Crumbl Cookie Making $1B/ Year, AI In Sports, and Underutilized Assets Create Businesses

Episode 419: Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) and Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) talk about how Crumbl Cookie is making a billion a year in profit, will AI take over sports, looking at underutilized assets to create businesses and much more. Want to see more MFM? Subscribe to the MFM YouTube channel here. ----- Links: * Flying Magazine * 1,000 True Fans * Parcast * Crumbl Cookies * Amjad Masad Twitter * Replit * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. * Want more insights like MFM? Check out Shaan's newsletter. ------ Show Notes: (07:50) - What is a university? (09:05) - Craig Fuller & FlyingMag (24:20) - Finding the real metric that matters (30:40) - Parcast (34:10) - Crumbl Cookies (42:20) - Super Bowl and AI (54:55) - Underutilized Assets Businesses ----- Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. ----- Additional episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto * #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

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

• 0:00Shaan Puri?

  And again, remember, percentage of their readers are ultra wealthy people who are like, "Yeah, great. I want to have a home on the East Coast that I can park my private plane in, and that'll be one of my hubs." And I'm pretty sure, okay, I don't know the exact numbers on this, but I can triangulate a little bit. I think they've done at least 25 million in pre-sales on this thing.

• 0:19Sam Parr?

  That is crazy.

• 0:19Shaan Puri?

  And it could be, it could easily be double that. But, um, but that is a really awesome and impressive, like, way to take this niche hobby, find a, find a kind of media publication that, that, that works and go content to commerce.

• 0:43Sam Parr?

  I have a, I have some stuff for today. You have something that I know about that I've kind of mentioned, but I mentioned it without saying their name. Craig Fuller. Now we can mention it.

• 0:53Shaan Puri?

  Let's talk about it.

• 0:54Sam Parr?

  Did you get permission for, uh, about this?

• 0:57Shaan Puri?

  Uh, yeah, um, I think so. So we got, uh, some of this is public, but let's, let's talk a little bit about this. Okay. So there's this, there's this business called, uh, Flying Magazine, or Flying Mag. And, um, so when you look at it, you're like, okay, well, what is this? And so basically the story is, there's a guy who bought this magazine called Flying Mag, and Flying Mag produces this beautiful magazine, amazing photos. And if you're a, a flying or aviation enthusiast, you will love this magazine. He bought it for like, I think, like, not quite 10 million, but a little under that. So maybe somewhere between, let's call it five to 10 million dollars.

• 1:35Sam Parr?

  My guess is a fraction of that. I think it was closer to one. Do you have any, any evidence?

• 1:41Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, we got a little source here saying high seven figures. So let's, let's assume the source is correct. Okay. So, um, but then I was like, well, where did this person get high seven figures to go drop on a magazine? That seems like a, a pretty indulgent purchase for somebody, unless they have a lot of money. So he started a company before that called Freight Waves, which, uh, basically is like a data company for the freight shipping industry. So they're like a, a price reporting company. So they, they provide data that shippers and freight companies use to, um, you know, inform themselves on what's going on in the market. They also have a SaaS tool. So they kind of have like a media side, which is that, you know, content that they're producing, that's pricing information. And then they have a SaaS business called Sonar that's in it. And they've released a public press release,

• 2:25Shaan Puri?

  so you can kind of see some of their numbers.

• 2:27Sam Parr?

  I saw they did that. That's very weird that they did that.

• 2:29Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, they're not a public company, but they sort of like did a public report and I'm not sure what the agenda was like. I think I'm just sort of naive here. I don't know. Normally this is, we want somebody to buy us or we want to raise money. Or prepping to go public, but it's, I don't think it's either, any of those three because of what they said. So they basically reported 13 million in revenue for a quarter. So let's call it, like, let's just extrapolate that out in a straight line. So roughly 50 million a year in revenue. It wasn't a lot in profit. So it was like, you know, one or two million in EBITDA in the quarter or something like that. So let's say that this business is making, I don't know, four to eight million of profit a year.

• 3:07Sam Parr?

  But it's growing 70% a year. It's growing quickly, almost.

• 3:10Shaan Puri?

  And it's been around, I think, for a little while. So, so, you know, it's done well. They had 28 million in cash, just like on the books, on the balance sheet. So, you know, the, the business was in a, in a healthy spot. So I think Craig starts Freight Waves. He then separately buys Flying Mag. One of the interesting things about Flying Mag is that if you think about who are the readers of a niche magazine like this, you have two categories. Uber nerds and Uber nerds who are rich because you know, you gotta be kind of nerdy about this hobby. If you're going to be like reading about this, like, we had a guy once who we hired as an engineer that used to had an app on his phone where he would listen to the what's called air traffic control. He would just tune into the frequency of air traffic control and listen to it at lunch.

• 3:55Shaan Puri?

  And like, I gotta tell you, never had a worse lunch with anybody in my life.

• 4:00Sam Parr?

  Dude.

• 4:00Shaan Puri?

  Me, him and his phone on with air traffic control was our lunch. And I was like, you know, hey, man, I'm gonna go back for seconds and then I'm gonna go kill myself. So you see later. This has been horrible. Thanks.

• 4:11Sam Parr?

  I do, I do that with the, I do that with the police scanner. You ever do that with the police scanner?

• 4:14Shaan Puri?

  At least police, look, there's a show called Cops. There's no show called Safe Landings, because that's all air traffic control is. There's no show called Which Way Is The Wind Blowing?

• 4:25Sam Parr?

  But there is a video game called that. There is a video game where all you are is an air traffic controller.

• 4:31Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, fair enough. Okay. So anyways, the back to back to my flying mag story. So a big percentage of the readers are like rich people with private planes. Or like you see this a lot in tech for some reason, like my buddy Furkan did this. So sold his company immediately starts signs up for flying lessons. Wants to get his pilot license to like, go fly this like, you know, five seater or six seater or two seater plane. They love that hobby and it's a really expensive hobby. So one thing that they did recently that I think is really smart is have you heard about this? This community that they're building in Atlanta?

• 5:05Sam Parr?

  So he told me, I'm not going to steal your thunder, but he told me what he was going to do. And he, he goes, I'm flying from New York to go see this property I'm looking at. And I'm flying my private plane. Do you want to come with me? And I ended up not going because I had to go up to Teterboro. So in New Jersey and then fly back down to Atlanta to see the spot with them. But he asked me to go with him and I almost did it. And he was, and so I've known about this for about a year and a half now.

• 5:31Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's great. And so the, the interesting thing is they're basically building a community in Atlanta. And I think the reason people build these communities is like, there's like a, a, what's it called? Like a landing strip, like in the middle of the neighborhood. So you could park your plane. And if you want to take off, you could just like, go take off. It's like, like the driveway of the community is like a landing strip. And correct me if I'm wrong.

• 5:52Sam Parr?

  It's, it's a, it's a, so it's a country club with golf, with homes around the golf course. But instead of a golf course, it's a landing strip. That's exactly what it is. So it's a, it's a country club, country club for flying. And so you purchase, I forget how much a piece of a plot of land costs. And then they build, build you a home and now you are part of this aviation community.

• 6:16Shaan Puri?

  Right. And so they pre-sold the, the plots of, of land, or the plots of, of the homes in this community. So they find this kind of bare ground or whatever. They start pre-selling the plots. And again, remember, percentage of their readers are ultra wealthy people who are like, yeah, great. I want to have a home on, on the East Coast that I could park my private plane in. And that'll be one of my hubs. And I'm pretty sure, okay, I don't know the exact numbers on this, but I can triangulate a little bit. I think they've done at least 25 million in pre-sales on this thing.

• 6:45Sam Parr?

  That is crazy.

• 6:46Shaan Puri?

  And it could be, it could easily be double that. But, um, but that is a really awesome and impressive like way to take this niche hobby, take, find a, find a kind of media publication that, that, that works and go content to commerce, right? This is the, um, what's a, uh, churn in group? Churn in group believes in this, that content to commerce. So they, they did, uh,

• 7:08Sam Parr?

  Which is what Hodinki did.

• 7:10Shaan Puri?

  Hodinki did this for watches, right? Watch blog for super high-end watches. Well, guess what? As soon as you start selling watches, that business, I think Kevin Rose came on this podcast and said it went from one or two million a year in revenue to a hundred million when they flipped that switch and started actually selling the watches that they'd been talking about for 15, 20 years. And, um, so content to commerce is this kind of like really interesting play. And I think that, uh, this is a great example of it being done well.

• 7:36Sam Parr?

  Yeah, look, you have BuzzFeed doing it with stuffed animals, which is pretty lame. You know, they did that with like, uh, they did it with, with houses. And this is Baller. Uh, Craig told me about this about a year and a half ago. And I was like, this is very bold. And he was explaining it to me and he was very confident and it was like no, no big deal. And I was thinking about this and I was like, I don't know, this kind of seems like a really big deal.

• 7:58Shaan Puri?

  Here's what we should do.

• 7:59Sam Parr?

  Well, I was like, I don't think you're going to be able to pull this off. Well, I didn't say that, but in my head, I was like, this is ridiculous. He totally did. They totally pulled it off.

• 8:07Shaan Puri?

  We, um, we did this way back in the day. I think you had said something. You were like, ads are lame. This is before HubSpot bought the podcast. So it was basically like ads are lame. We're selling ads for the podcast, but like, what would be a better business for, for my first million to do? And I think at the time people were like, you should create like a WeWork, like a branded version of WeWork or like a white label, like a coworking space, something like that.

• 8:28Sam Parr?

  Which sounded crazy.

• 8:30Shaan Puri?

  But I actually think that there was a version of that that that's a true like basically if we just bought like a eight unit or 16 unit apartment building in San Francisco, but it was only you could only go rent there if you were part of our community or you could buy units there if you're part of our community. Something like that could work because people would rather live in a community of like minded people than a community of absolute strangers. I think there's a huge number of people that would do that. And so then you get into the real estate game. These units in San Francisco go for, you know, a million and a half, $2 million on average, you know, they so so you could do these things where you, you know, in theory, a brand like ours could also do that and say, yeah, if you want to be around other entrepreneurs, other business people who are, you know, share this kind of like

• 9:15Shaan Puri?

  this ethos that we have, then, you know, you could do that.

• 9:19Sam Parr?

  But there's a problem, which is you and I, I don't know about you, me, I wasn't even bold enough to like, consider that. I thought that was stupid. Now I've got a little bit more experience and I kind of understand like our pull a little bit. Now I actually think that that could work, but at the time I was like, that's ridiculous. There's there's no way that would work.

• 9:36Shaan Puri?

  Dude, my brain is like a metal detector that's just looking for something that's going to scare me to do. I'm just like, where can I get the maximum thrill, the business thrill? Like, we're going to get the maximum reward, plus I'm down with the risk and saying like, if I said out loud that I was doing this, that I think would get other people's attention, but it would also make me a little scared because I don't know exactly how to do it. Like, I am very attracted to these ideas and there's that's not always a good thing. I think that's a bad thing in many cases, but uh, but I'm, I hear that and I want to run into that fire a little bit. Whereas I think you hear that you're like, there's a fire, why would I run?

• 10:11Sam Parr?

  No, no, no, no, no. Now, now I'm more comfortable because I've seen some, I've seen like, well, if you do this, this and this, the odds of some type of return is is positive, but like before I was still kind of understanding like that mechanics of business and like investing in things like that. Now I actually do see it.

• 10:29Shaan Puri?

  We're like the opposites. We're like the opposite. I get excited by that weird kind of like, kind of half figured out thing. And you're like, well, why don't I want to figure it out first, but then once you do figure it out, you're like, You're like, go and you just execute and you're like locked in and you just, you just freaking go on that opportunity. Whereas I'm like, oh, this is cool. It's kind of figured out. All right, cool. Um, like I'll kind of go there, but oh, there's this other interesting thing over here. That's like, you know, half figured out and I, I'm not as good at the lock in.

• 10:58Sam Parr?

  You get bored after you figured out the puzzle.

• 11:01Shaan Puri?

  Exactly.

• 11:02Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but for me, I have to figure out a little bit more and like, I want like a higher certainty that the puzzle pieces are even going to be able to fit, fit, fit together. You know what I'm saying?

• 11:10Shaan Puri?

  Right, right. Exactly. But then once the puzzle's done, you're, you're like, my puzzle. I love this puzzle.

• 11:15Sam Parr?

  Dude.

• 11:16Shaan Puri?

  This is my puzzle.

• 11:18Sam Parr?

  I'll tell you an example. So, uh, Sean and I are going to Vancouver Wednesday, I think, and we're doing this little, uh, meetup with us and Andrew Wilkinson. And this wasn't even that well organized. Like they've done a good job of it, but like, there's no, they not, maybe well organized isn't the right word because that sounds insulting. It was just kind of low key. Like we just have like a type form that you have to sign up for and that's it. And then you pay 50 bucks to show up and I think you get a refund if you show up. I think they're doing it to like guarantee seats. Like the people listening to the pod, if they say, how do I sign up? I don't even know where to, I don't know where to go.

• 11:49Shaan Puri?

  Uh, we're doing a meetup, but it's in stealth mode for no reason. I don't know. I don't know what the organizer guy's doing, but it doesn't make any sense to me.

• 11:57Sam Parr?

  It doesn't make any sense to me.

• 11:58Shaan Puri?

  Yo, um, what's the venue and date and time? Oh man, it's all coming together. We're working on it. It's like.

• 12:05Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I don't know. I don't know.

• 12:06Shaan Puri?

  Fire festival? What's happening here?

• 12:08Sam Parr?

  And then he, they refunded the money and I'm like, well, I couldn't use that money on like my flights and hotel. I wish, I wish, you know, like I'm paying money to go and do this. It would've been cool. Cause like the thing, it made like 50 or a hundred grand. I'm like, you know, give me like 3,000 to pay for my stuff. But, uh, when I, when I've kind of like realized that we are able to pull off some of this stuff, I'm like, oh, hey, we can get people. The, the, the thing with media, what is, if you can get people to buy shit or leave your home. So like, if you say, I'm going to be at this location at this time. The, if you were able to get people to do that, that means you have pull. And once everyone's about, when we pull that off, then I'm like, oh, we could have pulled this off, something like this, or we still could, we still can. Then I, I, I start to believe it.

• 12:49Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's interesting. Actually, that's a good metric because I've been trying to think about on the content side. I'm like, you know, I want to set a goal because I think I work better when I have a goal.

• 13:02Sam Parr?

  You have to give context. The context is Sean is now he's considering or planning or doing to go harder on creating content.

• 13:09Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Sounds lame. So I didn't even say those words. Content creator sounds like lame. I'm gonna come up with my own words. But like, yeah, the idea is, hey, I like doing this thing where I get to just like, learn about stuff, talk about it, and people seem to like it. Podcast is one version of that. The newsletter is another version, etc. And anyways, the point is, I was like, what's a good goal for this? And I was like, oh, million, 10 million subscribers, fans. No, what do I want here? And I was like, and then I was like intuitively, there's something more like that Kevin Kelly thing, the true fans, 1000 true fans. Where it's like, he wrote this blog post, it's amazing, that's called 1000 True Fans, basically says, if you can have, if you can have 1000 true fans, a true fan being somebody who would pay $100 across the course of a year.

• 13:53Shaan Puri?

  They'll buy your shirt, they'll show up, you know, for your event, they'll buy your tickets, they'll do whatever because they really like your stuff. And like, you know, for an artist, if you're somebody who's just creating 1000 people who are willing to pay 100 bucks, sounds kind of achievable. It doesn't, that's not like I'm going to be the next, you know, Justin Bieber or whatever. And it's 100 grand. And like, you could make a living doing what you love. If you get to that point, that was like one of the original things that I think inspired a lot of content creators online. And I was like, oh, maybe something like true fans, but how do you measure a true fan? I guess it's this $100 spend thing. But I think this thing you're saying is actually true, which is a, it's like a test. It's like, if I just tweeted, hey, I'm hanging out at this coffee shop right now in San Francisco, how many people would show up?

• 14:35Shaan Puri?

  And like, I think three years ago, that answer was zero to, zero to two. You know, like maybe just my actual friends who I hadn't caught up with in a while.

• 14:46Shaan Puri?

  You know, now I don't know what that number would be, but probably, what do you think? If I did that, I have no idea.

• 14:50Sam Parr?

  Well, if you.

• 14:51Shaan Puri?

  No, no, thousands would be crazy. But if I was like, I'm hanging out here all day. So it's not like.

• 14:56Sam Parr?

  If you gave it a, if you gave it a two week window or a two week notice, two to four week notice. I think.

• 15:03Shaan Puri?

  No, no, forget that. I'm saying same day. I'm just, I'm going to be here all day. Swing by if you're around.

• 15:08Sam Parr?

  Fifty to a hundred, I bet.

• 15:10Shaan Puri?

  Fifty to a hundred. Yeah, exactly. And I think that there's a, that's probably, that's great. That's, that's amazing. There's some point where it's like, uh, the coffee shop's like, what the fuck is happening? Uh, there, there's like, there's too many people here, guys. What, what is this? There's some point where you break the coffee shop and I'm like, okay, there's some way of testing that because I think what most people go is for reach and they get really tricked by these platforms that are like, yeah, your video got 95,000 views. And it's like, cool. Um, how many of them actually watched this versus just swiped by it? Or if they wa, like, how many of those 95,000 people know your name? How many of them know anything about you? How many of them care about you, right? Like, and so I think what most people do is they get, they just take what they're fed.

• 15:54Shaan Puri?

  And they're fed basically the most large vanity useless number. And I think for any business, you want to find not the vanity metric, but the true metric that actually shows, like the level of engagement you have, the level of love that your product has. And so, um, and, and different businesses, different companies have like different ways of looking at this. Like Facebook back in the day, one of their metrics that mattered was they were like, yeah, of all of our signups, 50% of them use this every day. And that became this thing that was like, okay, it's not that they have the most signups, like MySpace has way more. But man, this Facebook thing, like half the use, half of the total signups are using it every single day. That's gotta mean something.

• 16:36Shaan Puri?

  And the people that were able to identify that inside the company and as investors got mega, mega rich. Whereas other people were just chasing like a total user count number. But they didn't really like have a, the good way to measure it. So I think there's something to like finding the real metric that matters. At the hustle, what did you guys use? Cause you could have just said subscribers, right? But that wasn't like quite the, that wasn't just the thing. Like, do you have any examples of finding the real metric that matters?

• 17:02Sam Parr?

  Dude, we would just do replies. And so every once in a while, I would purposely either write about something that was a bit controversial, or I would purposely have typos and I would just see how many people reply and say that they saw a typo.

• 17:15Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 17:15Sam Parr?

  Or at the very bottom of the email, and I told you to do this, and I think you did do it. I would say, um, what city are you in right now? Send me a, or I would say, um, I'm working from this brand new desk. It's called this. I love it. Take, take a picture of your workspace. Let me see it.

• 17:31Shaan Puri?

  Yep.

• 17:31Sam Parr?

  And it would be just how many people are going to take a picture and, and reply back to the email. And there was a time where we, at the very bottom of the email, we said, we're going to send out stickers to everyone that replies. And we got like 10,000 replies. So we had to like mail out 10,000 stickers. And so we would do little things like that where, and this, we got like 10,000 replies on like 100,000 subscribers. And so I remember like anytime we get a reply from an email, that's a, that's a really good sign.

• 17:59Shaan Puri?

  Right. And like, I see this all the time with newsletters now because Substack has this feature where if you subscribe to one newsletter, like I read something, I'm like, yeah, I like this. I subscribe. It pops up this full screen thing, which is just like, Sean recommends these five newsletters. And there's only one button and you're just like, uh, okay, next. And you hit that and now you're subscribed to five newsletters and you can see people on Substack, they're like, wow, my, my growth is crazy. I'm hitting 100,000, 200,000, 300,000 subscribers.

• 18:26Sam Parr?

  Bullshit.

• 18:26Shaan Puri?

  Dude, it's all bullshit. And Substack's like, this is awesome. When they're showing this, I'm sure in their investor presentation, look at this. Now we drive the majority of subscriber growth for our newsletters. There's a network effect here. It's like, no, it's not a network effect. It's a giant screen where people click next. Like I used to do this with our mobile apps. It's like, oh, if I want to, if I want this app to grow, let me just pop up a screen where it's your entire contact list. Everybody pre-checked. There's one big button that says next, and there's a tiny black X that's like hidden in the top left corner. If you could see that you're going to skip it. And like, everybody wants to skip it, but two out of, two out of every 10 people are just going fast and they're just going to hit the button. And they just spammed all of their contacts. And guess what? My app goes viral. Is it really viral? Are they sharing it because they like this product?

• 19:08Shaan Puri?

  No, they're sharing it because I tricked them into spamming, basically. And Substack doesn't. The same thing. They basically trick people into subscribing to these newsletters. This is my opinion. I'm sure they would disagree and say, no, no, no. People just really want to be referred five news newsletters every time they've subscribed to one. I don't believe that for a second. This happens with podcasts. There's a very popular business podcast. I like the guy, but I think his numbers are BS. It's, you know, should I say the name? I don't know if I should say the name, but like. Do it. Uh, let's just say it's not 30 minute VC. It's a little less than that.

• 19:46Shaan Puri?

  No, he's a, he's a great guy and he's done a great job building his podcast up. But he'll tweet out these things where he'll be like. Two million. Two million people listen to the last week's episode with this person. And I'm just like, dude, there's just no way in hell. That's Joe Rogan numbers. That's, there is not two million people. I know we, we, we have a podcast. I can see where we are in the ranks. I could see where he is in the ranks. I know. You can see reviews. The charts. You can look at the reviews. You could just see the cult following of certain things. Like if you said, you know, the all in podcast is getting a million views per episode. I'd be like, I think that's true. I think that they have really tapped into something. You could see the YouTube numbers. You could, you could think about where, where the podcast charges. I think it's doing at least a million, probably closer to two per episode. They do once a week.

• 20:32Shaan Puri?

  It's super high quality. It's got a broad appeal. The numbers, the data matches up to that signal.

• 20:39Shaan Puri?

  But when you're like, oh dude, I, yeah, I get two million per episode for my super, you know, my talk with the third least well-known partner at this fund. I'm just like, there's no, no chance. And I think I even asked him once, I was like, dude, how are you getting these numbers? That sounds like off the charts for what like a, a business or tech podcast of, of this, you know, size could do. And he's like, oh yeah, we have a big audience in Asia or wherever. And I'm just like, oh, okay. Well, I've been in the internet game long enough to know like, like dude, I bought my first 5,000 Twitter followers. Right? Like I, I know that you can get a, you can get any number by doing anything on the internet. And it doesn't mean anything, especially for something like podcasts, which is like newsletter subscribers. It's like the hardest thing ever to have. Click once and now you're a, a consumer of everything else.

• 21:25Shaan Puri?

  Nobody could even measure on podcasting if anybody's actually listening to these things. And so. Yeah, I can go get a bunch of people to click subscribe one time and it will auto download my feed every time I release a new episode. Like there was a guy Nathan Laka that was doing this too. He was like, we get this many downloads per month. And I was like, oh wow, a couple of million downloads a month. That's pretty good.

• 21:45Sam Parr?

  Huge, yeah.

• 21:46Shaan Puri?

  What do you do? And basically he was like, and I, when I talked to him, I was like, he's like, hey, welcome to the show, Sean, blah, blah, blah. He's going like hyperspeed. Five minutes, the podcast was over. And I was like, this is a five minute episode. He's like, yeah, sorry, I gotta hop to the next one. I was like, how many of these you recording a day? He's like, I recorded eight of these a day. And then we released like, whatever. He was on some crazy schedule. And then I did the math and I was like, oh, he has like 7,000 subscribers. But he just releases huge volume of random episodes of these five minute episodes. And so his total monthly number, because podcasts is just like, you know, if you just do downloads, it just adds up all your episodes times your number of subscribers. You can have a small number of subscribers and do a huge number of download, a huge number of episodes and get a big download number. And so people, I think, use these vanity metrics all the time and they're BS.

• 22:31Sam Parr?

  So I, I'll bring this up because we're discussing it, but I didn't research it fully. But have you heard of Parcast? It's like my name, but cast. So Parcast. Have you ever heard of that?

• 22:41Shaan Puri?

  Are you, are you spinning off your own solo? Did the brand bake up, band break up? Are you doing your own?

• 22:46Sam Parr?

  No, listen, I, I, I wish I invented this. So it's a guy named Max Cutler. I think he's our age. I think he's like 31, 32, 33. So this guy named Max Cutler created this thing called Parcast. And the whole idea of it is it's a podcast network. But they, they only have like

• 23:04Shaan Puri?

  True crime.

• 23:05Sam Parr?

  True crime. And I'm a weirdo. You want to know what I listen to every night? There's two podcasts I listen to every night. The first one is just called Serial Killers. So it's a, it's, it's, it's just a bunch of podcasts about serial killers. I can, I can tell you all, I got a, I got, I got my fantasy league of serial killers, you know, with Ted Bundy as the quarterback. And then there's another one called You know, it's, it's, this one's fitting for going to sleep. It's called deathbed confessions. So it's people who confess about a crime they did when they're dying. So it's

• 23:39Shaan Puri?

  Oh, nice.

• 23:40Sam Parr?

  It's, it's the best. So this guy started this and it's all scripted. So it has like voice actors and it's all scripted stuff. He bootstrapped this podcast company, which is unheard of, and he sold it to Spotify for $200 million after only maybe five years. And him and his dad owned the whole company. His dad was in radio and so his dad was like a radio announcer, something like that. And they are producing something like 30 or 40 podcasts a day, like episodes, and they're all highly produced stuff. And it's amazing. Have you, have you not heard of this, uh, heard of this business?

• 24:12Shaan Puri?

  I've heard of this brand once before. Uh, I didn't realize that they, I didn't, I didn't know the business side of it. I didn't know that they had bootstrapped it and sold it to Spotify, but I really, I like true crime. I don't know where to start. There's just so many true crimes and a bad one is like such a waste of time. But, um, yeah, I've seen some of their shows because I go sometimes look in the browse section for, for like, you know, a good true crime.

• 24:33Sam Parr?

  Dude, so true crime, if you go and look at, so

• 24:37Shaan Puri?

  What's a good one of theirs?

• 24:38Sam Parr?

  If you look at, uh, I like serial killers, serial killers, dude, deathbed confessions is awesome. I'll send you a good deathbed confession one. They're so awesome. And true crime, it's, uh, if you go to the podcast, uh, app and you look at like one of the top uh, episodes or shows, it's always like 30 or 40% true crime and which is, it's mostly women who listen to it. And it's always, and so like, uh, Dateline, I told you about this Dateline from NBC, which is a show that's been around for 20 or 30 years at this point. It's still usually a top podcast every single week. And so these true crime folks, they kill it. And this guy bootstrapped this company, um, to a, I think it was a hundred million cash and then a hundred, another hundred million earn out.

• 25:20Sam Parr?

  All off of these true crime podcasts. He killed it. It's a really interesting story. I'm gonna have to, I'll dive deep and do some better research on it. But I was reading about it, uh, this weekend. It's, it's a pretty amazing outcome this guy had.

• 25:31Shaan Puri?

  So I just read an article. This might be maybe wrong, or maybe you're wrong. I don't know. Spotify confirms it paid 56 million for podcast, or Parcast, sorry.

• 25:39Sam Parr?

  Uh, then maybe I got my numbers wrong. I think it was 56 and then another like 75 outcome. It was a nine-figure, uh, uh, another.

• 25:46Shaan Puri?

  Retention.

• 25:47Sam Parr?

  There was a retention. According to the Parcast Wikipedia, which reads as if Matt Max Cutler, the founder, wrote it. Uh, it's very like congratulatory. Uh, it says there's like a huge earn out.

• 25:58Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. I don't know if I trust anyone that does true crime, by the way. Uh, these guys are natural storytellers and like liars.

• 26:05Sam Parr?

  Dude, all right. I've got an interesting thing to bring up. This is a, uh, something that we talked about a while ago. I think you brought this up in 2020 or 21. I forget. Right when we were recording in the original Hustle office. So do you remember that company, Crumble, that you brought up?

• 26:21Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Well, first of all, I love a good I told you so. So I'm already, I'm already glowing. Yeah.

• 26:26Sam Parr?

  Dude, you got this.

• 26:26Shaan Puri?

  Crumble, Crumble Cookies.

• 26:28Sam Parr?

  Crumble Cookies. So when you originally told me about it, the story was something like these two brothers or two cousins launched this thing. And for some reason in my head, I'm thinking like a family like cooking, making cookies in their like kitchen and they start this like pandemic thing and it gets popular. And basically, once a week, they tweet out a new menu and they have a drop, you know, things that like typically Supreme does or like these, but they're doing it with like outrageous flavored cookies. Well, that's not entirely true. They, what is true is they do do these drops, but it's a massive business and some sources are saying it's close to like 800 million a year in revenue. And the reason I saw it was someone shared this on Twitter, but basically over the last

• 27:10Sam Parr?

  like couple months, it's been growing and growing and growing. And so the other day, it was like the number four most downloaded app in the week. And so they have an app. And so their app now has 2.3 million ratings or reviews with like, with a 4.9 average. And what, and right now they're, they're opening brick and mortar and they're opening a new store every five days. They have something like 730 stores at the moment and it's one of the fastest growing chains in America. And so these guys, check, listen to these numbers. They have 800,000 followers on Twitter. 3.4 on Instagram, 6.5 on TikTok, 1.2 on YouTube. And they create these commercials every single week for a new cookie drop. And it is crushing it. These guys are killing it. It's so fascinating.

• 27:55Sam Parr?

  I never in a million years thought this was gonna work as big as it has. But basically, every Sunday at 6:00 PM, they do like a new drop. And their app just spikes and goes way up the charts. And they're, they're up there with like Uber Eats and all this stuff like that. They're killing it. And so I remember you brought this up and in my head, I was like, oh, this is like a little like mom and pop.

• 28:13Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it sounds cute. Like, oh, that's cute.

• 28:15Sam Parr?

  Yeah, like, oh, your aunt made cookies. That's nice. Yeah, no, they're sharks. They're killing it. Uh, and so you called that pretty early on and uh, now it's a franchise. So here's like, here's some stats. In 2021, uh, the highest revenue store did something like 3.6 million. Other stores did, uh, the average was like 1.6 million. The store with the highest net profit was 600,000 with the lowest being 33,000, with the average profit being around 350,000. And um, according to uh, the founder's Twitter, they did over a billion dollars in revenue. And you have to come up with a hundred and fifty thousand dollars and then you can open up a franchise. And they send you all of this traffic via their, you know, their Instagram and their app. Super fascinating business.

• 28:59Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, this, uh, I think in the franchise world, this is like the hottest franchise right now is Crumble Cookie. Because uh, they're just exploding and they're just super prob, super popular right now. I do feel like this is not like uh, the most sustainable franchise, like uh, at one point in time, wasn't like, I think, I feel like Froyo franchises were like growing like crazy like this. I don't know if it was Pinkberry or whoever else, like uh, you know, there's these waves where this becomes the, the treat. But like, I don't know how many people are gonna like, anything that's drop based, there's a natural fatigue that sets in for the buyer and uh, and there, and there's like a vicious cycle. Like drops, when everybody's into the drop, get even more fun. Cause it's like the hunt and you either got it or you didn't get it and you feel special.

• 29:44Shaan Puri?

  But as soon as that starts to, as soon as the drop fatigue starts to kick in and now. Oh, notifications there, but if I don't get it today, I can go get it tomorrow. Like as soon as the scarcity is gone, the drop like plummets in value. And so I think that that's a challenge for for something like this.

• 29:59Sam Parr?

  But I agree, but look, here's the deal. I have a you and I have a friend who buys broadband companies. So broadband companies are basically internet service providers. And a lot of people who are listening in the city will have no idea what I'm talking about. But where I have my country house, I have like this ranch way out in the country. And if you live out in the country, it's not like you're getting like Spectrum or Google or Warner or whatever the big service providers are in New York City. You're getting like a small internet provider that you pay a hundred bucks a month for. And they probably that company probably does 10 million in revenue and like 5 million in profit. And you and I have a friend who goes out and buys these companies. And everyone says to him, well, what about Starlink? Yada, yada, yada. And he was like, yeah, they'll they'll come eventually. But like until then, I'm making $5 million a year in profit.

• 30:41Sam Parr?

  So with with this cookie thing, yeah, maybe they'll plateau. But a billion a year is a nice plateau. I don't mind sitting on that plateau for a while. And that's kind of and that's kind of that's like how I feel whenever I hear some of these stories. Like it's not going to grow. I'm like, yeah, that's cool.

• 30:57Shaan Puri?

  Sorry, I couldn't hear you. The money counter was burring a little too loud in my ears.

• 31:03Shaan Puri?

  That goes back to the if anybody asked me why I sold for 200 million, you get in a slap. Like, you know, just don't ask, don't ask those stupid questions.

• 31:10Sam Parr?

  Dude, and and the founder, one of the cousins or one of the brothers, they he previously worked in tech and he had a Facebook app that got to like 120 million followers. So these guys are like viral guys. They know how to do this, but interesting story.

• 31:23Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it looks like he was director of product at Ancestry, which is like one of the like, you know, just one of the gems of internet companies that's like really big, but nobody knows anybody who's like works there or nobody, nobody claims to use it, even though it's like really, really popular site and did a bunch of cool like viral things. And like basically did a bunch of smart product stuff along the way to like make that business work.

• 31:43Sam Parr?

  Dude, Ancestry is funny too because they're a Utah-based company and they're founded by Mormons.

• 31:49Shaan Puri?

  By the way, this guy's first business, first business, BYU.com. You hear about this?

• 31:55Sam Parr?

  No.

• 31:56Shaan Puri?

  Here's what it says on his LinkedIn. BYU.com was a social network for Brigham Young University students. We grew the network to include half the campus in a very short amount of time, but was ultimately crushed by Facebook. So he did this in 2005. I think Facebook launched 2004. And so basically, he was doing the like, you know, the Harvard social network. He was doing that just on BYU's campus, but like the Facebook wave, you know, swallowed it. But that's, you know, you're putting on green.

• 32:21Sam Parr?

  That's pretty impressive.

• 32:22Shaan Puri?

  You're landing on the putting green right there. If you're, if you're creating a social network back in 2005 for college campuses, like, goddamn, you were close to being on to something, you know, like, I'm not surprised that this guy ended up being really successful.

• 32:35Sam Parr?

  No, it's a really fascinating story. But anyway, where do you want to go? You want to drive?

• 32:41Ben?

  Can I, can I tell my story really quick?

• 32:44Sam Parr?

  Ben has a story.

• 32:45Ben?

  So obviously, you mentioned they're a Utah company. So of course I know, well, so the story is,

• 32:53Ben?

  this guy adds me from Utah State University. Looks like he's just graduating or about to graduate. I have a bunch of mutual friends with him on LinkedIn. So I was like, okay, I'll do this kid a favor. I don't know what he wants. So I click add. And he immediately starts posting cringe. Like, I'm starting this company. It's going to be huge. And then he keeps posting stuff that's like, I don't know how to describe it. It's very, like Adam Grant or Dummer, like business, like, did you know that you can increase your productivity by 20% by having a team offsite? So we're having a hashtag team offsite this weekend. And I was just like, who is this kid? He says he's starting a cookie company. Honestly, when they opened their first location, I was like,

• 33:36Ben?

  I am amazed. I didn't think this kid would ever actually get even a location open. And it was Sawyer, the founder, the CEO of Crumble. And this kid who just posted cringe to my LinkedIn timeline.

• 33:48Shaan Puri?

  Oh, no, that just totally like breaks my frame. I just always assumed that if you're that mega cringe, you won't win. And now, now I have to consider the possibility that every hashtag user could actually be a winner. I just had a blanket rule.

• 34:06Sam Parr?

  If you're a Mormon guy and you're telling me you're gonna start a cute cookie franchise, I'm in. I mean, come on. Of course this guy's gonna crush it.

• 34:13Shaan Puri?

  Mormon does trump cringe. So like, if you're Mormon, I have to, I, you know, the checkbook's already out. I'm just waiting to hear, you know, how many zeros I need to put my, my number here. But that's based on the idea. So yeah, you're right. That, that actually overwhelms the cringe part because it's like, this guy's gonna sell. The person knows how to sell.

• 34:34Sam Parr?

  Yeah, the, well, that sucks, Ben. Yeah, you messed up on that one.

• 34:39Ben?

  Yeah, I know. I should have just hit him up and like, oh, this looks really cool. But, uh, you know, live and learn.

• 34:44Speaker 03

  I can't find this client info. Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform, so it shares its data across every application. Every team can stay aligned. No out of sync spreadsheets or dueling databases. HubSpot, grow better.

• 35:00Sam Parr?

  Um, Sean, I have a couple of things. What do you want to do?

• 35:03Shaan Puri?

  Um, okay, I have a quick little idea. So I was watching the Super Bowl and, um, did you watch, by the way?

• 35:10Sam Parr?

  Uh, uh, I watched the halftime show.

• 35:15Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I watched it. I watched, no, I, uh, I, I watched like quarter three.

• 35:20Shaan Puri?

  How long did it take you to figure out Rihanna was pregnant during the halftime show? Quick on the uptake or no?

• 35:26Sam Parr?

  You know, it was one of those things where my wife loves her and like, you know, you don't want to be rude when you see a lady with a lump and you want to like, you know, and I was like-

• 35:33Shaan Puri?

  I'm not going first. That's, I'm not, I'm not talking.

• 35:37Sam Parr?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I, I had her go first, then I asked. But she was doing some pretty, uh, raunchy stuff as a pregnant lady, right? I mean, that was like-

• 35:45Shaan Puri?

  I thought that was tame for Rihanna. That's like, that was PG to Rihanna.

• 35:49Sam Parr?

  Dude, I'm a, I'm a Rihanna fan. She's in my like, top five, like, most beautiful woman on earth. I'm a, I'm a, I'm a, I'm on team Rihanna. But when I saw that she was pregnant, I, uh, it was, that was surprising. I think she just had a kid, too.

• 36:03Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's yeah, she just had to get like nine months. I don't know. The math doesn't even make sense to me in my head.

• 36:08Sam Parr?

  Whatever.

• 36:09Shaan Puri?

  Whatever. I'm watching the football game and one thing you notice if you're watching the game is that when the Chiefs were scoring, they were scoring with these like incredible plays where the guy was just going untouched into the end zone.

• 36:20Sam Parr?

  Dude, what was that thing where they like, will they get in a huddle and they do like ring around the Rosie? And then they like run to the line? That was crazy. Is that like?

• 36:28Shaan Puri?

  Didn't work.

• 36:28Sam Parr?

  What is that?

• 36:29Shaan Puri?

  But amazing that they tried it, right? Like that is, that was an awesome play. So I was thinking about it and I was like, but it did stand out. They had the two or three touchdowns where it was just like brilliant play design, right call and like totally worked. And then, you know, I I've gone, you know, I love sports and I've watched tons of sports documentaries and shows like Last Chance. You could just see the life of a coach and a coach is like a really specific character in my head, like a football coach at a high school, college, or even pro level is like, it's the same type of dude in most cases. And their life is football. They live and breathe this shit. They're preparing all week for, you know, the Sunday game. And then they start again the next week and they're just like, they're just live in this playbook and the X's and O's.

• 37:12Shaan Puri?

  They all have the same value system about toughness and grit and whatever. And, um, and I was like, oh, this is another job that AI is going to replace. Cause I was like, this is, this is an AI problem, the problem of an offensive coordinator in the NFL, which is basically what play should I call here to maximize, you know, my expected return? And I think you could, somebody's going to build AI that basically ingests a bunch of data that says, in this situation, third down and seven, um, you know, maybe even take into account the teams and the talent, you know, equation. This is the best play to run with the highest expected value. It's basically like what Madden does when Madden suggests like, yeah, run this play, but like,

• 37:52Sam Parr?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's exactly.

• 37:53Shaan Puri?

  The really good version of Madden. Now that we have like, you know, computers are geniuses. And so, um, so I'm pretty sure that there's going to, somebody's going to build a. Basically like a play caller, AI play caller that will help because these guys are you just look, they're literally looking on a cheat sheet like, you know, like it's a open book exam or whatever. When it's like, you can bring in one eight by 11 piece of paper and everyone's writing in like size two font to squeeze as many things as they can on it. That's what these guys use when they're calling plays and it's like they have, you know, 10 seconds to pick the play. This is just a job that computers are going to be better at. And it's just reminds me of like how crazy AI is going to be that like even these like total

• 38:33Shaan Puri?

  non-tech situations, not even big markets, but it's just going to be like when now when humans play against a computer at chess or even, you know, Go or poker or whatever, where the computer is just so much better than the human. That's what's going to happen in this play calling situation. It just kind of reminded me about, man, AI is going to be going to be nuts because it's going to take over all these things that you wouldn't really have expected or in the line of fire for AI.

• 38:58Sam Parr?

  Is football as like, you know, there's obviously the famous Moneyball thing where he's like, I don't care what, who's a superstar, who's not, I'm just going to look at the math and we're just going to pick people off spreadsheets. And then famously, although I think this is highly exaggerated, Chamath was like, oh, I'm going to buy the Warriors and we're going to do that same thing with basketball. So we're only going to shoot threes or whatever. I don't pay attention, but whatever their shtick is. Sorry, I'm ruining this, but and the reason I have a feeling it's not true is I have a feeling.

• 39:26Shaan Puri?

  None of that is true.

• 39:26Sam Parr?

  Team and also like, I think he said that though, right?

• 39:30Shaan Puri?

  I don't think so, but.

• 39:32Sam Parr?

  Well, I'm making up then, but.

• 39:35Shaan Puri?

  Other people did it in basketball. Daryl Morey famously was like the big, you know, proponent of this.

• 39:40Sam Parr?

  The reason why I don't believe that is I have a feeling like teams were always doing this, like maybe it's one of those things where like, like for example, my favorite copywriter, he was like, I wrote these famous ads for the cat. What's it called the Casio watch? And he's like, we talked about how we use space grade aluminum and crystal quartz to make this watch. And he was like, little do they know, every watch does that. Like that's just like table stakes, like every single watch, but I'm going to explain it because I know that the audience doesn't know. And so like you have a guy saying like, look, we use state of the art technology and it's like an Excel sheet that like everyone else uses. It's like, yeah, I guess it's state of the art, but anyway.

• 40:16Shaan Puri?

  We have a premium licensed Microsoft Excel.

• 40:21Sam Parr?

  Unlimited seats.

• 40:22Shaan Puri?

  Unlimited seats. We do not use the trial.

• 40:26Sam Parr?

  But is football the same way where you could just follow the math?

• 40:29Shaan Puri?

  So there's actually, this is actually a great question. There's a, Daryl Morey went on that guy, uh, I forgot his name, but the invest, invest like the best guy, Patrick.

• 40:37Sam Parr?

  Patrick Shawnessy. Yeah.

• 40:39Shaan Puri?

  He went on his pod. Actually, it was a really, really great podcast. If you like sports and you like kind of business stuff, it was, it's kind of an amazing one. He talks about like, baseball is basically the, almost like the perfect game for modeling. Like you could basically, cause it's like stationary. It's like one pit, one batter versus one pitcher. And, um, and then, you know, like it's a like, it's a contained problem. It's like, whereas in basketball, you've got five guys on the, on each team on the court. You've got 10 guys all moving around free form at any given time. The ball's moving like crazy. It's much harder to model, but we could still model the impacts of like one player in these certain situations. And so it's like, the data thing has had a pretty big impact in basketball, but less than it did in baseball. Baseball was like a math, became a math equation.

• 41:21Shaan Puri?

  Basketball became more of a math equation than it was before, but still it's never going to be perfect. It's too complex and high.

• 41:26Sam Parr?

  There's too many variables.

• 41:27Shaan Puri?

  To be, to be, to be perfectly modeled out or whatever. Um, but still it was improved, which is why you see like they, they will post like a 20 years ago, here's what the shot chart looked like. And it's just dots all over the, the courts. Like as you kind of expect, like people shoot from everywhere. And it's like, here's what it is in 2023. It's like, people only shoot layups or threes. Cause optimally like basically a three is worth, you know, whatever, 150% more than a two. But there's percentage difference of shooting it is only like, you know, you know, five to seven percent worse than a two pointer or whatever. So, you know, you get like way higher expected value for shooting a three. So that's why all these teams shoot threes now or layups. They try, they tell their players, don't shoot this in between shot.

• 42:08Shaan Puri?

  Cause it's the wrong combo, right? Um, so things like that. And then he's like, football is going to be the hardest one to, to game because you have 11 players on each side. And on any given play, everybody's moving in different directions and you can't really figure out like the net effects of this guy running in this lane. What did that cause this other guy to do? You know, it's much harder to do. But I think that's, that's true at a like. Because the reason these general managers care is because they're trying to, they're trying to like, basically, it's like a stock picker. It's like, they're trying to find undervalued assets. So the way you do that is you say, this player is not like, yes, his traditional stats look like this, but his game impact is different because of whatever. And so you're trying to figure out the value of one player.

• 42:51Sam Parr?

  But is the game impact because of locker room stuff and leadership?

• 42:54Shaan Puri?

  Or is it? No, no, they're, they're looking at just the on the court movement. Like, you know, in basketball, for example, there's an assist. If I pass you the ball, you score, that's an assist. But if I pass you the ball, I've, I've made the whole defense shift to me. You pass it to the next guy, you get the assist. The stat sheet doesn't show that I actually was the one who created this whole play, this opportunity by, by caving in the defense. So the stat sheets, like the traditional stat sheet is limited. So what these guys have done is figure out like, advanced stats that like better, better show an individual player's impact, not including locker room stuff. And he's saying football is even harder, more players, more movement, more whatever, less plays total. Uh, so you have a smaller sample size. But I think that this play calling thing is bigger, bigger in football because in basketball, you don't call many plays.

• 43:39Shaan Puri?

  But in football, every play is called in by the coach. And so if you can make the coach 20% more intelligent by suggesting a better play, that's gonna like, that's gonna shift the title, you know, the balance of power towards that, that team, because they're just gonna get that many more first downs and touchdowns. So I think this is like, I don't know, it's kind of like really, really niche here, but I, I think this is an example of how AI is going to touch a bunch of areas and kill a bunch of jobs you don't expect. Bar shop, you got something.

• 44:04Speaker 04

  Yeah. Okay. So last night, the game was dictated on that terrible call that, um, you know, the, the Eagles defender, you know, got called on like a pass interference that basically made, uh, ruin the game. Chiefs win. That should have been decided by a, a AI ref. Like, why are there not AI refs? Why is any call up for debate? You know?

• 44:28Sam Parr?

  I agree.

• 44:29Shaan Puri?

  Well, there are in some sports, like in tennis, they put a chip in the ball. So like when the ball lands out, you see they always like instantly cut to this like silhouette of the ball. And it's like, it was out or it was in. And everybody's just like, it's unarguable. And why is that? Because they have a chip in the ball and a bunch of cameras that triangulate it. So they could tell you exactly whatever.

• 44:45Sam Parr?

  Dude, but that, that makes it so boring.

• 44:48Shaan Puri?

  Well, that's the problem because in baseball, you would have been like, oh, great. Like the umpire calls strikes by squatting behind the catcher and trying to like eyeball this like that's insane for this billion dollar sport like why, why are they doing this? And it turns out, if you just used computer to pick that to like perfectly call pitches, I guess the reasoning must be, and Ben, Ben Levy might know better, but there must be something where people preferred that their human had the like final say here versus because like the technology is there for a, a computer to call balls and strikes. There's really no need for that umpire anymore.

• 45:23Sam Parr?

  I'm not romantic to the early part of the game. I'm romantic to fistfights. That's what I want. And that's the best part about baseball is when like they get mad at each other. I mean, that's what I watch. I don't watch any of that other crap. I want to see them fight.

• 45:35Shaan Puri?

  There's a demo. I, I sent this to Ben. I'll show it to you. There's a demo of, because this, there's actually a bigger problem in fighting. Like dude, how many fights, I don't know, in the UFC fight, this fight this weekend, did you think the right guy won? I thought he, I thought the right guy won, but people were.

• 45:47Sam Parr?

  Me too. But a lot of people did not.

• 45:49Shaan Puri?

  People did not. And this is a big problem with like, it's these three judges that are going to decide who won the fight. And, um, and it's like, how do you call it? Oh, yeah. How do you judge? And you know, if this guy made the wrong facial expressions, like, did he get hurt? How am I assessing damage here? Whereas there's an AI demo of basically the like, um, like the, the striking tracker where it's like, this guy did a left hook and it landed with this, like, with this level of, of impact or this like clean, like it was deflected, partially there, or it was a clean shot. And they're like, we should have basically like perfect tracking of the fight game. But for you as a fan, would you want that? Would you want the computer to basically say who won the fight? Or do you want these three old judges to, to scribble a scorecard?

• 46:32Sam Parr?

  I want the three old judges because a lot of, a lot, but here's why. First of all, when you watch WWF and W in like fake wrestling, WWE is called now, the best part is when they like hit the ref or they like distract them. Like sometimes they'll have like a hot girl come and distract him and he turns around and then like something bad happens. And that's like the best part of the show is like when there's drama. But also, um, in UFC, um, they have a new thing where they measure, uh, aggression, you know, like who's like pushing, who's pushing the plot. Um, and I think they do that so it's more exciting. And I don't know if you can entirely measure like aggression with AI, but that's why I don't like it. Um, but, uh, no, I, I, I'm okay with having, uh, humans do it. The, I think it makes it more exciting.

• 47:16Shaan Puri?

  More exciting.

• 47:17Sam Parr?

  We're talking about it.

• 47:18Shaan Puri?

  They're almost always like they're they're only ever in the conversation when they do it wrong. Right. Like it's never more exciting because man, they really, the refs really added to the to the fight there by by scoring it. They don't they don't add anything. They only subtract when they screw it up. Uh, I'm I'm surprised you don't want like the actual accurate uh score.

• 47:40Sam Parr?

  The only thing that I want, I want them to tell me the scores of a fight in between rounds and have that be the official thing. Because I want, I want the person to know when they're going into round three or round five that I'm down. And if I don't knock this guy out, the fight's over. And so that would be the only change that I would want. I want them to know the real score as it's going.

• 47:58Shaan Puri?

  I got one more random topic. Let's do one more, even though we're a little over time.

• 48:02Sam Parr?

  Well, if you're gonna do one more, are you gonna do this guy, this Ahmad? That that seems meaty. All right, go for it.

• 48:07Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it is kind of meaty, but let's do like a fast version of it. So uh, so this guy, Amjad, who's the founder of Replit, which is an awesome company, uh, is, he tweeted this out. He goes, you know, some of the biggest companies that were built, Airbnb, Uber, et cetera, were built because they took an underutilized asset and were able to get more utilization. So for example, Uber or Airbnb said, well, there's extra, there's an extra bedroom in your house or extra rooms. You have extra space. Today it's not doing anything, but you could rent that out and we could actually have more rooms to stay in um, and more options for a customer. And that became Airbnb, this multi-billion dollar company. And Uber is the same way. He goes, what are some other underutilized assets?

• 48:50Shaan Puri?

  I think this is a great, you know, framework for trying to figure out, you know, where where a marketplace could be or where a uh, and and I think people were doing this maybe five years ago, seven years ago, a lot more. There was like a, people realized this and started jumping on it. And that's why you got Wag, the dog walker app, you know, becomes worth a billion dollars and Airbnb and then and a bunch of others. And I have some examples here, but but what do you think about this framework and uh, what examples stand out to you?

• 49:17Sam Parr?

  I think it's brilliant. I see on here you have stay at home moms. One of the best, or one of my favorite companies that I've been eyeing is called Squared Away. And their whole niche is virtual assistants and the virtual assistant is a military wife. And that's like, for some reason in my head, I think they're going to act a certain way, which who knows if it's true. But I think that's one of the best ways of like a quote and under a underutilized asset. I love that. But the problem is, is a lot of people like, I knew a guy who started a thing where you could do, it was like self storaged, but in other people's garages.

• 49:48Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 49:48Sam Parr?

  And I'm like, dude, this is the stupidest shit I've ever heard of. And it was in fact, really stupid and it completely didn't work. And so I think that a lot of people approach us poorly.

• 49:57Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think the, the, there's a lot of things you could think of, like I know, another one that people have tried a bunch was like chefs. So it's like, oh, why do you only order from restaurants? Like, what if there's a lady who lives three doors down that makes an amazing, you know, Thai red curry? You could just order for her and she would get, you know, she'd get revenue for her cooking skill and then she could deliver it to you and it's closer and, you know, it wouldn't just be limited to restaurants. But it's like, A, operationally, these businesses are usually absolutely brutal. B, there's like a whole bunch of like safety and quality concerns and like, um, uniformity of the quality concerns that that come up.

• 50:33Shaan Puri?

  So I think that's, that's another problem. Uh, and then the economics, like, uh, people do, you know, is there enough dollar value for there to be, you know, for the customer to pay? The provider to get paid and the middleman to get paid and the delivery person to get paid. Like you need enough value in the chain, which is why Airbnb works. It's like a high ticket thing.

• 50:52Sam Parr?

  There's one for a

• 50:52Shaan Puri?

  Versus others.

• 50:54Sam Parr?

  And there's one for pools that I hear is killing it.

• 50:57Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Share like rent, rent a swimming pool by the hour, right? Cause I have a pool. We're not using it 95% of the time. So if somebody could rent it from us and we make a few hundred bucks. Yeah, yeah, that's great. I want to give you some of the best answers that came from the thread. So the first, the number one is cars. So cars I think are parked like 93 or 95% of their, of the time. And so, once we have self-driving cars, um, that car shouldn't just stay parked. It should go, go be a taxi for somebody and earn you money. So I think that's like one of the big unlocks that people, you know, people who know about this, they're like, oh yeah, that's obvious and that's going to be a big deal. But I would say the majority of the population doesn't realize. That your car is going to turn into a worker for you.

• 51:42Shaan Puri?

  And people are going to just, you're going to be earning revenue when your car is idle instead of it just sitting in your driveway or your garage.

• 51:47Sam Parr?

  Dude, Getaround, which I used to use all the time in San Francisco, I think they raised almost a billion dollars in funding and they went public recently-ish. Their market cap as of right now, fifty-nine million dollars. So no one quite has figured it out yet, it looks like.

• 52:03Shaan Puri?

  Well, that's, that's a little, that's still rental cars. This is going to be just like.

• 52:08Sam Parr?

  No, Getaround's other people. Well, yeah, you're right. You're right. Right?

• 52:12Shaan Puri?

  So, so this is what Tesla is basically betting on. This is what Elon's betting on. He basically is like, your car is going to go from a depreciating asset to a revenue generating asset for you, which will make the car worth five times more than it is today. Once it, once it's able to just run all day for you and just go do rides.

• 52:29Sam Parr?

  Okay, that's, that's bold, but that'd be cool if it works out.

• 52:32Shaan Puri?

  Clean, structured data. So basically, there's a bunch of data that in a bunch of different companies just sitting around. And if you could kind of organize it and clean it up, that data is actually an asset that can be used. And like we talked about earlier, the FreightWaves company that's doing pricing data.

• 52:50Shaan Puri?

  You know, how many companies have pricing data about like what they bought recently, how much it costs, how much volume and from what provider? If that was available in a structured way and you could sell that to a middle, like a network, like a data aggregator. You know, that, that becomes a valuable asset that today is worth zero to the company that has the data, but is not doing anything with it. And it's not their main business to be able to do something. So I thought that was kind of an interesting one.

• 53:13Sam Parr?

  Dude, someone wrote the sun?

• 53:15Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, the sun. So they were like, the sun is basically providing all this energy, but until we have solar and batteries to capture it, it's massively underutilized. Like we're getting free energy from this giant, you know, nuclear fusion reactor that's in the, in the sky or whatever. But you have to be able to capture it and store it and it's underutilized for that reason. Another one I thought's kind of interesting, so a fun one, nightclubs. Nightclubs are really like only useful like, you know, for like. Five percent of the time, you know, at night on, you know, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, or whatever, um, what can we do? And they're usually in kind of prime real estate in cities. And, um, I've always thought it was cool. When I lived overseas in Indonesia, they used

• 53:57Shaan Puri?

  to take nightclubs and during the day turn them into like fitness day bars. So you'd go in, the dance floor and the mirrors would turn into basically like a cardio session. And then the bar would turn into a smoothie bar. And I was like, oh, this is so smart. They're getting like double utility out of their nightclub. Um, I don't know why I've never seen that in the United States for some reason. Um, so I think nightclubs is a fun one. And then another one that was on here was a specialist talent. So like, What's that mean? Like, think about somebody who's like a really great 3D animator or something like that. So like, if a company hires you, that's great. Uh, but I would actually say like, you doing the thing you're world class at, you're probably only doing like 10 to 15% of your time when you're in a big company. Um, a lot of your time gets spent sort of

• 54:41Shaan Puri?

  like waiting for approvals or feedback or doing meetings or doing whatever other stuff that's around it. There's probably a case to be made that likes people with really specialist talent, you know, financial modeling or design or whatever. They would be better off being freelance to companies, but it would need to, the market needs to be more liquid and fast paced than it is today. Like, um, you, you would need like, like Naval has talked about this. He says, the future of work is basically like Ocean's Eleven. It's small teams of people that are within each team. There's like highly specialized, you know, that guy's the, the guy who's a pickpocket and this guy's the guy who can break codes and this guy's the guy who can do acrobatics, whatever, like the Ocean's Eleven, that that's what they do. There's highly talented specialists, they gang up

• 55:23Shaan Puri?

  together to go on this mission for a heist. They, then they split the money, they go on their way, they rest until they get the next call. And he's like, that's what, and he's like, that's what work is going to be. It's going to be pods of people that work well together, highly specialized. They're going to get a beep up. They're going to wake up in the morning. They're not going to have a job. They're going to wake up in the morning and check their phone for possible missions they could go on. They could choose to do none of them and just chill that day or take one. Cause they're like, oh, that's a juicy bounty. They could go do that mission. When they're done, the employer rates them like, like an Uber ride, like five stars. You rate the employer five stars. The, the money gets paid out to everybody's cell phone and you go on your way and you do, you wait till the next job. And I just thought those are really sexy view of the future. It hasn't happened quite yet, but like, you could see like,

• 56:05Shaan Puri?

  I guess Uber kind of works like that. And I guess there's like, you know, TaskRabbit and these other things that kind of work like that. And I guess freelancing is becoming more popular. Maybe this is, maybe we are moving in that direction.

• 56:17Sam Parr?

  I hate when people make these claims like this is the future of blank. Like if you say that like the future is electric car. Yeah, I buy that. But if you say the future of work is like Ocean's Eleven, my reply to that is like, no, maybe the future of criminals is Ocean Eleven. But like, that's not like, it's like, the future of people getting money is to rob banks. No, maybe like a group of people will do that. But I just don't think that like,

• 56:42Shaan Puri?

  But why? Okay, take the Ocean's Eleven analogy out, right? Like, yeah, that's leading you to Because But what's wrong with the actual premise?

• 56:52Sam Parr?

  Because I think most people now, it's like saying, well, most people are just gonna freelance. No, maybe 30% of America will. But I think that 60 to 70% of America, they want to go to work at nine, they want to get off at four or five, and they want to play softball. That's what they want to do. They don't want to like, go on a heist where they like, are having some exciting mission. They just want to clock in and clock out and do the same thing every day. Maybe we think that's cool. Maybe our listeners thinks thinks it's cool. But I think when Naval says something like that, I think that he is in this small bubble. And although he's smart and gets a lot of things right, I think it's too grandiose to say this is the future of work. And I think it's really dumb. Like when people say, the future of media are the creators, like doing X, Y, Z. I'm like, oh,

• 57:36Sam Parr?

  my God, dude, like, maybe that's like, a new band that you're assembling. But that's not like, the, that's not like how everyone's gonna operate. I think you're just, you like to smell your own farts. And so I like, I think you're just, you're out of your, you're out of your depth here. That's, that's what I think when I hear stuff like that.

• 57:51Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, but I think, uh, nobody means 100% of people are gonna do this when they say the future is X. I think they mean like, a lot of people.

• 57:58Sam Parr?

  Certainly sounds that way.

• 58:00Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, but no, 100% of people don't do anything today. 100% of people don't do nine to fives either. So, you know, not even 80% of people do nine to five. So I think that's kind of, I think it's a given, right? That's like, uh, it's a given to be like, not everybody's gonna do this. You can't say anything is the future if you say everybody's gonna do it. There's still people who use AOL to get on the internet. Like, yeah.

• 58:20Sam Parr?

  My mom.

• 58:21Shaan Puri?

  You know, like, of course, you can't say that everybody's gonna do it. It's, it's not a, that's not a realistic thing. But I think it is real to say, uh, Shit's gonna change, trends are gonna shift, and, you know, huge chunks of the economy or the workforce is gonna look different than it is today because this whole idea of go to a, go to an office for a nine to five, that's also kinda new. And that was also a shift from what was before. So I don't think that's like just ingrained in human, that's not like biological, that's not physics. That's, you know, society and economics. And a society and economics tends to change.

• 58:59Sam Parr?

  It's not sexy enough to say, "The future of work is this group of people, that's a nice, small enough niche that you can go and capture market share while also being big enough to support a multi-billion dollar company that can return capital at a 55% annual return." I get it, that's not, that's not as catchy.

• 59:19Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, with a shorthand for the future.

• 59:20Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 59:23Sam Parr?

  But, uh, yeah, that's cool. I have some more topics that I'll save for later.

• 59:28Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 59:29Sam Parr?

  But, uh, this was a good one. All right, that's the pod.