These Are Some Of Silicon Valley's Craziest Startup Scams

Sam Parr

Alright what's going on

Shaan Puri

well besides massive technical difficulties nothing I'm good

Sam Parr

alright sean's recording on 1 airpod today because we're having mic problems

Shaan Puri

Yeah, there's no... you know, that's a man's last stand when he's down to his last AirPod. It's like, remember the Alamo? What's going on right now in my ears?

Sam Parr

I'm out here at Marathon Ranch, my ranch. How does this angle here look? This looks good, right?

Shaan Puri

That looks good! I really like how much you're trying to brand this as **Marathon Ranch** rather than just saying, "I'm at my house. I have my ranch, my ranch house."

Sam Parr

I have... if people like this, they can go to MarathonRanch.com. It's not set up now, but I'll do it. If you go to Marathon Ranch, it'll auto-direct to the Airbnb listing. I got my first guest; they left the other day.

Shaan Puri

did you like spruce it up for them and like kind of give them the 5 star treatment

Sam Parr

I didn't but someone did yeah

Shaan Puri

oh okay alright that should be good

Sam Parr

Do you want to... can I get into a story that interests me a ton? I think you might know more information about it than is public, but maybe not.

Shaan Puri

okay go for it

Sam Parr

Alright, so I gotta give a shout out to Haley at Rock Health. I saw this on her Twitter. It's about a company called uBiome, which you probably know a little bit about at a high level because it was in the press for kind of being like a Theranos-type of thing. But I actually learned a little bit more information about it, and this story is way underplayed. So check this out: uBiome was founded by this woman named Jessica Richman and Zach Apte, who are the founders. Basically, what it was is they measured different parts of your body to tell you all about your gut and your biome and things like that. In other words, they basically measure your poop. So you poop at home, I think you could swab your vagina, you could poop, and then maybe swab your cheek, and then you mail it in. It tells you all about...

Shaan Puri

your mic did you choose

Sam Parr

that's funny got

Shaan Puri

a I could do that

Sam Parr

that's the worst

Shaan Puri

1 airpod but I still got it

Sam Parr

So, anyway, you could swap whatever you wanted, and they would mail it in. It tells you all about your biome, which I'm not sure what that tells you, but it's supposed to be really important. When they kicked things off, they did a crowdfunding campaign and raised $300,000. They were also backed by Y Combinator, which is a big deal. Then, they raised over $100,000,000 from a bunch of people, including Andreessen Horowitz—so, tier 1 investors. This woman who started it, Jessica, is a young woman in the tech medical space, and she's under 30. She wins Forbes' 30 Under 30. You see her all over conferences. If you Google her name, some of the first pictures you'll see are of her on the TED stage speaking at conferences, etc. But once they start getting a little bit popular, people begin to question, "Is this really right?" The first thing is that a lot of experts in the space say something like, "You know, the way they're tracking and storing your data is a pretty big deal. We know all about your gut health, and there's a lot of identifying information there. The way you're storing that isn't really good." Second of all, we've been trying to crack this whole thing where you can just swab your cheek or your poop or whatever, mail it in, and get all these results. We've been trying to do that, and it's really challenging. I don't know how you guys are doing it. Then, about two years after they started—I think they started the company in 2016 or so, but 2017 is when they got all this press. Around 2017, an article comes out that turns out Jessica completely lied about her age. So, if you scroll down, Sean, in the document, I have her picture that she actually had in Forbes. What does she look like to you?

Shaan Puri

I would have said like mid-thirties if I looked at this picture, but 33, 34, or 35, something like that.

Sam Parr

In that picture, she's like 42. So when she won the Forbes 30 Under 30, she was actually 42, which is crazy. Once people find out about that, they realize, "Look, what else is there a lie about? What else are they lying about?" It turns out that they were billing patients without their consent. This meant doctors would order these kits after being pressured by the company. They would charge the doctors, who would pay them $3,000, and then they would do a recurring charge. So they kept charging the doctors, which then Medicare, Medicaid, or whatever it is, were footing the bill. In 2019, this is where you probably know the story a little bit. The FBI raided their offices, and basically weeks later, the whole company shut down. She goes to court, and there's like a 33-page indictment that says the founders committed tons of federal crimes, including conspiracy to commit securities fraud, conspiracy to commit healthcare fraud, and money laundering. By the way, at this point, they had taken $12,000,000 worth of shares off the table, which went straight to their pockets from the $100,000,000 that they raised. They went to trial and were found guilty, so they went to jail. But it turns out Jessica marries her co-founder, who's a German national, and they flee to Germany.

Sam Parr

People can't really find out where they are. Because of the way that the law works, it's not really easy to extradite them back to America. As of now, they basically have gotten away with it. You know, their reputation is ruined, but they're not going to face up to 95 years in prison. They've totally gotten away with it. This story, until I saw this tweet, I remembered it, but it's totally been downplayed. This woman and her partner have totally gotten away with it so far.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, they're at Oktoberfest right now having a great time. Well, you know, there's some guy in jail listening to this podcast. He's there for 15 years because he sold like 1.1 grams of weed, and he's like...

Sam Parr

he's like making wine in his toilet yeah

Shaan Puri

Exactly. God is making toilet wine. He's sitting in jail right now, serving a double life sentence. And these guys are at Oktoberfest right now after defrauding the public, the patients, the medical system, and then running away from the country. That's pretty much what happened here.

Sam Parr

it's a pretty crazy story and

Shaan Puri

I remember when this happened. I knew somebody who was working there, or maybe he had worked there. He was like, "This ain't right," and he kind of left really quickly. I remember because their office was, I think, in San Francisco, and it just got raided and shut down all in one day. This was a kind of hyped startup that was a Y Combinator-backed biotech company, you know, "gonna save lives" type of startup. And then, all of a sudden, poof! Gone.

Sam Parr

Yeah, and we didn't talk about it. You know, it kind of disappeared for the last two years during the pandemic. But I was researching it, and it's just pretty amazing. Then there's this other part, which is the lawyers who are representing America. They're like, "Hey, you guys gotta come back here." They're saying she can't travel because of some unnamed health condition. So they have all these excuses as to why they can't come back to America as of now.

Shaan Puri

bullshititis

Sam Parr

Yeah, I wonder if you could find that out in her poop. As of now, they've won.

Shaan Puri

Wow, that's kind of amazing. Pretty good timing for them with this whole pandemic thing, you know? Then there's Theranos and just like higher profile frauds that came out shortly after, like the one we were talking about. But like crypto... like money laundering, husband and wife. Yeah, yeah, the guy you knew, you had met. They're like the just the flashier version of these guys. And so somehow, this happened.

Sam Parr

it's it's kind of a

Shaan Puri

I've been going down a rabbit hole of these recently. I watched this documentary on Netflix the other day. Have you seen it? It's called "Trust No One" or "Someone's Telling the Truth." I think that's what it's called. It's about the crypto exchange. Did you see this on Netflix?

Sam Parr

but there's like one on enron and there's one on other things or is this just on crypto

Shaan Puri

no no no no this is like just their movie

Sam Parr

we got it

Shaan Puri

So basically, this is a crazy story. Dude, check this out! It's a great movie, by the way. If you want to watch the movie, you probably want to skip some of this because it's a spoiler. But I'm just going to say it because I'm not going to save this movie for whoever else. Alright, so basically back in like 2013, 2014, 2015, this guy in Canada creates a cryptocurrency. He's interested in Bitcoin, which was pretty new at the time. It had its first run-up where it hit $1,000 and stuff like that. This guy creates an exchange in Canada because he thinks, "Oh, it's really hard to buy cryptocurrency in Canada." So he creates this exchange called Quadriga, or QuadrigaCX. Quadriga becomes the largest exchange in Canada. The guy is like... Ben, pull this guy up on the screen share thing so Sam can see it. But basically, he's this blonde-haired, kind of nerdy-looking guy. In fact, he does these interviews, and they're like, "Are we talking to the next Mark Zuckerberg?" And he's like, "Well, you know, I don't know about that, but we do want to make a positive impact in the world." So he's just this soft-spoken, nerdy guy, and he's the founder of this thing. And whatever, Bitcoin keeps growing in value, and then other currencies...

Sam Parr

come out

Shaan Puri

yeah this is the guy

Sam Parr

Yeah, dude, he looks like Butters from *South Park* and he talks like him too, according to your impression.

Shaan Puri

My impression, by the way, sounds better. Like the guy that was, you know, I just made one up there. So, anyway, all of a sudden, one day, people go to Quadriga.com or whatever, and the website is gone. It's just like a 404 page. Oh, Quadriga must be down.

Sam Parr

is it

Shaan Puri

Just me, you know, it seems like everyone's having this issue. Alright, is it just down or is it gone? The website is gone. Where did the website go? Where did the exchange go? Where is my money? All of a sudden, people realize that all of the customer funds are gone. $215,000,000 of crypto is like not accounted for. This is before the run-up. Right now, this would be like $1,000,000,000 worth of that same crypto. But at the time, this is, you know, 2016, 2017, 2018, something like that. You know, crypto wasn't as... you know, Bitcoin was much, much lower back then. So everyone's like, "What the hell happened?" Then news comes out: the founder of Quadriga died suddenly on a trip in India, and he had the private keys to the crypto. He died, and no one else knew the keys. The crypto is now inaccessible.

Sam Parr

I remember this this happened maybe 3 years ago right

Shaan Puri

And so, yeah, exactly. People are like, "What the fuck?" A bunch of customers are saying, "Dude, I had $10,000, or I had $100,000, or I had $1,000,000 there," and people are pissed. So they get in a Telegram group and they're like, "Oh my god, I hope they're going to be able to recover this." Then, kind of like a day goes by and nothing comes out. The wife's estate posts on Facebook, saying, "You know, my husband has died suddenly on this trip to India. Unfortunately, we lost the keys." There's Jennifer Robertson, the executor of the estate or something like that. They go, "That was his wife. That's how she signed it." People were like, "That's a really weird message. He died a month ago and they just posted this now. Where the fuck's the money?" This is the number one exchange in Canada, and it was just one guy who had all the private keys. That seems so weird. So they start to say, "How do we know he's dead? How do we know he didn't just pull off what's called an exit scam in crypto?"

Sam Parr

yeah roll up that body

Shaan Puri

Yeah, exactly. And so literally, that's what they do. They get in a Telegram group together, all these customers, and they start basically crowdsourcing the investigation. First, they report to the authorities. The authorities do nothing. They're just like, "Hey, you know, we can't really... you know, cryptocurrency has all kinds of risks. We don't want to know what..."

Sam Parr

to do where was he buried

Shaan Puri

So, he dies in India, and they basically come back and have a funeral here. They ask, "Was anybody at the funeral?" and then they get in touch with the wife's sister. They inquire, "Was the funeral casket open or closed?" and she replies, "Closed casket." Then, people just start getting enraged.

Sam Parr

what what what was he what did he die from

Shaan Puri

He died from Crohn's disease. They were like, "Oh, he had a sudden gastro complication from somebody with Crohn's disease." And people are like, "Dude, I'm looking at this. You don't die of Crohn's disease." It's just very, very rare to suddenly die from it.

Sam Parr

did they call the hospital where he went to

Shaan Puri

So then, they contacted the local journalist. They sent somebody out to India to go find this. It's like a needle in a haystack. It's like, "Oh, is there a white man who had diarrhea in India?" It's like, "Yeah, all white people in India have diarrhea, dude."

Sam Parr

like you

Shaan Puri

know how are you gonna find this guy

Sam Parr

Everyone gets number 3 when they go there. Exactly, he's going to die to number 3. And so they...

Shaan Puri

but they eventually find the doctor they go to the doctor and they're like hey do you we we heard there's a there's a death certificate for somebody who who died here but like there's a so they're like there is a death certificate okay so you think he died then people are like dude you can fake death certificates like you can pay there's a black market for death certificates and so they're like talking about that then they're like alright they go find the doctor they asked the doctor the doctor's like yes I remember it guy came in was having like you know upset stomach we kept him here overnight for fluids and then he suddenly like had a heart attack and died like kinda like he let you know he suddenly got much worse than he died and they were like okay was there an autopsy he's like no there was no autopsy done they're like that's weird why was there no autopsy done and like so there's there's still like a? But you know the journalist comes back says look there's no reason to believe that he's not dead like you know this is what happened and so there's and there's rumors that he went and got plastic surgery changed his face and he's living somewhere in the bermuda triangle somewhere there's some random rumors like that and there's like all these people trying to like crowdsource this and they're like wait a minute the wife like the wife got like $12,000,000 of real estate they start looking into the wife and they're like how come her name is what it is like how come she doesn't have her last name how come there's no record of her name before this oh she changed her name recently she's changed her name three times in the last year why did she go from you know whatever aaron griffith to aaron jacobs to aaron robertson like that doesn't make sense and like then they find that like the ex husband somebody with the same last name griffith or whatever like died also of mysterious causes in canada they're like did she poison him and they're like what's going on and so nobody knows what actually went down but this and then there's like but because it's crypto it's all on the all the transaction of the blockchain so right so the whole time I'm watching this movie I'm like wait a minute but like if the guy is alive and he's trying to steal the money you'll see the money moving if the money's moving somebody has the keys and like what ended up happening was actually that the guy oh there's even more to the story so they go look into this guy they're like all right who is this guy and they find like an like you know the same way the silk road guy got caught they find an early like record or mention of the name on this like black hat hacker forum so they go to this black hat forum which is where hackers hang out black hat means you sort of do the like there's white hat which is like you find bugs you tell the company there's gray hat which is like you find an exploit you kinda use it but it's not illegal and black hat's like straight up illegal and they find this guy under this name like scepter or something like that on this black hat forum and he had been running multiple scams and they linked this founder that that guy I showed you butters they show they linked him to this guy scepter because he has the same name like they they found his his email address in the forum and his official name because he had like ordered some product to put in his name and address and it was like his actual full name and that and so they like figured out that he is scepter he he was a he was a scammer and then they find one key thing which is that some the the the blockchain forensics guy basically is like oh you know like these cases you sort of hit a dead end and it can be like that for years but then there's one bit of information that comes out that just cracks the case he's like that's what happened we got one bit of information about this scepter guy that went that cracked the case because then we found a a user on the network called scepter we noticed that he basically what was happening was a customer would come to cardigro they would buy bitcoin and he would just in the database send them bitcoin like send them quote unquote bitcoin into their account but there was no actual bitcoin he was just like funding their account with a a a fake amount of bitcoin that wasn't actually on the bitcoin blockchain and he would just take their money he would go go to other exchanges and actually buy bitcoin with it and like he he so he was funneling money himself so the whole time these users thought they had crypto in their account but they never did

Sam Parr

so where is the money now

Shaan Puri

Every crypto person's worst nightmare. Well, so that's what I'm saying. It's not that the site went down and they lost the keys to one wallet that had $200,000,000 in it.

Sam Parr

it's that it was actually there

Shaan Puri

the whole time it it was never there there was no wallet there there was no there ever

Sam Parr

was a one time wallet if you could always track it so where is it now

Shaan Puri

So, though that money, every time it cost... imagine basically it wasn't ever one bit of money. It's like every time a customer bought, he would go make a small transaction on one of ten exchanges. You don't know who's doing that because it's all under different account names and stuff like that. So basically, he laundered the money very effectively during that. All that money is gone, and so this is a crazy movie.

Sam Parr

what do you think happened is he alive or did the wife kill him

Shaan Puri

So, oh well, the other crazy part is back in that black hat forum. He had partnered up with, or he had reached out to, this other guy, Michael Patron. Michael Patron was another guy on the black hat forum, another scammer. They had built, they had launched, they had co-founded it together, actually, Quadriga. Then they got in a big disagreement, and Michael Patron left after, you know, some number of years. After that, it was just this dude doing it. So, one theory is that that guy killed him. Another theory is that the wife killed him. Another is that he killed himself because he thought he was going to get caught. Another theory is that he's alive. Nobody knows which of those it is.

Sam Parr

what do you think

Shaan Puri

I believe... I think the guy's alive based on the movie. Basically, they took the Indian doctor's word as, "Oh, I remember this guy coming in. Yep, he had complications, he died, we did no autopsy, and I remember it all." You know, I feel like they vastly underestimated the amount of corruption you can get in India for like $10. So, I think this guy is...

Sam Parr

probably alive just for the people listening for the people listening sean's indian

Shaan Puri

right yeah exactly

Sam Parr

so like let's say

Shaan Puri

for $10 I'll I'll say sam's dead

Sam Parr

So, dude, if you're... if you fake your own death, let's say you have $1,000,000,000, as low as $150,000,000, however much was sold, as high as $1,000,000,000. What's even the point of having that money if you're fake dead? Like, how do you ball out? How do you live? What's the point of it? And what did his mom and dad say?

Shaan Puri

most importantly how how ashamed of your parents

Sam Parr

well like did they were they devastated

Shaan Puri

Mom and Dad, they didn't talk to Mom and Dad. They talked to the wife's sister, and she was like, "You know, we now look like huge liars because at first we were like, she had nothing to do with this, and he was a good guy. He was so sweet, he was so romantic. Like, you know, he's not capable of crime. If he died, he died. You guys are horrible conspiracy theorists." Then it came out that, no, he clearly scammed. Now it's like, well, we were wrong about the first part, saying he didn't scam. So now nobody believes us that, A, she wasn't in on it, or B, that he's not dead, like that he's dead. So we kind of lost our credibility. We look like liars now just because we didn't really know.

Sam Parr

Here's what I've learned from studying conspiracy theories and watching like every episode of *Dateline* ever: people tend to be very bad at keeping secrets. If there are more than a couple of people involved, it typically comes out. Even if it's a long time, things come out. So whenever I hear these theories, I'm like, it could just be the simplest thing—that he did, in fact, die. It's really hard to keep that secret. Keeping that secret would be so challenging.

Shaan Puri

Right, yeah, I'm kind of with you. I think maybe it's possible he did suddenly die, or he got killed, you know? Like, one of those two. Or he committed suicide. Yeah, those are all possible. But man, dude, can you even put yourself in the mind of someone to execute on this elaborate scheme? You're literally just duping millions of customers simultaneously, sitting in your room on your laptop, just straight stealing from everybody. It's just a crazy level of, you know, like a sociopath to be able to do something like that. It's really wild to me.

Sam Parr

have you read about bernie madoff at all

Shaan Puri

no

Sam Parr

So basically, he... I can't think of a good analogy right now, but basically, yeah, he ran a Ponzi scheme. I think it was like $56 billion, but you and I were both too young to probably be watching the news when it happened. I think I was in high school or grade school, I don't remember. But anyway, he... it was like a $58 billion Ponzi scheme, and he had been running it for 40 years. The equivalent of it, I think, would almost be like, you know, Jamie Dimon at Morgan Stanley.

Shaan Puri

jpmorgan or whatever

Sam Parr

JPMorgan was like a figurehead because at one point, even when he got arrested, I believe Bernie Madoff was the chairman of either the NASDAQ or maybe he was chairman of the SEC. He was the chairman whose job it was to make sure that fraud didn't exist. When he got busted, it was for this massive fraud of like $58 billion. I think it was in the fifties of billions of dollars—just massive. He'd been doing this for 40 years. And they're like, "Why did you keep going?" He said, "Once I was in, I just couldn't back out. I was in."

Shaan Puri

So, dude, I guess I have another one—a more modern day, a current one of these that's unraveling as we speak. Did I... okay, so did I talk about this video of the CEO of Fast? I think I did way back in the day on the pod. Did I talk about this type of pay video?

Sam Parr

People were tweeting at us saying, "We called it," and I don't remember what we talked about with Fast. But basically, tell Fast.com it's a quick checkout. So, if you go to a website, I don't even know what websites, like Honest Company or something, and you want to buy diapers, it's like a universal checkout button. Basically, this is what PayPal is.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, it saves your information, so you can go to another website and do this, right? We had the founder of Bolt come on here. I invested in Bolt. Bolt does the same thing but with a lot of actual users and revenue. Basically, like, I don't know, this was maybe 2 years ago or maybe 3 years ago when all of a sudden on Twitter there was this new company, Fast. It had the domain, I think it had the domain fast.com. I think it has fast.com, but it definitely had the Twitter handle @fast.

Sam Parr

yeah

Shaan Puri

and all of a sudden there was this guy dom

Sam Parr

you would see this guy d

Shaan Puri

I'm sorry, but it seems there was an error in my previous response. Here is the cleaned transcription: Oh, my God. And it was like, "I'm the CEO of Fast." Before this, I grew my business to $50 million. Now I'm working on Fast. Basically, they were just like this Twitter hype machine. It's like this girl joined as the COO, and she looked cool. She had a background at Uber or something like that, and she was the new COO of Fast. Fast would talk about how fast their checkout was, right? And how big of a problem this was. They were making swag, raising money, and you know, he could just tweet out...

Sam Parr

At one point, he sponsored a Sea-Doo race team or something like that. There was a press event where he was on a Sea-Doo with a professional Sea-Doo guy doing that slip.

Shaan Puri

We need to literally put that in this episode. So, Ben, can you Google this? Or I know how I'm going to get you a link real quick, but it...

Sam Parr

was like a guy doing flips on a fast seadoo the greatest promo ever

Shaan Puri

word you're saying by the way I've never heard

Sam Parr

This one Sea-Doo, like a jet ski. I think, see, it's like Kleenex; it's the brand, but a lot of people call it...

Shaan Puri

okay so so ben go to go to this link and we're gonna we need to watch this video together in a second here but let me just set up this for the rest of the context so fast goes and fast starts raising money and they raised let me just pull it up so close to open stripe they raised from I think from shopify as well I I might be wrong on that but they raised yeah so they raised from stripe early on I think they raised this says crunchbase says almost over a $100,000,000 right so they raised a $100,000,000 series b they had a $20,000,000 series a and and so and so this was you know fast was like a darling in fact I met this guy from india this this indian engineer and he goes he he had worked at like I don't know stripe and now he works working at fast and I was like oh like you wanna you wanna be an entrepreneur someday he's like yeah I'm just right right now I'm just like I just collecting I'm just collecting my stamps on my passport he goes in india he's like in india if they see that you worked at stripe and you worked at fast and you worked at like name 1 of pinterest one other like one name company that they've heard of like oh yours you must be like super smart that's harvard iit that's like a a pedigree right there and so he was collecting his fast stamp at the time and I remember asking I was like I was like so is it legit because like they'd raised over you know nearly $200,000,000 and I was like you know is it like awesome like is it growing really fast are there users I don't know anyone who uses it and he's like no there's no users yet and the ceo kept the red flag number yeah I'd say red flag number 2 was probably like they he kept the ceo kept tweeting out these like tech like a screenshot of a technical scale test that they were doing it was like we can handle you know 400,000,000,000 payments per you know you know per second right now he was like we can handle this many transactions we we gotta go back to the lab though and keep scaling up getting ready for the big fast launch and I remember thinking wow there's this problem in silicon valley called premature optimization where you're prematurely you're you're planning for scale when you don't have any scale yet instead of just like going and getting customers who actually want your product and start using you and giving you feedback you're planning for this like fantasy world where everybody uses your product and you can handle the scale

Sam Parr

We're just gonna call... I remember, we're just gonna call them Dom Prejack from now on. Mister Prejack.

Shaan Puri

Exactly. So, Furkah and I were looking at this, and we thought it was weird that he was over there. We just kind of shrugged our shoulders at the beginning. When it first came out, I thought, "Well, honestly, the idea is a good idea." A single universal one-click checkout will help the whole world of e-commerce move forward. It makes the customer's life more convenient and helps websites make more money. The idea makes sense, which is why Shopify has Shop Pay and why Bolt is worth $1,000,000,000 now. The idea is solid, and "Fast" is a great brand name. On paper, this guy seemed great because he was super high energy, building the brand, and he mentioned in his bio that his last company had something to do with $50,000,000. However, everything started to unwind more recently when two things happened. The first is that people discovered that this guy, Dom, who branded himself as "Dom," had a reason for doing so. If you used his full name, Dominic Holland, and just Googled it, you would find all kinds of articles about his previous company, which was basically the same thing. It was a hype machine in Australia that ended up losing a bunch of money overnight, getting sued, and then he kind of ran away from the scene of the crime, in a way, like not until he left Australia.

Sam Parr

And he didn't pay people back. Yeah, it was... I think it was gray hat for sure. Potentially even illegal stuff.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, there's like a $15,000,000 dispute. The government was like, "Hey, we're owed something," blah blah blah. And the same thing had a great domain, tow.co. This guy was like, you know, good on the branding and the hype side, saying, "We're Uber for basically towing." So he had the story, he had his brand, tow.co, and then, you know, they basically left with a $50,000,000 legal dispute between him and the state government over who's supposed to pay for, you know, something that's going on, right? So the company goes under. So, you know, his story was like, "Oh, I built a successful company." I remember because I tried to get him on the podcast. I DM'd him and I said, "Hey, what you're doing fast seems interesting. I'd love to, you know, talk about investing and maybe have you on the pod. But can we do a call? I just want to understand your story." It was kind of hard to get ahold of him. Then we did a 10-minute phone call, and by the end of it, I was sort of like, "I don't know, this guy's kind of fuzzy with the details." So I was a little bit on the fence. Then he kind of sensed my hesitation. He DM'd me right afterwards and said, "You know what? I think we're not ready for press just yet." I'm like, which is ironic, right? Because he's pumping it on Twitter. So I think he saw that I was kind of like, "This seems like kind of bullshit," but like, okay.

Sam Parr

The patient alarm was ringing. So, anyway, the news just came out about...

Shaan Puri

You know about this guy's background, and then the second thing was that Fast is like very, very small. So, Fast has, I think, a lifetime revenue of $600,000. Is that right?

Sam Parr

300 employees

Shaan Puri

more 500 employees $600,000 in revenue

Sam Parr

it's crazy

Shaan Puri

so by I

Sam Parr

I had an interaction with them when I was running The Hustle about a year and a half ago. I think it was either me or someone on my team who wrote this ad. It was a video ad that featured a magician, you know how they do tricks where cards are coming out of their mouth? I think he was doing it with money coming out of his mouth or something like that. I received a DM from someone saying, "Hey, [they] ripped you off." They took the ad that we wrote and copied it shot for shot, word for word. I tweeted out that video and tagged Dom and his co-founder. I forget her name, but I said, "Hey, you guys just totally ripped this off." Dom replied with just a smiley face, and then the other co-founder said, "Hey, sorry about that. Sometimes..." and then she named a person on their team, I forget. She said, "Sometimes [blank] gets a little bit too carried away with the inspiration." I was like, "Oh, you're just going to call out this guy who works for you?" Then she DM'd me and said, "I'm not going to ask you to take it down, but maybe if you let them know, you could just tweet out saying that you know we deleted our ad or something like that." I had a run-in with them, and I did not like that. Dom, like objectively, has a super punchable face.

Shaan Puri

objectively we're just talking objectively here

Sam Parr

Objectively, like if 9 out of 10 doctors recommend something, 9 out of 10 people recommend that he has a punchable face.

Shaan Puri

Let's watch this video to confirm. Ben, play this video. It kind of follows after the ridiculous bit. So, my buddy Matt sent this to me, and he goes, "This is before this news came out about the no revenue, struggling to raise money, maybe gonna have a fire sale." And he's like, "Dude, is this company serious? I remember you just talking about them, but like, what the hell?" He sent me this obscure video from the Tampa Bay Journal because they moved to Tampa. Which, first of all, everybody's moving to Miami right now.

Sam Parr

that's like the big move tampa

Shaan Puri

they moved to tampa is that and that's the socks and impressive

Sam Parr

It's like the socks and sandals capital of the world, right? Dude, people love doing their socks and sandals joke recently. That's where we're going to host a legacy competition.

Shaan Puri

By the way, the funny part is I do wear socks and sandals. In fact, I love it! Alright, keep going. It's a little too choppy here.

Sam Parr

that's alright

Shaan Puri

pause for a second I didn't

Sam Parr

describe what's happening getting out of the car

Shaan Puri

He crawled out of the window like a fetus leaving the womb. Okay, so the mayor or somebody is like, "Fastest on a rocket ship trajectory." And what is this, by the way? Is this a race car pickup truck?

Sam Parr

it's a it's a I think they call it stock trucks basically it's a nascar basically

Shaan Puri

Okay, so some car running into that has Fast Dot Co all over it comes up, does a doughnut, and then the CEO crawls out the window and does a light jog to the podium. Alright, play it.

Sam Parr

oh my god

Shaan Puri

Some guy puts a peach blazer on him. "No, that's peach, bro!" It's like, "Yo, yo, peach me, peach me!" And he peached him with a peach blazer. Then, you know, the pained crowd of people—like 10 people.

Sam Parr

all wearing fast t shirts

Shaan Puri

yeah these these must be ordinary citizens excited right

Sam Parr

Making the world better, one checkout at a time. Thank you so much, Jim. Thank you to everyone for coming. Truly, thank you to Parker, my Uber driver, Parker Pliegeman. He also moonlights as one of the fastest NASCAR racers.

Shaan Puri

Oh my god, socks and sandals! So, fast forward a little bit to the jet ski part. Basically, he goes up there and gives this speech. You know, the city of Tampa gives a speech.

Sam Parr

oh my god

Shaan Puri

And then there's a stuntman on a jet ski that says "Fast" on it, just going in circles in Tampa Bay. Nice flip, I gotta give them that. So, this event happens, and this is just another thing where it's like the more parade you throw before you have customers, the bigger red flag you're throwing up into the universe. You know, this is ridiculous. This thing's about to blow. The news has already started to leak. We called it many months ago when we talked about this, and you know, it looks like it's going down soon.

Sam Parr

Yeah, this had red flags all over it, man. It's pretty ridiculous. This is crazy. What is he saying now? Has he said anything? Or what are the employees saying? He's not...

Shaan Puri

There's nothing on Twitter about it from him that I saw. So, you know, it's kind of... his last tweet was like, "Oh, they don't like this. Here's this new customer that launched with us."

Sam Parr

that's crazy

Shaan Puri

we'll see

Sam Parr

I'm so excited to see how this ends, man. We talked about this before. I've angel invested in over 50 companies; you've done, I imagine, that or more. It's easy to lie to people, and I talked about this with you. I was like, "Hey, have you been lied to?" I think you said maybe once. So far, I've not been lied to. It is so easy to lie and so easy to... that.

Shaan Puri

I know of right

Sam Parr

I thought you said there was one I thought there there was one person who you're like I think they're lying

Shaan Puri

I don't remember that, but yeah, our... Which is that like Silicon Valley does very little diligence at the early stages. Even at the later stages, there's a lot of, like, "Dude, it's a hot deal. Other big names are in." We're not doing, you know, basically they're like tight timelines, minimal data sharing. You're either in or you're out, and you sort of bet blind. During bull markets, everybody just, you know, like, it is common practice for people to invest in stuff without doing a ton of diligence. And during the, you know, bear markets, when the leverage swings over to the side of investors, they're able to ask more questions.

Sam Parr

which

Shaan Puri

dig in more and have more time

Sam Parr

I'm not entirely hating on this, by the way, because I think you have to take the good with the bad... or the bad with the good, whatever the phrase is. The good is that someone comes to an investor and says, "Hey, I have a track record of doing some interesting things. I don't even have a product yet, but my vision is this." The good is that there are people like you and me, and other people who are way bigger than us, who are like, "You know, screw it! You gotta take a shot, try it." That's good. They'll say, "Look, I don't have anything here, but let's try it." So I understand that. But then the bad of it is you get stuff like this.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, exactly. Honestly, at the time when I was reaching out to this guy, being like, "Hey, come on the pod. I want to invest and all that stuff," I think it's because, again, it really is a good idea. It's not that this is a bad idea. At that time, there was no traction, so there was nothing to diligence. It's pre-launch, so of course they have no customers. Of course they have no revenue for pre-launch.

Sam Parr

and you prejacked all over the place

Shaan Puri

Now it's much further along. Now that you know, sort of, you see that the emperor has no clothes. But I would say it is very common practice for this type of stuff to happen, and I think you know the...

Sam Parr

well I don't think I don't think it's common that net

Shaan Puri

takeaways it's

Sam Parr

It's not common that people lie like that or are full of shit. I think it's common that some people exaggerate, but in general, I think the system actually works.

Shaan Puri

But yeah, that... sorry, what I meant was it's common that you invest without having to do due diligence on every claim that the company makes. You don't audit all their financials, audit their customer base, or do reference checks. You don't do all that for the sake of moving fast. In the aggregate, it totally works, but then a few times you're going to get egg on your face. That's just the cost of doing business. It's just the same way that, you know, 1% of all credit card transactions are fraud. It doesn't mean credit cards are bad; it just means you have to bake that into your model that you're going to have some issues like this. Then, in general, there's the line... there's the gray area of like sort of "fake it till you make it." You know, you're forecasting optimistically versus actually misrepresenting something.

Sam Parr

Would you invest in someone if you had known that this guy did what he did in Australia? So let's say someone's being charged with fraud or something that is, you know, related to fraud. Would you invest in someone if they had that?

Shaan Puri

Usually not, but it depends on the situation. Sometimes, if you know somebody's being sued, you have to take that a little lightly because people can get sued for anything. It doesn't necessarily mean what happened; you sort of have to look into the claims. But yeah, it's not like a deal breaker in that sense. If somebody has some bad press about them, I don't necessarily view that as an absolute no. However, I have to come clear with it, you know, come to terms with it. I think I've told this story before about somebody who invested in HQ Trivia. At the time, I was like, "Yeah, I heard the founders are kind of... you know, there were some suspect stuff. They had really gotten in trouble at Twitter for berating employees and stuff like that. They got fired; there were some kind of weird claims." And they're like, "Yeah, we looked into it. We didn't find anything that scared us away. In fact, the fact that it scared other VCs away just makes us even more bullish." There's an honor in Silicon Valley of being a contrarian, which is, you know, or being founder-friendly. These things can get you in trouble sometimes.

Sam Parr

If you have any... The people who funded that, they call themselves contrarian. It was Founders Fund or some people related to that. They own a conference called the Contrarian Conference. But you want to know the thing, it's...

Shaan Puri

called but yeah

Sam Parr

It is, I think that's what it's called. The thing about contrarians is they're wrong most of the time, right? So, yeah, I'm not surprised on that one. Well, where do we go from here?

Shaan Puri

Okay, do you have time? Let's listen to two more topics. Alright, I want to get your quick take on something. I'm going to call this segment "Genius or Idiot." I want you to give me a call: is this more genius or more idiot?

Sam Parr

by the way I've I've got

Shaan Puri

is the cofounder

Sam Parr

Before we get to the genius video, I've gotten a fair bit of feedback on your drunk ideas: the very long-distance girlfriend, fan favorite, and the big ass bed.

Shaan Puri

oh dude by the way somebody somebody reached out about the long distance girlfriend

Sam Parr

very long

Shaan Puri

distance right

Sam Parr

very long distance girlfriend

Shaan Puri

Don't share this... don't share this. Oh yeah, sorry. I have a very long-distance girlfriend. They said, "Don't share this on the pod," but we have this idea, and they showed us the numbers. The numbers are super impressive, so that idea, like, legit is working. I wish we could talk about it, but they asked us not to.

Sam Parr

alright genius or not

Shaan Puri

Alright, so Alex Lieberman, who's the co-founder and CEO of Morning Brew... no.

Sam Parr

chairman

Shaan Puri

Is that not right? The chairman of Morning Brew came out and said he's looking at buying mini golf courses. He's like, "You know, I'm interested in buying and acquiring putt-putt golf businesses." He kind of had a couple of reasons why. I think he was like, "You know, these are like recession-resistant. People need entertainment that's cheap and fun." You know, these are cash-flowing businesses, and there's probably not a ton of competition, so the prices are probably reasonable. There's also a real estate play baked in. Those are his kind of reasons, roughly, if I was going to articulate them for him.

Sam Parr

and he said he he loves

Shaan Puri

reaction he

Sam Parr

said that he loves putt putt that's what he said

Shaan Puri

Like the man loves to putt. So, first reaction: genius or idiot? Which way are you going?

Sam Parr

Alex is a great guy. He's very smart, and I like him a lot. We've actually become friends. However, this is not his best idea, in my opinion. No, I don't think this is a good idea.

Shaan Puri

you're being very very gentle

Sam Parr

But, like, here's why. Alright, I'm an internet person. I made some money on the internet. Now, I'm currently at an Airbnb where I'm getting into the Airbnb business. What I'm learning is that things like Airbnbs and some other businesses can yield about 10% to 30% cash flow a year, if you're really lucky. Those are awesome, but they're more about growing your wealth quicker, not necessarily creating wealth. At least, that's a little bit more rare. So, I was out here and I just looked at my Shopify thing. My copy of that thing just made $5 today, and it'll do about $100 a month, maybe. I'm like, okay, well, a good month at my Airbnb will be like $20,000 to $30,000 a month. I had to spend over $1,000,000 or close to $2,000,000 to buy it. If I had to manage a putt-putt course, I think that's tough. My good friend Cody Sanchez does all this stuff, and in my head, I'm like, I just do not want to manage all these people. I think it's a nightmare. It's incredibly challenging. If you're Alex Lieberman, that means you're world-class—one of the best in the country at creating newsletter businesses. I would stick to that, maybe, or something related to that.

Shaan Puri

So, I'm going with "idiot." I'm going with "genius," but with a caveat. The genius move is that he already got all the value he's going to get out of this.

Sam Parr

tweeting that out was the genius move because it

Shaan Puri

Makes him sound interesting. It's something kind of fun. He seems, but basically, just by tweeting that, he's a more interesting guy than just the newsletter guy.

Sam Parr

I agree with that

Shaan Puri

He comes across as kind of fun and rich because that's who goes out and acquires a putt-putt golf course: somebody who's fun and rich. He has currently no more work to do besides typing the tweet out. So if he stops here, it's genius. If he crosses over and buys his first putt-putt golf course, he has crossed the line. There is a fine line between genius and idiot.

Sam Parr

He needs to take a picture of him touring it. Dude, when I launched, when I just said I was doing Airbnb and I said, "Here's the property I'm about to close on," that tweet got read by 2,000,000 people or had 2,000,000 impressions.

Shaan Puri

And he does need to milk it a little more. He needs to go to a few events, then he needs to tweet out the economics of how a public golf business works. He should share that out, just pour that out. Then, he should maybe take a picture of himself signing a piece of paper and say, "We'll see a new adventure." Yeah, a new adventure, a new chapter. And then, you know, he's signing whatever the waiver is.

Sam Parr

And then he just gives the owner $2,000 for like a 5% share. He says he owns Public Works. Yeah, down.

Shaan Puri

In his hometown, he needs to do that. All of his buddies need to be like, "Hey, I bought a piece of... you know, I'm an owner. I'm an owner in Alex's Putt, in Majestic Putt. We're thinking about changing it to Alex's Majestic Putt, but for now, I just want to keep that hometown vibe."

Sam Parr

they're like you guys

Shaan Puri

wanna go own 0.5%

Sam Parr

we gotta go do the back 9 at alex's you guys wanna go are you coming with

Shaan Puri

I have the keys we can go tonight

Sam Parr

yeah we can go together if

Shaan Puri

You want to go at night? We can go. Yes, I love it! That's the true genius move.

Sam Parr

what's the next one

Shaan Puri

Alright, so the next one here: Elon buys 9% of Twitter shares. I don't know if you saw that this morning. Baller genius! Already, oh, he's going baller. He broke the scale; he's going baller.

Sam Parr

I'm not even an Elon fan. I don't like him for... I think some of his jokes, like about 4/20 and telling a politician their head looks like a penis, I think that's silly. I'm not on board with that. I've also thought that, a) it's not even funny, and b) when you have people's pensions invested in your company and you're doing dumb stuff like saying "funding secured at 4:20," I'm not a fan of that. But this move is awesome! I think what's the point of having it if you don't flex? There's no point in having a few money if you don't say a few things once in a while. I think this is an awesome move. He's now the largest shareholder, so he spent $3,000,000,000. Is that right? 2 or $3,000,000,000?

Shaan Puri

yeah something like that

Sam Parr

maybe 4

Shaan Puri

for him nothing

Sam Parr

Yeah, so nothing for him. He bought into Twitter, and the stock is up 30% or 20% today. So he's already made a little bit... a lot. He's made a lot of it, and I think it's amazing. I think that he's all about this free speech thing. I actually think this is an amazing move. I'm very excited for it. What do you think? I think Twitter's been undervalued, by the way, for a...

Shaan Puri

I agree with everything you just said. First of all, I also think that Elon is kind of cheesy and cringey when it comes to his personality. However, I think he's obviously absolutely dope when it comes to his business and, you know, changing the world stuff. So, yeah, I think his sort of 420 joke and, like, you know, 69 jokes are sort of like... if a normal person said that, they would not be funny. It's only funny because you're rich and you're in business. So it's not like being a hot podcaster.

Sam Parr

yeah right

Shaan Puri

you're not actually hot you're a hot podcaster so it's kind of like

Sam Parr

That sounds like a conversation you just had with someone. It's some of when you acted like hot shit. Like, "Well, Sean, yeah, you're a good-looking podcaster." Yeah, you're a good-looking podcaster.

Shaan Puri

you're one of the best looking podcasters it's like oh good

Sam Parr

you've got amazing hair for a tech person

Shaan Puri

I'm the smartest person at Crate and Barrel. Fantastic! Who do I care? So, basically, yeah, I think he's cringing in some of those ways, but I think it's a baller move. This is sort of like when Bezos bought The Washington Post or whatever, and like, you know, whoever Benioff brought Time magazine.

Sam Parr

and this is the watch party is even better now than it was

Shaan Puri

Who really wants to own an actual physical newspaper? This is actually better: just buy Twitter. Twitter is the newspaper of the world. So, just buying a big chunk of Twitter and being able to, you know, go swing... go flex on it, I think that's a good move. I think Twitter could actually use some change. People always try to build alternatives. For example, Trump tried to build Truth Social as an alternative to Twitter or whatever.

Sam Parr

crashed the other day the stock

Shaan Puri

Did, yeah, but a better move is just to buy Twitter. You know, if you're ultra-rich, buy Twitter and institute the changes you want there because all the people are already on it, right? So I think it's a pretty baller move.

Sam Parr

How much stock do you have to own in order to have your opinion be heard? If you own 10%, I think there's some legal stuff around 10%, right?

Shaan Puri

I don't know exactly what it is, but I think it depends on how much he owns of the float. You need to own the voting shares, which means you may not own the same percentage of voting shares as you do total shares. The second thing is, basically, what you do is become sort of an activist investor. This means you get on the board or you lobby the board to make a CEO change. The CEO that gets installed is one who carries out the agenda that you have in mind; otherwise, they're also going to get fired by the activist investors. So, you know, I think that's the general idea. I don't think he's going to play it exactly like that. I think he's just going to be very vocal about what he thinks they should do, which is a lot around freedom of speech and the algorithm being either open-sourced or allowing you to choose your own algorithm. This way, you don't have to listen to Twitter's filter; you can choose your own filter or at the very minimum, know how the filter works.

Sam Parr

dude I'm on board with this I think this is great so so I

Shaan Puri

think that's what he's trying to do

Sam Parr

on board genius

Shaan Puri

And by the way, I think this is the only other stock he owns. I’ve heard him in an interview say that he owns only Tesla, SpaceX, Bitcoin, and Ethereum. Now, this would be the only other stock he directly owns, if he was not "bullshitting" that first time.

Sam Parr

that's crazy what a crazy person

Shaan Puri

Okay, I have another sort of genius or idiot thing. Did you see that Logan Paul was at WrestleMania?

Sam Parr

genius I did and I watched it it was awesome

Shaan Puri

And it's actually not a part of genius or idiot. This is actually a part of a different question: Is Logan Paul the greatest athlete of our generation? Did you see this video?

Sam Parr

he looked great he looked so good

Shaan Puri

he looked amazing

Sam Parr

so so paul is something that's in a row

Shaan Puri

I haven't watched wrestling since like in 20 years or something

Sam Parr

like that back wrestling is like booming

Shaan Puri

The wrestling is back, dude! He's back in a huge way, and I think there are a lot of opportunities around the fact that wrestling is back. But the whole world has changed. It's like wrestling is back, but the entire world and the way it works has changed. To me, that says there's a lot of opportunity because you have crazy fandom and passion, but with all new tools at your disposal for how you could harness that energy. So, they did WrestleMania yesterday, and I saw a bunch of clips. You know, Stone Cold Steve Austin came back and drank a bunch of beers. Pat McAfee, who is also a podcaster, somehow was a key person in the event. I don't know why; maybe someone can explain that to me. But Logan Paul did a match, and Ben, if you pull up the clip of Logan Paul in this wrestling match, he's an unbelievable athlete—absolutely unbelievable!

Sam Parr

Yeah, it was amazing! He did all the acting and stuff. He killed it! Yeah, dude, they killed it. I thought that was really good, and by the...

Shaan Puri

way easy to do what he was doing

Sam Parr

What's it called? It's not the WWF, it's WWE. I think that's a publicly traded company. Yeah, and so you could buy their stock. It's a killer business. They crush it.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I mean, Vince McMahon is kind of an unbelievable story in and of itself. He's an incredible athlete and has made a great crossover move. The Paul brothers continue to just not miss. I think, you know, Logan Paul's podcast is now one of the most popular podcasts in the world. More importantly than the fact that "oh, the Paul brothers did something and it got a bunch of views," that's not actually true. But it's a good podcast. It's actually entertaining content with deeper discussions. They talk to all different types of people—from business people to musicians to porn stars. They've had all different types of guests and have full-on conversations. So then it's a rebrand, right? It's basically taking this guy who used to be a Vine star making fart jokes, and now you see a more mellow side and a more thoughtful side, along with all this other stuff.

Sam Parr

Look at him! He is **yoked**. Logan Paul is **yoked**. Yeah, and as a kid, I remember watching him. Look at him do all that stuff! Dude, these guys are basically bodybuilders who have personalities. They are so freaking big!

Shaan Puri

They’re bodybuilders that are also soap opera actors and can do, or like, Cirque du Soleil acrobatics basically.

Sam Parr

dude they're unicorns

Shaan Puri

He did some crazy stuff in this match. Anyway, people should go watch it. It's honestly impressive just to see the physical feat that he pulled off in this thing. I thought that was impressive. I also think it's a smart move for an influencer. This was not what they've done with like going into celebrity boxing or deep podcasting.

Sam Parr

they've won

Shaan Puri

Crypto, NFTs, Pokémon cards... and then going into like Jake has a venture fund. Logan is going to WWE now and is building his character up there. They're talking about potentially doing a UFC fight. These guys are winning, man. They're winning at a very high level, and that is very impressive to me. You know, most people just write them off like they're idiots. They're not idiots; these guys are awesome.

Sam Parr

The thing about Logan is, I actually like... I've been watching his podcast. He has done a really good job of rebranding himself. He still has a little bit of that, but he's mostly not like a douche. He's not a bro. He's super thoughtful and he seems like a really nice person.

Shaan Puri

He's the respectful one on the podcast. Yeah, he's got his kind of goofball friends that are a little more brash and annoying. They can ask questions and joke around about stuff, but he's the more reserved, almost introverted, thoughtful one.

Sam Parr

26, mature person, 25. He's not that old, but he gives advice like he seems like he's just... there's a lot of stuff there that's rooted in pretty good values. You can just tell that his brother, I don't pay attention to as much, but Logan I definitely have been watching his stuff, and he seems like a very good dude.

Shaan Puri

Right, yeah, super impressive. Alright, let's do one last thing. I have this little life advice tip, which is: I believe that everybody needs to have a "treat yourself" budget. What is a "treat yourself" budget? Okay, so basically, this is part of the overall skill of learning how to spend money.

Sam Parr

and your friend jason did it wonderfully

Shaan Puri

spending money is a skill and we so here's what here's like my story around this so my dad was great at you know good at making money right he came into the country I think with like I don't know $9.91 and that was like all he had that's his like starting. And like he ended up making 1,000,000 of dollars in his lifetime and he learned how to make it but he didn't he never learned how to spend it you know if I if I go you know to a coffee shop with my dad my dad's first thought is like this is mostly water and like I can make this at home and like they're just charging you for the brand and the cup and the you know he's like talking himself out of a $3 cup of coffee when he actually wants a coffee and so you know like if there was a free coffee he'd walk 2 miles to go get it and so you know he wants the coffee but he doesn't know how to spend and so spending I've learned is actually a skill and so I think one way you can get better at the skill like anything else is to practice so how do you practice spending well I have this idea of a treat yourself budget so at my last startup we created a bonus program at bebo and basically I don't remember what it was it's like I think it was like $1,000 a month at the was like the low end and then basically as the company grew I would multiply the bonus pool so like when our user base doubled the bonus pool doubled as well and and so we would give out this bonus and the only rules the only strings attached with bonuses you have to spend it on something interesting that you weren't otherwise going to buy yourself anyways so you can't just pay rent groceries student debt can't do it sorry you got to buy something you weren't otherwise going to do it and then you got to come tell the story after you after you buy it and so jason was the 1st winner of the thing couldn't have been a better better guy to win it and he was like trying to debate what to do and I told him I said he was like well what's some of the he goes what's something you spent like $1,000 on that like like punched above its weight and I told him I go you know when I first got named ceo of the company I like I was like okay I'm making more money and you know like how do I like mark this new chapter and I was like oh I'm no longer like a college kid anymore but I still dress like a college kid so I had hired a personal stylist I went on craigslist I said hey I want somebody to come to my house take away all the clothes that suck and buy me new clothes that look awesome and I said send pictures of like what you think awesome style look looks like

Sam Parr

What's the statute of limitations on that? Because it doesn't look like you are following through on that as well.

Shaan Puri

this was a decade ago this is a decade ago so this lasted I think 2 years

Sam Parr

did she buy you cut offs

Shaan Puri

back in my wallet

Sam Parr

Did she say, "Alright, you're a cut-off T-shirt, a cut-off T-shirt type of guy in Jordan shorts. Let's go over to Foot Locker. I think we'll make you look nice"?

Shaan Puri

Dude, I gotta say, it was insane! I put that up on Craigslist, and when I woke up the next morning, I had 81 replies in my inbox. I was like, "Wow, there's a lot of interest!" It was mostly half people who were like, "Oh, I work in retail," or "I'm a stylist," or something. The other half were like, "Dude, I wish my guy friends would let me do this." It’s just like a girl who’s saying, "I know how guys should dress better. Guys dress horribly, and I wish my friends would let me do this." It sounds like you're gonna let me do this, so I'll do it!

Sam Parr

but but

Shaan Puri

I ended up picking this like really hot russian model to to do it and it

Sam Parr

was awesome

Shaan Puri

A great, great sense of style. She came to my house, went to my closet, and just took everything out. She was like, "Do you have garbage bags at the house?"

Sam Parr

oh my god

Shaan Puri

Oh yeah, yeah. Let me just go get them. I was like, "But that one's my high school jersey." She's like, "Yeah, it looks like a high school jersey. You know, we're gonna throw it away for that exact reason." She's like, "Did you wear this to prom?" And I was like, "Yeah, that's my good shirt." She's like, "This shirt sucks."

Sam Parr

I

Shaan Puri

basically she yeah go ahead

Sam Parr

So, we did this at The Hustle. Check this out! I want to hear what Jason did. Basically, we did the same thing every month. It was like $1,000, and one person could vote on how the group would spend it. We would all do something together. Maybe it was more than $1,000; I don't remember. One time, when we had, I think, 12 employees, our office was down the street from Costco. We basically teamed up in pairs, so there were maybe 20 people. I don't remember exactly, but I think we gave each group $200. We said, "Starting now, you've got 20 minutes, and you have to go buy something." At the end, we were going to vote on who got the best thing. I went and bought something, and I think it was $100 that you had to spend on something that wasn't food. The other $100 had to be spent on something that was food. Then, we were going to eat together and vote on what the winning thing was.

Shaan Puri

and

Sam Parr

So, people bought all this stuff that you don't really want to play, like the big cheese ball things. You don't want to buy it for your house, but you've always wanted to try it, right? It was the most fun team-building activity we've ever had. It was awesome!

Shaan Puri

That is genius! I was just talking to somebody, like the guy who runs our warehouse. He's like, "Oh yeah, you know, people want another... you know, this other Amazon warehouse is offering an extra $2 an hour." These guys are complaining that it's cold inside, and I feel like it's hard to hire people because people don't want to work anymore. I was like, "Dude, I get it, I get it." But you gotta be creative about how to make this fun for people. You gotta figure out how to take this many dollars and make it feel like a $1,000,000,000,000 budget for you. The thing you just described cost you probably like $1,000 or $1,200, but you're still talking about it like 10 years later.

Sam Parr

it was amazing

Shaan Puri

It was so fun! Your company remembers it. It was super fun, great team bonding. I probably liked some of the stuff that you got and liked.

Sam Parr

and then it morphed

Shaan Puri

such a simple way to like go go further

Sam Parr

It morphed into eating contests somehow. Every month, we would have an eating contest. We had one lady who worked for us who ate, I swear to God, **12 Krispy Kreme donuts in 7 minutes**. Then she went to the bathroom and just annihilated it. She had to go home because she was sick. So, it wasn't the most productive, but people loved it. The last thing we would do is taste tests. For example, we would buy every single bottle of water that this nice grocery store near our office had, and you had to see who could guess which bottle of water was which. We had another guy who would win **$100** if he could guess the difference in all the grapes because he was like, "Oh, I can tell the difference in all the grapes." I'm like, "I don't know, man, I don't think you can." We did the same thing with apples, and then we did the same...

Shaan Puri

thing blind taste test

Sam Parr

Yeah, like, "Which grape is this?" And then we did the same thing with apples. They had to guess which apple it was, and if you got it right, you'd get $100. Stuff like that was the most fun.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, see Sam, this is why you need to be teaching at business school instead of, you know, whatever professors teach at business school. It's the stuff like this that actually matters to people and makes the work environment more fun. They don't teach you this at school, so I am with you, dude. There are cheap ways where it's not about the money; it's about the creativity, the fun, and the humor of it that makes it hit.

Sam Parr

There's this book called *Man's Search for Meaning*. Have you read it? It's really sad.

Shaan Puri

I've read a bit part of it

Sam Parr

It's like a way you've read the cover. Yeah, it's like way deeper than the stuff that we're talking about. But basically, it's about a Jewish guy who was a psychiatrist or something, and he went to a concentration camp for four years. It's kind of interesting because he's like, "Oh, I'm my own experiment." What he said was that the people who survived best or the people who died would basically say, "We're gonna get released on Christmas." They would think, "I think we're gonna get released on Christmas," and then Christmas would come and pass. They would get all depressed and bummed, and they wouldn't have anything to look forward to, and they would die. They just got worn down. Then, the other people who were like, "I'm getting out of this, and when I get out of this, I'm gonna become a doctor so I can make sure that no one's harmed like this again," or "I'm gonna get out of this so I can see my loved ones," or "I'm gonna get out of this so I can tell the world about this and write about it." He said that every person that survived, most of them had something to look forward to. So I kind of stole that tactic. It doesn't exactly apply here, but I was like, for my office, we're gonna have a calendar, and we're gonna make sure we list all the activities. This way, people always have something to look forward to. I noticed that actually changed the morale. You want to have something to look forward to. So then when you're eating lunch, you're like, "Hey, in two weeks is that thing. Have you thought about what you're gonna buy at Costco?" That type of stuff really, really helped.

Shaan Puri

probably not the best to compare to a concentration camp but yeah

Sam Parr

but it

Shaan Puri

was you learned it from there

Sam Parr

I learned it from that book it's a great book

Shaan Puri

Yeah, it was the end of the story. It doesn't really have a conclusion, but basically, Jason hired someone. When Jason won, I was like, "You should do this thing." He did it, and he loved it. First of all, he's like, "Dude, the experience... it's like that scene from *Pretty Woman* where you just get to walk into the store. You know you're gonna buy up a storm. You don't even really have to think." The stylist, when I did it, she was like, "Go to the dressing room. I'm gonna hand you things, you put them on." I was like, she'd hand me something, and I'd say, "Oh no, I don't really wear stuff like this." She'd respond, "Yeah, I know. That's the point." Then, you know, I'd wear the thing, and sometimes I hated it, and sometimes I liked it. She never made you buy something you didn't like, but she would always make you try stuff that you don't normally wear. So, Jason came back to work looking super cool. All of a sudden, he had rings, jackets, and even cool socks.

Sam Parr

were quite interesting

Shaan Puri

Than they were before. He's a big ring guy and he had, you know, these little chains that his mom didn't buy. Anyway, he looked cool and had just the right amount of swag to it. He was saying something on Twitter that I thought was a very good way of putting it. He said, "Most guys don't know how to style themselves. It's worth being taught. Life is more fun if you're excited about what you wear every day, especially if you know that the outfit you're wearing amplifies the impression that you're trying to make and gives you more presence." Most people don't like to say this stuff out loud, but that's part of Jason's superpower. He's completely unashamed of the things he feels and says, and he was able to articulate it well. So, anyway, if you're listening to this and you have the budget, I highly recommend doing it. You will feel different, and it's a good experience to give yourself.

Sam Parr

it's a

Shaan Puri

Great way to treat yourself! But even if you don't do that, create a "treat yourself" budget. It doesn't matter if it's $100, $1,000, or $10,000. Start with even like $100 and ask yourself, "Am I going to spend $100 on something that I wouldn't otherwise have done for myself? I didn't need it, but it will give me some new experience." It can take you in some different direction, even a slightly different direction in life. It can make a big difference.

Sam Parr

That guy's name is Jason Hitchcock. He's a good follow on Twitter because he's living his best life right now. He's having a good time.

Shaan Puri

yep alright that's all I had for today

Sam Parr

alright that's the episode