. I did an interview with Bryte Johnson probably like a year ago now. I don't know how long it's been; it's been like 6 months or maybe a year. I went to his house and did a 3-hour interview with him. We had a professional cameraman; it was great! I was so excited about it. We came back, and I started editing. I did a bunch of interviews in LA and started editing them one by one. I edited 5 of them, and we released them. The Brian Johnson one was kind of like my finale, and I was so excited about it. But I was also like, it's kind of higher stakes. Higher stakes almost because I thought it could be great, but it would require more time and patience in the edit, partly because of the way we filmed it with multiple cameras and whatnot. I put it off, got busy, and started doing other things. Then I just didn't do it; I didn't release the episode. So, earlier this week, I asked Diego. I said, "Diego, it is now out of my hands. I'm giving you this episode; you are going to edit this, and we're going to release this. Even though it's been a year, better late than never."

Sam Parr

And I said, "It doesn't matter if it's a year away."

Shaan Puri

I have been the blocker of this because I initially was a perfectionist about it, which is weird because I'm never a perfectionist. I just really wanted it to be good. Then later, I was like, "Well, now it's been 7 months. Some of the stunning things he's talking about don't even make sense anymore." But whatever, I'm going to... I told him, "You don't have to ask me about it. Just edit it and make it good, and then we're going to release it." So I will right my wrong, and better late than never, here.

Sam Parr

Dude, no one would care or know that it's a year old, right?

Shaan Puri

Well, there are some things he says. If a baby is like, "Oh, we're going to launch this," and it's like, "It's actually been launched now," or whatever, like, you know, a year later. He’s reversed age; he looks younger now. So, you know, he might throw people off.

Sam Parr

Would you want to look like him?

Shaan Puri

Would I want to look like him? Yeah.

Sam Parr

I want shredded.

Shaan Puri

Like when you say "exactly like him," I don't look like me anymore, or just like my body.

Sam Parr

Your body.

Shaan Puri

Oh, hell yeah, dude! All he needs is a tan.

Sam Parr

He looks so shredded that he's...

Shaan Puri

Got an insane body. He just needs a tan. But actually, it's smart that he doesn't do the tan because, like, what I've realized is that Brian Johnson is a marketing genius. No kidding! Whoever he's hired to run his Twitter account, which I don't think is him, because his personality is... he's a really nice guy, but he's not like super... he's not like super memey. But his Twitter game is now really good and smart, and like, memes. Well, I think he hired a meme dealer, and he's got somebody doing his Twitter because it's very smart what he's doing.

Sam Parr

No, he seems like a guy who could study it and implement it.

Shaan Puri

And by the way, I'll put one thing on the ground. I might be fooled by this, who knows? But there's a lot of people who are like, "Oh, he's just doing this to make money." No, no, no. He made a lot of money. I believe he did this because it gave his life purpose after he'd already made a bunch of money.

Sam Parr

I agree.

Shaan Puri

And it gave him a purpose, a higher mission, a more ambitious thing to do. He got really into it, and I think he's 100% genuine. Even if he releases products that are associated with it, I think it's only to help this cause. I'm normally very skeptical. When most people do things and they say they're mission-driven, I'm like, "Cool, is mission code for money-driven? What are you talking about here?" In this case, I actually think Brian Johnson is one of the few truly mission-driven people. I think a lot of people, the more popular he gets, will want to tear him down. I'm just going to put out my position, which is I believe that he is super genuine about everything that he's doing. I mean, I believe he's genuine in his intent, and I believe he is actually mission-driven when he's doing this. That's why anyone doubts that. Oh, there are a lot of people who are like, you know, he named his olive oil "snake oil" because so many people were calling him a snake oil salesman. They're like, "Oh, you're just trying to sell us supplements and pills and blah, blah, blah." You know, the one thing I think that might happen is I don't think he... I think he might be more experimental in everything that he's doing and not publish everything. I don't have any reason to say that; I just wouldn't be surprised if that was true. I think he's truly going to be on the cutting edge, and also there's some responsibility in what you put out there to others. Maybe he waits until something is proven to be effective or safe before he tells people he's been experimenting with it. I think that might be true.

Sam Parr

I just think that you have to be really rich to tweet out how many boners you're getting in the middle of the night. He does this whole experiment where he's trying to improve how many erections he gets in the middle of the night.

Shaan Puri

And he's like, "The only wearable worth wearing." Have you seen the wearable? It's like a ring.

Sam Parr

It's.

Shaan Puri

Like a little Fitbit, that's how they measure. Because that was my question when he started putting in the data. I was like, "Is there someone watching? How do you know? Well, how are you measuring this?" And then he showed the device.

Sam Parr

It's like a little rubber band around a stack of dimes.

Shaan Puri

Exactly! We're like, "That's cool, but why is it so big? I don't think I'm going to need all that."

Sam Parr

Yeah, is this for... is this a...?

Shaan Puri

How does this bracelet work when you measure it on my wrist?

Sam Parr

Well, if you made it this far, you've got one of our rare dick jokes. Alright, is that it? That's a pod.

Shaan Puri

That's it.

Sam Parr

Alright, alright.