The New Best Web Browser For Your PC in 2020 | Better Than Google? | My First Million 06/22/2020

Sam Parr

You know I think I've changed my mind I think that investing

Shaan Puri

is

Sam Parr

fucking stupid

Shaan Puri

okay let's jump right in people have been craving a brainstorm and we're gonna give them a brainstorm

Sam Parr

can I tell you one thing really quick before we get to the brainstorm

Shaan Puri

yeah let's do it okay

Sam Parr

So, I'm gonna go buy a car in about 3 hours, and I'm gonna live, starting August, in a new city each month for 12 months. It's gonna be... I'm looking for a list of happiest cities. So if you have that, let me know.

Shaan Puri

Well, I've seen that once before, and I think it was like you're talking about us only, right? I think like Switzerland or Sweden is number one or something.

Sam Parr

I would go to Canada. I want to go to Mexico City because I love it, but the corona thing... I don't think it is under control there. At least, I wouldn't want to drive through those cities in order to get there.

Shaan Puri

so where are you starting do you know number 1

Sam Parr

I think it's gonna be Provo. Is it called Provo or Provos? What's it called? Provo, Utah. Yeah, the Mormons are definitely the happiest, so I'm gonna go and hang out with them. And then... I don't know, I gotta plan it.

Shaan Puri

Okay, well, I think that's good. You should figure it out as you go. Somebody tweeted this as a reply because I think you mentioned this maybe on the last one. They were like, "Dude, you must have the coolest wife who's just down to do all this stuff." They said, "We need to get her on the pod." So I have two questions for you about that. A) What's her reaction to your, you know, life plans? Like these crazy life plans. Does she feed into them? Does she pull you back a little bit and say, "Hey, here's what's a little more realistic"? Is she just down for whatever? Like, what's her take?

Sam Parr

She's down. Yeah, she's down. She's a little more conservative than I am, but she's down. But does this seem like a crazy idea? This doesn't seem like a crazy idea at all.

Shaan Puri

I don't think it's crazy necessarily, but it's definitely unorthodox. Most people don't do this, so let's say it's unusual. I don't think it's crazy; I think it's good.

Sam Parr

your wife think this is weird you were

Shaan Puri

if I told my wife if I well now we have a baby so that's probably your case

Sam Parr

but when you were childless

Shaan Puri

Yeah, childless. If I had said, "Hey, I want to move every month to a different city," she would have been like, "Why are we doing all this? No, let's not do that." Like, "Okay, you want to go on vacation? Let's go on vacation." I think that would have been her reaction. No, of course, she would really push forward. If I was like, "I need this," she would have done it, but...

Sam Parr

It helps that I don't have kids. We know that we're going to have Sarah's 27, so we're going to have kids in 3 years. We're definitely like, "Let's just party!"

Shaan Puri

Right, yeah, that's good. Someone is a year older than me, and so from day one, it's been like, "Yo buddy, I'm on the clock. Let's do this." Okay, so that's one thing. That's one question. And then the second question is, does she listen to the podcast?

Sam Parr

yeah yeah she does so

Shaan Puri

that's alright nice well

Sam Parr

That would be interesting to have wives come on because they have to deal with... like how do they handle it? Sarah, it's a handful for her to work with me for sure, like because I'm so crazy.

Shaan Puri

we should do it as a happy hour episode one time

Sam Parr

right

Shaan Puri

late night happy hour episode

Sam Parr

I'm not crazy, like I want to do wild stuff all the time, but emotionally, I'm just like... I'm nuts. I think a lot of people who create are like this. So, she does have to put up with stuff. She's patient, so it's good.

Shaan Puri

My wife goes crazy on the minor things and is down for the major ones. What I mean by that is: - If I suggest something that's a minor change, inconvenience, or setback, she overreacts. - But then, if I'm like... she was pregnant, and I said, "I'm gonna quit my job, we're gonna have no health care, I'm gonna go do this crazy thing. It's super high risk, high reward." And she was like, "Okay, yeah, I believe in you." So on the major things, it's like a switch flips in her head, and she's like, "Okay, I gotta be super resilient now."

Sam Parr

wait did you just reveal something

Shaan Puri

No, this was before, when she was pregnant, before we had our baby. I was like, "Look, I'm going to sell this company or I'm going to end the company." It’s one of two ways; we're not going to continue this as is. I'm going to go for the sale hard for 30 days, which is too short. If we get a term sheet, we get a term sheet. If we don't get a term sheet, I actually want to just go do something else that I think has higher upside. That’ll mean no salary, no healthcare, no nothing. And if this doesn't work out...

Sam Parr

well and you moved I mean you I feel like you bought a house and moved on a whim

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I did that too. Okay, let's jump in. Let's do some of these topics. What do you got? Where do you want to start?

Sam Parr

Okay, let's start with DuckDuckGo. I was on the James Altucher podcast. James was here with us a few weeks ago. James is like a dorky, nerdy guy. I say this with love; I like him a lot. He's a nerdy libertarian guy with a libertarian audience. I can't decide if this whole privacy stuff that we're talking about... So, hey.com, the email service, launched a few days ago, or was it a week ago? Yeah, its premise is, like, one of its many promises is its focus on privacy.

Shaan Puri

right

Sam Parr

And so, I'm really into this privacy thing. The founder of Pandora told me that he is seeing his customers, who are middle America people, actually care about privacy. When I was on my trip, I saw DuckDuckGo billboards everywhere. For those who don't know, DuckDuckGo is a Google competitor; it's a search engine, and it's all based on the fact that they don't track you, which like... really ruins the business model. I have no idea how they make money, but...

Shaan Puri

No, no, no, it doesn't. So their thing was like, it's not no ads. They still do search ads, but they're like, "Look, when you search for... you said you're going to buy a new car. When you go search for, you know, Mercedes versus BMW or whatever you're going to search for, they'll serve you an ad." They just don't need to know that you're Sampar, that you live in this place, that you have a wife. They don't need the personal data for the ads to still be effective because search is high intent. They know what you're looking for, so they can serve you a relevant ad. Their insight was that the slight drop-off you get by not personalizing is not so bad if that can become your value proposition. That, "Hey, we're not using personal information to serve these ads."

Sam Parr

Okay, so I just sent you their traffic. Yep, so go to **duckduckgo.com/traffic**. So here's my question to you, first of all...

Shaan Puri

We're looking at a hockey stick. We're looking at phenomenal growth in 2010. This is queries per day, or this is... yeah.

Sam Parr

So, they average 62,000,000 queries per day. I have no idea. I mean, what do you think Google's queries per day are? Probably like 5,000,000,000.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, insane. Listen, I mean operator, see if you can find Google's queries per day so we can put this. It's 3,500,000,000 per day.

Sam Parr

wasn't off okay

Shaan Puri

okay yes

Sam Parr

So, go ahead, Google or DuckDuckGo. It's at 50, 50, 60 million a day. So, they're... I don't even know, what's that like, 3% the size? Anyway, DuckDuckGo, what do you think about that? I personally love this. What I want to know from you is: do you like DuckDuckGo? And do you also think this privacy thing—like building products where the main feature or value is privacy—do you think that's going to be a hit?

Shaan Puri

I think it's a hit. I used to think the opposite. I used to be in the camp that was like, "Look, people don't give a shit." Like, if you just say, "Yeah, sure, in theory, people want privacy," if you offer no privacy or privacy, but when it comes down to products, they're like, "Oh, this is a free good thing, and I have to give up all my data? Alright, here you go." So, I used to think that people, in practice, were willing to easily trade privacy. I think that's still true on the whole, but if...

Sam Parr

you said yes

Shaan Puri

Where is the pendulum swinging? I think the pendulum is swinging more towards people caring about privacy. These things stack up, right? The more paranoid you get, the less trust you have in the system and in the big companies. It doesn't matter; you don't have to know which one is the straw that breaks the camel's back. Maybe it's the fake news stuff on Facebook. Maybe it's when your information gets breached for the 35th time, and you get an email saying, "Hey, sorry, your personal phone number might have been leaked." You don't know where it is, but these things just keep happening. I believe people care more than they did before, and they'll continue to care more. That's number one. Number two, you have to do it on a global product—like a product everybody uses—because it's still a niche audience. Like you said, Google has about 50 times the search query size than DuckDuckGo, so it's 50 to 1. You need a product that's used by pretty much everybody for those issues to add up and create a big enough market for you. So, I wouldn't do it on some niche product. It's like, "Oh, do you know some niche mailing software, like Mailchimp? Cool, I'm going to make a privacy-focused version." It's like, no, that's a niche of a niche.

Sam Parr

well but

Shaan Puri

if you if you take your decision about midstream it works

Sam Parr

like hey.com I call it hey.com because I don't even

Shaan Puri

call it email global right emails everybody uses

Sam Parr

It is global, but you don't need that many users to build a $1,000,000,000 company.

Shaan Puri

Totally! What I'm saying is that you're only going to get about 2% of the value needed to make a change. You know, like Superhuman did the same thing. Email is such a huge market. They thought, "Cool! We'll go get the 1% to 2% who are willing to pay $30 a month for email instead of using free email."

Sam Parr

and so

Shaan Puri

I think that's the same thing happening here

Sam Parr

Abreu, how old are you? 27? You're a little old for this question, the Zoomers.

Shaan Puri

5 years ago

Sam Parr

No, it's a generational thing. I want to know, do the 22-year-olds give a shit about this? Because the way that the Zoomers, the way that they live and think is...

Shaan Puri

really a shit about getting coronavirus so what what do we

Sam Parr

care about the

Shaan Puri

privacy of their data they don't care about their body

Sam Parr

They're a pretty conscientious group of people, I think. I don't know; I would want to know how they think. But that was my question. Okay, so here's another opportunity for privacy that I'm interested in. Do you know that when you go to Safeway... So, in California, we have Safeway. In the South, you've got Kroger, and in the other South, you've got Publix. What else is there?

Shaan Puri

albertsons

Sam Parr

Albertsons. Okay, so when you go to your grocery store, like your major grocery store, you enter your phone number to get a discount, right? What they do with that is they understand your buying behavior. They'll show you, they'll send you stuff in the mail, or they will just learn about inventory, whatever. This is incredibly effective. So effective that there's a famous story about a woman—a 16-year-old girl—getting mailed stuff to her dad's home, like baby supplies. The dad was like, "Hey, my daughter's 16, she's not pregnant! What are you talking about?" It turns out she was pregnant, and they knew it because in your first month, you know what to buy. Anyway, when you go and buy that stuff, did you know that you can submit a request and they'll send you all of your...

Shaan Puri

a do not track request

Sam Parr

well they you could do a do not track and they can send you everything you've ever bought

Shaan Puri

oh that's pretty cool okay I like that

Sam Parr

and so what what would you do with that data

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I think that's just an interesting thing you could do in general, like a Mint.com style. I think you could say, "Hey, what's your phone number?" Then you go request it on behalf of the customer and you give them cool visualizations about their spending patterns over time and other products they might like. But I don't... what would I do with that data if I was the company, or if I was myself? What do you think of it?

Sam Parr

if you're trying to build a business

Shaan Puri

I would go figure out other areas where this sort of linking and tracking will work. A lot of people have already done this, right? The ad market is kind of like porn, where porn innovates first. A close second or third might be the ad market. So, you know, Furkan, who was kind of my co-founder or CTO of my previous company, his previous company was an ad tech company. One of the versions of their app that they made—so the company is called AppLovin—initially had the premise: "What apps are your friends loving? We will recommend those apps to you." So, it was like, if I know what apps you have and I know that you're my friend because you're in my address book, then it can tell me that Sam Parr loves this app.

Sam Parr

I thought it was a a play out of mclovin

Shaan Puri

No, it was... I don't know, maybe that was a side benefit because every love's super bad but one. But then all kinds of little edge cases started messing them up. They would tell me that they love Grindr or whatever, right? So first, it's like not everybody's app behavior; they want to be transparent to their friends or their contacts. I think there was one really horrible case where they switched to trying to do this for app installs. They were like, "Okay, if I'm playing a game and it's awesome..." or sorry, forget about it, "it's awesome." I'm playing a game and they want you to download that game because they get paid $9 if you download it. They would show my face from your address book as, "Hey, Sean's playing Candy Crush right now. Tap here to play Candy Crush too." That was like a super effective ad unit; they were printing money. I think something really bad happened where the CEO of Expedia or something like that got an ad that showed his deceased wife was playing this game or something like that. Someone from his address book who had this app was shown to him, and he's like, "What the hell is this?" So it got back to them, and they had to turn it off. They did a similar experiment around location tracking, like kind of a Life360 thing. You gotta be really careful with these data... oh, let's use data to give you information about either yourself or others. You can get into a situation like the dad who finds out a 16-year-old's pregnant.

Sam Parr

yeah I long story short privacy

Shaan Puri

the privacy I I have a privacy idea for you

Sam Parr

I love

Shaan Puri

a privacy idea for you so I just got

Sam Parr

To because I've become, like, the older I've gotten, I've gotten more libertarian and have developed a "fuck the government" mentality.

Shaan Puri

Well, there are two things that are happening. There are people who are becoming libertarian, which is like "F the government" and "F the man" in general. Then, there are people who are becoming more nationalistic, which is like "it's us versus them." This "us versus them" mentality means keeping them out and raising us up. In both cases, you see a sort of retreat. It's not like a shelter-in-place physically, but it's a shelter-in-place psychologically and behaviorally. You reduce your openness and your spread, you know, in your behaviors, in your data, and in other ways. I think, in general, when times get a little crazy, people tend to have a flight to safety. I see this with investing and with the way people act and behave. More people do it when times get turbulent. Now, regarding a privacy-focused idea that I had the other day: I moved into this new house and needed to get the internet set up. Oh, shit! I had to play the Comcast game. Comcast comes over, and of course, the Wi-Fi doesn't really work great in my house. So, I thought, "Okay, I need to invest in good Wi-Fi." Not having good Wi-Fi is like not having water to drink. I'm looking for these Eero mesh networks that you can use in your house.

Sam Parr

I just bought one

Shaan Puri

give you more coverage so I just bought eero but I was talking to furkon and I was like I

Sam Parr

think eero sucks

Shaan Puri

Well, I hope it doesn't suck because I just bought it. The idea that I was thinking about is, you know how when you... what typically happens is you have your Wi-Fi router and then on your laptop, you'll have a VPN. A lot of people have VPNs; they are becoming more and more popular. Some people have it for work, while others use it to hide their traffic as they go bootleg movies on the internet, and they don't want it to be traced back to them. So, VPNs are kind of complicated to set up. You have to download one, and you don't know if it's malware you're setting up. The average person doesn't even know what the hell a VPN is. So, I was asking...

Sam Parr

I've I've done a ton of research on this market

Shaan Puri

Well, the idea was actually, "Why don't you build a VPN into the router?" That way, you never need to download anything. It's just VPN by default, and it's built into the hardware itself. So, the value proposition of the router is that this is secure internet.

Sam Parr

oh that's fantastic

Shaan Puri

So, there... Fergan, of course, was like, "You know, there are people doing this." I can't say I'm the first to have this idea, but he was telling me about a couple of companies to check out if you're interested in this. **NextDNS** is one of them, and **Ubiquiti** is another one. He was showing me a few of these that today are still kind of like... you kind of need to be a developer to know about these or, like, know how to configure them to set them up. I think if somebody takes the **Eero** level of simplicity and design, but they make the value proposition, "Hey, your internet search traffic, whatever you're doing on the internet, is private if you buy this box instead of that box," I think people can get behind that.

Sam Parr

The hard thing about these companies... So first of all, VPN businesses. I wrote about them because I think that they're going to explode, and they already are exploding. But a lot of them are based in Panama because of the privacy laws there. Many of them are notoriously scammy and weird. They're also ridiculously profitable. I talked to one guy who had a VPN that made $200,000,000 a year in revenue and like $100,000,000 in profit. It's just stupid. But do you remember Eero? You know, Eero got bought by Google, I think.

Shaan Puri

amazon I think

Sam Parr

Amazon got acquired for nothing. These companies are so hard to make money because it costs so much money.

Shaan Puri

Right, yeah, I think hardware is hard. Everybody knows that. Like, Ring Doorbell, you know, it gets a $1,000,000,000 outcome, but I don't think it was ultra profitable at the time. I think it was strategic—the reason it got bought. The reason I think Wi-Fi routers are interesting is because Wi-Fi is like email; it's like Google search. It's a thing that everybody has. Every physical place has a router. So, the 2% of that market that cares about privacy, I think, is still a big market. I don't believe that it's so hard to make money because, again, with this Comcast box that I have here, I have to pay these guys $14 a month just for this router to sit here. There's no way this router's worth more than like $50, but they're going to make money on me. They'll break even in 5 months, and they know I'm never going to get rid of my router. So, yeah, I think there's something interesting there.

Sam Parr

yeah also fuck those guys

Shaan Puri

yeah this episode is brought to you by comcast

Sam Parr

what what do you got

Shaan Puri

okay here's something interesting I saw the other day alright so

Sam Parr

by the way this costco for services that I pray you put freaking awesome but go ahead

Shaan Puri

yes okay you wanna do that one let's do that one I'll no I don't know

Sam Parr

you want anything about it

Shaan Puri

abreu you gotta pop in

Sam Parr

I wanna hear what you sean just keep going what you're doing then we'll do that one

Shaan Puri

Okay, alright. So, the one I was going to say is much more boring. It's about tax. I've been getting into tax stuff now because when you get a little bit of money, you're like, "Oh shit, why am I paying so much tax? Is there a way?" I think rich people avoid this. How do they do that? I need to learn their game. So, I was learning about what are legal tax avoidance and tax shelter strategies. How do you avoid paying 48% tax, which is what I ended up paying on a lot of stuff in California? One of the things that I learned about was solar credits. Solar is one of these things that the government subsidizes. If you have a building, you can buy solar and take 100% of the installation cost as a tax write-off. I was like, "Okay, that's cool, but where am I going to put that on my house? I don't know, I don't really need solar."

Sam Parr

I'm so ignorant when it comes to taxes. So when you say "write off," that just reduces... that just increases your income?

Shaan Puri

Yeah, like let's say you make $1,000,000. If you're going to pay, you know, 40-something percent—43 to 48% tax here in California—because let's say it was all ordinary income and you're in the highest tax bracket, so you're going to pay all that in tax. Now, you know, if you have certain business expenses, personal losses, or tax offsets, you can reduce your overall tax burden. So instead of paying $400 in taxes, you pay $300, which saves you $100. So, for most people...

Sam Parr

the damn thing

Shaan Puri

You still gotta buy the damn thing. But if you need a thing, or you like... with solar, this is where I'm getting at. Typically, with solar, it's like, "Well, I need power anyways. I'll save every month on my monthly bill, and I can get a tax write-off today." So, there's a good investment, right? I'll take $100, I'll put it in, and I'll write off $100 immediately on my taxes. So, it's sort of like I got the thing for free, and then I'm gonna get a lower utility bill every month after that, right? So, that's the theory.

Sam Parr

well I don't think you get it for god I'm so stupid I don't think I

Shaan Puri

I'm going to spend an extra $100, but immediately by spending that, I can write off the $100 on my taxes. So yes, I had to take another $100 out of pocket, but now I have to pay $100 less in taxes, right? You can see how it offsets your tax bill.

Sam Parr

You don't pay a god. I think I... I'm just so fearful of sounding like such a fucking idiot. I don't think... I don't think you.

Shaan Puri

I could be wrong too but I

Sam Parr

Don't think you spend $100 less in taxes. You spend $100 times 43%. No, it's like $100 less. It's... no.

Shaan Puri

No, let’s say my total taxes, if my total taxes due was $400,000, offset by a deduction that I can make. So, you take my total tax bill of $400,000 and you reduce it by $100,000. Now, my total tax bill is $300,000. That's how it works, for sure.

Sam Parr

okay

Shaan Puri

okay so so so so anyways

Sam Parr

I know nothing

Shaan Puri

So, I've been trying to find out what these deductions are, how they work, and whether I qualify. An interesting market that I saw was when my father-in-law mentioned solar energy. He said, "Yeah, you know, with solar..." I responded, "I don't own a building." He explained, "If you own real estate, you can depreciate the real estate and do solar." I reiterated, "I don't own a building, so what do you want me to do here?" He suggested, "Well, technically, you could buy the solar for another building and lease it to them. Then you write off your whole capital expenditure." What I found was that there's this business model. If you've ever noticed, when you drive by schools, they all have solar panels on top. In California, especially, every middle school and high school has solar panels along the roof. The way this works, I found out, is that companies like Chevron and Exxon want tax credits. They go to the school and say, "Hey, we will buy solar for your school." They purchase solar panels for the school, which becomes a tax write-off for them. The school then leases the solar panels from Chevron, and Chevron receives a monthly payment from the school. Meanwhile, the school benefits from lower utility costs without ever spending a dollar out of its pocket. I thought this was very interesting. I don't know much about it yet, but I plan to dig into it. It seems like there's a business opportunity in pairing up schools, churches, and other entities that want solar and lower utility bills but don't have the money to invest in the infrastructure. On the other side, there are businesses looking for tax write-offs. The idea would be to create a system where you push a button, the project happens, and you receive your paperwork that says, "Here's your deduction and here's your income stream coming from the lease." I believe there's a business to be built by connecting these two sides of the marketplace: a physical building like a school that wants solar without any upfront costs or work, and a company willing to provide that solar in exchange for the tax write-off.

Sam Parr

Love it! I'm going to tell you something very similar as well, and this is in the same vein of "half-baked," "10% baked," or "1% baked." Most highway medians and government property, or public property, have grass. The reason it has grass is that grass is the cheapest way to cover land.

Shaan Puri

okay

Sam Parr

but grass is actually incredibly expensive to upkeep

Shaan Puri

okay

Sam Parr

Like, if you're in a median, you have to mow it. The way that the math works out, it's something like... I forget the exact numbers; there's math behind this. Then, having to mow it and water it and do all this stuff, it's incredibly expensive. In LA, I have to remember the numbers, but I think that like 20 or 30% of all water went to watering lawns. So what they did was they tested this out and they gave turf to the residents. They just gave it away. They said, "Here, right, we'll do..."

Shaan Puri

it for you

Sam Parr

And it reduced water usage significantly. I started thinking about it, and I'm like, "That's kind of interesting." What if you just went to the government and said, "We're just going to turf all the medians in America"?

Shaan Puri

right

Sam Parr

I heard on NPR that they did this whole thing about how bad grass is. I thought, "That's pretty amazing! I gotta look into this." However, I have not looked into it yet. So, I sound like a complete idiot this whole episode, but...

Shaan Puri

No, no, no. So, let me give you one more. Okay, here's the general theme of these really random topics we're talking about. When you look around the world—and this is what I'm now training my brain to do—when you see some item, object, or patch of grass, just think to yourself, "How did this get here?" What you realize is there is a business underneath every single thing. Like, this is going back to when we said, you know, in offices, you've got that poster about the kind of HR hazards or whatever, like the stupid labor law poster you have to put up.

Sam Parr

up in your office that's like a

Shaan Puri

it's a huge business that's

Sam Parr

a huge business

Shaan Puri

Now, I was blind to this, right? I just saw this poster. I didn't ask how it got there or why it had to be there. Why does every office have this? But whoever asked that question realized there's an opportunity here. They started laminating these posters and making $50,000,000 a year by providing this annual poster that you have to update in your office. So that's the test for the listener: Start to look at the world and ask, "How did this get here? Who wanted this here? What is the economics of this getting here?"

Sam Parr

Oftentimes, that's a good point, Sean. A lot of times when people don't think about that stuff, what if you dug deep? You could realize that there was some bureaucratic decision that was a horrible decision.

Shaan Puri

right yeah and there could be opportunity it could be a totally broken stop opportunity

Sam Parr

So, a lot of times there's like a scrappy entrepreneur who comes up with something cool, like that sign business. Other times, it's like, "Why did you guys decide to make the screws 5 inches instead of 6 inches?" It's like, "Because the 6 on the keyboard was worn out."

Shaan Puri

Right, right. Alright, so here’s another example of these hidden-in-plain-sight businesses. Alright, you go to an airport, you take a flight, and you go to baggage claim. Okay, cool. Nine times out of ten, your bag's there. Now, the other ten times out of a hundred or whatever, you know your bag is lost, and they recover it. But there still ends up being this 0.3% of luggage that’s never claimed. Is it 0.3%?

Sam Parr

is that the number

Shaan Puri

0.3% of luggage, I believe, gets claimed. So, 0.3% of luggage is just unclaimed baggage. I saw this business called Unclaimed Baggage. What they have done is partner with every airline and said, "We will take the unclaimed baggage." They have some protocol; like, I don't know what it is, but after 21 days, if no one claims it, now they're just stuck with this stuff. And somebody was like, "Hey, that's not just stuff; that's a suitcase and some belongings inside." So, they were like...

Sam Parr

Have you seen the *60 Minutes* episode on this? It was like a 2-minute series. They're based in Birmingham, Alabama, I believe.

Shaan Puri

They're based somewhere random. They have a physical store in, where is it? Alabama. Scottsboro, Alabama.

Sam Parr

yeah I'll I know this company well I love it

Shaan Puri

So, you can go to their website, **unclaimedbaggage.com**. There's a tagline that says, "the nation's only retailer of lost luggage." That caught my eye. Anytime you say "only," that means I locked up an exclusive on this. I'm so happy that I can be the only player, which means I'm going to extract a lot of value here. What they do is they donate a bunch of stuff that they get in the bags to charities. Cool! There's a feel-good component to this. They take orphaned bags, recycle them, sell them, or donate them. Those three combined create a business. To me, this is such a cool, clever idea. I couldn't find their revenue; I didn't have a chance to check. But you can go on the site and see what's available.

Sam Parr

it called again unclaimed

Shaan Puri

Unclaimed bag... It's like you'll buy this. There's a Rolling Stones collector's limited edition leather motorcycle jacket for $500 up for auction on this thing.

Sam Parr

what's it called unclaimed baggage

Shaan Puri

unclaimed baggage.com

Sam Parr

Well, we could find this out. I remember "60 Minutes" did a big expose on this a while ago. It was like they have tens of thousands of square footage.

Shaan Puri

Right, yeah, yeah. They have a huge, huge facility there. The other one that's like this, which I think is more popular and people know about more, is the group that takes the... okay, you go to a hotel, you use, you know, two squirts of shampoo out of the mini bottle, and now there's still three squirts left. Then you check out, and they don't want to give that half-empty bottle to the next guest, so they ditch it. Some guy was like, "Whoa, that's a lot of waste of plastic and shampoo." So someone started going into hotels and partnered with them, saying, "I will take all your used shampoo bottles, conditioner bottles, body wash, whatever." And so they built a huge business just recycling this stuff.

Sam Parr

love that

Shaan Puri

They take it, they reuse the goods, and they donate certain things to charity. It's such a good business—it's like doing good while doing well. I think those are great.

Sam Parr

I love that. Here's why: I just Googled it. So, Doyle Owens is the founder of Unclaimed Baggage. He's dead now; he died recently. If you Google him, he's just like an old Southern gentleman.

Shaan Puri

right

Sam Parr

white looking dude I mean just a normal ass looking dude and

Shaan Puri

the the guy who watches billy madison 3 times a day

Sam Parr

Yeah, well, the reason why I like him is because I think that people tend to overcomplicate things. I'm very passionate about the mission of reducing waste. I just don't like the idea of consuming what you don't have to consume and just being wasteful. I was raised Catholic, and this idea of gluttony and waste is just in my blood. I hate it. This guy is like the definition of turning shit into gold. It's super simple; it's not fancy. It's in Alabama, which, you know, I'm from the South. No disrespect to the South, but people look down on that because they think they're in Silicon Valley and that they're special. But this guy reduced waste significantly and got very wealthy in the process.

Shaan Puri

right love it

Sam Parr

And he probably created maybe thousands of jobs for low-income people. This guy is the best! I love this.

Shaan Puri

So, if you know about a business like this, I'll call these "hidden in plain sight." You know, super simple ideas—just things that, when you look around the world, most people take for granted. Then, somebody out there is like, "No, wait! How did this get here? Who picks this up when it's done? What's the business of that?" Tweet those at me. I want to know what other businesses are like this out there.

Sam Parr

did you. Did you make that do you make that term up in plain sight

Shaan Puri

No, I think they use that term for like serial killers that are just in society. So, like, that's where I've heard it. It's like for criminals in some way, but I don't know. Yeah, it's a phrase.

Sam Parr

Dude, Doyle Owens is this guy's name who started Unclaimed Baggage. I love this guy!

Shaan Puri

doyle I hope you listen to this he's dead I'm sorry I said you oh no oh no

Sam Parr

he's dead I'm looking at his obituary he's he's dead

Shaan Puri

damn

Sam Parr

This guy is **fucking awesome**! Don't no one go into this market. I want this family to be... I love this family.

Shaan Puri

3 seconds of silence for doyle

Sam Parr

There's a big New York Times article. I gotta cover this on The Hustle. This is a super interesting story.

Shaan Puri

An example of this that you guys covered on The Hustle is the mannequin lady in Oakland. Yeah, it takes, you know, I guess either used or damaged mannequins out of stores. Because again, what are you going to do with this hunk of plastic? Like, who needs this mannequin? She's just got a warehouse of mannequins and then ships them out and makes a killing. So, there, that's another example of these... oh, like these are parts of the world that you didn't realize are businesses. Alright, Abreu, give us Costco for services. What are you thinking here?

Abreu Andrade

So, this is kind of like a **Pinduoduo** thing, right? Yep, copy in bulk, you get a discount. This is a two-part thing. What you would do is go to these companies, SaaS companies, say like Adobe, and ask, "Hey, what kind of tiers and what kind of pricing discounts per tier would you offer?" Let's say, "Hey, if I can bring in 100 customers, we can offer a 10% discount or a 5% discount over our normal prices." The second thing would obviously be to have a website where people can create groups and claim that discount. You can call them pods or clusters. For example, you get a 10% discount for 50 people. The website will show, "Hey, 40 people are already in this pod. 10 more, and you guys get to claim this discount."

Sam Parr

Yeah, what you're describing is group buying, and it could be great. A few companies that do something similar to this are AppSumo and StackSocial. I think they’re good companies. And then there's a new one called... is it called Secret or Ghost? You know what I'm talking about, Sean?

Shaan Puri

no ghost is like a blogging platform so

Sam Parr

I think it's called "Secret" or something like that. Anyway, it's called Secret. I think I'm looking at them because I was going to partner with them in some capacity. It's an interesting business model that a lot of people have tried. FoundersCard is another one that's probably a $12,000,000 a year business. It's an interesting business, but no one has actually made this scale wonderfully. I talked to—I'm going to name drop a little—at the backstage of HustleCon, we had the founder of WeWork. Not the one that's in the news, but the other one, Miguel is his name. What they did was, I don't remember how many tenants they had, maybe 50,000 at the time. He said they launched this rewards card where they got group discounts, and he said no one used it. That shocks me because what you're describing, Aubrey, I'm like, "Yeah, everyone wants to save money. Of course, you're going to use that." But for some reason, people don't do it. I don't know why businesses that have made this work in an indirect way are RetailMeNot. They kind of made it work a little bit. I mean, that company sold for like $1,000,000,000, I think. I mean, it was a huge exit, or maybe it's still independent, but it's a large business. What do you think, Sean?

Shaan Puri

I like group buying. I have a friend who taught me a lot about it, or he was telling me a lot about group buying companies. Everything was fascinating, but I didn't retain any of the information. So, we're going to have to ask him to come on and explain some of these group buying companies. Alright, let's move on to the next one. I have some other interesting things. First, did you know Jeff Bezos was adopted?

Sam Parr

yeah by cuban dad

Shaan Puri

I don't think he was adopted as an orphan. I think his mom left and remarried. No, his dad left or his parents got split. His mom remarried and his new dad...

Sam Parr

does he have does he still talk to his normal I don't

Shaan Puri

I don't think so because for Father's Day, he posted, "This is my dad." So, I don't know if he's... that's like a...

Sam Parr

Well, I read his bio. He considers his Cuban father, which I think is a step, like he's a Cuban guy, as his real dad.

Shaan Puri

and I just thought it was crazy like imagine adopting the wealthiest man in the world

Sam Parr

Steve Jobs... do you know that Steve Jobs was adopted too? He met his birth father at a restaurant, and his birth father didn't know that it was him.

Shaan Puri

oh I didn't know that I didn't know that part of the story

Sam Parr

... had us. Then, when he went to the restaurant and he saw his birth father (Steve knew who his birth father was), the birth father goes, "Oh my God, Steve Jobs is at my restaurant! I cannot believe this!" and like flipped out over it. I don't think Steve ever told him that he was his son.

Shaan Puri

That's amazing! I didn't know about that. Okay, I have another company that I think is cool. I want to talk about it. Wait...

Sam Parr

that's it you're just gonna say jeff bezos was adopted there's no yeah

Shaan Puri

That's the whole subject. I just thought, imagine adopting someone who became Jeff Bezos. That's crazy!

Sam Parr

Let me tell you a quick tip then. That isn't a business; Companies House, that's the name of it. Did you know that in Australia and many of the countries in Europe, if you're a privately held company that's above like $40,000,000 in revenue, I think you have to submit an annual report?

Shaan Puri

yes

Sam Parr

I didn't know that. I went to the Australian version and the British version. The Australian version costs $5 per report. It's called Companies House for Britain, and it's completely free. I just looked up all these cool companies, and you can see how much dividends they make.

Shaan Puri

Right, my friend started this in Great Britain. It's also called due diligence; it's just called Due Deal. It's his company, and I think it's like a massively successful company. I was like, "How are you getting all this private company data?" He's like, "Oh, it's just like you have to make it available here." So what we do is we just aggregate it, present it, and make it searchable. I was like, "Oh my God! Like, you know, Jesus, how... I wish that existed in the U.S. and, B, what a simple, beautiful business to do."

Sam Parr

looking at this amazing

Shaan Puri

Did you find anything interesting from these, or did you just want to shout them out as cool tools? So, what was the one? I'm going to check out the Australian one. That was what? House company? House?

Sam Parr

That's Britton. It's free. I don't know what it...

Shaan Puri

was called is it just easy to use like am I no

Sam Parr

It's not Companies House. It's easy to use the Australian one. It's not easy. It was called the Australian ASIC (Australian Securities and Investment Commission). I guess that's their equivalent of the SEC, right? And it cost money. So I looked up a research business that was similar to mine, and I was curious. The founder just pays himself $10,000,000 a year. And then I just looked at the financials. It's pretty big. It's called... you probably know this... IBISWorld.

Shaan Puri

yeah yeah yeah ibisworld I didn't realize that's how big it was

Sam Parr

a 100 million

Shaan Puri

so you know

Sam Parr

20,000,000 in time

Shaan Puri

The idea is... and these might exist already, but you can build a layer on top of these just to make them more user-friendly, searchable, and easy to use. You can clean up the data in some way, and those can be pretty awesome businesses. Import Genius is a great example of this. You know, they use publicly available customs data, and it's not even that easy to use, but they create an interface that makes it very simple and easy to find the data you're looking for. So, you know, if there's some entrepreneur in Australia who wants to take ASIC and make it more of a consumer-facing website— or maybe that exists— but that would be a cool opportunity.

Sam Parr

what else

Shaan Puri

So, I saw this company I liked called Align. I almost hesitate to even talk about it because I'm very interested in it. I may invest, may use it, may...

Sam Parr

something kind of like the t thing

Shaan Puri

Not the T thing, it's pretty cool. So, you know how Lambda School sort of popularized income share agreements? They basically say, "I train you, you go get a job, and you have to pay me back out of that." It's a novel way of handling student debt. So, income share agreements are getting more popular as Lambda School has proven that they work. All the Lambda School clones...

Sam Parr

I don't think they've proven they've worked I think that they're proven that some people are interested in them

Shaan Puri

in what income share agreements

Sam Parr

yeah I'm critical of them

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I don't really know why you'd be critical. Why are you critical, first of all?

Sam Parr

All I don't... I think that the boot camp idea is just unrealistic.

Shaan Puri

okay but that's different that's not

Sam Parr

That is different. I don't know. I'm not well-versed on it yet, so my opinion is I'm skeptical, which is...

Shaan Puri

so here's what I think

Sam Parr

is a with that

Shaan Puri

Here's what I think is a very valid skepticism of it: "Hey, you're making this sound like a totally new thing. This is just a different form of student debt. I go to school, and then when I graduate, I have to pay back X dollars for my education. That's student debt. That's how an income share agreement works. That's also how student debt works." So, there's a lot of people who are like, "Oh, you know, student debt is evil. Student debt is a big problem in the country. Income share agreements are a novel disruption." Really, they're both just debt instruments that work differently. I didn't have student debt, luckily, but I have friends who are still sort of paying that off. So, anyways, I think that's the valid criticism, which is that this is not that different. The income sharing agreement is not that different. The one difference would be that with student debt, you owe it regardless of whether you get a good job or not. For an income share agreement, you only owe it if you get a high-paying job. So, the incentive is kind of aligned for the school to train you up and help you get a good-paying job, which is your goal as well as a student. I think that's a fair counter. But, anyways, my...

Shaan Puri

Is they can share agreements, whether you like them or not. They are getting more popular. They've sort of been nonexistent 5 to 10 years ago, and now they're gaining traction as a financing instrument. So, what Align is doing—I think the website is helloalign.com—they basically made a sort of "Stripe for income share agreements." It's just a way for anybody who wants to set up an income share agreement to do so with like one line of code. They take care of the whole income share agreement process. Let's say I, which is true, have ideas for new education models, new schools, and new ways to teach people and help them earn more money. I could now set up an income share agreement website without having to deal with all the finance compliance and the work that I would normally need to pay a bunch of lawyers for and spend a lot of time doing. Now, I just get it out of the box. It's like when Twilio made SMS an easy thing to use out of the box, or TokBox made it easy to use video streaming, or Stripe made it easy to do credit card processing. Now, these guys have done it for income share agreements, which I think is a very clever niche.

Sam Parr

how big are they what's their traction anything

Shaan Puri

they're brand new I think they're in early access right now

Sam Parr

I'm on board with that. I don't think I would invest because I'm not investing in... I don't want to invest in private companies right now because I'm just... I'm just fearful at the moment.

Shaan Puri

no that's fair

Sam Parr

I'd be the stock market. But that's cool. I would put... I would put... I like it enough that I would be close to putting my money where my mouth is on it.

Shaan Puri

Right, I don't think I would invest either, but I just think it's cool that somebody built this. Also, I think it's a good example of identifying a niche trend. A lot of people do this. When bots started getting more popular, they were like, "Cool, here's a bot maker." Or when voice technology, you know, the Echo, gets big, people start buying a bunch of Amazon Echos. Then, people made it easy to create voice apps using things like Voiceflow. I think you want to be on the edge. Where is this a trend? If it is a trend, I can spin up a super simple website or service. Like, you know, "Oh, maybe email marketing is going to get big. Let me build a really easy way to email a mass list and track the opens and whatnot." Sure, 8 times out of 10, that trend is going to fizzle out or end up being much smaller than you think. But being early really matters in these spaces, and so I think that's cool. Here's another niche thing that I thought was cool: it's something called AgentFire. This is a website for real estate agents. It's like a Wix or a Squarespace specifically for real estate agents. So, it's like, "Push a button, here's your real estate agent website." This company is doing $100,000 a month, and what's interesting is that there's this guy you should follow. His name, his Twitter handle is @vinrob (V-I-N-R-O-B), and this guy, Robin Vanderhaden. What he's doing is, I don't know, I haven't met the guy yet, but his claim is, "I help people productize their service." So, here's what happened...

Abreu Andrade

I made

Sam Parr

a request oh my god

Shaan Puri

Somebody was making a service to do this for agents. Like, "You pay me X dollars, I'll build you an agent website." What he helps them do is turn that into a specific standalone SaaS product that will let an agent do it automatically. So now, there's no human service in the loop. He tweets out a bunch of examples of profitable niche services that have turned into products. I thought this is kind of a gold mine of cool little ideas and hacks. AgentFire, which is one of these, is a guy who was doing this as a service and turned it into a product. Now, he's doing over $100,000.

Sam Parr

This is amazing! How many requests? I mean, you said who he is. Rob, is he raising money? I don't know.

Shaan Puri

He's based out of Singapore. Everything about this guy, I'm interested. I'd like to meet this guy. I think people should follow him because he's tweeting out gold, and he's only got, you know, 2,000 followers. So most people aren't looking at [his content].

Sam Parr

This stuff, I'm following him now. Alright, let me wrap it up with one thought. Yeah, we've talked about it. We've had a bunch of people on here who are investors, and we had a friend who is raising a fund right now. You know, I think I've changed my mind. I think that investing is **fucking stupid**.

Shaan Puri

I would have bet a $1,000 you're gonna say stupid I would have been wrong because you said fucking stupid but

Sam Parr

like

Shaan Puri

why is investing stupid I would love to hear why investing is stupid

Sam Parr

Tell me if I'm being like just a baby here, but I just find this financial arbitrage stuff to be so boring and meaningless.

Shaan Puri

okay

Sam Parr

And I watched the TV show "1,000,000,000," and I'm like, "Oh, that's cool! They're doing all these big things; it looks exciting." Then I'm like, "Well, those guys are losers. They're not actually adding to... I mean, they're just wealthy and they're accomplishing dreams." So, I respect it, but I also think, "Oh my god, that's so soulless." That's what I think a lot of... I've got friends that create these websites. They're already wealthy, and they're building these websites that are just hawking stuff. They will admit that they are. I'm like, "What the heck's the point of this?" And that's kind of what a lot of investing is.

Shaan Puri

Is so, okay, but the friend's hawking shit, that's different than investing, right? That's just like selling, to some degree, for money, right?

Sam Parr

It's definitely from a similar... yeah, no, it's just like, why? If you already have a little bit of cash, which if you're still trying to get your hit, you know, go for it. But if you already have a little bit of cash, do something cool and meaningful.

Shaan Puri

okay so here's here's I'll give you 2 2 thoughts on this I'll give you the first as an example that supports your case and then I'll give you the feel good reason why you're wrong so k the support your case so I I mentor this guy who's 20 years old and he's at this. Where like he tried to do some stuff and it kinda didn't work out and now he's like fuck do I need to go get a job I need to pay my bills I don't wanna go move back home with my parents and so he's like he's like about to take this job and he's like should I you know leave this entrepreneurial path and go get a job because I you know spin something up in the next 60 days that will get so profitable that I'll be I know I'll be able to pay my rent and I said you know I empathize with the problem but I said you know let's just slow down for a second before you go take that consulting job let's just let's just talk things through for a second so I said how much money do you need to live every month what's your burn rate he said 2 grand I said okay 2 grand fantastic and I was like so let's say you wanted a year of runway to go try some shit you need to come up with 12 months times 2 grand you need to come up with 24 grand I said I know you do some investing in the stock market you're kind of a degenerate you know you like to pick stocks you try to buy bitcoin and shit I was like because at the beginning of the conversation he's like you know my my good the thing that's going well is my investments have done well the thing that's going bad is I'm about to have to take this job for my my bills I was like well those two things don't add up I was like I was like do you have enough money in the stock market right now that you could just sell and you could use to live off of to chase your entrepreneurial dreams he's like yeah I could but then I'd have to sell and I don't wanna sell because I'm getting you know good returns I said okay let's do the math real quick what do you think you could generate per let's take just the 24,000 that you need I don't know how much money you have you don't have to tell me let's take the 24,000 that you need how much do you think you could generate per year in return average he's like 50% I was like okay mini warren buffett you think you could do 50% a year but let's let's assume your delusional number is correct and that you could do it consistently which is the hard part you could do it for 1 year for sure but consistently generate 50% so let's say you you do the warren buffett you you invest perfectly you get your 50% way above market return and your $24 has turned into $36 now like fantastic congratulations you made $12,000 like you are still nowhere near where you're trying to get with your goals and if you and how many years would you have to continue to get this absurd return for you to be with where your goals are

Sam Parr

I was

Shaan Puri

like not

Sam Parr

that many but he'll that would never happen

Shaan Puri

You would never happen, right? You never get to 50%. So anyways, I was like, "You're talking about this year going and trading all your time for money at a consulting gig when instead you could just sell some of your stock, get $24 of runway, and you could live for 12 months. You could give yourself a bunch of shots on goal to try to build something that you believe in. You'll learn way more, you'll have way more fun, and you'll have way more upside than if you go take the consulting job." So, like, you're crazy. He was of the mindset of, "Well, I heard that rich people invest, so I want to invest, and I want to get a return. I want my money to work for money." He had kind of heard all these things and was investing for that reason. So I think investing doesn't make sense when you have a very little amount of capital overall and you're trying to go invest that capital while trading your time for dollars in other ways. Now, the other... so that's the argument for times when I think investing would be stupid. If you take a normal return, the amount of money that you're making every month or every year is not going to change your life, and you're locking up money in the system.

Sam Parr

But what's the second? Because I think the second point's going to be better than the first. The first that you made was that, "Well, only invest if you've got a lot."

Shaan Puri

Yeah, exactly. If you don't have a lot, I'd rather you use that money. If you're entrepreneurial, if you're one of the 5% of people who actually want to build a business or do something on their own, you're better served investing in yourself and buying your time back.

Sam Parr

yeah

Shaan Puri

And going, taking a bunch of shots on goal. Now, the second is investing. Stupid? Well, I think you're kind of right that it is not the most exciting thing. But excitement is different for everybody. Here's the cool way of thinking about investing: for anything to work, you need leverage. Right? So you run the hustle, but day to day, you probably write zero emails. You don't write the daily email, you don't do the trends report. This podcast is the most active thing you do for the hustle. Is that correct?

Sam Parr

it we could say yes for sake of argument

Shaan Puri

okay so for the sake of argument

Sam Parr

your your argument is correct I'm leverage

Shaan Puri

So, you're leveraged because you have a bunch of humans doing work for you. Cool! Another form of leverage is media. We’re going to talk for one hour, and then this is going to be listened to for hundreds or thousands of hours out there. So, media is another form of leverage. The last one is capital. Capital is another form of leverage. Here’s a cool way of thinking about it: if you have capital, investing is your way of allocating that capital to things that are either a) going to return the most or b) going to change the world in a way that you care about. So, capital is your way of influencing the way the world goes because you get to assign units of energy to different companies and causes that are going to go do things.

Sam Parr

In the world, I get that, and I think that's great. What I'm completely burnt out on is just lame-ass investments.

Shaan Puri

like what's a lame ass investment

Sam Parr

like

Shaan Puri

you don't have to use a name if you wanna kind of code name something

Sam Parr

I have a friend who gave a lot of money to an investor who's going to buy a bunch of multifamily real estate. It's simply a... like, I don't ever see this; I don't touch it. This is just, "Give me 7% of your..." Yeah, simply an asset class. It's just a thing on a spreadsheet, and I'm like, "Oh my God, that's so boring." I can't decide if I'm being a little... like, "bitch hater" or... yeah. But we have some friends who are buying companies, and they just look for anything that checks the boxes: "Does it have net churn?" "What is the acquisition cost?" And that's it. That's all. I mean, it's like mechanical.

Shaan Puri

yeah

Sam Parr

Yeah, I get it. I'm like, "Alright, that's a great way to make money," but it's just like so **lame** sometimes. I'm like, "Oh my god, you guys! Can we please do something exciting?"

Shaan Puri

Okay, so here's the rub. Let's say you don't invest. You're going to either: A. Park cash on the side and do nothing with it, which is probably lamer than investing and having the cash grow. Or B. You're going to... or what's door number C? So, what else would you prefer to do with your capital besides invest or leave it in cash?

Sam Parr

either start companies and even if that means I don't run them or

Shaan Puri

that's investing

Sam Parr

Yeah, I'm not saying investing... I'm using "investing" because I can't think of a better word. No, investing is cool. I mean, investing is great, but I'm just saying like arbitrage is... is... Again, starting a company is arbitrage, but I think you understand what I'm saying, yeah?

Shaan Puri

I I get where you're coming from

Sam Parr

I don't know... it just hit me last week where I'm like, "Oh my God, this is it." I don't want to talk about a carry fee ever again. I just think it's so lame. When I was traveling, I saw these normal people at the gas station with their wives and kids. I realized I'm way more fascinated by how to make that person just a little bit happier or a little bit better, not by how to eke out a little more profit from this service. Do you know what I'm saying?

Shaan Puri

I'm like I can't like

Sam Parr

Like, it's like I saw these... I remember being at this gas station and I saw this mom give her kid a generic Coke. I was like, "Oh God, that kills me that this little girl is going to drink this." How can we help this mother either afford or learn that this thing, or that thing, is not as good? How can we help her make a better decision? Make a better decision. Easy. Not, "How do I get 5% net profit?"

Shaan Puri

I think I actually understand what you're saying now, which is it's not that investing is stupid. It's not that putting money in some place and getting a return is stupid. What you are starting to get annoyed with, or tired of, is the amount of your mental energy that goes towards thinking about how to reap returns from cash deployed. So, it's actually about where you devote mental energy and not where the money goes. It's kind of like, I get that money—you gotta do something with the money. You might as well put it in a place that's going to grow; you might as well fund a company that's going to do something. But it's about mentally spending cycles thinking about how do I get 7% versus 8% versus a tax-efficient 9%, versus just mentally spending those same cycles thinking about something else. Like, I'm reading a book, talking to a person, building something cool, writing a song, whatever it's going to be. Is that more accurate?

Sam Parr

Yeah, just like get out of this financial arbitrage circle jerk and actually make a difference. Have an exciting, wonderful life.

Shaan Puri

yeah I'm with you on that

Sam Parr

myself and others

Shaan Puri

I'm with you on that. I catch myself doing that all the time, where I'm like, "How many hours is my brain spending on this financial game?" There's some amount that's correct, but it's very easy to slip into more than what you need—more than what's adding value to your life and others.

Sam Parr

I love that TV show *Billions*. I'm like, "Oh man, Bobby Axelrod, this powerful billionaire guy, he's going to war over some of the people." That's so awesome! I love that. Yeah, he's an alpha, but he's also just a jerk who's trying to squeeze pennies out of this thing or that thing, and it's complete nonsense.

Shaan Puri

right you know

Sam Parr

what I mean

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I think, you know, what also happens is important. In your twenties, you're trying to figure out what... like, your twenties, in many ways, are about feeding the ego. It's like whether you're partying, trying to make friends, trying to date people, or trying to get your name on the map in your career or your industry. I feel like a lot of people, including myself, spend their twenties feeding the ego. Then, in your thirties, you start figuring out that, okay, my ego is either full or it will never be full. I actually want to feed the soul in some kind of way.

Sam Parr

that's what I mean yeah

Shaan Puri

I actually want to become more conscious of how I spend my time and my energy. Then there's this constant push and pull of like, "Maybe I just want to make a bunch of money." Maybe I'm not ambitious enough.

Sam Parr

well I think you can do both

Shaan Puri

way over money focused and there's like these debates that I have in my head it sounds like you do too

Sam Parr

I think you could do both. I guess the thing I'm beginning to realize is that I love the builders more than the allocators. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah... the builders are our allocators.

Shaan Puri

All day. Okay, yeah, good. That's a good way to end the podcast. If you listened to us meander through that last 5 minutes, hopefully there was some value in the end for you.