How Kid Rock Makes +$30M/Year Using Redneck Business Strategies

Sam Parr

Sean, I want to show you three things that I've read in the past week or two that have inspired me. You want me to start with... I'm gonna start with the strangest one. I'm gonna get it out of the way. Do you listen to Theo Von's podcast?

Shaan Puri

Do you listen to the full thing? I only listen to clips.

Sam Parr

I listen to the full thing sometimes, and there was one that happened the other day that I sat and watched the entire thing. I think it was 2 hours long. You're going to laugh when I tell you who it is, but his episode with Kid Rock was awesome. So, do you know anything about Kid Rock?

Shaan Puri

I'm gonna say I don't know anywhere near as much as you do about Kid Rock. Dude, I could safely assume that. Hands down, I bet my life savings on that.

Sam Parr

I have been a fan of Kid Rock forever. I've been a Kid Rock fan for a very long time, and Kid Rock is a very fascinating guy. So, he's born in Detroit. He had this whole rap thing... it's kind of rap, whatever you want to call that genre. But the reason he's fascinating is that the guys who sold a lot of records in the late nineties are some of the richest musicians out there because CDs were like $22. How much were CDs when we were kids? Like $20, right?

Shaan Puri

Yeah, CDs were really expensive.

Sam Parr

Really expensive, and they cost like a dollar to make. Kid Rock has sold something like 40 million albums, which is a **huge** number of albums. He went on Theo Vaughn's podcast, and about halfway through, he started talking all about business. He's done some amazing things. So, let me tell you a few amazing things that Kid Rock has done. Kid Rock is kind of like Nickelback, where people make fun of him or they make fun of you for even kind of liking him. It's kind of a joke, but dude, he's a super savvy guy. So, listen to a few things that he's done. Have you ever heard of the Kid Rock cruise? No? So, Kid Rock has a cruise that he does every year. You pay like $3,000, and you go on a cruise for about 4 or 5 days. He goes on the cruise with you and plays music every day. It's an amazing experience!

Shaan Puri

Butchered the name. It's the Kid Rock Chillin' the Most Cruise. That's like, you needed to say that.

Sam Parr

It's so funny what he does. He's been doing this for like 10 or 15 years now, I think since 2010 or so. And that kills him. Listen to a few other things he's got going on. He has the Kid Rock Rodeo; that's his new thing. So, do you know anything about rodeo?

Shaan Puri

I mean, you're just embarrassing me at this. No, I don't know anything about Kid Rock. I don't know about his cruise. I don't know about his rodeo. You could skip the questions of whether I know about Kid Rock's extensive business portfolio. I do not.

Sam Parr

You've never been to a rodeo, but you've never been.

Shaan Puri

I lived in Texas for 10 years, and I did not go to a rodeo.

Sam Parr

I used to go to them in California at the Cow Palace. Do you remember the Cow Palace outside of San Francisco?

Shaan Puri

By the way.

Sam Parr

Dude, the Cow Palace is this venue literally 2 miles outside of the city of San Francisco. You go just 2 miles outside of San Francisco, and you're at the rodeo for the night. You're in redneck heaven! I used to go there all the time. It's so fun! I used to go to dog shows there. They have dog shows, and I would watch all the Swiss Mountain dogs and stuff. It was so fun. Anyway, Kid Rock now has the Kid Rock Rodeo, which is freaking killing it because rodeo is up and coming. You know who owns the PBR? It's the same company that owns Endeavor. Yeah, Endeavor, because it kills it. Well, Kid Rock has started his own rodeo, and it has teams, which is kind of a new aspect of rodeo. It's also killing it. He starts talking about the business of this rodeo. This guy is super savvy. He talks about how an owner came to him and was like, "Hey, we're going to start this new rodeo. Do you want to buy a team? It costs $20 million to buy into the league and to start a rodeo team." He goes, "No, I don't want to do that, but what if I just help you start the whole league and I own the league with you?" And that's what he's done! Now he has the Kid Rock Rodeo, where he goes and performs at the rodeo. It's very, very fascinating. And then finally, have you ever been to Nashville?

Shaan Puri

Nope. Okay, so...

Sam Parr

So, in Nashville, in downtown Nashville where I used to live, there's a street called Broadway. That's where all of the honky tonks are. Honky tonks are basically these kind of crappy, dirty bars with bright lights. They call it "Nash Vegas" because it looks like Las Vegas. We used to go on Saturday and Sunday nights and try to meet all the bachelorette parties. It was like a thing when you're in college. About 10 years ago, Kid Rock started this thing called the Kid Rock Honky Tonk. At that bar, it sells something like 15,000 beers a night. And yes, yes!

Shaan Puri

I don't know how many beers a normal bar sells, but that number sounds like a lot. It's a huge amount, man.

Sam Parr

And the business is doing... I was reading about it. The business does something like this: one bar, this one location, generates $30,000,000 a year in revenue. It's insane! It's a three-story bar on the main strip of Nashville.

Shaan Puri

Is Kid Rock our Billy of the week, actually?

Sam Parr

Kid Rock is so fascinating. On this podcast, he breaks down a bunch of the businesses. A lot of people think that I'm partying and stuff like that. He goes, "I don't even drink that much. I wake up at 4 AM, I do a cold plunge, I do a sauna, I do a workout." I swear to God, this is what Kid Rock is saying. He goes, "My..."

Shaan Puri

I write in my morning gratitude journal. He's like, "Then I do the next thing."

Sam Parr

Dude, he's so much more put together than a lot of people give him credit for. This podcast with Theo Von and Kid Rock is so good. You have to listen to it; it's hilarious.

Shaan Puri

Does he talk about all these business things on the podcast, or do you look those up?

Sam Parr

No, he talks about a bunch of them. He's like a really savvy business guy in Austin, Austin Reif. Our friend Austin Reif, Kid Rock, and his... like, I guess he has a family office. If I had to guess, I bet you Kid Rock is worth about $300 million. Austin Reif went to Kid Rock's house in Nashville because he was organizing a thing for startup entrepreneurs. He wants to find cool companies to invest in. Listen to this: his home in Tennessee is a replica of the White House. This guy is basically like a redneck with all this money, doing exactly what he wants to do. It's hilarious! He talks about his White House home in Nashville. And I'll tell you one last thing. I'm such a Kid Rock fan that I heard a rumor when I went to Belmont University from 2008 to 2012 that his son went there. So, I did a little Googling to find out what his son looks like. I spent months on campus just looking for Bobby Junior—that was his name—because Kid Rock's name is Bob, Bobby Junior. I spent months thinking, "I gotta find this kid. As soon as I see him, I'm gonna go up and just shake his hand and tell him hi." Just the most lame thing you could imagine. Well, I finally see him on a Friday night when I'm just blackout drunk. I can barely remember it. I see him and I go, "Bobby, huge fan!" I'm slurring my words, "I love your father." I put my arm on his shoulder and I go, "Here, take my number." I grab his phone, type my number in, and text myself. Then I just try to, like, force myself on this kid to be his friend. I think I was a junior; he was a freshman. I just looked like the biggest asshole, and I tried to force myself on him. Shockingly, it didn't work. But I've been a big, big Kid Rock fan for years, and this podcast with Dio Vaughn was awesome. You have to listen to it!

Shaan Puri

Okay, that was a great sales pitch. Also, I think "take my number" is just a very underutilized way of forcing a connection with anybody. "Here, here, here. Do you have a phone? Take my number."

Sam Parr

It's because I grabbed his phone so I could text myself to make sure that I got his.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, the real number.

Sam Parr

It was so embarrassing that I did this. But yeah, that's my Kid Rock story.

Shaan Puri

Alright, amazing! I'm tempted to just end the podcast right there and go try to book Kid Rock as a guest. But I'll give you a couple of things that I'm into, nowhere near as entertaining as that right now. My understanding was kind of like what you're saying. I'm watching some different content, weird content, and new info diet. I wanted to tell you some of the things I'm doing with my info diet. So, I'm going to give you the chapter titles of this, and then you get to pick which one you want me to explain. Here are the chapter titles of how I'm consuming this content: 1. Older is better 2. Look to the left 3. More with less 4. Pay for learning 5. Early arbitrage exploit Which one do you want me to talk about?

Sam Parr

1, 5, 4

Shaan Puri

Alright, number one is: **older is better**. In general, I'm trying to get away from the news feed. The news feed is, in many ways, like actual news. I don't watch the news for the same reason: the news is an entertainment program designed to find random problems in the world and then just shove them in your face. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram—these are all kind of the same way. People are here saying, "Here's my life," and just throwing out, "Here's what I'm thinking right now." It's useful to a degree, but it's more addictive than it is useful. My solution is not to just go detox and be like, "Oh, I just put my phone on silent and leave it in the other room to enjoy nature." That's not really me either. I have to substitute it with something else. So, I thought, what do I want to read that's shorter than a book but as informational as, you know, reading an annual report for some company—like an investor would, such as Warren Buffett—but still has some juice, still has some story? I found that annual letters, annual shareholder letters, or annual reviews of people are just a really fascinating place to go look.

Sam Parr

I get what's the difference between an annual review and an annual letter?

Shaan Puri

So, one is typically when you have shareholders or LPs (limited partners), that's when you're writing an annual shareholder letter. Right? Because you have your investors or you have your shareholders that you are looking out for. This is like Buffett's letters, Jeff Bezos' letters. I'll give you a really good one that I found: the Nick Sleep letters. You've probably never heard of this guy.

Sam Parr

Who's this guy?

Shaan Puri

Fascinating guy! When I did the podcast with Monish Pabrai, he mentioned Nick Sleep. I don't know the full story, but I just started looking because I found about 10 years of this guy's annual letters. The short story is that he and his buddy basically started buying stocks and investing on behalf of other people. They did so well over a 10 to 15 year period that they ended up retiring. His portfolio at the end consisted of just three stocks: Amazon, Costco, and Berkshire Hathaway. I just love somebody who can absolutely crush the market. He really excelled in terms of performance and did it without working really hard or going into some obscure rabbit hole. He identified correctly early on that Amazon, Costco, and Berkshire were good bets to be in, and he just stayed with those, riding those ponies till the end. This is pretty insane! He did other things, but that was where he ended. I found that fascinating.

Sam Parr

How big was the portfolio?

Shaan Puri

Did these guys get filthy rich? I don't know exactly how much an asset they have off the top of my head, but you know, basically in a very short period of time, they got filthy rich. So, I've just started these letters. I just read the first one last night, so it's pretty fresh right now.

Sam Parr

Cool! I like Nick Sleep. When you Google him, the first thing that comes up, by the way, is his legendary letters.

Shaan Puri

Exactly. The letters are what... and I think some people have maybe bound it into a Kindle book as well. You know, whenever it's something like that, like the last time it was like this, it was the "Boron Letters."

Sam Parr

Yeah, it's a cruise.

Shaan Puri

Of Boron Letters. Well, this guy was like one of the best copywriters. He wrote a bunch of letters from jail to his son. It's like, "Dude, I'm in!" This sounds like, you know, Season 2 of *Prison Break* mixed with my copywriting course. I'm in! You know, I’m really into these annual shareholder or annual reviews. We have a few friends—Said Balke does this every year. He posts an annual review on his blog and he just goes back and says, "Here's what I did this year. Here are some of the highlights, here are some of the lowlights," whatever. Nathan Barry from ConvertKit does the same thing. He posts this on his blog and he'll be like, "You know, thing 1: my family. Thing 2: ConvertKit. Thing 3: I bought some Airbnbs. Here's the occupancy of my Airbnbs. Here's how much money I made—all bad, but this was a pain in the ass." I just feel like people who are sharing that type of information is just very interesting to me. It's a very quick read, and to me, I'd rather spend 30 minutes reading that than 30 minutes aimlessly scrolling on Twitter. So that's my "older is better." That was my number 1. Alright, what's number... you said the last one: early arbitrage exploit. So I tried to put all my power words in there to hook you because I wanted to talk about this. Have you seen Airchat?

Sam Parr

I don't know exactly what it is. All I know is that Naval has some type of new social media thing, and it's invite only. That's all I know.

Shaan Puri

It's not invite-only anymore. As of, I don't know, two days ago, they just opened it up to everybody. They pivoted it. They've had a kind of air chat in beta for a few months. I checked it out, and I was like, "This is okay." It wasn't super engaging; it was kind of confusing in terms of user experience, and it was just a little bit slow to consume. So, is it like...?

Sam Parr

Twitter, but better.

Shaan Puri

Okay, so the new one... I'll tell you about the new one because forget the old one; it's gone anyway. The new one is basically like **imagine Twitter**, but it's voice-first. So, to post, you're just talking to your phone, right? You don't type; you just talk. But it auto-transcribes it using AI and speeds it up to like 1.3x or something like that. When you're scrolling the timeline, it just starts to play somebody's audio, or you could read it, but it plays it a little bit faster. So, it's actually like you're almost listening as fast as you could read, in a way, which is kind of interesting. You get to hear their voice, and people reply or whatever. So, the generous version of it would be, "Oh, this is a really cool new social media format." New formats are interesting, right? Twitter was a short-form format, TikTok was a different short video format, and Vine was a 6-second looping format. Formats mean things, and that's where the big breakthroughs come from. So maybe it's one of those. The other side of it is, it's kind of like if you turned on accessibility mode on your phone and then opened Twitter. It's like, "Hey, can you just voice-to-text? Can you just read me my timeline?" Which is not great. So, I'm not sure if it's going to be a hit or not, but here's what I do know: just like in the early days of Clubhouse, when an interesting person in Silicon Valley starts a new interesting thing and they invite only their interesting friends, that place is a very interesting place for like the first 90 days.

Sam Parr

For the first 90 days.

Shaan Puri

Who knows if it's going to be successful or not? You get a call option on that. So I'm like, "Fuck it, I'm all in on Airchat for the next seven days." Let me just go. Let me just throw full force. Let me completely ignore Twitter, completely ignore YouTube, podcasting, etc. and let me just Airchat the hell out of myself. Why? Because it's Naval's friends, which is probably the most interesting group of human beings in my world, in the business and tech world. That's who's using it. All the content is interesting because the people are interesting, and there's not that many people on there. So if I'm even remotely interesting, I'm like in the top 0.1% of interesting people on this app. The same thing happened when Clubhouse came out. I didn't think Clubhouse was going to be there forever, but I told my buddy Jason, who I always thought was an interesting guy, "Jason, quit your job and just be on Clubhouse like 10 hours a day for the next 30 days."

Sam Parr

Me work at your company.

Shaan Puri

We had gotten acquired, so I was like, "Just check out. You're at Twitch, just check out now. Who cares? Nobody will know, trust me. There are 2,000 people in this place; nobody does anything. Just stop doing work and get on Clubhouse 24/7." He's like, "Well, you know, I gotta..." I said, "No, no, no. Trust me, you'll get more value out of this than you will from your job." And that's exactly what happened. He went there, he was on it all the time. He's an interesting guy, so he made a bunch of friends. He ended up raising a $4,000,000 crypto fund out of it and made a couple of million dollars doing it. He returned their money, and none of that would have been possible. He raised money from a bunch of Clubhouse friends, and he made lifelong friends. They go on trips together in real life now. It's these early arbitrages when somebody awesome curates something. In many ways, Hampton was like this. You're an interesting guy; you had an interesting idea, and then you curated an early group of people. You were hell-bent on making this a great experience for them. So those first 100 days were going to be the best 100 days of this whole product forever, just because of that early day exploit.

Sam Parr

Well, I hope not. I mean...

Shaan Puri

It's okay. It's just like in dating; there is a honeymoon phase. For products, for people, for relationships, you know, "Let me get that door for you." "Let me take out the trash for you." "Well, it's Wednesday, let me send you a little gift." You behave a little bit differently at the beginning of a relationship than you do seven years in.

Sam Parr

Do you think Airchat's going to be better than Clubhouse? Is it actually going to work?

Shaan Puri

It's too early to say. I've only been on it for like 2 hours, so let me not do a hot take conclusion just yet. But it's interesting for sure. Hey, real quick, as you know, we're big on ideas here. We love bringing new ideas, business ideas, and brainstorming ideas for the podcast. Well, a lot of people ask, "What do you do with all those ideas? Can we go find them? Is there a list somewhere?" The great people at HubSpot have put together a business ideas database. It's totally free! If you just click the link in the description below, you can go download a collection of over 50 business ideas that are from the archive, listed out for you and curated. So, what are you waiting for? Go download it! It's free! Check it out; it's in the description below. Alright, back to the show.

Sam Parr

What's the fourth thing?

Shaan Puri

Pay for learning. I don't know if I said this one before, but pay for learning. Instead of me going out there and trying to get smarter about something—in this case, AI—I was like, "Wait, why is it that as adults we don't ever go to school, go to class, or have tutors?" So, I told you this before: I hired an AI tutor.

Sam Parr

Yeah.

Shaan Puri

And the guy, you know, people are like, "What is an AI tutor?" I was like, "Dude, AI is changing so fast! Literally, every three weeks there's a new mind-blowing paradigm shift in AI." Okay, great. There are thousands of companies getting funded. I can't even keep track of them. There are new models being released, a new talk that drops, a new interview that drops. Sam Altman says this interesting thing. I couldn't possibly keep up with it; it's a full-time job to keep up with it. So one way is you go read a newsletter or you join maybe a group chat or something like that. That's good. But what I decided to do was think, "How do I use... how do I spend money in an interesting way here?" I basically pay this guy $500 an hour and I say, "Your job is every week you're going to come to the table and you're going to tell me here are the four most interesting things that blew my mind." He lives in the AI world, so he's got to bring to me three or four of the most interesting things he's seen. Then I usually ask him a question like, "Hey, I saw people talking about this. What is it?" Or, "Chamath said this thing I didn't even really understand. What the hell is he talking about?" Or, "Hey, in my business, I have this problem. Is there an AI tool that could actually solve this?" Then he'll go do the research and he'll come back to me and he'll answer it. This has been just like such a hack to be smart about AI but shave my time commitment. You know, yes, I'm paying this guy $500 for one hour of his time, but I'm kind of saving 8 to 10 hours of my time because I now literally don't have to think about it. I put it out of my brain. I'm going to have a focused 60 to 90 minutes with him and he'll tell me everything I need to know.

Sam Parr

Have you ever used GLG? Do you know what GLG is?

Shaan Puri

I know what GLG is. Yeah, I was on the other side of GLG.

Sam Parr

You're an expert. I did it too. I remember, basically, GLG originally started because it was like bankers who were going to either take a company public or wanted to invest a large sum into, like, let's just say Mailchimp. Mailchimp's going to get acquired by Intuit, and they're hearing rumors about it. So they would go and find people like me who use Mailchimp-like services and ask us questions like, "If Mailchimp raised the prices, what would you do? How would you react?" Just so they can get an idea of the market. Well, there's GLG, now there's TGIS, there's also Intro, and I have also been an expert on those. You could charge like $2,000, $3,000, or sometimes $5,000 an hour—like crazy amounts of money to be an expert. Dude, I've been using it on the other end where I've been paying money to get insights. It kind of feels like it's cheating. You can tell GLG or TGIS or whoever that you want to talk to your competitor or someone who works at or worked at your competitor, and you can get so much information from them. I read this—I think I told you about Steve Cohen. I read this book about Steve Cohen. He basically is one of the largest hedge fund guys out there, and one of his guys went to jail, went to prison for many years because what they would do is they would use GLG so much that they would befriend the experts, fly out to the experts' homes, and get them to reveal a bunch of confidential information that they weren't allowed to reveal. Then they would go and trade assets on that information, which is insider trading. It's so powerful that I've been able to do this. It's been really amazing to be on the other end of paying these people. I'm shocked I haven't done this for years. Have you ever paid money?

Shaan Puri

I had never done it on one of those networks because, to me, I'm like paying somebody $2,000 an hour. Right? It makes sense for most of those customers because they're making very large investment decisions. So, if I can get better alpha, better information for $2,000, $5,000, $10,000, or $20,000, it doesn't matter when I'm taking a $10,000,000 position or an $80,000,000 position on a company. I've never been in that position where I needed to do that. That's not what I do; it's not the scale I play at. So, how do you justify paying, you know, for yourself? What are you paying for, and how are you justifying paying that much money?

Sam Parr

I'll give you an example. Let's just say that Hampton is a peer business, a community business. There are about five competitors out there, and a couple of them are quite huge. I'm curious how they're acquiring users. So, you could just sign up and say, "I want to talk to the director of marketing at this company." They go and find a former marketing executive or marketing leader at these companies and you can ask, "So, how are you guys acquiring customers? Could you just do LinkedIn ads?" They might respond, "Oh, LinkedIn ads didn't really work, so instead we did X, Y, and Z." You can just ask all these questions and hopefully save yourself a year of time making the same mistakes that others in your industry have made. For e-commerce, you could ask, "What about shipping from your own warehouse versus hiring another person's warehouse?" You know, things like that. You could just ask them all these questions, and it's made my life so much easier.

Shaan Puri

Right, yeah. I think it's more of like a scalpel than it is like a blunt force hammer. It's a very precise instrument. You only want to use it for very specific types of questions where the trade-off makes sense. There are many jobs where that makes sense, and then there are many, like in the e-commerce example, where you'd almost never do that realistically as an e-commerce person. But if you are, like, I've been on there and people would be like, "Hey, do you use Triple Whale? We're looking to talk to an expert who uses Triple Whale, and we want to know, did you evaluate 3 or 4 other competitors? Why did you choose Triple Whale over the competitors?" And it's like, "Yep, I did that. I evaluated other competitors. Here's the difference..." They really couldn't do that because they're not an operator. So when they're making a big investment decision, they want to go in with real information versus just random theories on their side where they weren't actually an operator in the space. Alright, let's do another one. Do you have anything else?

Sam Parr

I've got a book that I think you should read. I read this book years ago and I just recently reread it because it's so good. I bet you've never heard of this person. I'm going to ask, but I know the answer is no. **Kirk Kerkorian**—that doesn't ring a bell, does it?

Shaan Puri

That kind of does ring a bell. Who is Kirk Kerkorian?

Sam Parr

Alright, so Kirk Kerkorian was born in the early 1900s, like 1920 or something. He was an Armenian immigrant, born into an Armenian family. He was born in Fresno, California, but spoke Armenian and didn't even speak English. He eventually dropped out of about 8th grade, so he's like, you know, he's not the richest yet, but he's in the rags part of the story where he comes from nothing. I think his parents were farmers or something; he grew up poor. He learns how to fly a plane because World War II is coming up, and he doesn't want to be shooting guns. So, he goes into the Air Force and learns how to fly planes. He spends the war flying planes. After the war, he's able to save up enough money to buy a Cessna plane for $5,000. I think he saved up like $2,000, and he buys a plane. His first business is flying people from California to Las Vegas. This is in the 1950s and 60s. Las Vegas is not really a thing yet, but gambling is legal there, and all these rich Hollywood folks want to go to Vegas for the weekend. He's their guy; he flies them out there. While he's there, he starts getting into gambling as well. Through his gambling, as well as his very small business of flying people out there, he starts buying more and more planes. Over the course of about 15 years, he kind of builds a meaningful business.

Sam Parr

Where he's like 43 or 44 years old and he's making the equivalent of **$2,000,000** a year in profit. So, he's got a good business. Well, he sells this airline business for **$10,000,000**, which is like the equivalent of **$90,000,000** today. He sells it in his forties, and that's really where things start taking off. With that money, he buys a plot of land and he turns it into the **Pink Flamingo Hotel**, which is one of the first big epic gambling hotels in Las Vegas. Then, using the... what's so funny?

Shaan Puri

Just the flamingo? That's hilarious!

Sam Parr

Yeah, that's his thing. By the way, while there, one of the waiters who worked for him has a son, and Kirk always treated this waiter really nicely. So, he eventually names his son Kirk Agassi, his first name being Andre. So, Andre Kirk Agassi, the famous tennis player, is named after Kirk Kerkorian. He's known as a good employer; he's a good guy. He takes his small little casino, parlays it, and keeps on growing. By the time he's in his fifties and sixties, he starts buying other companies. He buys MGM, which at the time was a production studio, a movie studio. After years of doing this, he eventually, at 85 years old, buys 10% of GM. Then, at 88 years old, he tries to buy the entire Chrysler company and almost gets it done at around $30 billion. What's interesting about this guy, Kirk Kerkorian, is that he never had formal education. He's, I guess, a Wall Street guy who's not actually on Wall Street. He's a banker type, but he buys all these companies with no education. He's very private, so there are like 3 or 4 interviews ever about this guy. He's got balls of steel. He's a nice guy, but he's a hard negotiator. He puts his money where his mouth is and continues this until the age of 94 when he dies. Until the day he dies, he's making deals, and he's really low-key. He dies with a net worth of about $15 billion. If you and I have been kind of into the whole capital allocation type of thing, this is the guy. He's done it without any background or pedigree. Very fascinating guy.

Shaan Puri

I have to apologize to Kid Rock. I thought you were the "Billy of the Week." Actually, it's this guy. This guy is the "Billy of the Week." Wow, this is an incredible story! The Andre Agassi thing was just the cherry on top for me. I gotta say thank you for adding that one in. It seems almost impossible to me. By the way, I'm clearly wrong, but it seems almost impossible that a guy could just start chartering flights for people. He's like a pilot turned billionaire. That sounds so... the amount of capital he had to amass to end up owning 10% of GM and trying to buy Chrysler for $5,000,000,000! Like, how the hell did this guy compound at that rate for that long? That's so insane.

Sam Parr

The book is called *The Gambler*. It's a really good book. Basically, he's like, "I'm a gambler at heart. I love gambling. I'm in it for the thrill." He caught a couple of trends. The first being that airlines weren't popular, and his airline was kind of rickety. He bootstrapped it for about 15 years, which is kind of inspiring. He started the airline when he was 32, right after he got out of the war. It wasn't really a hit until he was 44. It wasn't that big of a hit; it was a good business, but it wasn't some epic thing. He sold it for $10,000,000, and then two years later, he bought it back. He ran it for three more years and then sold it again, this time for $100,000,000. The trend he caught was that airlines just weren't a thing back then. They were kind of a bootstrapped business. They didn't have these massive barriers to entry like you would think of today, where you have to have tens of millions of dollars. I mean, starting an airline today seems just insane. It wasn't like that back then. The same thing happened with Las Vegas. Gambling wasn't exactly a big deal. I think the plot of land he paid for was around $800,000, and then he spent another couple million to build the Pink Flamingo. He got these hits early on where he caught these trends—Vegas, airlines, things like that. Here's the inspirational part, in my opinion: he wasn't really a baller until his mid to upper forties, and he was in the game for literally 95 years when he died.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I think the... you know, Monish Pabrai, when I was talking to him, he was like, "You know, there are three variables that matter when it comes to wealth." He's like, "It's all about compounding." So, he's like, "It's either the rate that you're compounding, so the percentage gain every year; it's the length of the runway; or it's the amount you started with." You could pull any of those three levers. You either start with a huge amount, then you don't have to have a high rate or a long time. If you start with a low amount, which is where most people start, then you need a high rate and a long time. Or you need to have an explosive high rate and not that long of a time, right? Those are your variables to play with. And, you know, if you look at Buffett, his thing is that he compounded for the longest time. He basically bought his first stock when he was 11 years old. Now, at 95, if he hadn't given his money away, he'd be the wealthiest man in the world, or you know, number 1, number 2, number 3—somewhere up there. It's because he had an 80-year runway. So, it's not that his rate was that absurd; it's that the rate was consistent and it was for 80 years. One of those things for compounding is: how long of a runway do you get? For most people, you know, like for Buffett and for others, the bulk of their wealth is always kind of in the last two or three turns of compounding. That's just how compounding works. If you're doubling every 10 years, then doubling, you know, from 70 to 90 is going to be doubling a huge number at that stage.

Sam Parr

And people say that, and you're right when you say that, but it almost discredits Buffett. If you read his biography or any of his early reports or annual letters, man, even when he was like 35 or 38, he had something like $50,000,000 in assets. People are like, "Well, he didn't actually make it; the $1,000,000,000 didn't come until his fifties or sixties." He was killing it for a long time. Like, he started...

Shaan Puri

Can it be true, right? $50,000,000 is still killing it, and $50,000,000 is not the same thing as $90,000,000,000.

Sam Parr

Yeah, yeah, that's for sure. But if you read about him, he was... I think he said when he graduated college, he had a $100,000 portfolio of his own. In the '40s, that's like having $2,000,000. He was killing it from a really early age. His early compounding was like 30% to 50% for 6 or 8 years in a row. I mean, he was kind of **the man** from the beginning, if you ever read about him.

Shaan Puri

When that episode comes out, you'll like it. That Monash is basically like a buffet historian and a monger historian. He knows year by year what he was doing, what he was investing in, and how much he had. He has charted it out. He gave me like an oral history of Warren Buffett in a way that I've really never seen. I loved it because I've met a lot of people who are super successful, and then it's like they're not kind of like students of the game in the same way that I am. I'm like, "Oh, did you ever go back and read all the letters and kind of deconstruct them?" They're like, "No, I was just doing my thing." Right? Or like, I know great investors. I ask, "Do you do detailed kind of models? Or do you write memos? Did you go back and review them? Or do you track your hit rate?" You know, nerdy stuff that I like to do. And often, very often, I would say more often than not, the answer is actually, "No, I don't do any of that. I just focus on what's in front of me and I just do that thing." So it's really nice when I see somebody who wins with the same play style I have, where they kind of are a nerd about it. They do like to go back and kind of chart things out, break things down, and analyze it a little bit themselves and other people. They try to use that to kind of reverse engineer some lessons. So it was pretty cool to see that.

Sam Parr

What was your takeaway after he said that?

Shaan Puri

Like I said, I think it was reassuring in a way. It sounds silly to say, but it's true. Whenever I meet a more successful person than me who does things the way I do them, I feel good inside. I feel a little reassured, like, "Oh, that's cool." This person reassures me that my method can work. I already believed it could work because, why else would I be doing it? But it gives me even more conviction that this works. I don't need to shift what I'm doing in order to make it work. When you see somebody who's very similar to you—maybe similar demeanor, similar philosophy, similar approach, similar work habits—I like finding people who have a match. It's very hard for me to change my nature, my work style, or my habits. So, it's actually better for me to double down, make them super strengths, and find other people who've won with those same strengths. I can look and learn from them and what they did, versus trying to become some different guy playing some other play style that I'm not familiar with, that I'm not good at, and that I haven't done for 15 years already.

Sam Parr

Let me wrap up by telling you one last thing, and this one is going to be short because I'm not terribly well-versed on it. You would know this guy better than I would. Actually, what's his name? Mike Novogratz, the crypto guy? So, I think he started or helped start Fortress, which is a massive hedge fund, right? Yeah, he's got this new podcast called *Business Untitled* right now on YouTube. I think it has 3,000 subscribers, even though they're like 30 or 15 episodes in. His podcast is so good; it's him.

Shaan Puri

And interesting, dude. It's...

Sam Parr

So good! It's him and this other guy named Mike Barry. Mike Barry, I believe, is a real estate guy and he owns a chain of hotels or something like that—really high-end hotels. It's sort of like the "All In" podcast, where it's billionaires talking about stuff, and that's one of the reasons why it's exciting. But these guys have a little... "All In" is not even remotely... I wouldn't even use the word "blue collar" at all to describe those guys or what they think of themselves. This podcast, however, does kind of have that vibe where they're like... they weren't born wealthy, and they still remember where they came from. They're talking like they're small business owners, except the numbers are absolutely massive. It's a beautiful, wonderful podcast. You gotta listen to a few episodes!

Shaan Puri

I'm so jealous of this thumbnail style. Oh man, I see this and I just wish this was our thumbnail style. This is...

Sam Parr

Is it like dollar bills?

Shaan Puri

It's just **fucking awesome**, dude.

Sam Parr

It's great, man. It's really... hadn't.

Shaan Puri

I wish I could just steal... I wish I could have just shown this to me and I'd be like, "Let's steal this!" because this is so, so damn good of a thumbnail style.

Sam Parr

Well, they only have like 3,000 or 4,000 subscribers. How many subscribers do they have on their YouTube? I think it's like 38,100 or something like that. Yeah.

Shaan Puri

So you're saying we can steal it? Nobody will... yeah.

Sam Parr

We could steal it! It's really good. This podcast is so good. They have amazing guests; they even had Snoop Dogg on recently. They'll have the founder of Equinox or a bunch of really big names. They just shoot the shit, and it's wonderful. It's so good, and they tell stories about starting Fortress Capital. I guess West Eden, who started Fortress, I think he eventually bought railroads or something like that. They tell the stories, but they have this weird blue-collar, down-to-earth kind of style that I've been digging. It's really good.

Shaan Puri

Alright, that's a big, big endorsement. I like that. I gotta ask you, what do you think about the fact that so many people have podcasts? It's pretty remarkable. When we started this, it was roughly 4 years ago. I think we were not early to the podcasting scene; we were like a decade plus late. It felt late at the time. But I would say since we started, it's now incredibly common. If you're anybody, the number of people who start a podcast is astounding. There are interesting people from other walks of life, right? Like investors, business people, athletes, whatever. It's kind of amazing. One of the content pieces I was going to talk about was J.J. Redick has a new podcast with LeBron James.

Sam Parr

Have you seen this? I saw that. It's awesome, right?

Shaan Puri

It's like LeBron is podcasting. This is amazing! What the hell is going on?

Sam Parr

I love the athlete ones. A lot of the UFC guys are doing them now too. Kamaru Usman has one, and I love them.

Shaan Puri

So, what's your take on this? Where does this go? What do you think is going to happen with everybody starting a podcast now?

Sam Parr

I love it as a fan; I enjoy listening to them. I don't think they're going to last that long. I think it's a lot harder than people realize to do it for a really long time. When you and I, or when you first started this, the common thing was, "You guys are going to run out of stuff to say." I hadn't really felt like that much. There are some times where I'm like, "What else can we talk about?" But in general, that's only happened 10% of the time. I don't think they're going to run out of things to say, but I do think that it could be a lot harder work. I mean, you're signing up for something. I'm shocked that Tim Paris has done it for 10 years. I think that it's a lot harder to do it for many years than people understand. Do you agree with that?

Shaan Puri

Yes and no. I think that there's a problem with it. I don't think that's the problem. I'll tell you what it is. On the topic of running out of things to say, I think most people will choose interviews, which is a kind of infinite runway format. It's like, "Oh, you just bring somebody on, and you talk to them, and then you ask them questions." Bringing another person on and asking them questions is what we do when we don't have guests on. That is a lot harder for us to have longevity with because it's like, how many interesting things are Sam and I going to be able to say as original content versus an interview or reacting to news? I think reacting to news and interviews, or reacting to TV shows, like that's always going to be a format that has an infinite runway. I think most people will do those, and they won't run out of content. I think the problem is, how many podcasts on average are you listening to at any given month? Five? And you're a power user of podcasts.

Sam Parr

That's funny. Yeah, I mean maybe less... 3 to 5, right? And not... not a...

Shaan Puri

Lot shelf space is just really **goddamn** small. I don't think most people realize this. I think they think... I don't even think it's a discovery problem. I think it's a discovery problem because people cannot consume that many podcasts. For example, I think what a lot of people do is they're like, "Oh yeah, I use Twitter, I use Instagram. Oh, TikTok comes out, I'll use TikTok." They kind of think everything's social media. If your experience before was, "Well, if I'm just interesting, people will follow me," it's like I can follow literally like 5,000 people on Instagram. I can scroll through in one Instagram sitting and I could see content from 200 people in that, you know, that 30 minutes. But my shelf... so the shelf space is huge on every other social media, but the shelf space is tiny on podcasts. People will listen to 1, 2, or 3 on average in rotation. So the question is, can you break into enough people's top 1, 2, or 3 podcasts? You're going up against a habit they might've had with other podcasts for 5 years. The hope would be they expand the market, that new people start listening to podcasts, and I'm sure that's going to happen to some extent. But I think just like the supply and demand is so off. The demand is so small for the number of podcasts somebody will regularly listen to that it doesn't matter how many new people create a podcast. It's gonna be very hard because the shelf space is too small.

Sam Parr

But you do realize that it's over two times the amount of people who listen to radio than podcasts? I mean, if you go to where I'm from and you talk to certain people, they're like, "What's a podcast?" Like, it's...

Shaan Puri

Still like listening to music, dude? Yeah.

Sam Parr

But like, it's...

Shaan Puri

Not like AM radio.

Sam Parr

But there's still a lot of market penetration for podcasts, particularly among the general population. For example, someone who cares about LeBron... I bet an athlete will get significantly more new listeners.

Shaan Puri

But what I'm saying is, I think the best podcasts in every category are going to grow. Like you're saying, there's still 10x more headroom for them to grow. However, the number of winners is very small in podcasting. In contrast, on Instagram, there are so many winners. There are so many people who have followings, either small or just enough to keep you hooked and engaged. It's very hard to be a winner in any category. Let's say I want to start a true crime podcast, a business podcast, or a sports podcast. The ones at the top are going to keep getting more and more and more.

Sam Parr

More and more downloads because, like, you have an audience now. So it's easier for you to do it. To do it from scratch when you don't have an audience, I think it's basically impossible.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, even people who have an audience—look at, like, even people who are successful or have some audience. It's very hard to boot up a podcast. I don't know, I think the shelf space problem is my take on what the limiting factor here is. It's just that there's only so many humans who listen to podcasts. That number is growing, but the number that's not growing is how many different podcasts they're going to regularly listen to. They only have so much ear time that they're going to dedicate to entertainment, right?

Sam Parr

Is the JJ and LeBron one good?

Shaan Puri

I would say it's **amazing**, and I mean that in the literal definition of the word. Not like the content is amazing; it's just that I am amazed that this is happening. I am amazed that LeBron James is sitting down and explaining to me the **marching guard screen**. It's like, "Oh, what's the guard screen?" and he's explaining what this is and how it works. However, I think they really need to work on getting the overlays. They need overlays that show the X's and O's. They need to be able to see an actual clip of what they're talking about because it's so abstract that the average person is not going to be able to follow. The other thing is, I think it's going to be hard for them to resist. What's happening now, already, is you can see the clips where it's just LeBron talking about the turning point when he won his first championship. "Story time with LeBron" is always going to get 10 to 100 times more views than LeBron and JJ Redick explaining this defensive coverage and how they make adjustments to it. One is just a juicy story, and the other is like really hard math that you need to learn—the basketball equivalent of math. So, I think what's going to be hard is their editors are going to be like, "Alright, cool, we should just ask LeBron if he thinks he's better than Jordan," because that's going to get 10 million views. It's just so there for them. It will be interesting to see if they stick to the spirit of what they wanted to start with, which is X's and O's, real basketball talk—no hot takes. It's not an interview with LeBron James, which would always do well. It's them talking about spacing on the wing, you know, like random basketball X's and O's tactics. It'll be very interesting to me to see, like, six months from now, what's happening. But you know what? Even if it's just a miniseries, even if they just did like 12 of these, it's still phenomenal. It's amazing for JJ Redick and amazing for LeBron's brand. Because I watch this, and I'm like, "Oh shit, I get why they say this guy's got crazy basketball IQ." JJ Redick will bring up some play that happened four years ago, and LeBron's...

Sam Parr

**Jay's the man too, right?**

Shaan Puri

He's such a... he's so good. But he'll bring up something, and LeBron will have like perfect photographic memory recall of the play from four years ago on a Tuesday night in Orlando. That's just kind of amazing. So for his brand, it's like what "The Last Dance" kind of did for Jordan, where it's like, "Oh man, Jordan's just amazing." LeBron is also playing the legacy game, where he's building his brand of like, "Dude, LeBron just knows his stuff, man. His basketball IQ is the greatest of all time." Now he's trying to be the greatest of all time in other ways. So even if they only do 10 episodes and never do it again, mission accomplished.

Sam Parr

Dude, what I liked about Jordan was that he didn't give a shit. He cared, but you know, if you asked Jordan to come on the podcast, he'd be like, "Dog, that's beneath me. Not a chance." I kind of like that because...

Shaan Puri

He podcasts weren't good at the time. He went on Oprah, and he's smiling, giving away stuff on the show. He did the things that were the equivalent of podcasts at the time, right? He was very image conscious. You know the great quote about Jordan? They're like, "Will you take a stand politically? Who do you support for this election?" He said, "Republicans buy shoes too." So he's like, "I'm not gonna comment jack shit about this because I'm here to sell sneakers." It's like, alright, you know, the guy was very image conscious.

Sam Parr

I don't give a shit about sports, but anything LeBron is part of, honestly, I would listen to it. I appreciate the best talking.

Shaan Puri

Exactly! There's appreciation for greatness. Also, it's just fascinating to see. Oh, that's interesting. What would you do if you got an A-list, A++ star who is still active in their game to sit down and do a podcast with you? What would you do, and how would you do it? How would you set the vibe? Oh, they're popping wine; they're drinking wine because they're both into that. But that gives a different casual feel. They film it in a certain way. As a content nerd, there's a lot to pull from it.

Sam Parr

Who's producing it? Do they own it?

Shaan Puri

Tommy Alter and Jason Gallagher, I think, is the producer of it. Yeah, it's like a collaboration between JJ's media company that he does with Tommy and LeBron's media company, Uninterrupted. So they came together to create the...

Sam Parr

Mean, that's a huge poll for JJ, right?

Shaan Puri

Oh dude, that's like... yeah, it's like Travis Kelce dating Taylor Swift or something. It's... it's like Travis Kelce is great; you're one of the great tight ends. J.J. Redick is a great basketball player, but goddamn, that's a great pull still.

Sam Parr

That's a good poll. Alright, is that it?

Shaan Puri

Is that the pod? Yeah, that's the pod.

Sam Parr

Alright, that's the...

Shaan Puri

Pod.