Greatest Hits #6 - Sam Tells All, Again - Selling for 10s of Millions after Making Millions with an Email Newsletter

On this episode, Sam (@theSamParr) gives an update on an earlier episode with one of our most popular guests, himself. Sam revisits what he said almost 2 years during Episode 3, and shares 18 updates on how he currently thinks about those same topics now. Sam Parr (@theSamParr) is the founder of The Hustle - a simple email newsletter that has surpassed 1M daily subscribers and will be north of 8 figures this year. Sam walks us through how he built The Hustle from scratch as well as his adventures starting a hot dog stand, selling booze on the internet, meeting celebrities on the street and convincing them to hire him and how he would get rich if he was 21 again! --------- * Want to be featured in a future episode? Drop your question/comment/criticism/love here: https://www.mfmpod.com/p/hotline/ * Support the pod by spreading the word, become a referrer here: https://refer.fm/million * Have you joined our private Facebook group yet? Go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion and join thousands of other entrepreneurs and founders scheming up ideas. --------- Sam's commentary: * (1:02) Sam intro commentary * (7:41) Sam commentary 2 * (13:56) Sam commentary 3 * (20:07) Sam commentary 4 * (25:14) Sam commentary 5 * (39:46) Sam commentary 6 * (42:52) Sam commentary 7 * (45:16) Sam commentary 8 * (47:33) Sam commentary 9 * (49:06) Sam commentary 10 * (53:18) Sam commentary 11 * (54:43) Sam commentary 12 * (58:07) Sam commentary 13 * (1:05:42) Sam commentary 14 * (1:06:06) Sam commentary 15 * (1:07:37) Sam commentary 16 * (1:09:29) Sam commentary 17 * (1:12:32) Sam final commentary

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Shaan Puri?

  This episode is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. But what is the HubSpot Podcast Network? That's right. It's a new thing by HubSpot. They started with our podcast and now they're branching into more and more podcasts with experts in different business areas. So you might have a podcast about marketing, or sales, or operations, or customer service. And we're going to go over through the different podcasts on this network. Some are more entertaining, some are more informational, some are a good mix of both. That's what we try to do here. And HubSpot's goal here is to have on-demand mentors. So if you're an entrepreneur, you're a startup, or you're scaling up, you're going to be able to hear practical tips and inspirational stories by listening to the different podcasts on their network, which by the way, I think this is a smart idea. Too many brands just try to sell you their thing.

• 0:44Shaan Puri?

  HubSpot, I love their approach here. They're like, let's put out great valuable free content and help more companies succeed. And the more companies that we help succeed, the more will eventually come back to us, sort of like a good karma kind of thing. So listen, learn, and grow with HubSpot Podcast Network, hubspot.com/podcastnetwork.

• 1:03Sam Parr?

  All right, we have another greatest hits episode. And what we're going to do is we're going to air this episode that Sean did about 18 months ago, and I'm going to talk over it and give commentary. People seem to like this. And over the next couple of weeks, we're actually going to do this where we do commentary over lots of different interviews, whether it's ours or not. And well, you're going to see, it's going to be pretty good. But today, we've got a good one. And I say that with hesitation. Why? Because it's about me. I'm Sam Parr. I started The Hustle. I don't actually think that, you know, like when I started HustleCon, this is like this big event we have, I would, I always had a rule where I'm like, I'm not going to talk at my own event. That's kind of lame. I think it's weird.

• 1:47Sam Parr?

  And I always thought it was weird to kind of talk about myself a lot on this podcast because it's not supposed to be about me. But by the numbers, this is like a pretty popular episode, and a lot of people want to know how to make money off of newsletters. And we just sold our company for tens of millions of dollars, like eight weeks ago or something like that. So people have been asking about this, and we're on our fourth or fifth or sixth installment of this, and this is like the fourth or fifth or sixth most downloaded episode. So here we are. We're going to play this episode. In this episode, I'm going to explain how I started The Hustle. So when Hustle sold, we were... We had millions of subscriber. We were doing eight figures in ad and subscription revenue. And it was a great company and I loved working here and I loved building this company.

• 2:32Sam Parr?

  So I'm going to talk to you about how I did it and I'm going to give an update. This interview was 18 months old, maybe, maybe 20 months old. And I'll talk throughout and kind of give you an update on how things turned out. And let's see how it goes. So let's get into the interview. We're going to be launching a ton of new stuff, by the way. So we've been doing this little series where we, where we do a recap on the greatest hits. But we've got this cool thing where we're going to splice together different people's interviews and different bits of content throughout the YouTube and podcast world. And Sean and I are going to like roll together themes on. So for example, like we'll talk about how stuff is not, or is rarely an overnight success. And it takes a long time. So we're going to have interviews of people explaining how long it took

• 3:18Sam Parr?

  them to make stuff, even though you assume that it happened much faster than it did. So that's one example. That's going to be cool. So in order to know when those are live, you got to hit the subscribe button though. So hit the subscribe button on iTunes and also hit the follow button on Spotify. The more you do that, the more followers we get, which means the higher in the ratings that we go. And the higher in the ratings we go, the more listeners we get, and the more listeners get, the more we could do this. Please do that. Let's start the show.

• 3:59Sam Parr?

  A big CEO of a huge media company that you know of told me this business will never make more than $2 million a year. And it wasn't until like six months ago where I was like, man, there's like a path to make literally a hundred million dollars a year in revenue.

• 4:37Shaan Puri?

  All right, we are here with Sam Parr, the founder of The Hustle, the big daddy of the publisher of the podcast. How does it feel to have a podcast on your, on your network now?

• 4:45Sam Parr?

  Well, I'm excited and I hope people will like it. We have to wait and see the numbers first. That's what I'll be excited for most.

• 4:50Shaan Puri?

  I know, I know, alright. So, for those who don't know, The Hustle is a daily newsletter, goes out to about a million and a half readers. Is that right? A million and a half?

• 4:57Sam Parr?

  Yeah, we could say that.

• 4:58Shaan Puri?

  We're growing. Every morning, so people like to start their day with it. It's, the way I think about it is like you get an email and it tells you the news, and I like the way you describe it, which is, it's like, you know, your no BS friend just explaining it to you. So, it's, it's a simple way to understand what's going on in the world without spending a whole lot of time doing the research yourself. It's like, we did the research for you.

• 5:20Sam Parr?

  Yeah, as if I'm, me, Sam Parr, are gonna tell you, Sean, the news each day.

• 5:26Shaan Puri?

  Right. And, and because you spend five minutes on it in the morning, you save an hour of doing that, you know, reading and research and finding out what's important yourself and what to make of it. And then, you know, you're at work, you're at the water cooler, and you sound smart.

• 5:37Sam Parr?

  Yes, and we have more stuff coming out, but that's our big thing now.

• 5:41Shaan Puri?

  Okay, okay, and something that launched today, I believe, right?

• 5:44Sam Parr?

  A little beta launched yesterday.

• 5:46Shaan Puri?

  Okay, alright, so, alright, we're gonna get to that in a second, but let's start with the, the question we always start with. Sam Parr, how did you make your first million?

• 5:55Sam Parr?

  By starting and selling multiple companies, which the biggest one being a news operation that emails millions of people a month and tells them the news they need to know each morning.

• 6:05Shaan Puri?

  Alright, you said starting and selling multiple businesses, so, different, a different way of looking at it is, when did you know you wanted to make a million bucks?

• 6:14Sam Parr?

  Not for a very long time. My mom and dad are entrepreneurs. I thought that that's just what you do to make a living. I didn't really think about money a lot, other than I knew that I wanted to start businesses because that was like my hobby.

• 6:28Shaan Puri?

  Like when you were a teenager, you mean?

• 6:29Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but then when I got older, only like a year or two or three years ago, did I realize that money was something that's nice to have a lot of, but it's like not as nice as I thought. So for years, I was just doing this because it was fun and exciting. And it just so happened, the output, the result was income.

• 6:50Shaan Puri?

  Okay, like a lot of people say that. They say, you know, I'm not doing it for the money. The money is sort of a byproduct, and I like that. I think that is a great way of looking at it. But I also know you, you're my friend. You think about money a lot, you ask about money a lot, we talk about.

• 7:04Sam Parr?

  I talk about, I love talking about it. But when I ran, I talk about it all the time. But I was a track and field athlete in college. I talked about that all the time, too. It was just whichever the career I have or the vocation that I have at the time, that's what I'm obsessed about. And so to me, money is, it's kind of like bench pressing 300 pounds. Once you get past a point which is lower than you think, it's not really that important to be able to bench 350 pounds, but it's just like you're obsessed with it.

• 7:32Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 7:33Sam Parr?

  Because you, as my buddy, can bench 400 pounds. So it's like, man, I wanna, I wanna beat you, I wanna compete with you. All right, let's talk about money real quick. So a lot of people talk about money, and I find it to be fun to talk about. But I like talking about specifics. So I talked about a certain point for me. So I'll give you the points in my life where money kind of felt differently. The first was probably when I saved $25,000. I remember when I saved $25,000, I was only spending three grand a week, or sorry, three grand a month, maybe two grand a month. Wherever it is, it was almost like 25 grand could last me close to a year if I made no income. And I was like, hell, yeah, I'm rich. So I felt like rich then.

• 8:18Sam Parr?

  I remember when I saved $100,000 and I felt really rich. I was like, oh, my gosh. And then a million, like they say a million is like a big deal. That didn't really feel like that big of a deal.

• 8:33Sam Parr?

  10 million felt like a big deal. Um, and I'm not worth a hundred million dollars, but maybe I will be. But a lot of people say that like the, so I, I, I put down 25 a million. Sorry. 25, a hundred thousand, a million, 10 million. And then maybe like the next thing is like a hundred million. I mean, but um, if you are interested in money, I think there's two things you should do. There's this one great subreddit called Fat Fire. It basically is, um, so you heard of FIRE. I think that stands for financially independent, retired early. Um, there's like lean FIRE, which is like people who want to save up like 500,000 or a million dollars. And they want to live off two or three or 4% of that. So 40 grand a year.

• 9:16Sam Parr?

  Fat FIRE is people who want to do that, but they want to save a lot of money and live pretty lavishly. So they want to be able to save 10 million and live off three, four, 500,000 dollars a year. And that kind of changed how I thought about money. And then there's this other book called How to Get Rich. It's horribly titled and I, I'm embarrassed to talk about it, but it's written by this guy named Dennis Felix. Um, sorry, Felix Dennis is his name. And he started a publishing company in the seventies. And eventually he launched a bunch of stuff, including like Maxim magazine. He, he did a lot of stuff. So he died in his early seventies and right before he died, he wrote this book about his, uh, things he learned about making money. And he was worth like seven or 800 million dollars when he died.

• 10:01Sam Parr?

  So he was like a wealthy guy who happened to write a book on this, not, he didn't get rich from the book. So I think you should read those things and those are the numbers that are interesting to me. We actually talked about what's your number, but um, yeah, I like talking about money. It's interesting and my perspective about it has basically mostly stayed the same that like, um, I think it's important and I think it's great to have. And, and, and by the way, I don't have kids. I think that when you have, when I have kids, my perspective will change because it's like, I want to provide for them. But for me, I was most happy or like the biggest difference. I remember it's like probably 25,000 saved and then a hundred thousand saved. So that's an update on that. And I want to compete with myself.

• 10:40Shaan Puri?

  Gotcha. And when did you like first start doing business? Was this, you know, are you a kid?

• 10:46Sam Parr?

  I first started-

• 10:47Shaan Puri?

  A lemonade stand type of thing?

• 10:48Sam Parr?

  I was selling stuff on eBay. Track and field shoes, my old clothes, I would sell them on eBay. And then I would sell stuff on Craigslist.

• 10:55Shaan Puri?

  And you were doing it because you, you know, you came up with it yourself? You saw somebody else selling on eBay?

• 11:00Sam Parr?

  I came up with it myself and I thought it was a really cool adventure. I just, it was just like a, I have an addictive personality and this was my adrenaline rush. I started YouTube channels that got millions and millions of views. Like the first year, two, three years that YouTube existed. And that made money and I just loved scheming.

• 11:17Shaan Puri?

  What, what kind of channels?

• 11:18Sam Parr?

  So, this was in 2009. I don't know how YouTube was around then.

• 11:23Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think YouTube started maybe 2004, 2005, but-

• 11:26Sam Parr?

  So, it was like the third or fourth year of YouTube in existence. And I noticed that when you would type in a certain phrase on YouTube, it would autofill. And I would just look at all the words that would be autofilling. And I'm almost embarrassed to say this, but I will. But if you typed in like "street fights", it would be like "street fights" and it would autofill, fill with like, "black guy beats up white guy", or "street fights, white guy fights black guy". And so I would, was kind of scammy and I would create these videos with these clickbait titles. And the thumbnail would be the only image that existed. So it was a video with just, this is because YouTube didn't have that filter to like catch that.

• 12:06Shaan Puri?

  So the video was nothing?

• 12:07Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it was nothing, but if you, I can go and find it somehow and it probably has 10 million views. And then I would charge bands money, $10, $50 a month to have their music as the background.

• 12:21Shaan Puri?

  And so, so you didn't even have a fight? Because I used to search for these. I used to watch Kimbo Slice.

• 12:24Sam Parr?

  Yeah, the same, the same stuff, like "street fight", like "big black guy knocks out little white guy". I have a video that's titled that, that has 5 million views. And don't you remember on YouTube years and years ago? When you would click these certain videos and you'd hear these horrible electronic like music?

• 12:41Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 12:42Sam Parr?

  So those people paid me money to put my ads or put their music on the background.

• 12:47Shaan Puri?

  And so how, how old are you when this is going on?

• 12:49Sam Parr?

  I was a senior and freshman in college. So like, it was like sometime around 2008, yeah.

• 12:56Shaan Puri?

  Okay, alright, so you started the kind of keyword.

• 12:59Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 13:00Shaan Puri?

  Keyword arbitrage, because since then, I actually learned this from you. I went to one of your workshops that you and Neville did. And for those who don't know, Neville is a good buddy of yours.

• 13:08Sam Parr?

  Neville's the best man at my weddings, one of my best friends, yeah.

• 13:12Shaan Puri?

  And he's kind of famous for this copywriting course, right? So, talk a little bit about that, because I think this is something that's extremely underrated. I added it to my arsenal.

• 13:20Sam Parr?

  Copywriting is the most important skillset anyone can have, because copywriting is not writing. Copywriting is understanding how other people think and feel, and how to use words to get them to do what you want them to do. Specifically, the written word, but it can translate to anything.

• 13:37Shaan Puri?

  Right. Copywriting is sales, copywriting is persuasion, copywriting is...

• 13:40Sam Parr?

  It's meeting a girlfriend, it's talking to a friend and trying to let them know you care about them. It's trying to sell something. It's just the idea of understanding other people's perspective, and then trying to figure out if you could solve that or empathize with that, and communicating that you have the tool to fix their problem. By the way, if you want to learn more about copywriting, it's so funny, when I was into this stuff in like 2010, 11, 12, it wasn't as popular, but right now it's like really popular, and I think that's good. Part of me is like, I'm like an angry Karen, where I'm like, "Well, I did it first." But part of me is like, "Well, finally, like, everyone cares about this stuff, because it's actually really important." And it is, I still believe it. So if you want to learn about copywriting, there's a book called Adweek Guide, it's by a guy named Joe Sugarman.

• 14:24Sam Parr?

  It's called The Adweek Guide to Copywriting, I believe, or The Handbook for Copywriting. But Joe Sugarman's the guy. Another great book, I think, is David Ogilvy's, I Like Confession of an Ad Man. He also has another book called Ogilvy on Advertising. And those are all really great. And then, one of my best friends, who I just mentioned, Neville Madora, he has a course called Copywriting Course. It's awesome. Just type in Neville Copywriting Course, you'll see it. So if you want to learn about that, those are great resources.

• 14:54Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so perfect example, the first business that I knew that you did. I didn't know about the YouTube street fights, I didn't know about the eBay stuff, but I did know about the hot dog stand.

• 15:05Sam Parr?

  Yeah, Southern Sam's.

• 15:06Shaan Puri?

  The name of the hot dog stand, it's not just Southern Sam's. What's the slogan?

• 15:10Sam Parr?

  It's Southern Sam's, weiner's as big as a baby's arm, so.

• 15:15Sam Parr?

  A hot dog is a commodity, like, they pretty much are all the same. I mean, little variants, but I bought them Vienna sausages, which a lot of people buy. And it was like, how do you just stick out? How do you stand out? And I thought that would be a funny slogan. And the idea was if a parent put their baby's arms on one of my buns and we put mustard on it and we take a photo, they get a free thing, a free sausage. And that was like the shtick.

• 15:38Shaan Puri?

  Was this like pre-social media?

• 15:41Sam Parr?

  This was in 2010 to 2012. So it was around, but if Instagram was around, it was barely around.

• 15:47Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so we got, we got Southern Sam's, Wieners as big as your baby's arm.

• 15:51Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 15:52Shaan Puri?

  The best name. I started a restaurant too, but it was, it had nowhere near sort of the fame or appeal as that. So I love that. How did it do?

• 16:01Sam Parr?

  So I just tweeted about this today, actually, because someone would ask me if I had to make money today with a thousand dollars. I started it with $500. I was only able to afford the first day's ingredients. And the first day, it did okay, but it took me about a week to get a thousand dollar day with like 50% margins. Most days I would make between 100 and 500 days. If I would go and work all night or go to a concert, I could make 1,000 to 5,000 dollars a night. It was really hard work. In Nashville in the summer, it's 110 degrees some days. It was horrible. It was really hard, but it was really fun. But it paid, like, I got paid.

• 16:36Shaan Puri?

  And, and you were the one manning the stand?

• 16:39Sam Parr?

  For a long time. And in the beginning, I was there all the time, but then I hired friends. My friend Carly, my friend Rydell. I would give them an hourly, like a minimum wage.

• 16:49Shaan Puri?

  You know, I was thinking on my way over here, I was like, what should I say in the intro? And I was thinking, I was like, oh, what do I really believe? Because when I started doing this podcast, the beginning, I would do like a radio host intro, which is not me, it's me playing like a radio host, like, hey, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the show.

• 17:05Sam Parr?

  Yeah, doing what you think you should do.

• 17:07Shaan Puri?

  Fantastic, yeah. And now I'm like, well, what do I, what would I actually say about you? Like, if I was just explaining this to myself, what would I say? And I was like, The thing about you is if this was Lord of the Flies, I haven't even read the book, but I understand the premise. We all get dropped on an island and sort of, we're all starting from scratch, just us in our bare hands. If you took everybody I know in San Francisco, a lot of great entrepreneurs, investors, successful people, but if you put us all on an island and it was like, here's a race to $10,000, I think you'd win.

• 17:35Sam Parr?

  Oh, thanks.

• 17:36Shaan Puri?

  I think you'd win the $1,000 Lord of the Flies Silicon Valley edition. And so, and the hot dog stand is like the perfect example of this, which is just like very straightforward, fundamental thinking. I have this much money. I can, you know, I want to get my money back quick. What do people want? What do people need? Where should I stand? Oh, I should go to the concert. That's where people, you know, are drinking and want a bite to eat. And just doing the basics and not trying to be sort of the genius inventor. Is that a good characterization? Because that's my mental model of you. Is that, is that how you see it too?

• 18:10Sam Parr?

  100%. So, I'm from Missouri. I'm from St. Louis, Missouri. A lot of people think I grew up as a hick. I kind of did, but I grew up in a city. My parents started a fruit stand that eventually became a produce brokerage. My father's not educated. I was not that good of a student. I was just like a redneck like kid, right? And so I just did whatever and I just, I will do whatever. It just so happened that I learned how to use the internet. So I would say I'm, I'm basically like a midwestern, small business owner that just learned how to use the internet.

• 18:42Shaan Puri?

  Right. The internet is your corner instead of your neighborhood corner.

• 18:45Sam Parr?

  Right. Versus like this idea, like the Mark Zuckerbergs, I will never, I don't understand how they think. I'm much simpler.

• 18:53Shaan Puri?

  Right. And so when you're, you're doing the hot dog stand, hilarious name, good results, you know, paid, paid the bills for a period of time. At some point you jumped onto the internet.

• 19:02Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 19:03Shaan Puri?

  Because the hot dog stand was, was more like the kid in Missouri and the stuff you do today is a lot more like the kid in San Francisco.

• 19:09Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And so what I was doing in the evenings after selling stuff, so I worked for this guy named Mike Wolf. Have I told you this?

• 19:15Shaan Puri?

  No.

• 19:16Sam Parr?

  Have you seen this TV show, American Pickers? Mike Wolf was my boss. So when I was in college, he was, I loved that TV show, American Pickers. I saw him walking down the street. I thought he was cool. I was a huge fan and I walked up to get my photo taken with him. And I just became friends with him and he asked me to run his store in Nashville or to work there and help set his shop up. And so I did.

• 19:34Shaan Puri?

  Okay, hold on, pause. I went up to him to ask to take a photo with him and I became friends with him. This is a Sam Parr thing that you do and I want the people listening to know how the hell you do it. Cause that's how we became friends. You literally emailed me being like, hey Sean, heard great things about you. You'd never heard anything about me.

• 19:48Sam Parr?

  I had.

• 19:49Shaan Puri?

  Things about you. Probably not. We had never met. The point is you just reached out cold and you were like, hey, I got this big dinner. I need to host for like 80 people, like next week. Can I borrow your office for, for free? It's gonna have all these awesome speakers. You're gonna love it. You can attend the dinner. And I was like, yeah, sure. And we became really good friends since then.

• 20:07Sam Parr?

  By the way, I knew who Sean was and I admired him from afar.

• 20:12Sam Parr?

  And I still do this all the time. I reach out to people on a regular basis. I think you should too. I think, I like to think about what's gonna be interesting in 20 or 30 years. And we're gonna say to ourselves, I can't believe that that was allowed. And there's a few things I, I think. I think privacy, people are gonna say, I can't believe people would just give out their information really nearly like that. The second thing though, that you should take advantage of today, I think in 30 years, we're gonna say, can you believe that you could just guess someone's email and email them? Cause you can't. You can email like Jeff at Amazon or maybe it's Bezos. You can email, you can, you can, it's very conceivable that if you spend six months at this, you can reach Jeff Bezos via email by just following up consistently.

• 20:55Sam Parr?

  And that's wild to me and you gotta take advantage of that now before that loophole closes. I, I think it will close eventually one day.

• 21:02Shaan Puri?

  And so you have this, this gift of befriending people kind of out of the blue. So tell me, what actually happened when you met him on the street?

• 21:10Sam Parr?

  I call it the gift of gab. That's what my parents called it growing up. Let's see, he, I had my dog Sid with me. Mike's a big dog guy. I walked up to him, asked for a photo. He started talking about my dog. I go, oh yeah, thank you. Like yada, yada, dog stuff. And I'm like, by the way, what are you doing here? Oh, I'm opening up this shop. Amazing. Who's gonna run it? I'm still looking. Mike, I'm your guy. I know we just met, but I'm your guy. Like, let me do this. I probably said it in that, that exact tone. And he was like, Yeah, like, I don't know, maybe. And I just started heckling him and just like joking with him a little bit. And he's like, yeah, okay, well, here's my wife's number. Call her.

• 21:45Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 21:46Sam Parr?

  And so I called her and then I found out that the place that I met him at, it was a jeans store. And I like jeans a lot. And he was, we were going, we used to go to the same store. The next day, I was, I went into the jeans store and I, there was a guy who worked there named Matt. And I go, Matt, Mike Wolf was here the other day. When's he coming back? And he goes, well, he's got some clothes that he's got to pick up tomorrow. So I go, okay, here's $50. Text me when you think he's going to come in tomorrow. I'm going to show up. And so he did that and I just waited on the couch for him and I go, Mike, what's up, man? Look, here's the deal. Let me run this thing. Or let me, let me help you set it up. He goes, all right, fine, you're it. And that's how it happened.

• 22:19Shaan Puri?

  Right. At that point, he's like, okay, it's going to take more effort to get rid of this kid than to just give him what he wants.

• 22:23Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So that's kind of how that happened. But anyway, while working there, I like met all these amazing people. Cause Mike's a celebrity and he would get all these cool people coming in. And Kid Rocks manager or something like that came in and I started just, just messing around and talking to him. He said that there's this new law that allows small time distillers in Tennessee to create whiskey. In the same way that in the 90s, craft beer was allowed to be created. And I was like, oh, that's kind of interesting. And because I worked at Mike Wolf's store, I knew that like Americana and vintage stuff is really popular and Moonshine is Americana vintage, all this kind of like.

• 22:58Shaan Puri?

  It was a trend. Shout out to.

• 22:59Sam Parr?

  Yes. We had this new product coming out called Trends. But it was like, Moonshine was like popular and there's all these like Moonshiner shows. And it was basically, Moonshine means illegal whiskey. This whiskey that the Kid Rocks guy told me about, it's called Popcorn Sutton's. It was, it's illegal. They could sell it in stores, but they, they only would make it in small batches. And so what I did was I created an online store called Moonshine Online. And I would try to get customers from all over, like places that weren't the South, that weren't used to this, this novelty whiskey. And I started selling it online.

• 23:30Shaan Puri?

  And how was it doing? I mean, I

• 23:31Sam Parr?

  It was awesome.

• 23:32Shaan Puri?

  Do I even need to ask? You sold, we sold alcohol online, probably did pretty well.

• 23:35Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I mean, I would be in like finance class and my, this was PayPal on, I don't even know if I had an iPhone, but it go ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching. And I said to my finance teacher, I'm like, I just made a thousand dollars while I was sitting here in class. Like, what do I do?

• 23:49Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 23:50Sam Parr?

  And so it was good. It was making

• 23:51Shaan Puri?

  What did they say?

• 23:52Sam Parr?

  They're like, well, he was like, you need to talk to a lawyer because I don't know if what you're doing is legal. So I talked to a lawyer and they're like, yeah, you're kind of breaking some laws here. So, so the moonshot online didn't last long.

• 24:01Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so the BlackBerry with PayPal installed had to, had to go quiet for a bit.

• 24:06Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and so he was like, uh, yeah, like you gotta like jump through all these hoops. And I was like, okay, well, I don't know if I want to do that. But I Googled like where in the country do internet companies live? And online it said San Francisco, so I emailed the founders of Airbnb. I asked for a job. They said, can you come to our office next week? I was like, yeah, I'm here already. And so I bought a ticket and flew out here. I interviewed there and, but while I was here, I met a really cool guy named John Havel. And he had started a business because I, I stayed on his Airbnb. That's how I met him.

• 24:39Shaan Puri?

  Gotcha.

• 24:40Sam Parr?

  And I was like, I was like, this is so cool. There's people my age doing cool stuff. I'm coming out here. And so I moved, I went back home a few days later, sold the limited possessions that I had, left school, and I moved out here. And we started Bonk, a roommate matching app that was sold after 10 months for a tiny amount of money. And then I started my current company.

• 25:01Shaan Puri?

  And how important was it to get out here? Like, what happens if you don't move?

• 25:06Sam Parr?

  It

• 25:06Shaan Puri?

  Because there's a lot of people right now

• 25:08Sam Parr?

  Nothing would have happened.

• 25:09Shaan Puri?

  Nothing, nothing would have happened differently or nothing would have happened at all?

• 25:12Sam Parr?

  I would not be where I am.

• 25:13Shaan Puri?

  Hmm, what would you be doing?

• 25:15Sam Parr?

  By the way, um, all right, so we're in pandemic or post pandemic time. Do I still think that? I kind of think that. I kind of think that you still should move to a major city if you don't, if, if you're like young and you know, like, go west, young man type of thing. I think you should. I don't think you need to be in San Francisco anymore, although I still recommend it. But I do think you should go to New York, San Francisco, LA or Austin for sure. If you're trying to make it in business, I think that it is inspiring to physically see people around you. I think someone like me who has a network, I don't need to do that because I can just call people. But I do get inspired being around people, like physically being around them. Although now I have a network so I can kind of call people and still kind of get in on stuff. But if you're, uh,

• 25:59Sam Parr?

  A nobody, I mean, I don't mean that to be offensive, but like if you don't know a lot of people and you're totally fresh and new, a rookie, that's way better than a nobody. Cause that's what I mean. I don't mean nobody, but you know, if you're a rookie, still move to one of these cities. Highly recommend it. Working at hot dog stands or started a lawn company or.

• 26:21Shaan Puri?

  Was it obvious to you and others at the time, like when you were saying, hey, I'm going to go out to San Francisco? It seems like that's where the internet.

• 26:28Sam Parr?

  It was not. I told my mom about Airbnb and at the time, 300 people or 200 people worked there. So it wasn't like small, but it wasn't well-known. And she was like, is this a scam? What is this Airbnb thing? You stay at other people's homes? I was like, yeah, there's other company called Uber Cab. And it's kind of like that, but like with cars. And she's like, what are you talking about? Do they offer health insurance? That's all I care about. And I was like, I'm doing this, guys. I'm doing this. And they, they gave me, I sold my car. That gave me $5,000. And then they gave me a thousand dollars to, as like my, I hadn't graduated college yet, but as like my graduation gift. And they go, all right, come, we'll help you do it. And I gave me a grand and I moved out here. And so they supported me, but they, they didn't know what I was getting into.

• 27:12Shaan Puri?

  You don't even know this. Our stories are so, they're very different, but they're like parallel, parallel tracks. Everything you're saying, I literally had a moment like that in my life, which it's for another day. Cause I want to, this is your story, but.

• 27:25Sam Parr?

  Having supportive parents is like a really unfair advantage.

• 27:28Shaan Puri?

  Absolutely. Also having a level of like, you gotta have a little fuck it in your system. And you had enough fuck it to say, all right, I'm just going to go out there. I don't know. I don't have the whole thing figured out. I'm going to go and I'm going to figure it out. I know enough that that's where I need to be. Tony Robbins has this really good phrase I like, which he says proximity is power. Which is just like, if you know nothing else, just get close.

• 27:49Sam Parr?

  That's cool.

• 27:49Shaan Puri?

  To the stuff you like. Get close to the people you like. Just hang with them more. The proximity has its own power. Go to the place you want. Just be near it. Proximity is power. And I've seen that play out many times for myself. Your story reminds me of that.

• 28:00Sam Parr?

  Well, the thing is, is that you and I both have a lot of buddies that are really wealthy. Their children probably aren't going to be willing to take a lot of risks because when you grow up wealthy, you kind of know what there's to lose and all this stuff. But the way I grew up, like, I was a little bit of a wild man and like, sometimes I would get kicked out of my house and I would literally sleep outside.

• 28:17Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 28:17Sam Parr?

  So it's like, the worst case scenario is like, I just sleep outside, it's like, this is no big deal. Or the worst case scenario is I go and like, sell bottled water on the corner, like, I can make it work. Like, the downside is really, really low.

• 28:29Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 28:30Sam Parr?

  Or the worst case is, I call my mom and be like, "Hey, I don't ever want you to support me, but like, can you give me like, $300 so I can get, I can just come stay in my room?"

• 28:38Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, there's a get out of jail free card. Did you ever, you know, I remember when I was doing my very first startup, I was living in Colorado. Kind of a similar situation, I won't do the whole backstory, but I got into a spot where we had won 30 grand of just prize money because I would just go pitch in these business plan competitions.

• 28:53Sam Parr?

  That's amazing.

• 28:54Shaan Puri?

  And I was good at pitching, and so I would just win the business plan competition. So we rolled up 30 grand in like, a month of prize money. And then, my dad was also like, "Okay, if you're gonna do this, not gonna go to med school." I took the MCATs, he's like, "If you're not gonna go, let's take, you know, some of that tuition." And he gave me, uh, like, I don't remember, was it 20 grand or something like that? He's like, "That's gonna last you the year." So I got 30 grand from this, 20 grand from this, and there's me and two, two co-founders.

• 29:15Sam Parr?

  That's like, such a good dad.

• 29:17Shaan Puri?

  Oh yeah, it was huge. And he was, he was not even trying to be helpful, he was like, "You've been so lazy your whole life, that like, I finally see you switched on." I think this is a terrible idea, you're doing a sushi restaurant, like, that's a terrible idea.

• 29:28Sam Parr?

  But it's your tuition.

• 29:29Shaan Puri?

  But, yeah, but you're, you're actually waking up and doing something every day? Without anyone telling you to do it? And, and he, you know, he, he gave me this line, that's, uh, "In life, it's a lot more about motion than it is direction." So, uh, you know, imagine you're on a beach, and you want to get to this island. The island is where all the fantasies come true. And if you could see the island, you would say, "That's the direction I need to go." Problem is, from where you're standing, you can't see where the island is, you just think this island exists.

• 29:53Sam Parr?

  So you just gotta move.

• 29:54Shaan Puri?

  So you gotta go, you gotta get in the boat and start paddling, and then as you go, you'll realize, "Hey, actually I see it, it's over there." And you, he's like, "It's much easier to move a boat when you actually have some momentum." You can just put your paddle in the water and you'll actually turn, and you'll start going in the new direction. And that's literally what happened in my life, so, so I give him credit for that. But I remember, we were living pretty frugally.

• 30:14Sam Parr?

  Frugal, you're frugal.

• 30:16Shaan Puri?

  And, and you're Mr. Frugal.

• 30:18Sam Parr?

  I am.

• 30:18Shaan Puri?

  And so I wanted to get into that. I remember one time, the way we were living, it was like, kind of embarrassing. It was three of us in a one-bedroom apartment, uh, in Colorado and... Everything we would need, we would buy and return. So it's like, hey, we need a camera for this photo shoot to take our menu pictures.

• 30:34Sam Parr?

  Costco's the best for that.

• 30:35Shaan Puri?

  I can still tell you, yeah, it's like Best Buy 14 day policy, but you don't need this. And you know, so we would go buy this DSLR camera and return it 14 days later, 10 times. And I remember we would sleep on air mattresses and we knew that Target had a 90 day return policy on air mattresses. So I remember going and returning my air mattress. So embarrassing of like, damn, I'm this poor that I'm just like.

• 30:55Sam Parr?

  Were your parents poor or were they frugal?

• 30:57Shaan Puri?

  We were like middle class.

• 30:58Sam Parr?

  Just normal.

• 30:59Shaan Puri?

  It was just that I couldn't go to them with an ask. Cause when you go with an ask, you gotta have a little, it's like going to a bank. It's like, you gotta have a down payment of some kind of success or momentum.

• 31:08Sam Parr?

  No, I feel you.

• 31:09Shaan Puri?

  At this point, I didn't feel like I had my down payment of, I know what I'm doing. Look, it's working. Just give me a little money. This was like, hey, I'm taking a leap of faith. You already gave me a little money. I need to stretch that dollar. Cause I don't know if there is another dollar after this. All right, boys and girls, time to talk about this week's sponsor, the HubSpot CRM platform. If you're looking for a CRM because your business is growing, it's getting complicated and you need something to organize all your customer conversations, relationships, check out the HubSpot CRM platform. It has things like analytics tools and something cool called conversational intelligence. And that means you can have transcripts, you can monitor the different conversations that are happening. That makes it easy to manage and coach your team, provide feedback and create sales playbooks for everybody to learn from.

• 31:54Shaan Puri?

  So if your business is growing and you're scaling your company up and you want to scale the company without scaling complexity, check it out at hubspot.com.

• 32:06Shaan Puri?

  Did you have any sort of, when you were living frugal, did you have any moments like that, that were the sort of?

• 32:11Sam Parr?

  No, I grew up kind of poor that my parents started a thing that like made a pretty good living for them and they paid my high school tuition and they, I got a car that was $5,000, an F-150 truck. But it's not like I was like pulled up from my bootstraps, like from nothing.

• 32:29Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 32:30Sam Parr?

  But I've never, the thousand dollar gift that I got from graduating college was the most money that they've ever, that I've ever, like, yeah, and that to me was like, a thousand dollars? Yeah, no, it was so and then they gave me like a like a credit card that had like a $500 limit on it like they're like here's this for emergencies and I remember I cut it up right when I got here I was like I'm doing this I was like I'm going on the I was like I'm gonna I'm literally gonna be homeless before I ever asked for help.

• 32:57Shaan Puri?

  And so you lived pretty like a Spartan lifestyle for a while when you were starting up the hustle.

• 33:03Sam Parr?

  I loved it.

• 33:03Shaan Puri?

  Tell us about that because I think people got to know what sometimes what it takes.

• 33:07Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 33:08Shaan Puri?

  Sometimes you don't have to sacrifice but there are sometimes situations where before it builds up and gets big you know you gotta you gotta live that Spartan lifestyle tell us about that.

• 33:16Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so I do well now but people are like yo you know it's only been our company just turned three years old the other day it's only been three years and you're doing good and I was like well I've been grinding since like taking risks since like 16 17 18 and up until a few years ago like I didn't have any money and so for the longest time in San Francisco I had a $600 rent maybe and I did that because I was able to scrape together some money after selling something and I rented a four bedroom house I furnished the whole place with used or free furniture on Craigslist and then I rented it out to people like the other three bedrooms and that ultimately paid for my rent which means

• 33:57Sam Parr?

  that on just living expenses I was able to only spend about a grand a month and so because of that the first couple of years my W2 income was only about $15,000.

• 34:06Shaan Puri?

  And so that was the first couple of years of the hustle.

• 34:07Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 34:08Shaan Puri?

  And then let's give people a sense of the numbers today you don't have to say the specifics but you know what should we be thinking about when we think you know how is the hustle doing?

• 34:16Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so our business is very profitable it makes eight figures in revenue really fat margins my goal is to get it to 100 million in revenue by 2025 and I think we'll get there so it potentially may not be Uber but it'll be a nice sized business it'll be 100 million dollar business companies like ours could probably sell for any in the huge number the huge range of 20 to 60 million dollars and we haven't taken any venture capital.

• 34:42Shaan Puri?

  Right. So you raised money, but you raised it sort of from, from the Rolodex in a way.

• 34:48Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but they weren't in the Rolodex at the time. Tim Ferriss was like, lived on the block from me and I became friends with him that way. So he ended up investing, the founders of Bleach Report, the founders of NerdWallet and loads of other people just like that, like 36 people. Scott Belsky, one of the early Uber guys, loads of people like that, all collectively put in some sum between 20 and a hundred thousand dollars for Meet Sethi. And collectively we raised about a million dollars.

• 35:13Shaan Puri?

  And then you also raised from the community.

• 35:15Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so what we did, we, the hustle started as a conference, a conference with a newsletter. And I realized the newsletter could be a way bigger business, but then I realized the newsletter could actually lead to an even bigger business. But in the meantime, let's use this newsletter to make profits. And once we hit 200,000 users, we said, we always got emails of people wanting to invest. And we go, let's just let anyone invest. And so I thought that we would get a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in 90 days. We ended up getting close to three hundred and fifty thousand dollars in 48 hours.

• 35:42Shaan Puri?

  Wow. All right, ladies and gents, if you want to make that first million, you have got to be organized. Our sponsor, Monday.com is back to get you there with a weekly dose of the Monday.com motivation. You know, keeping a clean desk, making to-do lists and using a calendar, those aren't just things that adults do. They're things that wildly successful teams do to hit their goals. In other words, being organized makes achieving your dream of swimming in that money vault that much closer. Visit Monday.com backslash pod backslash million. That's right, two backslashes. Monday.com backslash pod backslash million to get 10% off of Monday.com. And you can use their customizable templates that will help you get organized, it'll increase your workflow, it'll manage your workload and get you one step closer to hit your goals.

• 36:28Sam Parr?

  And so we raised a little bit of money from our users as well. Looking back, logistically speaking, I didn't need any of that money.

• 36:36Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 36:36Sam Parr?

  We've always been profitable, it's huge cash flows, but Tim Ferriss gave me money. Now he's my friend and I could text him and ask for advice and that's kind of like a cool trade-off.

• 36:45Shaan Puri?

  Right. And, and with the community money, was that worth it? Cause most people don't do that, cause there's.

• 36:51Sam Parr?

  Looking back, no.

• 36:52Shaan Puri?

  Issues.

• 36:52Sam Parr?

  It was not worth it.

• 36:53Shaan Puri?

  Why, why do you say that?

• 36:54Sam Parr?

  I have grown to be much more private than I was in the past and I hate having people that know my business.

• 37:00Shaan Puri?

  Gotcha. And just a second on the origin of the Hustle and the HustleCon, the conference really, cause it started as a conference before it was a newsletter.

• 37:10Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 37:12Shaan Puri?

  And it started before you.

• 37:13Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so I randomly met Eric Bond and Elizabeth Yen. And these folks are successful entrepreneurs. Eric had a business called Beat the GMAT that he sold for, I don't know how much, but if I had to guess, eight figures. Elizabeth Yen had another business called Launchbit that had a nice exit. And so I met a guy who introduced me to them and we just became friends. And I had like a really small exit in 2012 or 13. And I emailed Eric, I go, what do I do now? And he said, I got this thing I put on, I put on this thing called HustleCon. It was kind of like a conference, but in reality, it was like a meetup and like 100 people came, it made like $4,000 or I forget some number like that. It's just basically a website and email list of 200 or 300 people. Do you want it?

• 37:58Sam Parr?

  Just do something with it and give me like 10% of the profit. I said, "In." So I launched, I relaunched HustleCon on June 1st of 2014, hosted that conference six weeks later, and it made like 60 Gs. And the whole idea behind it was, I'm not trying to make money, I'm just trying to meet interesting people. And so I would cold email all of these speakers and I would say like, "Hey, do you want to speak? These other 15 speakers are coming." And of course, they hadn't, they weren't coming. And they would say yes, and then I'd go to the other 15 and be like, "Hey," you know, I would do the same shtick with them. And they all started coming and then I became friends with them. And they would teach me stuff and I would learn stuff just hanging out with them. I'd be like, "Hey, I need to come by your office so we could talk about the talk." But I talked about the talk for 10 minutes and the next 50 minutes, I just would ask

• 38:43Sam Parr?

  them questions. And so I hosted this event and the way in which I made it popular was by doing email marketing. And I knew that email marketing was effective because of just like studying it and teaching myself how to be a copywriter. And so that first event in six weeks made about 60 Gs and I only spent eight grand or some low number like that on the event. So I was like, "Oh, that's cool." So took that money and actually for six months, I drove my motorcycle around the country and camped and hung out. And then during that trip, I was like, "Let's do this again." The next time, this time was 80 days, that's when I met, I think, yeah, that's when I met you. That event did about a quarter of a million in revenue on 30,000 or 20,000 in expenses. And then it was like, "Okay, this is cool, but I don't want to run the conference forever."

• 39:27Sam Parr?

  I had just read the biography of Ted Turner, the guy who started CNN. I was like, "That guy is southern, I'm kind of southern." He like is kind of wild like I am. I could do that. I'm already doing that kinda like I could start a media company. And so that's when we said, let's do a media company. And then the first six months of the hustle, which started in 2015, it was just a blog. Okay, really quick, 100% if you're sitting there, a lot of people are listening and they're just sitting there and they want to figure out something to do. You can do this exact strategy and make a great company. Not only a great company, it's pretty fun. I mean, it's hard work. It's not like software where you can just go to sleep and you're making money in your sleep. I mean, you kind of are if you hire good people, but so it's hard work.

• 40:11Sam Parr?

  I mean, like an event's a pain in the butt. It's just a pain in the butt in so many capacities, but you could do this right now. And we actually did a whole podcast where we broke down the economics of this. So if you're interested, Google my first million events. There's a YouTube video that we did, and then there's a podcast where I show all the financials. And what you should do is do an event, make it B to B, though, not B to C. So you don't want to do something sexy. You want to do something a little bit more boring. Like if it's like, oh, I don't even know. I mean, it could be like in nursing home industry. Whatever industry you work out, like whatever you do for your job, you could do this for that or whatever your profession is. So if it's like user research, product management, AI, software, like whatever, whatever your profession is or industry, you could do this.

• 40:55Sam Parr?

  You create an event, you get people to come, you charge a little bit of money and

• 41:01Sam Parr?

  then you eventually you can make hundreds of thousands, you can make millions of dollars doing that. Then you turn it into a blog, you get sponsors to sponsor the blog, then blog people come to the event. It's such a good little flywheel business. You could 100% in three to four years, make your first million off this, whether you're off selling the company or just making a million dollars plus in profit.

• 41:21Shaan Puri?

  I remember that it was you. You were just telling really great stories, but it was like long form.

• 41:26Sam Parr?

  Long form blog stuff, and I would just blog about like funny stuff or interesting stuff like. Taking LSD or living on solent for 30 days.

• 41:33Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 41:33Sam Parr?

  Just stuff like that. And it got loads of traffic, but it was clear that would not be a huge, that wouldn't be a huge business. So we relaunched on April 19th of 2016. So that's why I say we're about three years old. And that's when we decided, let's go all in on email. Let's build this whole thing on email. And then it became very clear that if you study the history of Groupon, of Daily Candy, of Thrillist, people may not even know what the last two are. But anyway, I was like, man, some of these like billion dollar companies all started with an email list. Like, let's do that. Let's build up this huge email list and then start creating more products and use that as a distribution channel. And I think we could build a billion dollar company that way. And that was the idea.

• 42:07Shaan Puri?

  And I remember pretty early on, there was a temptation from, not even really, you didn't seem tempted, but other people were tempted to say, jump on Facebook, jump on video, jump on

• 42:17Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 42:17Shaan Puri?

  this trend, Snapchat.

• 42:18Sam Parr?

  I knew from day one that would be a horrible idea. It's like, I've always wanted to be independent. And I felt that building an audience on the back of Facebook was like, building a business in a rented apartment where the landlord raises the price every quarter. Like, that's a horrible idea. And so I called my email list my pirate ship and every subscriber was a little bit of wind in our sails.

• 42:35Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 42:35Sam Parr?

  Because, like I said, I'm a, I'm kind of a simpleton. I'm a simple guy. And if you look at like the economics of like building something on Facebook or someone else's platform, you're like, so where's the profit come from? Well, if you do this, like, I don't understand that. That, that, that doesn't really make sense.

• 42:50Shaan Puri?

  Too fancy for me.

• 42:51Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Let's just narrow this down and call it what it is. It's called focus. There's basically two ways. I mean, I guess there's a bunch of ways, but the two easiest ways that a small nobody startup, you know, one, two, three, four, five people can crush a huge company. The first one is speed. You can move faster. You don't have bureaucracy. You can just do whatever you want. You could come up with an idea. You can launch it the next day. The second is focus. I think an agile team of one to 30 people who, you know, small, can 100% outwork and outmaneuver and outcompete.

• 43:28Sam Parr?

  A huge multi thousand dollar or multi thousand person company without a doubt. No question in my mind. So it's called Focus. I talk about Focus all the time. I've stolen that idea from other people. I have no idea how people can have multiple projects at the same time. I can only do one thing at a time. And to be honest, like, that's one of the few things I'm going to say. I think that way is just better than most every other way. If your goal is to make something big and make it big fast. Like that does not make sense to me and I don't want to do that. It's a, we didn't.

• 44:03Shaan Puri?

  And I think that's paid off because now you have, I mean, this has got to be one of the biggest daily emails in the world.

• 44:09Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I think so. I think we got to be up there. I only know of maybe two or three people that can compete.

• 44:14Shaan Puri?

  And who's that? Who can compete?

• 44:15Sam Parr?

  There's the scam. I mean, they claim to have six or seven or eight million. They're pretty big. And then there's a maybe a handful of one off things that aren't confirmed that, but I would guess.

• 44:26Shaan Puri?

  And when you were doing this and it started to make money, that was also pretty counterintuitive. I mean, unless you really knew the email game.

• 44:33Sam Parr?

  Which I didn't. By the way, I do nothing. Like up until, like, I didn't know anything. I didn't know what like basic words were, like an RFP or, I mean, I knew nothing.

• 44:43Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 44:43Sam Parr?

  I knew, I didn't know what CPM meant. I didn't know, I didn't know how, like, I was doing our accounting. I didn't know the difference between cash flow and revenue. Like, I didn't know anything.

• 44:53Shaan Puri?

  And do you know things now or you just hired people who know things?

• 44:55Sam Parr?

  I know a lot of things. Yeah, yeah, I do. I know how to read a balance sheet and do a P and L statement. I know how to make money. I don't know how the, I don't know how to code. I cannot code at all. And we have a tech team, a nice sized tech team. And we built all our own custom technology. I just, I'm really good at being like, what's the simplest solution? Like what niche should exist? By the way, building your own technology for a newsletter business nowadays is stupid and it's not simple. Don't do that. If you're going to build a newsletter business, use Mailchimp to start. And then go to like, Constant Contact or HubSpot or something like that. Don't build it yourself. Just start with HubSpot, to be honest. Don't build it yourself. That was actually dumb. So there it is, a few years later, me telling you that.

• 45:41Sam Parr?

  And I'm like, hey, guys, can you like, it would be cool if this existed. Can you, do you know how to make that happen? And they would just say, yeah. I'm like, all right, great. Show me in a week and let's see.

• 45:50Shaan Puri?

  Right. And what was the first milestone where you were like, holy shit? This thing's actually, not just it's working, but this thing's actually gonna be really big.

• 45:59Sam Parr?

  Well, the first week of our existence, we got a million people coming to the website. And I was like, that's awesome. That is great. And we got on the front page of Reddit and we had like two or 3,000 concurrent users on real-time analytics, Google Analytics. I was like, sick, that's awesome.

• 46:13Shaan Puri?

  How good is it to watch the real time?

• 46:15Sam Parr?

  It's addicting. It's addicting. It's hugely addicting. And then I was like, this is not gonna, this cannot be big. I thought that, and someone once told me, a big CEO of a huge media company that you know of, told me, this business will never make more than $2 million a year. We could do that in a month now.

• 46:30Shaan Puri?

  And what was that person wrong about? What didn't they get?

• 46:33Sam Parr?

  They were a New York media person who was kind of fancy and they didn't, they're like, email is such a small thing, like an email newsletter, a newsletter, like you don't even have a website, like there's no way advertisers are gonna want that. And I'm like, well, but if you think about it, if you just look at how much they're gonna pay per click on all these other platforms, who cares if it's on your email or on a website? Or like, does it matter as long as they get like traffic to their stuff? Like, who cares? And it's like, well, it doesn't work like that. I was like, okay, well, and so I kind of believed them. I didn't think that it would work. And then, once we started growing, I was like, oh, this is crazy. And then it wasn't until like six months ago where I was like, man, there's like a path to make like literally $100 million a year in revenue on this. I kind of knew a little bit that it could be big.

• 47:18Sam Parr?

  Daily Candy, the company that I modeled us after early on, they claimed to have 25 million in revenue and 10 million in net income a year. So I was like, well, if we just do that, that might happen.

• 47:28Shaan Puri?

  And they're still around, they're doing well?

• 47:29Sam Parr?

  They sold for 125 million to Comcast and then Comcast screwed it up and shut them down. These numbers are still true, by the way, and it's actually bigger than I thought. I think that there's definitely, we don't do advertising anymore, but I see people in the space who are making 30, 40, 50 million dollars a year in sales with the newsletter business. You 100% could still do this. It's harder now. So if you're going to copy this model, which I think you should, don't do something mainstream. The hustle kind of mainstream. It's like a tech, like a generalist type of thing. Do something a little bit more specialized. So do, start with a more special niche audience and then expand from there and make sure

• 48:12Sam Parr?

  it's B to B. And I think you can do really well.

• 48:16Shaan Puri?

  Gotcha. Okay. And so let's play a little game called remake my first million. If you had to remake a million bucks, so you, I take away your business as it is today, you can't do that again. This exact business, you can't do it again. You're 21 years old though, so I give you back that youthful energy and time. What would you work on? What would you try to do? Let's say you don't have capital, you don't have network, you don't have a lot of those pieces. You're you, but you're 21. What would you do again? Or what would you do differently this time?

• 48:46Sam Parr?

  If I was 21, 22, I would try to get a quick win and try to get like a couple hundred thousand or maybe a million dollars in my bank by like starting a business that made 100 grand a month and would try to sell it and own all of it. And I think that that is significantly more possible than most people think.

• 49:00Shaan Puri?

  So I'm, I'm 21, I'm listening to this. I say, all right, that sounds pretty good. Be more specific. What do you mean?

• 49:07Sam Parr?

  Let's talk about that real quick. If you're young, listening to this, a lot of times you, you want to go, go big, you know, you're like, I got this energy, I want to raise all this money. And I think a lot of people should. I mean, like if you're, if you're capable, I think you can do that. But I also think if you're young, if you can kind of get a fair bit of money issues out of the way at a young age, your life, life's different. I mean, let's just do the math. Let's say that like you, we make 8%, that's a little ambitious. It's between 6 and 8% a year, but for the next five or 10 years, it could be as high as 15, the way the economy is going. But let's say it's like 7 ish percent a year on just S and P 500 boring stuff. If you have a million dollars, that doubles

• 49:50Sam Parr?

  every 10 years. If you have $5 million at age 30, you're looking at 10 at 40 or 20 at 50. It doubles up fast, man, and it's maybe not enough to retire right away, but you get that wind into you and you act different. This is why startups can sell secondary. So you have a startup, you raise $20 million and the VCs are happy to let you walk away with $3 million of that because when you have a little bit of money, you think a lot bigger and it's a lot smaller than you think, you know? Like I said earlier, $20, $100,000 made a difference. Get a million bucks in your bank at age 25, 30. It's freaking life-changing. That's rich. I know that we have billionaires on here and all these fancy people, but you

• 50:35Sam Parr?

  get hundreds of thousands of dollars in your twenties. That is very good. And that's why I think a lot of people should start something relatively small that can build up and these things build up fast. So in three, four years, you start something small in a very short amount of time, you can have something that's making hundreds of thousands of dollars of profit and kind of solves the money problem for you. So you can create something even larger.

• 50:57Shaan Puri?

  What sorts of ideas can you do?

• 50:58Sam Parr?

  Well, if they're 21 today, start blogging. And when I say start blogging, I would say learn one new interesting thing each week and then just blog about what you learned. Do that every single day, every week for a year. Try to get 2,000 to 3,000 people a day coming to your site through search. The way you find out what to write about is you go to harefs.com and you buy a subscription and that will teach you what to write because it will tell you what people are searching for. Try to rank for those words, build up an email list of 5,000 people and then create a course and sell it to them.

• 51:29Shaan Puri?

  I like it. And I like the looking up the keywords. It's like having the answers to the test. It's like, here's what people want to know.

• 51:35Sam Parr?

  Yeah, just answer it.

• 51:36Shaan Puri?

  Just answer it.

• 51:36Sam Parr?

  And answer it by learning on your own and then just teaching people what you learned.

• 51:40Shaan Puri?

  There's two ways to teach or to create content. One is to be the expert and the other way is to be the curious novice. And so a lot of-

• 51:47Sam Parr?

  The second one 100% works.

• 51:48Shaan Puri?

  Right. A lot of people count themselves out because they just assume I'm not the expert. But in reality, the curious novice works great.

• 51:54Sam Parr?

  Yeah, you just gotta be one step in front of your audience and that one step could be you just read a, you just read a book over the weekend.

• 52:00Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 52:02Sam Parr?

  So if I was a 21 year old kid, what I would do is go on Yelp, find, pick a very specific niche, like irrigation services, scaffolding rental, lawn cutting service, pick some niche in a town like Nashville, Denver, or something like that, and try to start a business that beats all the other people on Yelp. I'm quite obsessed with the idea of consolidating local businesses, so.

• 52:24Shaan Puri?

  And so you.

• 52:24Sam Parr?

  Boring stuff, right?

• 52:26Shaan Puri?

  Well, it's not boring. It's like, people don't like to hear the obvious, and it's almost the obvious, or it's the basics.

• 52:32Sam Parr?

  Dude, because people are super fancy, man. Like, me and Ramon, him and I have started or funded like, five or six companies that collectively make $10 million or something like that, and it's like the most simple shit on earth. And if I told you that this company makes this much money, you'd be like, what? That is so stupid. Ramon owns this one that I participate on a little bit as well, that sells dog ramps.

• 52:55Shaan Puri?

  What's a dog ramp?

• 52:56Sam Parr?

  A dog ramp is when you have a dash hound, or what kind of dog do you have, like a chihuahua?

• 53:00Shaan Puri?

  I have a multi-poo. He said it was for wiener dogs.

• 53:02Sam Parr?

  Yeah, that's a dash hound.

• 53:03Shaan Puri?

  Okay, that's the fancy word.

• 53:05Sam Parr?

  Sausage dog, yeah, wiener dog. When you have these small dogs and they want to get on your bed, they can't get up, so it's just like, oh, this is a piece of wood and it flips up, so like a ramp, like a miniature handicap ramp, and your dog can get up there.

• 53:19Sam Parr?

  That company's gonna do 40 million this year, by the way. That's the update. How's that? Holy moly. And that makes sometimes tens of thousands of dollars a day.

• 53:27Shaan Puri?

  And why are people scared of these businesses? Or do they just assume it can't be, you know, can't be that big?

• 53:33Sam Parr?

  Here's why. I think about this all the time because I struggle with my team. They don't understand leverage. So they think that in order to make, let's say, a million dollars, you have to work an equivalent amount of hours that in their head they think is a million dollars, or you have to have an idea that is the equivalent of a million dollar idea.

• 53:51Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 53:51Sam Parr?

  When in reality, you could just have really good execution, which is not tied to the amount of time in which you spend on something. You could have pretty good execution, like 100% effort for a short amount of time, and that, if you leverage it correctly, it creates significant amounts of value. And so they overthink stuff. Also, I think they feel guilty. It's like.

• 54:14Shaan Puri?

  Guilty how?

• 54:14Sam Parr?

  Like, the way I compare it is like when your mom makes a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, it always tastes better than when you do it because you see how simple it is, and you're like, oh, this like, isn't that? Like, yeah, this is like, it's gotta be way better. Like, the other people must do it way different because this isn't that. Like, this can't be that easy, can it? And that's kind of like the idea and people like overthink stuff. I also think that we hang out with a lot of high IQ people and I think the smarter you are, the more disadvantaged you are

• 54:40Shaan Puri?

  Making money.

• 54:41Sam Parr?

  At some of these like simple things. Our, our whole podcast is about this at this point, by the way, guys, um, like just yesterday, I recorded an episode where we met this guy who created this bump box or box bump or something like that. They do 40 million in sales. It's a box that sells pregnant ladies and babies who have, uh, ladies who just have babies. You like pay 50 bucks a month and you get like products that are meant for the baby's age. So like if you're eight months pregnant, you're gonna get itchy. So you get like itch cream. And then when your baby's like three months, you know, the baby is, I don't know what babies are doing, but teething, then you get some type of teething thing. And that doesn't sound like a revolutionary thing. It's probably worth $200 million and

• 55:23Sam Parr?

  they own the whole thing. Um, the world is big. Small things can be big. So small like niches can be quite lucrative, quite large. I just told you about a freaking dog ramp business that's gonna sell $40 million of freaking dog ramps. Uh, we talked about a soap opera business that sold for 10 million. I just told you about a baby bump box that is gonna crush it. I mean, there's 400 million people nearly in America. I know if you're not, you're not in America, maybe you're in India, maybe you're in Australia, there's a, you're in Europe, there's a lot of people out there. You can make a lot of money on a lot of stuff that appears quite small. Trust me. And it's also fear.

• 56:01Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 56:01Sam Parr?

  People are afraid.

• 56:02Shaan Puri?

  PB and J businesses are, can be great businesses if you apply leverage. And that's the, that's sort of the difference where your same hot dog stand idea could have been a big business if you're just a product more leverage, more stands, more locations.

• 56:16Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 56:16Shaan Puri?

  Franchises it out.

• 56:17Sam Parr?

  And the way you create leverage is like, you just have to like set things up in a, in a very particular way. So like you just hire key people or you use the internet and you realize, well, I can do the same thing, but I just put two zeros on the back of my ad spend. It's like, wow, I just, I'm not doing any extra effort, but I'm getting like 10 times the amount of money. And that.

• 56:37Shaan Puri?

  I think you had a business that you bought, uh, a SaaS company or for those.

• 56:40Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So Ramona and I also own a SaaS company. It's like a $30,000 a month SaaS business.

• 56:44Shaan Puri?

  And all you did was raise the prices. Is that correct?

• 56:46Sam Parr?

  Yeah. All we did so far was just went in and changed the three to like a six. And that was it. That's all we did.

• 56:54Shaan Puri?

  You're like, I can't code, but even I know how to do this.

• 56:56Sam Parr?

  Yeah, most people don't price their stuff effectively. We bought a company. Literally, all that was done was double the price and revenue doubled. Same amount of people sign up every day is super simple.

• 57:07Shaan Puri?

  I love it. This is why I call you the lord of the flies, man. You would find the way to make the money.

• 57:13Sam Parr?

  And if I, what I would like to do is buy more software companies and 10x the price. I think that that's possible as well.

• 57:18Shaan Puri?

  So you have all these experiments in your head, but one experiment you guys just launched is Trends. And I want to hear about it because I like Trends, but I don't fully get Trends.

• 57:28Sam Parr?

  Yeah, a lot of people, a lot of people who haven't experienced it, I don't think are going to get it yet. And that's because we aren't.

• 57:35Shaan Puri?

  What is it?

• 57:35Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so basically, the idea is it's a premium publication, a paid publication, a paid weekly email. And we have hired a team of analysts as well as myself. And we crawl the web and look at millions of bits data. And we also talk to people like you and other experts. And we just explore various industries and we do deconstructing of various businesses. And we just show like where are our cool opportunities and where's the white space in loads of different industries.

• 58:01Shaan Puri?

  So it's, if I'm somebody who is looking for my next opportunity or my next idea.

• 58:07Sam Parr?

  This has become pretty big, by the way. Trends is almost two years old. It's basically an eight-figure subscription business or around there. And there's a very clear path to make it much, much larger by launching different types of verticals. So this paid off. I learned a lot from it. I got a lot of parts wrong. We should have charged differently. I should have maybe branded it a little bit more higher end. This totally worked. There's so many of these now. There's all these different people copycatting it. But this worked. So pat my, pat myself on the back on that one. I'm not going to lie. This one totally worked. I didn't explain it well in this episode because I was still figuring it out.

• 58:51Sam Parr?

  We had actually launched like the day after this episode or the day before. Turned out to be pretty good. So trends.co, sign up. The community ended up being a lot more successful than I ever thought. I didn't think that was going to be important. The information was good, but people prefer community. Shocking, shocking to me. And yeah, it's a great, great business. I love trends. So and the podcast ended up becoming this. You notice how I'm being interviewed here? We don't really do that anymore because all we do is deconstruct different ideas. It worked. The way that we explained it is like, look, if you start a company, you can make it win or at least do be mildly successful with enough effort. Like you could, if you like are willing to spend 20 years on something, you could probably get a little bit of success out of it.

• 59:36Sam Parr?

  But if you start something on a small ripple that can eventually become a wave or tsunami, like it's just gonna, the products will get pulled out of you. Like it's just gonna push you down this hill and it's like life will be a lot better. So it's just like, let's explore some of these waves while they're still kind of small and what they're doing.

• 59:52Shaan Puri?

  Gotcha. So you guys are trend spotting early, these business opportunities.

• 59:55Sam Parr?

  As well as looking at interesting companies and saying like, well, here's how they work. What if you applied that to this thing? So like, we interviewed the guy who started 1-800-GOT-JUNK, Brian. And he said, yeah, 1-800-GOT-JUNK, here's how it works. Here's the economics. I'm like, oh, that's amazing. We're like, where else can this work? And he goes, local irrigation services. And we go, awesome.

• 1:00:13Shaan Puri?

  Thank you.

• 1:00:13Sam Parr?

  We went and interviewed a bunch of people and we got the data and we chose, all right, here's, this is like a cool idea.

• 1:00:19Shaan Puri?

  Nice. And so if trends works, the hustle becomes this thing that has got the daily newsletter. We tell you what's going on. You got trends, which tells you about the big opportunities that are coming.

• 1:00:29Sam Parr?

  I'm trying to steal SoftBank's playbook. So in the late 80s, early 90s, Masa-san, he started what was called basically the PC magazine of Japan. He started a publication, started a conference.

• 1:00:41Shaan Puri?

  That's a good example, right? PCs was the wave.

• 1:00:44Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:44Shaan Puri?

  He started the magazine, just to ride the wave.

• 1:00:46Sam Parr?

  Then he started the conference, which is now called CES. And then with

• 1:00:51Shaan Puri?

  He created CES?

• 1:00:52Sam Parr?

  He bought it.

• 1:00:53Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 1:00:53Sam Parr?

  He bought it with the profits from the publication and then he was also selling software. And then he started investing in the companies that he saw that were advertising with them. So I just want to do that same thing because I think like working at SoftBank would be a really cool job.

• 1:01:05Shaan Puri?

  Nice. Going after SoftBank.

• 1:01:08Sam Parr?

  Wow.

• 1:01:08Shaan Puri?

  You picked the big blue whale.

• 1:01:11Sam Parr?

  It seems like you like see his life. You're like, oh, man, he gets to hang out with cool people. He gets to invest his money. Like, let's just do that.

• 1:01:18Shaan Puri?

  That's pretty good. Okay. So when you think about like when somebody's listening to this podcast, let's talk about the podcast for a second because this is a new product essentially that is being published on the hustle, by the hustle.

• 1:01:31Sam Parr?

  Yeah, hopefully there's 100,000 people listening to this right now that came from my email list.

• 1:01:35Shaan Puri?

  If you're listening to this and you're one of the 100,000, just tweet at Sam so that he knows you're listening. All right. So why do a podcast? I guess, why didn't you do a podcast earlier is a better question?

• 1:01:45Sam Parr?

  Because I didn't know anyone that could do it well. And you and I shoot the shit all the time. You're very successful. You're amazing at asking certain questions. You're also amazing at like saying these weird phrases, like when you were just talking about your father and talking about like emotion versus direction. And so when you said you were going to do a podcast, I was like, oh, let's see if we could partner with him. And we got to do that. I also think that podcasts in general are a horrible business if that's your only stream of revenue. But since we have all this other stuff, it's like, yeah, let's do that.

• 1:02:15Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's just sort of, it's found money on top of the existing audience that you have today.

• 1:02:21Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:22Shaan Puri?

  And I think that the good thing about what you guys do is that I think you guys capture just a fraction of the value you create. So giving people the news every morning in a super simple, digestible way. And then you capture, you know, it's free for them and you capture just a tiny amount of that value on advertising.

• 1:02:37Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so with trends, we're going to be capturing a little bit more. And this is now another component that we can actually give for free and capture a little bit of the value. And hopefully people will sign up for, maybe 3% of people listening will sign up for our paid services.

• 1:02:49Shaan Puri?

  Gotcha. Okay, cool. And so I want to close it out. I want to do bonus segment about money.

• 1:02:54Sam Parr?

  Money.

• 1:02:55Shaan Puri?

  Okay, this is the money round. I'm going to ask you a bunch of questions related to money and you're going to tell us about them. How much money were you making at age 21, 25? And I usually say 30, but you're 29. So we'll do 29. So 21, 25, 29.

• 1:03:10Sam Parr?

  Twenty-one. I had just, I joined a company after we had a little exit. My salary was fifty to sixty thousand dollars a year with a bonus that was nice sized. I was able to save twenty-five thousand dollars with that salary in San Francisco.

• 1:03:23Shaan Puri?

  You saved twenty-five thousand on a fifty thousand salary? Fifty, sixty thousand salary? Plus bonus?

• 1:03:29Sam Parr?

  Yeah, plus bonuses. I think my bonuses maybe came out to be like eighty grand, like total compensation.

• 1:03:34Shaan Puri?

  Okay, gotcha. Uh, that's good. And twenty-five?

• 1:03:37Sam Parr?

  Lower, because I started the company when I was twenty-five. The conference made sixty grand, about fifty grand in profit. The second conference made some number of around two hundred thousand dollars in profit. That all stayed in the business, other than a draw I did of two thousand dollars a month.

• 1:03:53Shaan Puri?

  And then twenty-nine, your company's doing really well now. What do you pay yourself?

• 1:03:56Sam Parr?

  I pay myself six figures. I pay myself some number in between six and seven figures, below seven figures, above six figures. I didn't pay myself six figures from the company until last year. For a long time, it was, it ramped up from like forty to sixty to a hundred. And then I started giving myself meaningful bonuses based off performance. I make more income from my investments. So, selling other businesses, rental income, things like that, I make more money that way.

• 1:04:29Shaan Puri?

  And so, um, last question, a lot of people have a number in mind. This is the number that they want, the number where they feel like they've hit it, they've, they've made it. As of right, and the number can move. I think when people hit their number, they make a new number. But right now, what's your number?

• 1:04:45Sam Parr?

  I think that, uh, an old guy who I love, Stuart Allsop, I don't know if you know him, he's a good friend, but, um, he's a big time investor. He invested in, he was Twitch's seed investor.

• 1:04:56Shaan Puri?

  Does he like being called an old guy who you love?

• 1:04:58Sam Parr?

  Uh, no, but he's like seventy years old. I just like calling him that. I don't know. He's, he's a good guy. He told me that the first unit you make makes life different. And I go, what's a unit? And he goes, ten million. He goes, you get one unit, that's when life changes. So, one, one unit will, where you're liquid is a big deal. It goes probably ten, and then a hundred is like, you're set forever. Ten is like, be cool and you're fine.

• 1:05:27Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:05:29Shaan Puri?

  Don't go Mike Tyson.

• 1:05:30Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:31Shaan Puri?

  And you're fine.

• 1:05:31Sam Parr?

  Yeah, like 100 is your set, 10 is like, like, life is never gonna be the same, but you could still ruin it if you like, really do something bad.

• 1:05:40Shaan Puri?

  So that's your number right now, one unit.

• 1:05:42Sam Parr?

  Hey, look, at least I'm consistent. That's what I said earlier. And um, I, I, I think it's true. A unit, getting liquid. That said, I don't think I'll be happier with it. I know I won't be happier with that. Right? You're not gonna be happier with $10 million, I don't, I don't think.

• 1:05:59Shaan Puri?

  I think I would be. I think, I think, uh, it's not so much happier. I think happier is kind of the wrong word.

• 1:06:04Sam Parr?

  The money won't make you happy.

• 1:06:07Sam Parr?

  Update. It's true. And such a, such a stupid thing to say. People listening to me playing, oh, you're complaining, you're not happier. I get it. I, I'm such an idiot right now, the way that I'm, the way that I sound, but it doesn't make you happier, unfortunately. I, I, I think money does make you happy, though. But my opinion was like, that 100, that first 100K got me amped. After that, less amped. But I, there is a sense of accomplishment, you know, it's like, like I said earlier, it's like bench pressing, you know, you hit a number and it's like, awesome, it feels great for a minute.

• 1:06:46Sam Parr?

  And then it's like, okay, what's next? So I'm, but I'll, I'll, I'll fully acknowledge how silly this sounds. So hopefully you can experience this and agree with me, but until you do, uh, trust me, I get it. It's the fact that you did it.

• 1:07:02Shaan Puri?

  The fact that I did it, uh, as well as the lifestyle. So I think money, I, I have this thing that money is just stored time. So, so when I give you money, I'd like to unlock some of your time to go do something for me. Uh, and when you give me money, it's because, uh, you're, you want some of my time and that's sort of how money works. Money is just time frozen into a piece of paper. And when you give it to somebody else, it thaws out, you get their time. And so the thing, you know, if I had a unit, that would make sure that I'm the one unlocking other people's time. Nobody's really unlocking my time unless I'm choosing to do so.

• 1:07:36Sam Parr?

  Yeah. This actually changed my life when Sean talked to me about this and, and I call it being a time billionaire. I think that that should be the goal here is time, not money, time, time, time. Um, if you've got a

• 1:07:53Sam Parr?

  If you can make a little bit of money, but then you gotta grind and dedicate 80 years to doing something you don't wanna do and doesn't make you feel better about yourself, or you're not proud of, or it's not fulfilling.

• 1:08:07Sam Parr?

  I don't think that's worth it. I'd rather be way less, have way, way, way less money, but be able to do whatever I want with my time. That's the only thing you can't get back. And how do you know this to be true? Ask yourself, would you trade places with Warren Buffett? He's 90 years old, richest man in the world, 90 years old. Would you trade places with him? I bet you wouldn't. And every person who has money says they would give it all back to be young again. So time, I totally, I'd rather be a time billionaire than a cash billionaire. You could just do that with a lot less money than you think. I choose to work. I could not work. I do it because I like it.

• 1:08:44Shaan Puri?

  As long as it's a choice. What I'm saying is that most people, and I put myself in this bucket right now, I don't dictate how I spend every hour of my day. It's not all my choice. There are several things that are, things that I don't wanna be doing with my time. So the day that I can do sort of what I want, when I want, where I want, the way I want, that will be sort of the ultimate freedom.

• 1:09:04Sam Parr?

  I agree with you. My point is it could be lower, it's a lower number than you think.

• 1:09:08Shaan Puri?

  What's the number?

• 1:09:09Sam Parr?

  It depends on how much you spend, but like, I don't spend a lot of money. I could say fuck you to everyone and balance and be fine.

• 1:09:14Shaan Puri?

  I'm a spender, that's the problem.

• 1:09:15Sam Parr?

  Man, maybe when I hit a hundred grand, I'm like, a hundred grand liquid, I was like, that's fuck you money. But I was one to say fuck you to...

• 1:09:24Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you live a fuck me lifestyle and you could have fuck you money at 100K?

• 1:09:29Sam Parr?

  Dude, I still give Sean trouble for this. It is about how much you spend. I still don't spend a lot of money. I'm like, he was making fun of me when he came to my house, cause I had sold some clothes online for like $93 and then I went to Target to return something for like $8 and he made fun of me and I like clipped coupons still. I don't spend any money. Why? Cause I don't spend anything, I don't spend money on stuff that doesn't make me happy. Also, whenever I buy something, I always try to make sure I own it and it doesn't own me. Sean spends a lot of money and I tease him for that. And he spends it because he just doesn't really care. He's like, look, if this saves me time, I'm gonna do it. And so our philosophies are the same. Like if this saves me time, I'm gonna do it. If this makes me happier, I'm gonna do it. It doesn't make me happy to waste, though, and...

• 1:10:12Sam Parr?

  So instead of like, you know, buying something fancy and I mean like, all right, this saves me time to store it or have someone just take care of it. Instead, I'm like, I'm just not going to get in the first place because it just doesn't make me happier. So I still stand by this. That's exactly right. If you're willing to say fuck you even at 10,000 or 1,000, 100 gram liquid made a difference.

• 1:10:36Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:36Sam Parr?

  That's my, that's the number I'll give you. 100 gram liquid made a difference. And I, and I was willing to say, fuck off.

• 1:10:42Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. You know, I, I like this, this segment, the money round because money is this weird taboo thing. I remember when you messaged me on Facebook once and you were like,

• 1:10:51Sam Parr?

  I, oh, well, we all do that.

• 1:10:52Shaan Puri?

  You were just like, how much you make? And I was like, you know, we knew each other, but like, we hadn't talked about it before.

• 1:10:58Sam Parr?

  No, amongst my close friends, I'm very open. I'd be like, here's how much cash I have.

• 1:11:01Shaan Puri?

  Right. And you asked me all these questions and I was like, this is kind of cool. Cause I was like, it's, at first I just admired the balls of, hey, you know, you know, just to ask. But the second thing was I was like, this is how we can kind of help each other get ahead is information. Can we unlock some information so that you understand how people are playing this game? Because the pie is very, very big. And so the weird thing-

• 1:11:21Sam Parr?

  It's not a zero sum game. A lot of people think that like, if I make money, that means I took it from someone. It's like, no, that's not exactly how it works. Like if I create a piece of art, I didn't take this from anyone. I just created this valuable thing that someone's going to give me something for.

• 1:11:34Shaan Puri?

  Right. And even if you are taking money from somebody else, there's so many players in the game.

• 1:11:39Sam Parr?

  Yeah. As long as you, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like we, we can all win. And so it's, it's, whenever I ask people, it's never out of jealousy of like, I wish I was lower than, or I wish I was bigger than. I do wish I'm, have more than, than what I have sometimes, but it's not of like, I want you to be lower than me. It's like, oh man, what could you teach me?

• 1:11:57Shaan Puri?

  Right. Yeah. And I've learned from you and you've learned from me in that, in that regard. So. All right, Sam, where can people find you aside from subscribing to The Hustle?

• 1:12:04Sam Parr?

  Subscribe to The Hustle.

• 1:12:05Shaan Puri?

  Thehustle.co.

• 1:12:06Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Go to trends.co, trends.co, sign up.

• 1:12:10Shaan Puri?

  What about you personally? Where do they find more of you?

• 1:12:12Sam Parr?

  Don't email me because I won't reply more likely than not, but tweet at me and I will reply. The Sam Parr.

• 1:12:18Shaan Puri?

  Awesome. Thanks, Sam, so much. Great episode. We're going to do a Spartan race tomorrow.

• 1:12:23Sam Parr?

  Yeah, we're running eight and a half. I don't know if we're going to run, but we're walking eight and a half miles.

• 1:12:27Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. We'll get a long stroll tomorrow. All right. Good, good stuff, man. Great talking to you.

• 1:12:33Sam Parr?

  I crushed Sean in that race, by the way. I crushed everyone in that race. But, alright, that's the episode.

• 1:12:40Sam Parr?

  I just bragged about myself a lot, but I wanted to say, um, thank you for listening. That's the episode. I'm gonna keep doing this. I think people like this. My handle is @thusampar on Twitter. Let me know. We have some really cool ones. They're gonna be a little bit more well-produced, and we're gonna keep doing this.

• 1:12:57Sam Parr?

  A few topics that I'm gonna cover are, things don't happen overnight. They take a long time, so I'm gonna aggregate a bunch of interviews of people explaining that topic. Um, and you're gonna see a lot more of this stuff. It's gonna be really good, so please go to your iTunes, your Spotify, click Subscribe, click Follow, click all those buttons. I'm telling you, if like, like, you're listening to this right now and you hear people explain this all the time, that they need this, it makes a huge difference. So go do it. Leave a review. Let me know what you think. We'll see you on the other side. My First Million. This is Sam Parr. Out.