#44 - New e-mail clients, Sharing the craigslist office & How to keep your star players

Sam (@thesamparr) and Shaan (@shaanvp) are back talking news, trends, interesting products and businesses. Dear all loyal listeners: 1) Please, please, please give us a review on Apple Podcasts!, 2) Screenshot your review and tweet it to Shaan and Sam, 3) They'll give you a present!. Also, if you're looking to promote your own podcast, visit castro.fm/promote - they push your podcast out to thousands of people. And last promo for the day... the way to make a million is by surrounding yourself around other people who want it. Join our Facebook group where we share ideas and help each other out: www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion. Alright the topics for today: The first Hustle office was also Craiglist's office (01:43), Taking craiglist sections and turning them into unicorn startups + Sam's first startup (05:34), New email clients like Superhuman, Hey.com and Front (12:06), Pay to get a reply from influential people like Earn.com (21:23), Getting paid by the minute instead of bi-weekly (23:26), Donation business models (25:52), Taking on Wikipedia (29:39), Menstruation apps (32:01), Life schools (36:29), Prenups (38:49) and Negotiation tactics / How to keep your star players (43:12). See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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

• 0:10Shaan Puri?

  Sweet gold shoes dude.

• 0:12Sam Parr?

  Thank you. They are, uh, they're women's.

• 0:16Shaan Puri?

  Thank you. They're women's.

• 0:19Sam Parr?

  I think they're size 14.

• 0:20Shaan Puri?

  Did you have to convince them to like, give them to you?

• 0:22Sam Parr?

  Well, they're like, they're like, you know, those are women's. I was like, yeah, I don't, I don't care.

• 0:26Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 0:27Sam Parr?

  Who cares?

• 0:28Shaan Puri?

  Give me, it's like when we were buying these chairs. We were like, give us the reddest, brightest chair you've got. And they're like, well, you sure you don't want this good looking chair? We're like, no, no, no. We want the brightest, reddest chair in the store. We want two of them and we want them now.

• 0:41Sam Parr?

  Yeah, that's what happened with these shoes. Um, okay. So we're gonna try, we're doing this, as a reminder, we're doing this to get a hundred thousand listens per episode. We're doing good. Uh, the last 30 days have been the most listened ever. So here's what I want to do. If you like this podcast, or if you don't like it, just do this anyway, please. Go to iTunes and give us a five star review. Take a screenshot of you doing that and DM one of us and we'll give you a surprise.

• 1:11Shaan Puri?

  I'll take a four star even. I'll take a four.

• 1:13Sam Parr?

  Yeah, a four will be five.

• 1:14Shaan Puri?

  Give us an honest review. That's all I care about.

• 1:16Sam Parr?

  We have 250 or 300 reviews. Let's see if we can get to a thousand. So leave us a review and uh,

• 1:22Shaan Puri?

  Tweet it at us and we will do something. We gotta figure out something cool.

• 1:25Sam Parr?

  And follow the hustle and Sean and me on socials and we're taking all these videos and turning them into clips and we'll be sharing them and all that shit.

• 1:32Shaan Puri?

  And all the links for this are going to be in the notes of the podcast. So you don't have to remember our handles or whatever. All right.

• 1:37Sam Parr?

  So, um, leave us a review, send a screenshot and we will mail you back a special surprise.

• 1:43Shaan Puri?

  So let's give the people what they want. Let's give them some good stuff. All right. I see up here Craigslist story.

• 1:47Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So we ended this yesterday and I, and I thought that this would be a cool story to start things off. So when we started our company, when I started this company, the first office that I had, did you ever go to that one?

• 1:57Shaan Puri?

  I've been to it. Well, is it the Craigslist? Craigslist one. Yes, I've been there.

• 2:01Sam Parr?

  The first office I had, we didn't have a lot of money.

• 2:05Sam Parr?

  And I moved, we, I started, me and Siava, my friend, we, we co-leased an office in the Inner Sunset, which is a non-popular neighborhood in San Francisco, but it's lovely. And it just looked like an apartment. It was a house that they, that was zoned mixed-use. And when we went to visit it, there was a sign that said Craigslist, 1996 to 2000, whenever we moved in, 15 or 16 or 17, I forget. My portion of the rent was $500, which was a lot of money at the time. And, uh, cause we had just started the business, we only were making 30 grand a month. And, uh, we move in and there was a desk still in one of the rooms. And this was like a, it wasn't a shitty apartment, but it kinda was a shitty apartment. Yeah.

• 2:48Sam Parr?

  Um, it was a three-bedroom apartment, less than a thousand square feet. And I move in and Craig from Craigslist, Craig Newark, he actually left his desk there. And his desk was a kitchen table. That was his desk, but it was too heavy to move, and so he just kept it there. So that's what I used. And the landlord, I came in, his name was Emmanuel, I believe. He came in and I was like, hey, so Craigslist was here? He's like, yeah, Craig, uh, started the, he lived down the street in Coal Valley. He started the company here from 96 up until recently. I go, oh, what was that like? He's like, yeah, they were kinda like little celebrities in the neighborhood. Everyone knew about them. And at the time, when they moved out, they were making something like five or 600 million dollars a year in revenue.

• 3:31Sam Parr?

  And this, a whole apartment, my half of the rent was $500. Siava's was like 2000, so we paid $2,500. And it could only see at most 12 people probably. Yeah, that place is tiny. That was the Craigslist team. And I go, well, what were they like? And he's like, well, they were cool. Craig told everyone, if you, if he introduced, like if I talked to me and I'd be like, Craig, what's your job here? He wouldn't say he owns it or that he's the founder. He would say, I do customer service for Craigslist. Nice. And they were so, he said they were so cheap and frugal that in the lease, it said something like Emmanuel had to give them toilet paper each month. And every once in a while, he would forget or not bring it on time and they wouldn't pay the rent.

• 4:14Sam Parr?

  Until they got the toilet paper.

• 4:15Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, if you just close your eyes and imagine the Craigslist website and then start to imagine apartment or a house, it looked like that. It looked like the UI of the site.

• 4:24Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And if you Google Craigslist office, you'll see photos of it. They had a big sign on it. It was great.

• 4:28Shaan Puri?

  And did you ever meet him?

• 4:29Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So I cold emailed them, Craig, and we talked back and forth. We talked on the phone a little bit. And I was like, hey, can you come and take a picture with me at the office? And he never made it over. But we did talk and I, we correspond every once in a while. It was awesome. And a lot of people don't know how Craigslist makes money. They make money only from

• 4:48Shaan Puri?

  Jobs.

• 4:48Sam Parr?

  Jobs.

• 4:49Shaan Puri?

  In certain markets.

• 4:50Sam Parr?

  And cars, all in certain markets.

• 4:52Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 4:52Sam Parr?

  And they make

• 4:52Shaan Puri?

  Everything else free.

• 4:53Sam Parr?

  They make like five or 600 million dollars a year that way. And they've never bought a company. They only employ, at this point, probably 30 people. So they just must, it must be one of the most profitable companies in the world.

• 5:03Shaan Puri?

  Right. And if you, if you've never seen this, there's a diagram floating around. If you just Google like Craigslist unbundling.

• 5:12Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 5:13Shaan Puri?

  There's a diagram that basically takes the homepage of Craigslist when you're in one of the cities. And there's like all the different categories and it just draws a line from like, let's say, shared housing. And it'll draw a line to like Airbnb and it'll be like, um, temporary shared, shared housing, couch surfing, and it basically goes through every category.

• 5:31Sam Parr?

  Apartment rentals. It goes Zillow and Trulia.

• 5:33Shaan Puri?

  Exactly.

• 5:33Sam Parr?

  Homes for sale.

• 5:34Shaan Puri?

  And so you can just see how many different businesses just realize that, hey, if there was demand for it on Craigslist, maybe we could build a specialized version for, um, of just that one feature. We could build a whole site of just that one service that it's offering. And there was like hundreds that are in this. And this has actually happened again.

• 5:53Sam Parr?

  A trillion dollars in enterprise value.

• 5:54Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. And so huge, huge number of successful companies that literally did that. And companies like Airbnb bootstrapped off of Craigslist. So I don't know.

• 6:03Sam Parr?

  That's how we, when I started my first company, me and John. Um.

• 6:06Shaan Puri?

  Because you were, as we're doing a roommate thing?

• 6:07Sam Parr?

  Roommate thing. We got, we would get thousands of users.

• 6:10Shaan Puri?

  So what'd you do? Break it down. How did you leverage Craigslist?

• 6:13Sam Parr?

  Premise, John started it and then I joined it. The premise was in major cities like San Francisco and New York, there's a lot of young people who are moving there who don't know anyone and getting a one bedroom or two bedroom apartment is prohibitively expensive. And so what we would do is we would holler at people, apartments and landlords who had two, three, four, five bedroom apartments and we would throw massive parties for people who were interested in it. And what we would do is we would take the five bedroom apartment that was five grand and post it on room shares for a $1,000 per bedroom. And yeah, and then we'd throw these parties with 50 people who all had similar interests and we'd pair them up in groups of twos, threes and fours and they would move into a place.

• 6:50Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 6:51Sam Parr?

  Cool idea, but it didn't work well.

• 6:53Shaan Puri?

  And then, uh, what happened with Craigslist? How did you guys sort of leverage Craigslist the most?

• 6:57Sam Parr?

  What we would do is we would create, John was good at Photoshop and at the time Craigslist stopped doing this because so many people, uh, like us did this. Yeah. And we would, the ad was just an HTML file and it looked like this big image and it said, click here at this big button to sign up and you would click there and it'd go straight to our website. I'm saying we would get thousands of people a day. Um, and then what we did was, uh, once they banned that, we would just post it without the image and people would email the Craigslist address and we had an auto responder that said, great, apply here.

• 7:28Shaan Puri?

  Right. Yeah. Uh, there's a story about the Airbnb guys, how they got started, right? Cause every marketplace, you have this chicken and egg problem. You have no supply because you don't have supply, you don't get demand and they just sort of, it's a chicken and egg problem. And so one thing that came out that Airbnb did, they're not very public about this. They've actually, I think, denied in some cases this, but, um, you can go out there and you can find this. I found the whole description of it in one black hat forum, um, black hat marketing forum. But basically they did two things. So what people know about is that they scraped Craigslist listings. So they said, okay, if you listed your apartment, uh, for, for rent on Craigslist, they would scrape Craigslist every day. They would take all those listings, make a listing for it on Airbnb with those same photos. So they, they say, they say it's like,

• 8:12Shaan Puri?

  They would just share the supply, right? And then if somebody came to Airbnb and tried to book that, it would email the person via Craigslist and say, "Hey, you got an inquiry. Come check it out on Airbnb." And so that's like how they started. That part is generally seen as like, okay. The part that they got a little bit of heat for was they went one step further. They started creating fake personas, Linda, or Cindy, or whoever it was. And they would go and they would email every listing that was up for rent on Craigslist. And they would say, "Hey, I'm super interested in this." And they're like, "Oh, great. You know, here's the details." And they would say, "Oh, do you guys have Airbnb? I really only want to rent through Airbnb. It's much more trustworthy than this." And then they'd be like, "No, what's Airbnb?" They're just like, "Here's the link. It's pretty awesome.

• 8:55Shaan Puri?

  I'd really be interested if you guys would do this via Airbnb. Otherwise, I'm not interested." And they would just send this to thousands of people every single day. And so all these people were like, "Shit, seems like if I use this Airbnb thing, this customer would have bought from me." And that's how they grew a lot of their awareness.

• 9:11Sam Parr?

  I love that. I'm totally in favor of that. A few other services have done similar things and they got sued and put out of business. Airbnb pulled it off.

• 9:18Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, they escaped.

• 9:20Sam Parr?

  When I was at that office, the police would show up a couple of times a month because they would get subpoenaed, like someone would be murdered or a stolen car was sold on Craigslist. And the police would come to our office, like a sheriff.

• 9:32Shaan Puri?

  Thinking you're the Craigslist office.

• 9:34Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I was like, "You know, they're not here anymore." And we would get mailed cease and desist letters, or we would get mailed subpoenas. We would get mailed letters from people who bought, who were messaging Craig. It was cool. It was wild.

• 9:46Shaan Puri?

  It's a sorry, they're not here anymore, but do you guys like news? Do you guys like email? We got a newsletter.

• 9:52Sam Parr?

  It was awesome. And on the sign, it said Zappos was started there as well on the second floor. It was a two-story. There was a one apartment up top and one apartment at bottom. Now, nugs.net, which is a trading marketplace for mixtapes, for Grateful Dead mixtapes.

• 10:07Shaan Puri?

  No way.

• 10:09Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and that's real famous too, for people who are into that shit.

• 10:11Shaan Puri?

  That's hilarious.

• 10:12Sam Parr?

  All right, what else we got?

• 10:14Shaan Puri?

  So your buddy has an interesting company. So Andrew Wilkinson, who you've talked about a couple of times on the podcast, owns a bunch of different companies, Dribbble, MetaLab, blah, blah, blah. One of the companies he has now is podcast related. Actually, he has two podcast related ones. One is Castro. You use Castro, right?

• 10:30Sam Parr?

  Yeah, big fan of Castro. I've been using it to listen to, I like true crime podcasts. I use it for that. And I like, they have this feature that allows you to clip and or trim some of the clips and share that on your social feed and with friends.

• 10:43Shaan Puri?

  And so you were using what before Castro to listen to podcasts?

• 10:46Sam Parr?

  Uh, just a podcast app, which is horrible for searching.

• 10:49Shaan Puri?

  Right. And so with Castro, from what I understand, they have two things that are good. One is, you know, when you have the podcast app and you're like, oh, I'm interested in this show. And just by being like, I'm interested, I subscribe, it downloads like every episode of theirs, whether you're listening to it or not. And then like your phone's out of space the next time you go take a photo. So what Castro does is like, the app, the podcasts you listen to a lot of, they download, they have them right there at your fingertips. And the ones you're just kind of dabbling in, picking and choosing, they don't clutter up your, your whole phone with all the episodes from those podcasts.

• 11:18Sam Parr?

  Yeah, actually, I had to help with my mom the other day. Everyone has to do this when they go home for Christmas. She was gonna go buy a thousand dollar new phone. And I was like, let me see your phone. And I looked at it and she had eight, it was a 16 gig phone. She had eight gigs of podcasts.

• 11:31Shaan Puri?

  Right. And then they have this other thing which we're going to use now, which is, they have this like promote program. So promoted podcasts. So we're trying to go this podcast as we said, as we said many times. The podcast has already grown, you know, six months, we got to a million downloads, but we're looking to, you know, five, 10x that even more. And so what they have is they have a bunch of people who use their app. So as a podcaster, we can submit it to be promoted. And if you pay, you can actually get your podcast in front of a bunch of the right audience. And so we're going to try this out, see if this helps us grow. If you want to promote your podcast, go to Castro.fm/promote. That's Castro.fm/promote.

• 12:05Sam Parr?

  Uh, let's go with, uh, okay. So something that interests me, um, two years ago, I would have thought this would have been a horrible idea. Totally bought into it now. Uh, new email clients.

• 12:19Sam Parr?

  Okay, so there's Superhuman. Superhuman is, uh, they're based here in San Francisco. The guy who started it, his name's Rahul. Is that his name?

• 12:26Shaan Puri?

  Yep.

• 12:26Sam Parr?

  He previously started Reportive, which is now Table Stakes, but at the time was groundbreaking.

• 12:32Shaan Puri?

  Right. I remember the first time I used that shit, I was like, this is magic.

• 12:35Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it is magic. What it does is you could type in anyone's email and it could tell you if it's the right email and it could tell you all their social links.

• 12:42Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, like in the sidebar of your Gmail, it like took over the webpage and then the sidebar pop up a photo of the person's face, their Twitter, their last few tweets, their job on LinkedIn. It was like, it was like having a great memory, uh, or like being a great sort of networker without having to do anything.

• 12:58Sam Parr?

  I used to call it my stalk and talk method. It would help me stalk them, then I would.

• 13:01Shaan Puri?

  And if you needed to guess somebody's email, you would just type it in and if Reportive had nothing, it's not their email. You'd try a different variation of like.

• 13:08Sam Parr?

  Well, you could, you could put a hundred emails in there and then highlight each one.

• 13:11Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 13:12Sam Parr?

  It was great. Well.

• 13:13Shaan Puri?

  Got bought by LinkedIn or something.

• 13:14Sam Parr?

  For 15 million bucks, I think. Uh, great outcome for him. Uh, I'm friends with him on Facebook, so he bought himself fancy Lamborghinis and shit. Okay, so email apps. He launched this thing called Superhuman. I think they have about 20,000 paying subscribers at $300, uh.

• 13:30Shaan Puri?

  $30 a month.

• 13:31Sam Parr?

  $30 a month. I bought it. It's cool.

• 13:34Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I use it as well now.

• 13:35Sam Parr?

  There's a new one coming out, hey.com.

• 13:37Shaan Puri?

  Right. So two, two quick things on Superhuman. So if you don't know, if you already know, just skip forward 30 seconds. If you don't know what it's good at, it's trying to make you really fast at email. So the idea is most business people spend a lot of freaking time in email. And so they just made it really fast. Lots of hot keys, little smart little details.

• 13:55Sam Parr?

  It's hard to use.

• 13:56Shaan Puri?

  You, you have to literally learn it. So they will not let you use the product. You cannot sign up for it. You cannot give them money unless you go through their onboarding where they call you, they video call you and they teach you step by step for 30 or 40 minutes, all the different tricks, all the different little tips that make it faster for you. And then every day the founder emails you one more tip of a thing that makes it slightly better than normal email. And I would say it is better than normal email, but I'm not a big email guy, so I'm not really getting the value out of it, but you know.

• 14:25Sam Parr?

  Do you know how many?

• 14:26Shaan Puri?

  It's like having a Louis Vuitton bag in Silicon Valley is to have a Superhuman email account.

• 14:31Sam Parr?

  The numbers work out, work out to where there are more email addresses per person in America. So everyone has roughly two emails.

• 14:40Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 14:40Sam Parr?

  Um, so that's just in America, let alone everywhere else. It seems very plausible that you can get a million people to pay you $30 a month.

• 14:47Shaan Puri?

  Right. A million pro, pro users of email. So that's a superhuman. On the other side, you have Hey. So yesterday, Jason Fried, who's the founder of 37 Signals, that's a company based in Chicago. They make stuff like Basecamp. What are some other, other big products? So they have-

• 15:04Sam Parr?

  Campfire, that's-

• 15:06Shaan Puri?

  Campfire, they shut it down. They kind of doubled down on Basecamp, really, but they've built stuff. They've been around for a long time.

• 15:10Sam Parr?

  Only okay, I think.

• 15:12Shaan Puri?

  They've been around for 15 years. They actually kind of punch above their weight because they're very, very smart. So first, they released a bunch of books on the way they work. Rework is a phenomenal book. I fucking love that book. And so Rework is one of their books that they launched, and that's made a lot of money and grown awareness of their brand. They also just love to pick fights with Silicon Valley.

• 15:30Sam Parr?

  Which I don't agree with all the time.

• 15:32Shaan Puri?

  It does. It's a brilliant marketing tactic. Even if you don't agree with the opinion, it's like such a smart thing to do for them.

• 15:37Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 15:38Shaan Puri?

  So they're like, oh, Silicon Valley will say you got to work 80, 90 hours a week. That's crazy. 40 hours more than enough.

• 15:44Sam Parr?

  And I think they do four day work weeks in the summertime.

• 15:46Shaan Puri?

  They do four day work weeks during the summertime. They don't have ambitions to take over the world. They're like, we're not interested in conquering, disrupting. We just want to build a good business for our customers, make our customers happy. And they just really try to be the anti-Silicon Valley. They're a tech company, but they're an anti-Silicon Valley tech company. And because of that, they get a lot of flack, but really just get a lot of attention. You know, so it's brilliant marketing, and they may believe exactly what they're saying.

• 16:12Sam Parr?

  So yesterday, Jason-

• 16:14Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, so he announced his new project. Hey, hey.com. It's like a baller domain.

• 16:19Sam Parr?

  I bet that domain, if they had, they probably already owned it.

• 16:22Shaan Puri?

  They probably owned it for a while.

• 16:23Sam Parr?

  That could probably cost a quarter of a million to half a million dollars.

• 16:25Shaan Puri?

  Easily. Yeah. So they, they came out and they basically said, hey, just go to the website. They kind of explained in a letter what they're trying to do. It's a little bit vague because the product's not out yet, but basically they're trying to make email. They're like, look, email is great. It's awesome when you get a, when you get email from a friend. It's awesome when you get a newsletter that you really wanted to get, but that's like 1%, 2% of all the email most people get. Most people just get a slew of automated shit, and it's just made email really unpleasant experience. We're going to try to make it pleasant again, the old 37 Signals way. I'm interested. What do you think?

• 16:59Sam Parr?

  Uh, very interested. So I signed up for the beta. We'll, we'll find out if I got it. Very interested. I, I think that there's a lot of cool stuff going in the email space. Another one is, uh, Front app.

• 17:11Shaan Puri?

  Yep.

• 17:11Sam Parr?

  Is it called Front?

• 17:11Shaan Puri?

  Front.

• 17:13Sam Parr?

  Um, the, the woman who started it released a lot of their details, like their deck, and you can kind of reverse.

• 17:17Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you can see there's, there's Series A fundraising deck. Just search Front Series A and you can read the whole thing. It's great.

• 17:23Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And what other email apps are there?

• 17:25Shaan Puri?

  And, and what Front does a little different. Front's like for teams. So let's say we for this podcast want to have a email address where, where listeners can email us. Front says, okay, you don't need to like make one account and share all the credentials. And then everyone's logging in from different devices and you, you don't know who's read what. So Front is email designed for a team. So it's good for customer service. It's good for marketing. It's good for any like shared inbox that five people in your company all need to use. Pretty smart because that's actually a common thing.

• 17:50Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And then there, uh, this actually was shut down recently or a few years ago, actually, this guy named Gentry Underwood started this thing called Mailbox.

• 17:58Shaan Puri?

  Yep.

• 17:58Sam Parr?

  They were trying to reinvent email. It was acquired before they even launched.

• 18:01Shaan Puri?

  Hundred million.

• 18:02Sam Parr?

  Hundred million dollars. Good deal.

• 18:03Shaan Puri?

  For very nice UI.

• 18:05Sam Parr?

  So they were kind of the first ones to do it. I think that this is a massive, massive, massive opportunity.

• 18:10Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 18:10Sam Parr?

  I think that there is not even close to enough competitors in the space. There's room for everyone to win.

• 18:16Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 18:17Sam Parr?

  Or a lot of people to win.

• 18:19Shaan Puri?

  And the key, the reason it works is email is interoperable. The, the protocol is not owned by anybody. So you can make a new client. And unlike a messaging app, if I make a new good messaging app, I have to convince you to switch off of iMessage or Facebook Messenger to come message me over here. But email doesn't work that way. I can use Superhuman, you can use Gmail, he can use Hotmail. And all of our email works. We don't need to convince each other to move.

• 18:39Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 18:40Shaan Puri?

  That's why email clients can work as a business.

• 18:42Sam Parr?

  So can I tell you what I think is the biggest opportunity here?

• 18:44Shaan Puri?

  Go for it.

• 18:44Sam Parr?

  Okay. So I would actually make it a free email client. But what I would do is make it so you can purchase products inside the email. So the way email works now, let's say you send an email to a hundred thousand people.

• 18:56Shaan Puri?

  You gotta click out.

• 18:56Sam Parr?

  If you're lucky, you'll get a 30% open rate. So you have 30,000 people of those 30,000 people, then maybe 5%. So what's 5% of 30,000?

• 19:06Shaan Puri?

  Henry. What is that, six, six thousand?

• 19:09Sam Parr?

  Is that six thousand? So, is that right?

• 19:11Shaan Puri?

  No, less, six hundred.

• 19:12Sam Parr?

  Six hundred? The six hundred? I think it's six hundred.

• 19:14Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 19:14Sam Parr?

  So you'll get six hundred clicks on a hundred thousand cents. That's just the way the math works.

• 19:19Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 19:19Sam Parr?

  Um, if you can make it to where you can purchase products quickly in email, that'd be great. The reason why you can't now is the way Gmail is set up, like JavaScript and things like that. It just doesn't work. I'm not technical, uh, but our team explains this as it just, it physically is impossible. So the only way that you can make email like this work is through building it from scratch.

• 19:41Shaan Puri?

  Do you think somebody would wanna, oh, I'm gonna use this new email client so that I can buy things through email? Like, that makes sense if you're the sender.

• 19:47Sam Parr?

  No, but I think that this, that, that's an interesting way to monetize though.

• 19:50Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 19:50Sam Parr?

  I think it's an interesting way. So it, this is a, this is not like a weekend project. This is a massive project.

• 19:57Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 19:58Sam Parr?

  Um, but I think that, like, there are, there, like, if I was superhuman, I'd be like, man, I wonder, instead of, like, charging, could I somehow take a cut of merchants?

• 20:06Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 20:06Sam Parr?

  And get mass adoption. I think it's incredibly interesting. Uh, another thing with email is I've been hacking with this in my brain and we've thought about doing it here is it's a few interesting things you can do with email. The first thing is you can't put movies and sounds in email.

• 20:23Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 20:24Sam Parr?

  But you can put GIFs, which are basically movies without sound. And another thing that you can do is if you tell us, if you can put a GIF in there and you say, hey, refresh this, and you can refresh it and you could upload a new image on the backend, so it shows like part two. So I've been hacking around with this. I think it'd be cool if you could have actual movies and image, uh, audio that are long in email. It's quite interesting. I think the, what's the, I think the size limit for email is,

• 20:51Sam Parr?

  man, I'm gonna sound like an idiot. Is it a hundred and fifty megap, I forget what it is.

• 20:56Shaan Puri?

  Pixels.

• 20:57Sam Parr?

  Megabytes. I know.

• 20:58Shaan Puri?

  I think it's smaller than that, cause Gmail makes you zip stuff when it's over twenty-five, so maybe.

• 21:02Sam Parr?

  Or is it fifteen? Sorry, is it fifteen? Uh, I don't even wanna, um, sound, I mean, I don't know what I'm talking about here. I, we are, I know that there's a limit though, and our tech team knows what it is. Anyway, very interesting stuff with email.

• 21:13Shaan Puri?

  Right. Yeah, I like, I like it a lot.

• 21:15Sam Parr?

  Project.

• 21:15Shaan Puri?

  Huge project and very hard, but very valuable if you can crack it because everybody, everybody uses it.

• 21:21Sam Parr?

  So I'm, I'm pretty, I'm pretty into that.

• 21:23Shaan Puri?

  I'll give you another idea that I, I really liked that didn't work, which is probably a stupid thing to talk about on the podcast, but idea I think is dope that got tested that didn't work. It was this company that got sold, it was called Earn, it sold to Coinbase. It sold basically because the main guy is like very high profile.

• 21:40Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 21:40Shaan Puri?

  Balogies. We should get him on, he apparently, Marc Andreessen calls Balogies the most, the highest ideas per minute that he's ever seen and anybody he's ever met. He said, this guy has the highest velocity of ideas.

• 21:53Sam Parr?

  Is this like a good looking Indian dude?

• 21:55Shaan Puri?

  Uh, not that you're looking, but he's an Indian dude.

• 21:56Sam Parr?

  He looks like a celebrity.

• 21:58Shaan Puri?

  I wouldn't say so, but maybe to you.

• 22:00Sam Parr?

  Oh, I know who you're talking about. He's got like, he's on Twitter, he's got like an image.

• 22:03Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 22:03Sam Parr?

  Like a.

• 22:04Shaan Puri?

  He's got an image.

• 22:05Sam Parr?

  Cartoon.

• 22:05Shaan Puri?

  Yes, exactly. So this guy, he's really interesting guy, big time into crypto. So he tried this crypto project, which was pretty cool concept. It was look, we all get too much email and a lot of businesses are always trying to send people email, but the incentives are not aligned because email is free to send. So it's freedom, it's free for me to bother you, but you don't want to get bothered and you don't get any value when you respond. So he, he set up a different premise, which was what if you could just set a price? We said, if you pay 10 bucks, I guarantee I'll reply to your thing.

• 22:34Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so there's another one, there's a few of those. And the reason I know this is when we send a million emails, we have a reply address. I look at it all the time and it says, you've got to pay a dollar to reach this person.

• 22:43Shaan Puri?

  Interesting. What are they, do you know what they're using?

• 22:45Sam Parr?

  It starts with a D. I don't, I can't remember off the top of my head, like Discord or Discourse or is a word similar to that?

• 22:50Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 22:51Sam Parr?

  I don't remember off the top of my head. Facebook Messenger tested this as well, where if you wanted to cold message someone, you'd have to pay a dollar. I used to do it all the time.

• 23:00Shaan Puri?

  And would they receive the dollar or Facebook gets the dollar?

• 23:03Sam Parr?

  Facebook.

• 23:03Shaan Puri?

  Right. So this is different where this says, I will get five, I will get, if it's 10 bucks, I get nine, the service gets one and the person gets a guaranteed reply. And I think that's pretty cool for, you know, high profile people or important people, you know, recruiters who want to reach people is pay per reply. I think that's interesting. It didn't work, but maybe there's a V2 that will work eventually because the premise makes a lot of sense to me.

• 23:25Sam Parr?

  I'm into it.

• 23:26Shaan Puri?

  Cool. What else we got?

• 23:26Sam Parr?

  Uh, let's do the, uh, what's the streaming thing?

• 23:29Shaan Puri?

  Streaming payroll. Okay. So this is an idea my buddy Furcon gave me. Um, so he was basically like, hey, there's an interesting crypto project and I was like, what is it? And I forgot the name of it now, but he, he basically was describing, he's like, you know, you know, we get payroll, like we get paid every two weeks or one, you know, whatever, bi-weekly. Why don't you just get paid per minute like that you work? Why aren't you just like, we stream video and it just, you know, bit by bit just comes to us instead of having to download a full thing and then watch, you know, the way video turned into streaming, money should become streaming and I should just get paid all, every hour I'm working, not once every two weeks. And so the crypto project trying to do this, I think this would be awesome if the world could make it work.

• 24:11Sam Parr?

  Why does it have to be crypto, crypto to make this work?

• 24:14Shaan Puri?

  It doesn't have to be crypto to make it work.

• 24:15Sam Parr?

  Crypto, I'm like, I don't want to talk.

• 24:16Shaan Puri?

  It doesn't have to be crypto to make it work, but you're building basically on new financial rails to do this. So there's a reason we don't do this in the traditional financial system. But in this case, uh, you know, there's another company that's very successful that doesn't use crypto for something very similar.

• 24:29Sam Parr?

  It's called?

• 24:30Shaan Puri?

  Earnin. So what Earnin does, Earnin's a company they've raised now $190 million. And, um, what Earnin does, you'll see their ads on Tik Tok. This is how you know, uh, they're doing something interesting. Uh, so they basically say, if you're a retail worker, most, most people, three fourths of Americans are paycheck to paycheck. So if there was a two day delay in getting their paycheck, they would have problems making rent, paying their bills, et cetera, et cetera. And so what Earnin does is that's a shame. You work at this job. You've worked there for two years. We know you're going to get paid. Um, why don't we front you the paycheck? So this has existed like payday loans, which were really predatory before, but what Earnin does is pretty cool. So you just connect your bank account, it scans your bank account and it'll just see, oh, every two weeks it gets a deposit from the same company every two weeks. Okay.

• 25:15Shaan Puri?

  We understand that's your paycheck. And what they do is they say, hey, if you want to access your paycheck now, um, you just click this button and it's actually free to do that. So they're not taking some aggressive payday loan. The way they do it is once you get your thing, you can tip. So it's whatever you, however happy you were with the service, you tip. So it's all pay it forward and your tip becomes the front for somebody else's paycheck payday loan, basically.

• 25:39Sam Parr?

  Oh, I hate that.

• 25:40Shaan Puri?

  And so it's doing really, really well.

• 25:42Sam Parr?

  That shocks me. I hate companies that are based off of.

• 25:45Shaan Puri?

  I'll tell you another, I'll tell you another story about donations.

• 25:48Sam Parr?

  Are you sure this is good?

• 25:49Shaan Puri?

  It's doing really well.

• 25:51Sam Parr?

  Pay for it. Why don't you just pay $5 for that?

• 25:53Shaan Puri?

  So you do, you do pay $5 for it, but you just do it voluntarily.

• 25:58Sam Parr?

  I hate that.

• 25:59Shaan Puri?

  You can hate it. It works. And so I have another example of this.

• 26:03Sam Parr?

  That's crazy to me.

• 26:03Shaan Puri?

  When I was in the restaurant industry, there was a restaurant, I can't remember which one, I think it was Panera Bread. Panera Bread ran an experiment somewhere, I think Missouri, maybe actually.

• 26:12Sam Parr?

  Oh, you know why? That's where I'm from. That's because it started, we call it St. Louis Bread Co.

• 26:16Shaan Puri?

  Right, exactly. So they went and they did a thing there. They were like, look, there's a low income area. We want to make this restaurant, it's pay, pay what you want. And they did a pay what you want experiment. And I was talking to the guy who ran the experiment and he said, we've done it for over a year now. He's like, the data is crazy. He goes, I don't know if it's just because it's a novelty thing, but we've gone a year now. And what they found was that if the average checkout at the time, I think it was like $9 at Panera, at the pay what you want thing, it was $12. And they were making, they were making more money per customer on the paycheck because he said, the majority of people will do the recommended and some people are generous and some people are sort of freeloaders. But on average, they were making more money per customer in this.

• 27:00Shaan Puri?

  Now, that might have been a novelty thing. I don't know because like maybe the people who go there sort of self-select.

• 27:05Sam Parr?

  Everlane.

• 27:06Shaan Puri?

  They do what?

• 27:07Sam Parr?

  You know Everlane?

• 27:08Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 27:08Sam Parr?

  Cool t-shirts and shit like that.

• 27:10Shaan Puri?

  It's all tipping?

• 27:11Sam Parr?

  No.

• 27:12Shaan Puri?

  All donation?

• 27:12Sam Parr?

  When they have, instead of putting, so they for sure have it. I, I, I think it's instead of sales, but they have a selection of items that are pay what you want.

• 27:21Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 27:21Sam Parr?

  And what they do is there's a baseline, like $40 and you could easily figure that out just by lowering the thing. But it's like, what do you want to pay? Just pay it. And if it's below that threshold, they don't accept it. And so what I do is I just lower it. I just find out where that baseline is and that's what I pay.

• 27:37Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 27:38Sam Parr?

  But um, yeah, I, I hear what you're saying.

• 27:41Shaan Puri?

  Another example.

• 27:42Sam Parr?

  I think it's really stupid.

• 27:44Shaan Puri?

  Another example for you. So I'm at Twitch right now. Twitch has two, two ways to pay, two main ways. One is you subscribe, you pay five bucks to Twitch. Twitch gives a cut, you know, half to the, to the streamer roughly. And you get these benefits in the chat. You get to use these special emojis, blah, blah, blah. The other thing is you could just donate straight to the streamer. You get no perks, but 100% of the money goes to the streamer.

• 28:09Shaan Puri?

  Stream Labs, which is a company that runs that tipping service, they put out a quarterly report every, every, every, every quarter and it's public. So you can go read this. But there are hundreds of millions of dollars flowing through the tipping service where you get no benefit. It's crazy to you, but I'm telling you, there's something to this. I've enough data points to believe.

• 28:27Sam Parr?

  PBS, you know PBS, they've been doing this, NPR has been doing this. And I don't know what their numbers are. I'm sure they're public.

• 28:35Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 28:35Sam Parr?

  But shocking to me. Shocking to me. I don't, I don't understand.

• 28:40Shaan Puri?

  It may not be optimal, but, but it is above the bar of not working, right?

• 28:45Sam Parr?

  I would not want to run my business that way.

• 28:46Shaan Puri?

  Sure.

• 28:47Sam Parr?

  So maybe there are, what's the phrase, a rule?

• 28:53Shaan Puri?

  Exceptions to the rule.

• 28:53Sam Parr?

  Exceptions to the rule. Maybe, I think these are the exceptions.

• 28:57Shaan Puri?

  Could, could totally be the case.

• 28:58Sam Parr?

  That's mind boggling to me. I would not want to be in that position where I have to ask for donations. We talked about Ted Turner yesterday. That's what they did when they first started though. They would do.

• 29:06Shaan Puri?

  How much does Wikipedia raise when they do their donations based thing? Do you know? Can you, can you Google, how much does Wikipedia raise in their donations? I'm curious. Cause they're probably the biggest example of a donation based global service.

• 29:19Sam Parr?

  Web Archive, I think, does it too.

• 29:21Shaan Puri?

  Right. But Wikipedia is one of the most popular websites on earth, right? So that one's gonna do.

• 29:27Sam Parr?

  How much do you think Wikipedia costs to run? 20 or 30 million dollars a year?

• 29:30Shaan Puri?

  I have no idea. I mean, it's a lot of bandwidth, right? There are the static pages. What's that?

• 29:35Sam Parr?

  You think they get that for free?

• 29:36Shaan Puri?

  Maybe, maybe they, maybe they get donations there too. Okay.

• 29:40Sam Parr?

  You want to talk about Wikipedia real quick? Have you heard of gold.com? Is it gold.com or golden?

• 29:43Shaan Puri?

  Golden.

• 29:44Sam Parr?

  Golden. Golden.com. Some of our friends invested in it.

• 29:48Shaan Puri?

  They're trying to compete with Wikipedia.

• 29:50Sam Parr?

  Andreessen Horowitz invested in it. Rumor has it, there's another big round, big round that will be discussed soon.

• 29:57Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 29:57Sam Parr?

  Like, I think a pretty large round.

• 29:59Shaan Puri?

  So golden.com. What they're trying to do, it's very hard for me to actually figure out what they're trying to do. I've been watching them for a while.

• 30:05Sam Parr?

  I don't get it.

• 30:05Shaan Puri?

  It's very confusing.

• 30:08Shaan Puri?

  I like the guy behind it, Jude. I like him a lot. I think he's really smart. But Golden is almost too smart for me. So it's basically like Wikipedia, but they'll explain topics that sometimes Wikipedia doesn't do a great job of explaining. So like science topics or things about companies, stuff that Wikipedia doesn't do a great job of. It seems like a long, slow, hard road to build something like that.

• 30:29Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I don't quite understand what they're doing. I mean, I know what they're trying to do, but I don't get the angle. Another person who's trying to do the same thing is Mockbood from, um, he's-

• 30:38Shaan Puri?

  Rap Genius.

• 30:39Sam Parr?

  I think he's a crazy person. I've hung out with him a little bit. I think he's nuts. He started Rap Genius, which was like Wikipedia for rap lyrics. Now he has this thing and he's been doing it for a while called Every, is it Everypedia or-

• 30:52Shaan Puri?

  Everpedia, yeah.

• 30:53Sam Parr?

  I think it's stupid.

• 30:54Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think it's stupid too. But then again, I thought Rap Genius was pretty stupid initially.

• 30:58Sam Parr?

  But it's not a good business.

• 30:59Shaan Puri?

  And then I swi- I switched because when they, they said the stat, which was that 2% of all Google searches were for lyrics.

• 31:05Sam Parr?

  Yeah, like AZ lyrics.

• 31:07Shaan Puri?

  It's just insane. Uh, and then they grew that thing and then it sort of like crashed because the founders are crazy and it wasn't a great business.

• 31:13Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's hard to monetize that stuff, but they went the media route. I don't think that was the right route.

• 31:19Shaan Puri?

  Did they sell to Spotify yet? It seems like they're just trying to sell to Spotify. They like, look like Spotify.

• 31:23Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but I think they raised it like a billion dollar valuation. Like it's like hundred-

• 31:26Shaan Puri?

  Oh, that ship sailed now, like-

• 31:28Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I think-

• 31:29Shaan Puri?

  There's no recovering from that.

• 31:29Sam Parr?

  I think it was north of a hundred million dollars. I mean, it was a lot of money.

• 31:32Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 31:33Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I don't get that. Wait, what about Wikipedia? What's the answer? What's it say?

• 31:37Speaker 02

  They raised, uh, according to Business Insider, in 2016, they raised 82 million.

• 31:42Sam Parr?

  Eighty-two million dollars in one year?

• 31:44Speaker 02

  Donations, yeah.

• 31:45Sam Parr?

  Wow. Yeah. See, and that's the biggest website in the world.

• 31:47Shaan Puri?

  Pretty good.

• 31:47Sam Parr?

  One of, I don't, I don't, I don't think it's great. I'm not a fan. Um, what's this period?

• 31:52Shaan Puri?

  So more money than that gets donated to Twitch streamers every year. Which is something wrong in the world. Wikipedia is great.

• 32:01Sam Parr?

  Let's do a period apps and then number eight and nine you have here.

• 32:05Shaan Puri?

  Okay, period app. So I don't have, I don't have a ton to share here. This is very surface level, but I saw, I've been tracking this for a while. So there's two types of apps that didn't work very well early on when the App Store first came out. That now there's a bunch of successes for. And so the lesson here for an entrepreneur is just because it didn't work then, something might have changed now. And I think people just got more used to using apps to run their life.

• 32:31Sam Parr?

  Is this period like time or period like a

• 32:34Shaan Puri?

  Menstruation. Yeah. So basically there's two types of apps. So, you know, we just had a baby. There's these apps that are about, I think one's called What to Expect.

• 32:42Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 32:43Shaan Puri?

  And these apps do phenomenally well. Oh my God, like the, the downloads, the usage, the monetization, it's all on point. And that one's a little bit tough because when you get out of the, you know, after nine months, you sort of churn because you've moved on.

• 32:56Sam Parr?

  That's okay, but during that nine months, you'll buy anything.

• 32:57Shaan Puri?

  During that nine months, you A have to buy a lot of shit. So like their sponsorships are crazy, like Dove is going all out and so is Huggies and all these other guys. Crazy sponsorships. The forums are crazy. So what they do is they bat you. They say September mommies. You know, October 2019 mommies, whatever. And so they bat you by, by birth month. And the forums in this thing are like, I've never seen this level of engagement because the moms want to know what's going on. They want to share ideas. They want to ask questions and this is like the safe place to do it.

• 33:27Sam Parr?

  What's the name of the company?

• 33:28Shaan Puri?

  So that's What to Expect. Then there's the ones that are about generally tracking, you know, menstruation cycles, fertility and that sort of thing. These companies are crushing it. So I saw some numbers for a company. They're, one of the, one of the companies has a, a tracking app. Going to do 30 million this year annually. First year they turned on monetization.

• 33:47Sam Parr?

  What's, how to make money?

• 33:48Shaan Puri?

  It's insane. Subscription and in the subscription you get, I think, probably either access to either more information. So there's some like mini courses inside or it's like sort of just unlocking more data about yourself. So better, better tracking around certain things. So between fertility, menstruation, tracking, you know, the birth cycle process, these apps, I would literally remember when the app store first came out, people tried to do these things and they got no traction.

• 34:14Sam Parr?

  I remember in college, me and my girlfriend would do it.

• 34:16Shaan Puri?

  And so now they, these have become like very mainstream in the same way that Calm sort of took many, many years. And now boom, meditation apps are making, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars now. The same thing has happened with these niche apps.

• 34:28Sam Parr?

  If I wanted to make money right off the bat with this, I would make it a newsletter where I would say, tell us where you are in your pregnancy or like, are you just, you just got pregnant? Are you, how, you know, whatever, if you know, are you a week, you just gave your birth a week ago? Where are you at? And then you could send daily or weekly emails on what to expect.

• 34:48Shaan Puri?

  I think that's a very smart approach.

• 34:49Sam Parr?

  And you make, you only get to make that shit one time.

• 34:51Shaan Puri?

  And I think it would work better than the app because I think an app has a whole different problem of like people remembering to check it, whereas email just goes to their inbox. And so if, if somebody's doing this or you're interested in doing this, talk to me because I want to partner with you on, on the, on the specifically around babies, either, you know, pre, pre, pre-birth or after birth. I'm very interested in that space.

• 35:13Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I think I would do it in email. You know, you, what the cool thing about email is you can make this stuff one time and you'd have to write a lot, but you could do it as you go. It's like a lesson plan. You do it as you go, but then you could re continually reuse it and you make it a drip sequence. So you can download ConvertKit.

• 35:31Shaan Puri?

  Yep.

• 35:32Sam Parr?

  MailChimp.

• 35:32Shaan Puri?

  Yep.

• 35:33Sam Parr?

  Whatever.

• 35:33Shaan Puri?

  Love it.

• 35:34Sam Parr?

  Sign up.

• 35:35Shaan Puri?

  It's week one of pregnancy. Here's what you need to know. This is exactly how, what, what to expect. That's how it works. You start with that, that basically says you're in week one. Here's everything. Week two, it changes, that sort of thing.

• 35:44Sam Parr?

  And then you can have a basic ass Facebook group where it's $30 a month to be part of and.

• 35:53Sam Parr?

  It just says, here's the top posts from this week of related to people who are in your category.

• 35:57Shaan Puri?

  Right. And I have a half baked idea around this. So last night, we went to a class because our baby's five months old and that's when you start introducing solid foods. And so my wife was like, oh, we need to go to this class. They teach us how to do this. Like, we don't know how to prepare the foods. We don't know what, how many times to do it. We don't know how to blah, blah, blah. So I was like, okay, so we went to our class. Nice lady teaches us and there's just like a bunch of families there, all of us with our crying babies crying during the class. And I was just sitting there thinking, I was like, man, information like this is actually super critical. Like, I've never paid attention in a class more than I was for like figuring out how to feed my baby. And why, and like, why isn't this like, just an online thing? Why isn't there life school? That just teaches you real life shit that you need to know?

• 36:39Sam Parr?

  Our, one of our-

• 36:40Shaan Puri?

  I want to start that. I want to start real life-

• 36:42Sam Parr?

  Our engineer Wes goes to one for buying a home. So he bought a home and he went to a, I think it was a couple of weeks where there's a maintenance class and he learned how to fix a freezer, an air conditioner, all this crap.

• 36:53Shaan Puri?

  Fixing shit, learning, I have friends that just came into a little bit of money and they're like, hey, I know I'm supposed to be investing, but like, I got no clue. And everywhere I look, I just feel like they're just trying to rip me off. So I'm just like, I left it in my checking account for four years. And this is like, life school. Here's how that works. Here's how a mortgage works. Life school. Here's how, you know, going through the divorce, here's what divorce looks like. You know, like-

• 37:13Sam Parr?

  Fuck, yeah.

• 37:14Shaan Puri?

  People just need, people just need information that's not selling you the service.

• 37:19Sam Parr?

  When I got married, we were thinking that we're looking at the annulment stuff, or not the annulment, prenup, prenup stuff.

• 37:24Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 37:24Sam Parr?

  I had no idea where I was. I had, I knew nothing about that shit. And that was hard to figure out. But-

• 37:31Shaan Puri?

  So how did you end up figuring it out?

• 37:33Sam Parr?

  Paid a lawyer.

• 37:34Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 37:34Sam Parr?

  But I didn't know, I just went to Yelp.

• 37:36Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 37:36Sam Parr?

  But I was overwhelmed.

• 37:38Shaan Puri?

  So you did a prenup?

• 37:39Sam Parr?

  We didn't end up doing it.

• 37:40Shaan Puri?

  Didn't end up doing it. Why not?

• 37:42Sam Parr?

  Because we both were coming to the table with equal things.

• 37:46Shaan Puri?

  With some things, yeah.

• 37:47Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 37:47Shaan Puri?

  And who, who was trying to do it? Were you trying to do it? Or was she trying to do it? Because I've always thought, man, that's a awkward conversation to have.

• 37:54Sam Parr?

  It wasn't, it was not awkward at all.

• 37:56Shaan Puri?

  And why was that?

• 37:57Sam Parr?

  Because we're both, we have the same values.

• 38:00Shaan Puri?

  Who, who brought it up? You brought it up or she did?

• 38:01Sam Parr?

  I brought it up because me and Sarah, my wife, is a very successful, comes from a very successful family. And we were just like, we had the same values when we got married was, so it starts with love. We'd love each other. But also, the second thing was like, this is like- Sounds weird. It's almost like an arrangement. Like it's a team, like we are

• 38:21Shaan Puri?

  Partnership.

• 38:22Sam Parr?

  We're joining forces and it is about love, but also like a partnership. Here's the rules that we're going to agree. You know, I mean, that's really what it was. It was like, all right. Do you want to raise your kids like this? Cause if that doesn't fit how I, my values and this partnership doesn't work. It was very much a partnership. It was like, all right, so what, what can we expect for the next five or 10 years?

• 38:40Shaan Puri?

  Right. The operating agreement.

• 38:42Sam Parr?

  Yeah, we had an opera, basically what it was. We, we, we sat down, we said, this is how I feel. Do you agree or not? Meaning to hash this out, otherwise we're not going to get married.

• 38:49Shaan Puri?

  And so let, let me ask you a different question. If one of you, let's say you or her, let's just say, let's just say for, for a hypothetical. Let's say she wasn't coming to the table with, let's say, equal financial means at the time. Would you have still brought it up? And do you think it still would have worked?

• 39:04Sam Parr?

  So the logical side of me says, yes, you have to do it. The emotional side of me, there's a funny quote from Ari Gold. Uh, an entourage and they say like, Ari's telling all his actor friends to get, uh,

• 39:17Shaan Puri?

  Prenups.

• 39:17Sam Parr?

  And they go, what about you? He goes, I'd kill my wife before we got divorced. That's, that's how I felt. I'm like, look, if I'm going to commit, like I've been this forever. And, and, and you know, we both said that, we're like, even if we hate each other, like, because we're both Catholic and like, this is, this is, we are committing. You're fucking Indian. It's like, the Indians are like that too.

• 39:37Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, Indians don't get divorced, but for different reasons. It's like, what, what will society say if we got divorced?

• 39:42Sam Parr?

  That's how I felt. Like if I commit, I'm committing forever.

• 39:45Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 39:46Sam Parr?

  And no matter how bad I fuck up, unless it's like physical abuse, like it's forever. That's how I felt. And so.

• 39:53Shaan Puri?

  Why did you even explore the prenup if you feel so strongly?

• 39:57Sam Parr?

  Because every smart person, like all the lawyers that I have.

• 39:59Shaan Puri?

  They got in your head a little bit.

• 40:00Sam Parr?

  Yeah. They're like, you should do that. And, uh, who the fuck knows? It might come up and bite me in the ass.

• 40:06Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 40:07Sam Parr?

  We had a handshake agreement. I think there's also some laws around California that whatever you come into it is already separate.

• 40:13Shaan Puri?

  I think there should be the thing you were talking about, the operating agreement. I think there should be like a little quiz questionnaire quiz that couples take before they get married. I think this would be an online service that says, how do you feel about this? How do you feel about this? And then it compares your answers and it tells you, here's where you guys are super overlapped. And here's where you guys are most different. And maybe you guys should have a conversation and here's some tools that might help you guys.

• 40:32Sam Parr?

  So there is this thing, is it the New York Times? This guy like came up this list of 23 questions and they're like, how to like get to know someone? How to fall in love with someone in five minutes? Have you heard of this thing?

• 40:42Shaan Puri?

  Uh, nobody in college, we made up a similar thing called the get to know you game.

• 40:45Sam Parr?

  And they're like, if you ask these five questions, and this is like when I was single, I was like, shit, I'm gonna do this on the first day.

• 40:51Shaan Puri?

  What are some examples of the questions?

• 40:52Sam Parr?

  I don't fucking remember. It was something like, um, um, if your parents were dying, like what would you tell them? Like, just like, it starts off as like high level, like, simple shit.

• 41:03Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, beach or mountains.

• 41:04Sam Parr?

  Look, Henry, look this up. Look up 23 love questions or some bullshit like that. Like, yeah, look up that. And it's like, um.

• 41:10Shaan Puri?

  New York Times 23 love questions.

• 41:12Sam Parr?

  Yeah, New York Times covered it. Thirty-six, what is it? What's it called?

• 41:15Speaker 02

  The 36 questions that lead to love.

• 41:17Sam Parr?

  Thirty-six questions that lead to love. Can you give me some examples of the questions? It starts easy and gets harder. So we did that early on.

• 41:23Shaan Puri?

  Nice.

• 41:24Sam Parr?

  Um, and, uh, yeah, we were like, an operating agreement would be great. But you didn't do this?

• 41:30Shaan Puri?

  I think everybody does it in some informal way and ad hoc way and incomplete way.

• 41:36Sam Parr?

  No, we sat down and hashed it out.

• 41:37Shaan Puri?

  Ours was incomplete, I feel.

• 41:38Sam Parr?

  Sarah, I'm lucky, you know, Sarah, she's very, um, she's pretty business minded.

• 41:44Shaan Puri?

  Very rational.

• 41:45Sam Parr?

  Very rational, and that's why I love her and one of the reasons. And when we got married, we had to go to the church and you gotta talk to the priest. And I was raised Catholic, but I don't do any of that shit anymore. And, um, he was like, so why do you want to get married? And we were like, well, we have similar values. We want the same things in life. We're both really driven, we're both a business. And we said all this shit like that and he goes, what about love? And we're like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that too.

• 42:08Sam Parr?

  And while we were meeting this priest, I remember he was like, so you guys are Catholic? He's like, and I was like, yeah, Catholic is shit, super Catholic. And I remember I was so nervous because I didn't want him to turn us down, which we're not really Catholic. I remember my phone rang and then I go, oh, fuck. And I go, I was like, oh, shit, sorry, didn't mean to cuss. Like, I was trying to like, not get banned.

• 42:27Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 42:27Sam Parr?

  So hard. But anyway, that's, we went through the whole process. What are some questions?

• 42:31Speaker 02

  Um, when did you last sing to yourself or someone else?

• 42:34Sam Parr?

  So when did you last sing to yourself? That's an easy question. But then what are the questions like 30 and 25?

• 42:39Speaker 02

  When you get to like, um, when did you last cry in front of another person?

• 42:44Sam Parr?

  When did you last cry?

• 42:45Speaker 02

  Of all the people in your family, whose death would you find most disturbing?

• 42:49Shaan Puri?

  Who's, of all the people in your family, whose death would you find most disturbing? Yeah, these are good questions.

• 42:52Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So if you're single, I think these are good things to ask on the first couple of dates.

• 42:56Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think it's great.

• 42:57Sam Parr?

  It's a good, they're icebreakers and you can get intimate fast.

• 43:00Shaan Puri?

  Love it. Uh, good stuff. Okay, cool. What else we got?

• 43:03Sam Parr?

  You want to wrap up with number eight or number nine?

• 43:07Shaan Puri?

  Okay, yeah, let's do, uh,

• 43:09Sam Parr?

  I don't know either of those.

• 43:10Shaan Puri?

  I'm gonna do number nine. So this is just something I'd noticed. All right, so this one that I have up here, it's called three reasons versus one reason. So I noticed this because in the last 24 hours, I did three different like deals or negotiations.

• 43:22Sam Parr?

  And Say what they are.

• 43:23Shaan Puri?

  Uh, one I definitely cannot say, uh, one was at work.

• 43:27Sam Parr?

  All business?

• 43:28Shaan Puri?

  Business, business related. One was at work where a guy on my team wanted to leave and go do this other team. And he's like, our, one of our star guys. And we were like, I was like, no, you can't leave. Why, why do you want to leave? And he was giving me his reasons and I was trying to convince him essentially, don't leave. We, you know, we need you. You're great. It's great. Whatever's wrong, we can fix it. And, uh, another was a business transaction where I was buying something and negotiating a price. And, um, in all cases, I noticed this thing, which is,

• 43:58Shaan Puri?

  There's two types of disagreement. I'll start at a high level. There's two types of disagreements. There's a disagreement you can actually fix and a disagreement you can't because you're fundamentally misaligned. So let's focus on the ones where, how do you figure out which one you're in? So anytime somebody puts up resistance, there's the stated reason and the real reason. And I think because I played poker a lot growing up, I just now assume that the stated reason is never the real reason. It sometimes is, but I just always assume it's not. And I've noticed in a lot of people that I hire, I have to teach them this, which is whatever they told you, that's the stated reason. And they're not necessarily lying to your face. It's just what they feel is polite. Or it's what they think is true, but they haven't really assessed it themselves.

• 44:39Shaan Puri?

  But there's the stated reason, there's the real reason. And if you find the real reason, you want to figure out. Is it three reasons or is it one? When it's three reasons, or it's a bunch of different things, and you start to ask why, and they're like, well, there's this, and then this, and this. What you're getting is an emotional reaction. They are just emotionally hurt and they want change. If you get one reason, that's an actual reason that if you just solved it, they'll change their mind. And so I've found this where I'm talking to somebody, I'm trying to convince them of something. Or we're trying to find some common ground. And when they give me three reasons, and I start to use logic to address those reasons, it never works. They'll just pop up a fourth reason, and a fifth reason, and a sixth reason.

• 45:21Shaan Puri?

  It's because it wasn't a logical problem to begin with. It was an emotional problem. They weren't feeling the love. And I just got to show them the love. And then we'll see what happens. And when it's one reason, if I start to show them the love, it doesn't do anything. Because I got to actually problem solve the one reason. It's actually a rational decision that they're making. So it's just an observation. If you're talking to somebody and they give you resistance, first figure out. This is the stated reason. What's the real reason? You do that by probing, asking questions. And then when they give you the real reason, is it one or three? If it's one, you could probably solve it. If it's three, it's an emotional problem and you need to show them the love.

• 45:54Sam Parr?

  That's cool. And that book, High Output Management, it discussing, discusses something similar, which is there's, when you meet with people, employees, there's really only one or two or three, actually, three or four reasons why meetings exist. The first one's just to exchange information. The second one is they say they have a problem and you solve it. And the third one is you just gotta listen. Someone just wants to complain and don't like, you know, a lot of complaining you don't want to put up with, but every once in a while, people just have, they just want to vent.

• 46:25Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 46:25Sam Parr?

  They just gotta, they just gotta talk about shit. And you just gotta sit there and listen, and you don't try to solve the problem. You just gotta listen to it.

• 46:31Shaan Puri?

  And that's usually the hardest.

• 46:32Sam Parr?

  And that's the hardest. But it's, you can overcome that shit. It's just, I think, men in particular, you hear, you go, they go, I got a problem. You go, okay, we're gonna solve by doing this, we're gonna do this, and then do this. A lot of times, they'll be like, well, no, look, you're not hearing me. It's not actually a problem. I'm just trying to get it off my chest.

• 46:48Shaan Puri?

  Even worse, you'll say, that's not a big deal. Look, let's just do this or this. So not only have you minimized the problem, you basically told them they're stupid for thinking it's a problem, and you tried to fix it when they didn't want either of those two things.

• 46:59Sam Parr?

  Yeah, no, I've, I've had alerts.

• 47:01Shaan Puri?

  You have an executive coach. I had one that basically taught me a phrase that said, she said, are you listening to learn, or are you listening to fix?

• 47:08Sam Parr?

  Are you listening to learn?

• 47:09Shaan Puri?

  Or are you listening to fix? Two different modes.

• 47:12Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 47:12Shaan Puri?

  And people typically will actually just want you to listen to learn. You're actually listening to understand how they feel and what's, what's wrong.

• 47:19Sam Parr?

  Well,

• 47:20Shaan Puri?

  Not listening to fix.

• 47:21Sam Parr?

  We share the same executive coach company, Torch. We gotta talk about them next week. They just signed up to sponsor with us.

• 47:25Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, we, there's free sponsorship for them that they're getting.

• 47:28Sam Parr?

  Yeah. No, we, they, and they just signed, we just signed a deal with them. So we'll actually have, maybe they'll actually be like a proper advertiser, but we'll talk about them regardless. Maybe next week.

• 47:38Shaan Puri?

  Cool.

• 47:38Sam Parr?

  Cause it's kinda cool. I, I really dig that. They're, they're good.

• 47:44Shaan Puri?

  Like it. Okay, that's all I had today.

• 47:46Sam Parr?

  All right. Please, comment and give us a rating on this. We're trying to get to a hundred thousand.

• 47:52Shaan Puri?

  Go on iTunes, give us a rating. It takes 30 seconds. Please do it. Give us an honest review. If you do it, tweet it at us or DM us, and we will hook you up with some cool.

• 48:01Sam Parr?

  And we thought about charging for this podcast, and we are not charging for it, because we're hoping to make money promoting other things, our own products, which means the only way that you can help us right now.

• 48:10Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 48:11Sam Parr?

  Is by clicking five stars.

• 48:14Shaan Puri?

  There you go.

• 48:14Sam Parr?

  Thank you.