Unpopular Truths From The Pod, Gourmet Gifts, and 4 Side Hustles

Episode 393: Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) and Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) talk about the unpopular - yet valuable - lessons they have learned on My First Million, $1,000/day side hustles, and gourmet gift ideas. ----- Links: * RVshare * Mark Jenney Twitter * Caitlyn Minimalist * Harry & David * Omaha Steaks * 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: (01:30) - Are courses legit? (07:30) - Unpopular things learned on MFM (32:30) - Mark Jenney (44:15) - Last minute gourmet gift ideas ----- 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?

  Here's the headline.

• 0:00Sam Parr?

  Great headline, great headline.

• 0:02Shaan Puri?

  Guy sells $1 bills for $15. Here's how, right? And so here's what he did. So he basically, he's 15 years old. And he says he sees a dollar bill on eBay that instead of, who's on the dollar bills? Washington or something like that. Instead of whoever, let's follow George Washington. It's Michael Jordan's face in the middle, right? And he orders it as he's like, oh, love Michael Jordan or whatever. This is funny. And gets it. And it's a basically, it's a normal dollar bill. But then there's just like a sticker paper over the George Washington. And you could just like do that. You could just go to Office Max and like do this. And so that's exactly what he did. He goes to Office Max. He's like, I need to be able to create these.

• 0:43Shaan Puri?

  Cause what better business is there to sell dollar bills for $15? And so he's, uh, he goes there and then he goes, he puts them up on eBay.

• 0:59Shaan Puri?

  What's up?

• 1:01Shaan Puri?

  Let's jump in. What you got?

• 1:03Sam Parr?

  You tell me you, I, I think I've been driving the last handful of sessions. I, I, I'm gonna ask you to drive right now.

• 1:11Shaan Puri?

  Let's switch gears. I want to do a topic about, do you, I think you know Mark Jenny, you know, Mark Jenny?

• 1:17Sam Parr?

  Mark Jenny's a great friend of mine. He's, he's an amazing, amazing, amazing entrepreneur.

• 1:22Shaan Puri?

  He's an awesome guy. We're going, I'm going to meet him next week. We're going down to stay at one of us. He has this like luxury Airbnb portfolio. And you should follow him on Twitter.

• 1:33Sam Parr?

  Well, you want me to give his background? Do you know his background?

• 1:36Shaan Puri?

  I know a little bit of it, but go give, give the story.

• 1:38Sam Parr?

  So if I remember correctly, I think he was raised, he had a, something was a little wonky with his childhood. I think like he didn't have a dad or a single, single household or something like that. So he wasn't, he wasn't raised in like a very. Privilege place. And then I, at one point, I think he was even homeless and he lived out of like a storage unit or something like that. He started a bunch of different companies, like info marketing stuff and everything did kind of okay. Then he started RV Trader, I believe, or is it RV Share? RV Share, which was like Airbnb for RVs. He eventually sold a large portion of it to KKR, I think, a large PE company. And he probably made many, many tens of millions of dollars, a lifetime of money. Now he has a new thing that he's been doing for the last, maybe five or something like that years where he

• 2:21Sam Parr?

  buys, I think he owns 20 of them now. He's got a huge portfolio of Airbnbs. And these are high end luxury homes that sleep like 20 people. It's like two acre, like a two acre plot with like a fancy four, five, six thousand square foot home with like basketball courts, tennis courts, mini putt putt. And he's built this like really, really good business, making millions and millions of dollars renting Airbnbs. And he's doing it right. And he's got a small team and it's a proper company, not like a side project.

• 2:50Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. I think, what is it? Like a $50 million luxury Airbnb portfolio at this point?

• 2:55Sam Parr?

  Yeah. I mean, I, I'm friends with Mark. So he tells me lots of stuff. So I'm trying not to say any of the numbers because I forget what's public and what's been private. So anything that you, I'll let you actually say any of the numbers because you're probably getting it from public.

• 3:05Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's just what he tweets out. So you should follow him on Twitter. He's a good follow. And it's cool to see like he'll post like a before and after photo of these properties. He's like, here's what it was. And then we added a McDonald's play place in the backyard. And it's like, he does like dope stuff, like, which I like, you know, he's not just like,

• 3:19Sam Parr?

  And he's totally unheard of. Like he has, he's got like maybe 2000, 3000 followers on Twitter, I think. Like, he's not like a popular, like a, like a big name person.

• 3:29Shaan Puri?

  So he tweeted this out the other day. And I thought that this was a great, we haven't done a blue collar side hustle in a while. So I thought this is kind of a great little, almost like a blue collar side hustle that he, he said he had done. I don't know if you saw this. He, he was talked about one of his very first. Um, like sort of side hustles that he did or early, early hustles was selling dollar bills for $15. Did you see this?

• 3:53Sam Parr?

  Yes. Yeah. Go tell, tell the story.

• 3:55Shaan Puri?

  So he tweeted this out. You can kind of look at it, but here's the headline.

• 3:58Sam Parr?

  Great headline. Great headline.

• 4:00Shaan Puri?

  Guy sells $1 bills for $15. Here's how, right? And so, um, here's what he did. So he basically, he's 15 years old and he says he sees a dollar bill on eBay that instead of, who's on the dollar bills, Washington or something like that. Instead of whoever, let's call George Washington, it's Michael Jordan's face in the middle. Right? And he orders it is he's like, oh, love Michael Jordan or whatever. This is funny. And gets it. And it's a, basically it's a normal dollar bill, but then there's just like a sticker paper over the George Washington. And you could just like do that. You could just go to Office Max and like do this. And so that's exactly what he did. He goes to Office Max. He's like, I need to be able to create these because what better business is there to sell dollar bills

• 4:45Shaan Puri?

  for $15? And so he's, uh, he goes there and then he goes, he puts them up on eBay and he, oh, he first he looked on eBay and at that time eBay was showing like how many, um, how many items a seller would sell. And he could just keep track of it. Like, okay, this week, oh, wow, they're selling like, you know, a hundred of these. Like, that's amazing. So he starts doing it. He creates an eBay account. He starts selling these and he starts averaging a hundred, a hundred bills sold per day for $15, which includes the shipping costs, general profit.

• 5:15Sam Parr?

  What's that? 1500 a day?

• 5:17Shaan Puri?

  About 1500 a day. He's, he's profiting basically a thousand dollars a day, um, doing this. And then he's, he ramped it up and he got it to, I think $10,000 a day in, um, in sales. And he became the largest seller of custom novelty collectible dollar bills on eBay.

• 5:35Sam Parr?

  But it's a real dollar. It was a real dollar.

• 5:38Shaan Puri?

  It's a real dollar. Yeah. And you just add the, uh, the sticker on top. So you could sell.

• 5:41Sam Parr?

  Can you do that legally?

• 5:42Shaan Puri?

  I guess so. Why not?

• 5:44Sam Parr?

  I don't know. I don't know. There I just thought there'd be some weird rules around money.

• 5:48Shaan Puri?

  No, I think you could do it. Like, you know, people sell these like coins and whatever. It seems legit. So then what he would do, he's like, you know, here. So I had to start thinking of growth hacks. How do I beat these other eBay guys at doing this? So what he would do is he would do one of the auctions. And then he would direct message everybody who didn't win the auction, offering him the bill at whatever their highest price was. And so, um, and so he's like, you know, whatever eight was your top price? All right. I'll do for eight. And so he started like just racking up as many sales as he could doing this. So then he became the top ranked seller, which helped him in the organic search as he was going from there. And I kind of love this and I loved it for a couple of reasons. One, it's just another example of these little nuggets, these little stories that shows you

• 6:31Shaan Puri?

  there's a trillion ways to win. There's a trillion ways to get rich, right? Like he was doing basically $365,000 a year of sales or whatever. Um, you know, he was doing really, really well at that time. You know, and how in a hundred days a day. What?

• 6:45Sam Parr?

  How old was he? Did you say he was like a kid?

• 6:47Shaan Puri?

  Teens. He was 15, 16 years old, something like that. And, um, and, you know, probably didn't last forever, but these, these little arbitrage opportunities that come up. And then I started thinking, okay, like, what would somebody do if they're doing that now? So here's, I'm going to give you three ideas of how you could do that now. First, I think you could probably do the same thing. Like, what's old is new. What's out is in. And I think you probably do the same thing either on eBay or Etsy or find one of the marketplaces. And you could try to win doing the same thing. I went on Etsy and actually you could see that there's people doing this on Etsy right now. And you could see, you know, how they're, how they're doing. So possibly you could go do the same thing and compete. Especially if you could pick a different, you know, celebrity face to put on the thing like

• 7:29Shaan Puri?

  Trump is the obvious one. Uh, but if it's not Trump, like maybe there's some other, some other ones that you could do. But Trump dollar bills is my first idea of how I would do this. Second idea. Okay. Well, let's, let's remix it, right? We want to keep 80% of the idea. We want to change 20%. So what's the 20% change? I would try to piggyback off of whatever's trending in movies or music or something like that. So for example, remember when Superbad came out and there was like the McLovin? Uh, you know, ID, his Hawaii ID, the rainbow on it. It's like this kind of iconic look. I think you could just do McLovin IDs at that time. Like if that was the movie that had come out now, I think you could take a prop from a movie or like in Pulp Fiction, they had the bad mother F for wallet or whatever. Like, I don't know.

• 8:13Sam Parr?

  I had one.

• 8:14Shaan Puri?

  I don't watch a bunch of movies now, but yeah, exactly. I wanted one of those and you could just like jump on that trend and be like, cool. Like for the McLovin one, it's like upload your photo and we'll send you yourself as a McLovin ID and maybe use a little of these like AI things to like create the avatar where it looks the same. But I think that's one that you could do really cheap to print and laminate and then you, you know, you can send these out very cheaply because they're, they're so thin. Um, then I saw some other ones. If you go on Tik Tok, you'll see things that are like this. One, uh, for example, I think the second biggest Etsy store, maybe the first actually now, I think it's second or first on the planet is this thing called Caitlin Minimalist. I'm guessing you've never heard of this, but

• 8:57Sam Parr?

  No, what is this?

• 8:58Shaan Puri?

  I got a whole thing coming on the pod of my Etsy deep dive, but, but I'll just give you a little sneak peek. The top selling store is Caitlin Minimalist. What she does was how she got her break was she was like, she was making jewelry for herself. Her friends were like, oh, that's cool. Then her friend had a special request. She goes, my mom or dad passed away. I forgot which one. Um, and like the last thing they wrote me was like this note, is it possible to like get their signature in their handwriting as like a bracelet? And she's like, yeah, you just like, I could do that for you. And she just gave it to her for free. She was like, this is so meaningful to you. I'll just give it to you for free. And she was like overwhelmed, was like, this is the most meaningful thing in the world. And so she was like, oh, wow. People just want like, you know, their name, their parents' name, their kid's name, and ideally in their own

• 9:43Shaan Puri?

  handwriting, like done in jewelry. And so that's what

• 9:45Sam Parr?

  How do you do that? You like send her or is it all digital? You like

• 9:49Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you send her a picture or you write the name, you know, depends. If you want to match the handwriting, you got to send a picture of the, of this, of like a piece of paper with the writing on it.

• 9:57Sam Parr?

  And there's some tech that just then like tells her

• 10:00Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, just like etches it in that, that look, right?

• 10:02Sam Parr?

  Oh, so it's not like made out of metal. It's a metal plaque or it's like, it's like a dog tag. And then she like

• 10:09Shaan Puri?

  No, no, it is. It's cut. It's like the name is cut and it's like out of the chain or whatever. Like, yeah, it is like, you know, whatever, somehow, somehow cut. I don't know exactly her manufacturing process, but. These little like custom, custom name things I think work. And I was on TikTok yesterday when I was thinking about this idea.

• 10:25Sam Parr?

  How big is it?

• 10:26Shaan Puri?

  Oh, it's huge. She's done like probably eighty, ninety million in sales is my.

• 10:30Sam Parr?

  Oh, my God.

• 10:30Shaan Puri?

  So she's done two million transactions. I would guess her average transactions, like, you know, something forty, fifty bucks, something like that.

• 10:37Sam Parr?

  Wow.

• 10:38Shaan Puri?

  You know, that's like eighty million dollars in sales lifetime. And she's just like this woman out of LA or whatever. And I was on TikTok and I was scrolling and I saw another one of these, which was.

• 10:50Shaan Puri?

  You, it was a hoodie. It was like, here's a perfect gift for the holidays or for Valentine's Day, whatever. It's a hoodie and they're like, take a picture of you and your whatever, your, your boyfriend, girlfriend, spouse, whatever. And it basically takes like, let's say it's a picture of you and your wife and you're kissing. And it just like, it'll etch, it'll stitch like a silhouette of that.

• 11:11Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 11:11Shaan Puri?

  As like into the hoodie. So it's like a meaningful gift. But again, it's like this kind of what they call mass customization, right? So if you could do mass customization, if you could figure out a manufacturing process to do this, there's a lot of opportunity to sell somebody these like kind of gimmick gifts that I think will, that can and will work.

• 11:28Sam Parr?

  Do you remember Teespring?

• 11:30Shaan Puri?

  Teespring, yeah, that was like the print on demand type of.

• 11:33Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it was a really cool T-shirt company started by this guy named Walker Williams. And they were like, one of these companies that was like, oh, this is going to be one of the fastest companies ever to get to a hundred million in revenue. And the way that they got popular was it was on demand T-shirt printing. And they figured out this hack on Facebook where you could target people that have your, like by last name. So it could be like, the one thing we all know about Smiths is that they love to party. Or, and then they also did it by location, like, the one thing we know about people who are raised in Boston is that they love blank. And it had a T-shirt that said, I'm from Boston and I'm proud, or I'm from Boston and I love blank, or I'm a proud Smith, or something like that.

• 12:15Sam Parr?

  And the engagement on those ads was crazy. So their CAC was like stupid low. And that's one of the ways that they grew. And it's just like that. It's that thing from Dale Carnegie. The most beautiful word in any language is a person's name.

• 12:28Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 12:28Sam Parr?

  And I think it's like name, location, and maybe like where you went to school. And then followed by like your friends' names. And if you can figure out how to like incorporate those into ads.

• 12:36Shaan Puri?

  Or.

• 12:36Sam Parr?

  The click through rate is crazy.

• 12:37Shaan Puri?

  Your pet's face. So there's another one, which is pet socks, pet's face on socks. I think.

• 12:43Sam Parr?

  I have a pair.

• 12:44Shaan Puri?

  Jungle Creations was the name of it. So if I remember correctly, at one point they did like a million dollars in like a week selling. You'd basically go on the website, you'd upload a photo of your pet's face and they would print it on socks. And they would just drop ship that to you, basically. And let me see if I can find, yeah, they did 2018, they did 17 million in revenue.

• 13:09Shaan Puri?

  They did 17 million in revenue doing basically pet, pet face on socks. Right. And so that's the same thing, you know, celebrity face on dollar bill, pet face on socks. Right. Like we have a buddy who was doing the pet portraits, right? Like a painting of your pet that would just be like mass, mass customized produced. There's, there's a ton of these like little opportunities.

• 13:29Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And the click through rates on these things are like kill it for the ads. So yeah, that's an interesting idea. Let's see if anyone actually follows through with it. I, but Mark Jenny's amazing, man. He's awesome.

• 13:38Shaan Puri?

  All right. So.

• 13:39Sam Parr?

  Let me bring one thing up.

• 13:42Sam Parr?

  Dude, this guy made fun of me the other day for having a course. And it hurt my feelings.

• 13:49Shaan Puri?

  Or an internet stranger.

• 13:51Sam Parr?

  A little bit of both. And it really hurt my feelings. Do you feel like, because, all right, so I built a business before. I built a few businesses before, a few that I've gotten to seven figures, a few that I've gotten to eight figures. I've sold things. I should feel confident about this. And then you and I both have courses. I'm gonna actually launch another course that I think can be like a like a million dollar plus a year income stream for me and my family, which is awesome.

• 14:19Shaan Puri?

  It's never good when you have to say for me and my family, like if you have to justify feeding your family, that means uh there's that's just the insecurity poking out. Poke it out of there.

• 14:29Sam Parr?

  Well, it gives context and what I mean is, is it the contact, the question that I'm gonna ask is, is it worth it? Because part of me thinks, well, if I'm such a big shot, I shouldn't talk about it. I should just have shit and not teach it. But then I'm like, but I like doing it and it's a significant, like it pays for my whole life. So do you?

• 14:49Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, if you, again, the only question I was gonna ask, do you like it? You like doing it?

• 14:54Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 14:55Shaan Puri?

  All right, then that's enough, right? Like who cares?

• 14:57Sam Parr?

  But do you feel like you feel like a fraud sometimes too, or at least you've never said that to me, but you said that when we had, when we were interviewing that one person, you're like, I kind of feel like a fraud every once in a while, or I forget what you said.

• 15:07Shaan Puri?

  Not a fraud, but um I do feel like I make fun of myself about the course thing. Um because same thing.

• 15:14Sam Parr?

  Self-conscious, maybe.

• 15:17Sam Parr?

  Self-conscious is a better word.

• 15:18Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, you know, I would say somebody who is like somebody who is really locked in and I'll I use the word locked in because it's not about how much money you have. Like, but it's true. Somebody who's really, really wealthy would not do a paid course, I don't think. I don't think somebody who's like super wealthy probably should be or would be doing paid courses. It's pretty unusual to do that.

• 15:43Sam Parr?

  I I think that's actually wrong though, because like Warren Buffett had a course at Columbia. I mean, uh there there's a lot of examples of like wonderful investors who go and they add.

• 15:53Shaan Puri?

  I don't think Warren Buffett did his course for like, I don't think he was pocketing a bunch of money doing a direct sales course type of thing like I if I went and taught a guest, if I was a guest lecturer at Stanford, right? I drove 45 minutes away. I go guest lecturer at Stanford. I'm a teacher there. I would be doing that for different reasons and it would feel totally differently than me being like, hey, I have my power writing course. Go sign up and pay for it. I don't know why it is. It's it's just different. It's it's a different thing, but I would say two things. I said locked in because also. If you have like a main thing that is totally uh, an obsession for you, you're loving working on it. There's so much, there's more to do than you'll ever have time to do.

• 16:36Shaan Puri?

  You really wouldn't take the time to stop, pause and go sell a course. This is my opinion about myself. I should say, I would not go do that. So to me, as long as I'm still doing courses, it's me, part of my wandering around phase. Trying to figure out what I really want to do when I grow up, what I want to do with my life, what I want to do with my time. I know that if I get locked in on, oh man, I really love this project. I'm just building brick by brick. This is something that I'm really excited about. There's no chance in hell that I would push pause and teach course, even though my courses are like, it's two weeks out of the year. So it's not a lot of time, but even, even those two weeks I probably wouldn't do if I was in that position.

• 17:16Shaan Puri?

  In the same way that when I was building my startup, I had no podcast. I had no angel investing. I had no courses. I didn't do, I didn't tweet. I didn't do shit when I was building my startup for like seven years. Cause I was fully locked in on that. It's only after we sold that I started doing a bunch of these things. Um, and that became the new, the new business was the podcast and other things. I think I'm going to keep doing it. Um, but. I think you should totally keep doing it. You said you like it. So keep doing it. Let me share a little thing I do during my course. Cause during the course, the, uh, the writing course, some people will be like,

• 17:52Shaan Puri?

  you know, okay, I get like, uh, this lesson was really great. I feel like I now have a much better idea how I would write to like, kind of grow viral or build my brand. There's a part of me that just feels like, you know, they'll ask a question that's like, how much content would you say is too much? You know, it's what's too much to post or would you say that like, you know, I should wait, you know, until my product launches to start doing content or like they ask all these questions that are sort of like. Self-promote and, uh, self-conscious feelings. Self-conscious. There's just a, there's just a layer of self-consciousness around the whole thing. Or like, you know, what do you, what do you say if you post something and then somebody comments, do you take it down, blah, blah, blah. Do you, you know, how do you deal with, you know, negativity or blah, blah, blah? And I always just say the same thing. I go.

• 18:36Shaan Puri?

  Like, oh, I may answer your question, but hang on. What, what time is it? I want to make sure we don't go over. What time is it? And then they're like, uh, nine 34. I'm like, no, no, it's me o'clock.

• 18:49Shaan Puri?

  You know, you're thinking about what everybody else might think, what they might say and how they might feel and what my, bro, you forgot the main thing. It's always me o'clock. You just gotta ask yourself, do I like this? Do I want to do this? How do I feel about doing this? Remember, it is always me o'clock. In fact, I want to get watches made or a clock on my wall that just, it just reminds me it is me o'clock. Should I wait to go do this thing? No, it's me o'clock. Should I care what other people are thinking? No, it's me o'clock. How do I feel? That's what I'm going to do things based off.

• 19:19Sam Parr?

  Dude, there's this funny picture of Fidel Castro, you know, like the, the dictator of Cuba, and he's wearing two Rolexes at the same time, both on the same wrist. Just because he's just like, he just wants to flex that hard.

• 19:34Sam Parr?

  You need to get two watches on each hand that say, wait, just let me make sure this other one's not broken.

• 19:42Shaan Puri?

  That's exactly how I feel. So your question to me, I don't even need to answer. I just got to remind you it's me o'clock. You do what, you do what the hell you want. All right, you have another thing on here that was like.

• 19:53Sam Parr?

  The 10 list?

• 19:54Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, the list. I, I'm going to read the title and you, you go from there. So it just says, a few non-popular things I've learned from this pod. Pretty good headline. Eight out of 10.

• 20:04Sam Parr?

  Thank you. Will accept. I'm going to say each one and I want you to give me your reaction and then I'll explain a little more context. But all right, the first one.

• 20:12Shaan Puri?

  Well, can you give context on the whole thing? Like, where did this come from? Or what, why did you even think of this list of non-popular things you've learned from the pod?

• 20:19Sam Parr?

  I see a lot of things online of people talking where they try to explain, uh, like rules. Like you do have to work this much or you don't have to work this much or, and the reality is, is that, uh, there's a million ways to get the same things done. So like for every example of one person succeeding in one way, there's going to be lots of examples of them succeeding a totally different way. So I think it's silly to have rules. And so I like, will see these things of people posting of like, oh, you know, like they say, it's a 10 year overnight success. And in my head, I think. Man, I know people who have had overnight successes where like literally in three months their life has changed. And I think it's silly to not acknowledge that, you know? And so that's how I kind of came up with this list.

• 21:03Shaan Puri?

  Okay. All right. Hit me. I'm excited now.

• 21:05Sam Parr?

  All right. The first one I just said, so an overnight success, which is like one or six months, it's absolutely possible. And those, those exist and they're real. What, agree or disagree?

• 21:15Shaan Puri?

  All right. Give us an example.

• 21:17Sam Parr?

  For example, uh, we covered this company called Brewmate, B R U M A T E. And the, I think in like year two, they got to 20 million in revenue and year one, they got to like eight million. And I know a few people that have had other companies where like in the first six months, like it kind of just took off and it worked. Uh, so we interviewed, who else did we interview?

• 21:36Shaan Puri?

  Well, you're, I would say your current stealth company, we haven't talked about yet, taken off right away.

• 21:43Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's, it's succeeded like pretty quickly.

• 21:46Shaan Puri?

  How do you count that? Do you count that overnight success? Or do you say, I've been preparing my whole life for this, right? That's the, that's the counter argument.

• 21:52Sam Parr?

  I'll say like, I built up a reputation and I'm trading off that reputation. But there are times you and I have like talked to people, for example, we, uh, I had this guy on who you weren't here, but you know him, his name's Val. You know Val, V A L, Val? He had a company where in year one, it made like 10 million in profit and it was selling like ringtones on the internet. And like just some people just have the it factor. And then also like luck is real. So that's another thing. Luck is real. Sometimes you just kind of nail it and it just works. Not always, and most of the time it doesn't, but every once in a while, it just happens. And so I think for people to say overnight success isn't real, I think that that's nonsense. Cause I, I know a handful of people who are like 19, 20 year old kids who

• 22:36Sam Parr?

  they like, within a few months, they've got something making many, many tens, or sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in sales and it just works.

• 22:43Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Yeah. I'm, I'm with you on that. I agree.

• 22:46Sam Parr?

  Um, all right. Here's another one. I think at least in the beginning of your career, where you live, it actually really, really matters. It's incredibly important. And the people who don't move some places, I think they are at a disadvantage.

• 23:00Shaan Puri?

  Hundred percent agree. I did this. I was sitting in Australia and I wanted to do startups and I was, I went to a local startup like event and I was like, okay, um, I'm like looking around. Everybody's being super nice, right? It's Australia. Everybody gets along great. And I just thought in my head, I go, who's the most successful entrepreneur in this room? And it was this one old ass motherfucker who was like, you know, had built something in the nineties and he just like stuck around and then nobody else, pretty much. And then I was asking some questions. I was talking and something and then the organizer was like, dude, you should give a talk next, uh, next month at the meetup. Like this is great. We would love to have you teach. And I was like,

• 23:42Shaan Puri?

  teach? I'm 23. I've done nothing. I was like, and I like, at first I was flattered and then I caught myself. Two seconds later, I was like, oh, wait, this just means I'm in the wrong pond. I do not want to be a smart guy in there. They should be like, dude, you should shut up. You don't know anything about anything. That's the type of room I want to be in. And so I literally went home. I went on, I think like T-Mobile or whatever. I activated a, a phone plan and I got a six five oh area number, uh, area code, um, because I was like, I need to just mentally, before I even move, I need to go to Silicon Valley now. So I changed my phone number and then I booked a ticket and my mom was like, you know, what are you gonna, where are you gonna stay?

• 24:22Shaan Puri?

  Do you have a job? I was like, I don't know. I, I'm gonna figure it out, but I'll, I have a better shot of figuring it out there than I do from here. And that was my whole mindset. And Tony Robbins has a thing he says about this. He goes, proximity is power. And I am a huge believer that proximity is power. I have done pretty crazy things to just get in proximity of people that I think are awesome. Like I will take jobs that I think are like the worst job of all the job offers I have. If I know that it's going to get me to sit side by side with somebody awesome, because I know six months next to that person is going to do more for me than, uh, you know, like a better higher paying job would have done. And so proximity is power. I'm.

• 25:01Sam Parr?

  This goes beyond business. It's beyond business. It's just anything. If you want to make it in the movie industry, you have a higher likelihood if you at least spend a handful of years early on in Hollywood. Just putting in the time matters. You know, there's like these funny stories about Bill Murray. He lives in like North Carolina or something and he's like totally out of the loop. It's like, yeah, that, that, that definitely works. There are examples of that, but I think it helps.

• 25:24Shaan Puri?

  Your odds. Yeah. You want to increase your odds of success.

• 25:27Sam Parr?

  The second one, or the third one, luck is incredibly real. You know, I remember like early on in my career, I was thinking like, there is no such thing as luck. It's just hard work and I'm just gonna do it. Nah, shit's real, shit's real. I remember, I've said this story a bunch of times, but when we were selling our company, Brian Halligan, the CEO of HubSpot at the time, got in a life-threatening accident two weeks after we closed. And there's a world where two weeks before, if it happened, it could have ruined it. I think you've had a couple of examples where if one or two things happened before or after selling a business, like within like a month, it could have changed things. Getting sick really matters. Being born like in a healthy place, in a healthy family, like things like that. Luck is totally real, and I think that we dismiss it too often.

• 26:12Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think I agree with that. I would say luck is real. I would also say a big part of luck is in your control and a small part of luck is outside of your control. So most of the luck you experience in your life, there's a whole bunch of things at the beginning. Being born in a certain place, healthy, your parents, whatever, those are outside of your control. A lot of what happens after that is in your control. And we've done the, there's a podcast episode called Four Levels of Luck where we talk, you know, on Framework Friday, where we talk about actually manipulating luck to be, to go towards your advantage, if that makes sense. There is a set of actions you can take that will increase the amount of luck you end up having in your life. And this is not like, you know, hold crystals or something like that. It's like more practical, tangible stuff.

• 26:56Shaan Puri?

  Okay, the last part of that that I'll say is, I remember when I was, I had moved to San Francisco and I met Michael Birch, the guy I came to work with. Because again, proximity is power. I just took the job because I was like, oh, I get to sit next to this guy? This guy's like a billionaire who's built four successful internet companies? Well, what is the thing I want to do? Build a successful internet company? I think this is the place to sit. And I was talking to him and I was trying to figure out like, did this guy just get lucky? Or what happened? Because a lot of people, I think, would look at him and say, oh, he got lucky. Because the thing he sold, two years later, Bebo, he sold it for $850 million. Two years later, a year later, AOL wrote it off for like, you know, a giant tax write-off and just like, and nobody uses Bebo now. Facebook won and Facebook beat it.

• 27:40Shaan Puri?

  And so some people would say, oh, he got lucky, right? You know, he sold it for whatever. And I definitely don't think that's true because he's built like multiple companies that have been successful. But what I figured out, what I, the thing I ended up figuring out was it's not lucky that he won, but it is lucky how much he won. So he was going to be successful either way. But whether that number was 20 million, 80 million, or 800 million, there was a large degree of luck and timing that was outside of his control that contributed to that. He could just easily, just as easily have been an 80 million guy versus an 800 million guy. And that I don't think was necessarily in his control. That was right place, right time, right time, right circumstances. You know, the right person had the right drinks at the

• 28:23Shaan Puri?

  right bar next to the right person. And I think that, you know, the magnitude of success is a lot more based on luck, not the appearance of success, not the, that the existence of the success. He was going to be successful no matter what.

• 28:37Sam Parr?

  All right. And I'm going to jump around. Another one Ivy League ish schools. So I don't know how we're going to define that, but like a top 20 university is totally worth it. Even if that means that you have to go into a lot of debt, I think it's totally worth it. I think state schools where you get some type of in-state tuition and you still get a college experience, totally worth it. Most everything in between, if you have to go into debt for it, I think it's absolutely not worth it.

• 29:06Shaan Puri?

  You're like where I went to school.

• 29:08Sam Parr?

  Where I went, I went to Belmont University. I was, I was fortunate. I got a little bit of a scholarship and my parents paid for it. 100% not worth it. It was at the time, I think 30 or 40 grand a year, and it's a no name university that it just completely irrelevant. 100% not worth it. But I know people who went to, my wife went to an Ivy League school. I know people like you went to Duke and like you have a handful of connections. If you go to Stanford, you have all these connections that seem 100% worth it. And here's another like thing. If you have Stanford on your resume, you're going to at least get the interview. This is true. If you look at how people recruit, they just got to scroll through an Excel sheet and it just says where you graduated. Bellarmine in Kentucky, that costs $60,000 a year or whatever it is, that is not

• 29:51Sam Parr?

  the same as Stanford or Dartmouth. Like you're just automatically going to have an increased likelihood of getting that interview. But even more important than that, you're going to meet people who are, have been, maybe been around the world, have rich parents, like that stuff actually matters. And actually those connections and that, that influence on your life, it really actually matters and it's worth going into debt.

• 30:14Shaan Puri?

  Kind of disagree here. So I went to Duke, which is not a night, not technically an Ivy League school, but is like considered up there with, with Ivy League is actually like a sports thing, but like, you know, whatever. It's considered like a top school and it wasn't worth it for me because I was not ready to figure out how to make it worth it. Right. It's, it's what you make of it. It is not going to be handed to you just by showing up. And I had the total, I had totally the wrong mindset. I thought I'm here. I gotta, I don't know, do the thing I've been doing to get here. Get good grades. Um, you know, eventually graduate, pass the test, you know, go to med school, do whatever I'm supposed to do. It was like a track and there are some people who made it worth it. The people who were like, yo, we got these resources for free or I'm going to go and

• 30:59Shaan Puri?

  meet these, these two professors or I'm going to get exposure to these other classes that I want to learn about, or I'm going to use my time here to socialize, plus spin up some side hustles. Cause man, there's no better time to find co-founders and build a startup than when you're in college. Like there were some people who had that right mindset. The light, my light bulb is not on, right? Like now I got this floating ass light bulb. There was no, there was no light bulb on at that time. And so I misused it. I think the majority of people misuse it. I did have one phone call that was really important and I'm just going to say it out loud here because if there's somebody who needs to hear this, you know, I got lucky that my dad gave me this phone call. Maybe your, maybe your dad doesn't have the same sort of wisdom that, that my, mine did. So I'm going to say it out loud. I called my dad, my second year into college and I was like,

• 31:43Shaan Puri?

  hey, um, he's like, how's it going? And I was like, ah, it's, it's okay. He's like, what do you mean? Like, how's your, how's your, you know, how's school? And I was like, well, grades aren't great. He's like, oh man, what, what happened? And I was like, no, they're not terrible. I'm not failing. I just like, you know, I'm a B minus student here. And like, you know, I'd been getting A's in high school. So B minus was like, no, not very good. He's like, all right, that's all right. Um, he's like, are you trying? And I was like, yeah, I'm trying, but man, like everybody here is smart. Like, you know, everybody here is just as smart as me, if not smarter. And they all work harder than me. And I'm trying to figure out this whole hard work thing, but like, you know, just going to be honest with you. It's like, these guys just live in the library and I just don't even like, I just figured out where they go. They go to the library, they go to office. I

• 32:28Shaan Puri?

  was like, I was, I didn't even understand where people were going with their free time. That's what they were doing.

• 32:32Sam Parr?

  Were your, was your dad paying?

• 32:34Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, parents are paying for it. So this is what I told him. I go, you know, you're paying a lot of money for me to go here. And, uh, you know, I could go to UT, you know, state school, it'd be, I think 10 times cheaper or something like that, like five times cheaper, maybe. I was like, you know, if you want me to like, I'm willing to transfer, by the way, just because like, I don't think I'm gonna do that well here. And so I don't think it's worth it for you to pay this amount of money. And so I told him that and he goes, um, and but I had been telling him, he's like, he goes, why do you say that, you know, um, you're not like good there. And I was like, well, like dude, my, my, this guy who lives next door to me, he's like a freaking genius. He's like, you know, he just gets the physics stuff right away. And then

• 33:16Shaan Puri?

  he's also good like outside of class, like, you know, in the summers, he goes in, he drives an ambulance in the Palestinian war front just for fun. And like, that's how he spends his summers. Like, you know, I'm over here picking boogers with you. Like, you know, I don't, I don't even know what to do in the summer. These guys all got plans and internships and, and this and that. And like, this guy's uncle works at JP Morgan, so he's doing that thing. And I was like, and he goes, yeah, that's the point. He goes, that's why you're there. You're not there for the classes. You're there because when everybody around you is like that, it will just raise your standards. You won't even know what mediocre looks like. You think you're mediocre, but that's because you're hanging out with exceptional people. If I take you and put you in a state school, you're not going to have as many exceptional people around you who for them, that's normal.

• 34:00Shaan Puri?

  And he goes, so, you know, the point of being in college for you to go to that school is not so you could graduate at the top of the class and get the best grades and be the smartest kid in the, in the classes. It's so that that becomes your network and that becomes your normal. And he's basically said something to that effect.

• 34:14Sam Parr?

  So you're proving my point, by the way.

• 34:15Shaan Puri?

  Pretty deep.

• 34:16Sam Parr?

  You're kind of proving my point.

• 34:18Shaan Puri?

  I know, I know. So I'm saying like, that is the, the saving grace of it. I don't know if the, I don't know, like that light bulb went off for me halfway through. Then I started to focus on, oh yeah. Then once I realized that, I started to get to know those people. Before that, I was like, oh, these, they're just different. I'm gonna stay away. And like, I don't know, I gotta find people who are like me, who are just basically bumming around here who don't know what to do. Instead, I was like, oh, the point is to be hanging out with these people and become more like them and not feel like I'm competing with them or intimidated by them.

• 34:46Sam Parr?

  All right. I've got a few more and I'm going to actually merge a couple of them. So, uh, another one, having a technical skill. If we're talking about internet companies, it, this mostly means like being able to like code or design. In my case, it was writing, which actually I think counts, but it's a little bit less more important. But having a technical skill, like in training, to have a skill set is a massive, massive advantage. And I think being a generalist is not, that is just a bullshit excuse, but you should actually be good at at least one thing. And particularly coding or design would be better, but copyrighting counts as well. And there's a few other things, sales actually I think can count, but you need to be good at something. And I think that most people don't do that.

• 35:29Sam Parr?

  You need to be great at something. You gotta like train for years to acquire a skill and then go beyond that. But you need a skill and I think it's a massive advantage and people dismiss that as being a generalist. And that's just like self masturbation. That is a bull crap excuse. In reality, you should be, you just try to get great at something.

• 35:47Shaan Puri?

  You know what's the funniest version of a generalist? So generalist already is like, you're teetering on the edge of just being a bullshitter.

• 35:53Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 35:54Shaan Puri?

  It's people who call themselves a polymath. Have you ever heard somebody call themselves?

• 35:58Sam Parr?

  Bullshit dude. Yes. That's like people who call themselves a contrarian. It's like, dude, if you gotta label it, you're probably not it.

• 36:04Shaan Puri?

  You can't be the one who calls yourself a polymath, nor could you call yourself a contrarian. It's other people who got to point it out. That's when that label works.

• 36:13Sam Parr?

  It's like you can't nickname, nickname yourself brain. That doesn't, it doesn't work that way, you know? You gotta, you, you, you either, you either is or you ain't.

• 36:20Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. No, no, that's not how that works. Other people can call you humble. You don't get to call yourself humble. Yeah. So polymath is like the, you've, you've, you've fallen over the fence like Humpty Dumpty. And now you're fully in bullshit land. Um, when you're calling yourself a polymath. So, okay, that's my, that's my rant on that. I think you're a hundred percent right. You gotta have some, what do we say? You gotta have some attributes.

• 36:43Sam Parr?

  Yeah. You gotta bring some attributes, man. You gotta have some size, strength, time. You gotta have attributes. You can't just be a dope.

• 36:49Shaan Puri?

  I hired a guy that I thought was gonna be great because he was like, you know, saying all the right things, hustling. He was saying all the right things. And within a month, I realized.

• 36:58Shaan Puri?

  Guy's got no attributes. He's got to have some attribute. What are you good at? What can you do? Oh, man, I can help with anything. Okay, you can help with anything. What can you, what problem can you go solve? What, what are you great at? If I hand you this thing, what can you just nail this part of it? I, I would also consider myself somewhat of a generalist, but it's, you can only really, what people mean when they're actually a good version of a generalist is they're great at one thing, but they decided not to just specialize as that, that one tool for the rest of their life. And they've decided to go broader, but they got that in their back pocket. One or two core skills. They're amazing at paid marketing. They're amazing at copywriting. They're amazing at building, at, you know, coding. They're amazing at, um, sales.

• 37:43Shaan Puri?

  And they could just do that as their job and they could be, you know, in the top 10% of people, if they did that just as their job, not the top 1%, right? Cause they're not specializing and being like, I'm going to hone this craft every day for the rest of my life. But they're in the top 10% already at that. And then they're in the top like 30% at four or five other things. That's a real generalist, not somebody who's just average at everything and like,

• 38:05Sam Parr?

  Or good at nothing.

• 38:06Shaan Puri?

  Or good at nothing. Right? Yeah. What, what did, uh, Rhonda Rousey called it? A D N B. You remember that?

• 38:12Sam Parr?

  What's that mean?

• 38:13Shaan Puri?

  She, she goes, she was talking about this when she was on the top and in the O C. And she, she goes, all these other girls are just D N Bs. They're just do nothing bitches. I was like, wow, that is an incredible phrase. And so in my head, when I hear of a generalist, I'm like, let me make sure you're actually not just a D N B.

• 38:33Sam Parr?

  Yeah, dude, a dude, nothing bitch. Like you need to do something in, in, or like in your case, your skillset could actually be like charisma and like attracting and recruiting people and like putting them in the right direction. That, that's a skillset, you know, leadership is a skillset, uh, getting things started that, that and being like the, the, the initial match that gets like a fire started. I think that's a skillset, but I think having a skill and that actually being great at something. It's really important. All right. I'll give you a few more.

• 39:01Sam Parr?

  Assume that people don't change. I think that's like a safe, that's like a safe rule. You know, we, we have this attitude, maybe it's an American thing. I don't know where it's just like, you can change. And I do believe that's possible. You know, I've had demons in the past that I've overcome. I know a lot of other people who have had things that they've overcome. That shit does take place. It's fairly rare. And if you are a person that talks the talk and you don't walk the walk, you will never change. And if I meet someone like that, I just assume, oh, they're just always going to be like that and they will not change. No amount of encouragement is going to make them change. Sometimes that happens. Assume it won't. And that's, I used to have a different attitude when I started my company. I'm like, oh, I'll just get these people and I'll teach them how to be great, yada, yada, yada. As I've grown with this pod and

• 39:46Sam Parr?

  talked to people, I just, the people who act a certain way have always acted that way.

• 39:51Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, there's a, my sister says this, she goes, no, no, people change for the worse.

• 39:59Shaan Puri?

  They will decay more often than they're going to be like turning it around and like, you know, going from A to B. And so I think you're right. That is the working assumption. You know, innocent until proven guilty, you know, same till proven different is how I feel with people, right?

• 40:15Sam Parr?

  Exactly.

• 40:15Shaan Puri?

  You gotta show that something is changing. I am not going to assume, and I'm not going to be that, you know, the stereotypical like the woman who wants to fix him. It's like, don't, I'm not that. I'm, I don't want to be that when I recruit people anymore. No, I'd rather just recruit people who are great and like, just let them do their thing versus somebody that I'm going to train and groom and turn around a project. It's like, why do all that effort? No bonus points for making it harder.

• 40:42Shaan Puri?

  I can't find this client info.

• 40:44Speaker 02

  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.

• 40:57Sam Parr?

  All right, the last two. So I actually don't think necessarily that the time and effort put into a project is going to dictate the outcome. I think to get like, to build like a company, now I would have to like, put numbers on it. To build a company that like, makes you potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars in some cases, you don't necessarily have, you can achieve that by having balance. But I think to have these massive outsized, world-changing companies, things that create tens of billions of dollars in 10, 15 years, and have a meaningful impact in the world, like a Tesla, or something crazy like that,

• 41:39Sam Parr?

  or Stripe, something like that. I think that working 80 hours a week, raising lots and lots of money, and having zero balance is 100% needed. That said, I think you can still achieve a huge amount of success compared to the average Joe, and actually do it working 40 hours a week, or in some cases, after a while, less. And that's like, an interesting dichotomy, but I think it's to be, I think it's true.

• 42:03Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I'll go with that. I like that. What else you got? Any one more?

• 42:07Sam Parr?

  Last one. And this is like, this is one of the very few irreversible decisions. So having some type of success and taking a meaningful amount of risk, before you have a family, meaning you have less time, you've got less responsibility. Unfortunately, it's an irreversible decision, but getting an early-ish win, early in your career, is 100% a huge advantage. And you are at a massive disadvantage by having a young family and not having like, achieved something, and then wanting to go achieve it. It's not impossible, but like, taking those risks early on, people should be encouraged to do that more, because it is life-changing.

• 42:50Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think so. The, Paul Graham has this essay that he wrote, I don't remember the name of it, but he basically was like, assume, I forgot the exact metrics, I read this a long time ago, I was in my early twenties, and I, it like, stood out to me. He was like,

• 43:05Shaan Puri?

  Assume you start out with seven points as an entrepreneur and these are your set. The seven points is like your capacity to like take risks and like achieve what you want. And then he's like, for every one of these things, like, you know, minus one, right? It's like mortgage and whatever minus one kids minus two, um, you know, and he's basically like, you know, you can still do it, but you, your margin of error and the difficulty that you're going to have.

• 43:32Sam Parr?

  And the stress.

• 43:33Shaan Puri?

  And the stress you're going to have of pulling this off, like, assume you are sort of sapping your, your, you know, your life mana, your, your points, uh, in terms of how much ammo you have to go attack this thing. It's being sapped by each one of these, these factors. And, um, I don't remember what all of them were, but it's worth, you know, go, go and find this essay. Cause I think he's actually true. It's an uncomfortable truth. People don't like this because it doesn't sound politically correct because like, you know, the politically correct thing to say is.

• 43:59Sam Parr?

  You can do it.

• 44:00Shaan Puri?

  You could do anything and, um, and you could argue, and you should, by the way, if you're 40, you shouldn't be listening to this part. You should be saying, screw that. I got all the wisdom. I got the, my purpose, my kids, I got the experience, uh, you know, that a 20 year old will never have. I have, and yes, you have different advantages, but objectively speaking, it is much easier to take risks. And if you were going to just play it out in an ideal scenario, you would take your risks earlier. When you have less to lose, you have less pressure, less stress, less financial obligations. It's just a more like game theory optimal way to play. You don't have to play it that way, but it is, I think, sort of objectively speaking, and a, a, a, preferred way to play.

• 44:43Shaan Puri?

  But you know, if you didn't play that way, it's okay, you can still win anyways.

• 44:46Sam Parr?

  So that's the list. That's my unpopular truths, my, my not awesome stuff to discuss, but I believe it to be true that I've learned from the pod. And I'll end with all of those rules, or whatever I described them as can be completely broken. And there's tons of examples of all of them being not true. But.

• 45:03Shaan Puri?

  Yep.

• 45:03Sam Parr?

  That's what I believe to be true. So that's my list.

• 45:06Shaan Puri?

  Okay. I like it. Um, let me give you another idea. All right. So, uh, I was doing, do you do like gifts, like company gifts for the holiday or something like that? Do you like send out gifts?

• 45:16Sam Parr?

  No, no, that wasn't, that wasn't a me thing. Do you, are you doing that?

• 45:19Shaan Puri?

  Warm, tender person who might.

• 45:21Sam Parr?

  That, you know, give, give exact my love language, bro. Words of affirmation are.

• 45:28Shaan Puri?

  Silent nods of approval.

• 45:30Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A pat on the back is the greatest gift.

• 45:36Shaan Puri?

  The greatest gift is the lack of criticism that I provided you today.

• 45:42Shaan Puri?

  So I was thinking about it. I was like, oh, you know, and I remember at a, you know, at a previous company I worked at, the, the office manager, she was good at the stuff and she would get like everybody's address and then she would send these Harry and David gift, gift baskets. Have you ever had a Harry and David gift basket?

• 45:57Sam Parr?

  No, what's that?

• 45:58Shaan Puri?

  Oh dude, imagine.

• 46:03Shaan Puri?

  Somebody's at the door. Who could it be? You go to the door. Uh, hey, we have this amazing huge gift basket for you. You take it into your kitchen. You're like, wow, what's, what's going to be in this gift basket? Sam, take a guess. What's in this gift basket?

• 46:15Sam Parr?

  Chocolate, I guess.

• 46:17Shaan Puri?

  Could be chocolate, could have been chocolate. It's not chocolate though. What else could it be?

• 46:22Sam Parr?

  Like local foods, like bricks of salami and cheese?

• 46:26Shaan Puri?

  Could be salami cheese. There's a little bit of that. There's a little bit of chocolate. There's a little bit of cheese in there. Pears. They had these jumbo pears and they know because pears are the most underrated fruit. They are the official fruit of my first million, as far as I'm concerned.

• 46:39Sam Parr?

  I agree.

• 46:39Shaan Puri?

  Huge delicious pears were in there. And I was like, what the hell is this? And I was like, what is this giant gift that I received? And why does it, why is it so awesome?

• 46:49Sam Parr?

  It's called what? Harry and David?

• 46:51Shaan Puri?

  Harry and David, right? So, so they, they do gift baskets of all kinds, but this one was a giant pear basket that we got. And I still remember this thing and I was, dude, you came over to my house. I don't care if you're the, the cleaner, you're just a guy walking by. I was slinging pears to you because I had the juiciest pears that were going to go bad. They were massive and I needed to offload these things. And everybody asked, oh wow, where'd you get this? I said, my company sends it to me because they love me and that's how I felt. And so I thought, I, I always remember this experience. And so then I started digging. I was like, what's up with this Harry David thing? By the way?

• 47:24Sam Parr?

  Oh man, they're huge.

• 47:26Shaan Puri?

  Harry and David sold to a company that you know of, 1-800-FLOWERS for $142 million back in 2014. And they have a couple, you know, main brands of this thing. I, Harry and David, which is these gift baskets. They have Wolferman, which is gourmet English muffins and other foods like that. And they have Stockyards, which is, you know, prime, you know, prime meats, basically. Um, and Harry David, it's a super seasonal business, fall and winters, when they get a lot of their orders and. They got 50 retail stores that like, you know, helped them fill the stuff. And it got me thinking about Harry David. It got me thinking about 1800 Flowers. I did a little deep dive. So 1800 Flowers starts off as a phone number 42 years ago.

• 48:08Shaan Puri?

  Literally, it was just 1800 Flowers and it goes on to build basically like a $600 million plus business. They, you know, for a long time, it's just the phone number. Then 1985, they, they start e-commerce because they're like, oh, we need this. And they basically have like thousands of locations and fulfillment centers, not all owned by them, but like fulfillment partners, somebody who can send flowers to you. And, um, you know, basically these guys are, it's like four, it's like a bundle of 14 brands. And let me just give you their, their revenue last quarter. So

• 48:36Sam Parr?

  They're publicly traded.

• 48:38Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. What's that? Publicly traded. They did 485 million in revenue, uh, last quarter. So that, that means they're now a, um, what, what is that? 500 times?

• 48:48Sam Parr?

  Well, and that's not even a popular quarter. Probably, probably their February revenue like trumps like the, the, the.

• 48:53Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think winter's probably their biggest. Well, let's say it's probably a billion and a half a year. This is, is pretty, pretty safe to say. Uh, the gift baskets, which are the Harry and David section, they're doing, they did 148 million last quarter. So that means that's probably like a $500 million a year business. Um, florals was 300 million. And then, um, yeah, basically they have like, whatever, they have some other stuff. They got Cheryl's Cookies. They bought her for 40 million. They got, um, you know, personalization mail, which is something I don't know. They bought for 250 million. They got Sherry's Berries.

• 49:24Sam Parr?

  Sherry's Berries. I love Sherry's Berries.

• 49:26Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, right. It's great. Popcorn Factory bought that for 30 million back in the day. So they own all these brands. So I'm like, okay, this is great. Now I've also been doing this food gifting thing lately because I'm like you, I'm not a big gifter, trying to get better at it. Inspired by our buddy Ramon and who is a prolific gifter.

• 49:46Sam Parr?

  The best gifter, some would say.

• 49:47Shaan Puri?

  Savage of a gifter. Um, so he got me thinking, man, he, he really highlighted my gifting deficiencies. So I said, I don't know, I'm gonna start sending gifts, but I, I'm not a big plan ahead guy. So. Day of, where do you get a last minute gift that can get to that person's house same day, same hour, maybe, maybe it's 11:00 PM, I'm trying to squeeze it in before midnight, DoorDash and Uber Eats, that's what I've been doing. I will just DoorDash you food, because food is, you know, the universal love language.

• 50:15Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but what are you gonna do, send me a pizza at 11:00 AM? That's stupid.

• 50:18Shaan Puri?

  I'll send you a pizza and wings, I'll send you four slushies, I'll send you boba tea, I'll send you a Cinnabon, I'll send you, bro, I got options, I got, I got a whole like menu of my gifting foods that I'll go to, because I gotta know, and I gotta know what you like, right? Like, I know you've got that sweet tooth, right? I might hit you with 16 pints of ice cream, and you'll be like, this is, Sean, this is simply too much ice cream. I'll be like, I know, because I love you that much, right? So I'll just hit you with these kind of, these kind of gifts. So, I think that somebody should build a 1-800-FLOWERS type of brand, because the things I'm gifting, they're not made for this, they're not made to be gifted, right? The Cinnabon is not made to be sent to a friend for their birthday, but I think somebody should build basically,

• 51:00Shaan Puri?

  birthday eats, or last minute gifts on DoorDash, on Uber Eats.

• 51:05Sam Parr?

  I completely agree.

• 51:06Shaan Puri?

  As a cloud kitchen, I'm just getting stronger as the idea builds, as a cloud kitchen, nationwide, it is optimized for gifts, so baskets that are nicely, like, put a bow on it, handwritten notes, that's gotta be a part of it, you know, so something that's gonna be able to give you a note, or even a little like, little trinket that shows that this is a card, that this is for the occasion, and then, help me help you, help me gift to somebody else, is how, is how I feel about this. Now, the cloud kitchen is already good, but if you remember back in the day, we had the idea of not just a cloud kitchen, but a clout kitchen, where you partner with a celebrity. So this is where I need your help. We need our celebrity partner,

• 51:47Shaan Puri?

  who is gonna be the face of this last minute gifts brand, this gourmet gifts brand that we're gonna create and launch nationwide across Uber Eats?

• 51:55Sam Parr?

  It sounds, this sounds like a rhetorical question, so I have a feeling you have someone in mind.

• 52:00Shaan Puri?

  No, no, honestly, only person I thought of was Ryan Seacrest, and I don't even know why.

• 52:06Shaan Puri?

  I might as well go with the hardest working man in Hollywood. I haven't seen his face in that app, I think he would like to be in that app, so I'm thinking Ryan Seacrest is a good option.

• 52:14Sam Parr?

  White, white women like you, you'd be fine.

• 52:16Shaan Puri?

  Universally, universally not hated.

• 52:22Shaan Puri?

  Like a recognizable face. Um, but who else could be, who else could be the guy or the the gal, like, you know, Mariah Carey, she's seasonal. Maybe Mariah's, maybe Mariah's is, is, is, maybe she needs to get out of the song game and get into the gift game.

• 52:37Sam Parr?

  I, I, I, I don't know, but I do think this is actually brilliant. I've tried to order one. I'm the last minute gift guy too. And I'll try to order 1-800 flowers the, the morning of Valentine's Day and they, and oftentimes they don't let you, you know?

• 52:50Shaan Puri?

  They're just like, it's too late. If you really loved her, you would have done this three days ago.

• 52:54Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And it's a, it's, it's super annoying. So I'm totally on board. I, I, I, I think this is awesome. I think this is, this is, this is great. Um, can you not do that now? There, there aren't any good gift basket companies on DoorDash?

• 53:09Shaan Puri?

  Like if I open DoorDash right now, so let's, let's open this.

• 53:11Sam Parr?

  I can't get an edible arrangement. Also a great gift, man. Edible arrangements. Wonderful.

• 53:16Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, those are good. And I think you can get some of those, but I think we're, we need a fresh brand. So like, like, you know, they have like, they have the flower and gift boutique online at least.

• 53:30Shaan Puri?

  And it's flowers, you know, it's just flowers, right? Like,

• 53:34Sam Parr?

  It's like roses from Whole Foods.

• 53:35Shaan Puri?

  A cookie in a bag, right? You know, a bath bomb. Come on, come on. You think Mariah and Ryan Seacrest are just gonna lose to this?

• 53:48Sam Parr?

  No, man.

• 53:49Shaan Puri?

  Extravagant.

• 53:51Sam Parr?

  I, I'm on board. I, I, I've experienced the same thing. And I've also studied 1-800 flowers. 1-800 flowers is a really interesting company because they will tell you all types of insights in their annual report and they have so much intel because they own so many brands. So I'll give you an example. In one of their reports, they said succulents are growing amongst millennials. And I remember reading about that like in 2018. And I told a couple of people about it and they started succulent delivery businesses geared towards millennials and they kill it. You know, there's now the, the sill. There's another one called, uh, what's that other one called?

• 54:23Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, who knows? Millennial, millennial, you know, succulents.

• 54:27Sam Parr?

  Plant businesses. Yeah, I don't know. Dude, and they have so much insights or another insight that you can get for 1800 flowers is they're like, we're trying to, what do they say? They go, we actually don't make a lot of money from flowers, but we make a shitload of money from like when people buy vases. So I'm like, why aren't you like painting cool shit on this vase and getting people to like, spend more money on it, you know, like, why, why don't I see like a Frida Kahlo or whoever it is like, painting on like this like sick vase and I'll pay you $50 for it.

• 54:52Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 54:52Sam Parr?

  Uh, dude, 1800 flowers is actually a really, really, really good business to go and read their annual reports because they have such interesting insight and they've been doing it for, I don't know how old is it now? It's from the seventies, I think. Um, and so really interesting company to study. I love that business. I love the gifting business. But their market cap sucks. Why is their market cap so bad? Their market cap is $600 million.

• 55:14Shaan Puri?

  Is it really?

• 55:15Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's horrible. They just like plummeted over the past, uh, well, I guess everything has plummeted, but it's been really bad over the past year.

• 55:22Shaan Puri?

  That's interesting. I wonder if they think they're getting like, you know, disrupted by something? Yeah. 600 million is the market cap? That sounds.

• 55:29Sam Parr?

  And the guy who runs it's really interesting. I think that the guy who invented it, uh, who founded it, I think his name was Jim McCann and his son now is the CEO and Jim is like a really interesting guy. I've had him on the, uh, I've talked to him on the phone a couple of times, really fascinating person and his son is, is the CEO now. So it's almost like a really weird family business. Another one that falls in this category, have you ever studied Omaha Steaks?

• 55:51Shaan Puri?

  No.

• 55:52Sam Parr?

  So Omaha, do you know what that is?

• 55:54Shaan Puri?

  No, but that just sounds like exactly what it is.

• 55:58Sam Parr?

  So Omaha Steaks, it's a mail order business. Uh, they sell steaks. So if you want to buy someone like $200 of like prime rib and filet mignon and chicken and like bratwurst and shit, you order from there and they send it to you and it's an awesome gift. And I believe it's privately owned. They make many, many, many hundreds. I wouldn't be surprised if it's actually north of a billion in revenue. And they were one of the very first companies to take advantage of internet marketing. And so right when the internet got popular, you would see Omaha steak ads everywhere. And they were very, very, very progressive with like their, they're figuring out how to market on the internet. And they're still really fascinating and it's a really, really interesting company to study. I think it's privately owned. You've never, I'm shocked you haven't heard of Omaha Steaks, but you also didn't know who Dolly Parton was. So like.

• 56:39Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you're really shocked. Yeah, exactly.

• 56:42Sam Parr?

  But anyway, look up Omaha Steaks. You know, I, I, I think they're in like the six or 700 million dollar a year in sales range. And they're invented or founded in like 1920. They've been around forever. A really fascinating company to study.

• 56:56Shaan Puri?

  So they, are they like in, are they mostly in stores? Or this is like?

• 57:01Sam Parr?

  No, no, no, no. It's 100% online and you gotta, you just have to call them or it was like a catalog and you like would order steaks.

• 57:09Shaan Puri?

  The very first thing it says, the classic gift, a $90 package of steaks.

• 57:14Sam Parr?

  Dude, it's a great gift. Neville, my, my best friend Neville, who's also my neighbor, his mom always is buying him Omaha Steaks. And so whenever he gets an order of Omaha Steaks, we all go to his house and we like, we grill them. It's an awesome gift. Omaha Steaks is a wonderful gift. I'm shocked you haven't heard of it.

• 57:28Shaan Puri?

  No, but I, I also feel like this could be done with like the right influencer partners. Like just do a sort of, you know, a slightly different version of this. This, this seems like the type of thing that is, uh, you know, it's got a pretty good moat probably because they were like, you know, they probably own the, the production or something like that.

• 57:47Sam Parr?

  No, that's not what their moat is. I would think their moat is the fact that like it's been around for so long. And so like you saw your parents gift it to people and then you're like, like, oh man, what should I get this guy like? Oh, like, I guess like some fucking Omaha Steaks. You know what I mean? It's like seize candy. It's like, why does Warren Buffett like that? He's like, I don't know. Just cause like, that's just like the default gift that men give their wives and like people have seen their parents do it for years and then they grow up doing it.

• 58:12Shaan Puri?

  I don't know. The local seize candy here near me, they opened up a nursing home in the store because everybody there is so old. It's incredible. Genius idea on their part. They're like, hey, actually we're just a funeral home in the back.

• 58:25Shaan Puri?

  You know, there's like one in five chances you're just gonna drop dead in the store.

• 58:30Sam Parr?

  Dude, seize candy is pretty whack. Like I, I go and eat it. It's shit, but like it does seem kind of dead at this point, but you know, I guess.

• 58:36Shaan Puri?

  Warren Buffett likes it because it's like a dating center for him. Like, I don't know what's going on. Why is everyone 90 and inside seize candy? Is that just my local one here?

• 58:45Sam Parr?

  No, it's always like that, but it is like fire. Like you get some like just some truffles. You ever had a good truffle or turtle? I'm all about the turtles now.

• 58:54Shaan Puri?

  Great talking to Turtle. It is nothing to bat an eye about.

• 58:57Sam Parr?

  But yeah, look up Omaha Steaks, look up 1-800-FLOWERS. These are really interesting companies to study because like, they're also interesting because you think Omaha Steaks and you like judge them of like, or at least I did. I'm like, oh, you know, it's just like some Omaha company. They can't be that sophisticated. They are incredibly sophisticated, at least in terms of internet marketing. And so they're really interesting to go and study.

• 59:18Shaan Puri?

  Right. Okay, cool. Let's, uh, let's, let's cap it here. Um, I, by the way, there's a bunch of fun stuff coming. So I've got to say, I want to do the studio tour and breakdown of how we did this like studio change and what, you know, what we learned from it, what it cost, all that good stuff. Um, I want to do a plan for next year. We're going to do our annual awards. We're going to drop the new intro music. We're going to do all kinds of different stuff. And, uh, we're going to talk about where the pod's going. So I want to do that soon. And, um, yeah, I think, I think in the next, the next two weeks, I think we're going to have some fire podcasts.

• 59:52Sam Parr?

  Yeah, we gotta have, are we going to do the Milli Awards?

• 59:55Shaan Puri?

  We gotta do it with Andrew again. Yeah. And let's get Andrew Wilkinson booked again. So we can do the Milli Awards.

• 1:00:00Sam Parr?

  And we have, uh, Austin Reef. I'm excited for Austin. Uh, so it's going to be a good couple of weeks.