Frame Breaking Businesses: From Pomegranate Juice to VPNs

Episode 357: Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) and Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) talk about four businesses that change the way you think about what they do... from VPNs to pomegranate juice and more. ----- Links: * Unclaimed Baggage store * Comparitech * Quinstreet * Highkey * Franklin Mint * Wonderful Company * 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: (02:30) - Teddy Bear Law (12:50) - Frame Breaking Businesses (13:40) - Comparitech (21:00) - Quinstreet (31:55) - Highkey / AJ Patel (46:15) - Stewart Resnick ------ 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.

• 0:00Sam Parr?

  So in like 2012, 2013, 2014, he started a vitamin brand and it only did okay. And then he started also tinkering with a skincare brand, which it actually did much better. It got to like 10 million or so in revenue. He hired a CEO, the CEO kind of like drove it into the ground and didn't really do that well. And so he started focusing again to his vitamin brand. And he's like, look, it's doing okay, but who's the best customer of a vitamin company? Dogs. Because this is, I'm not disparaging him, but like, do they work? Yeah, why not? Like Fugazi, you know, like.

• 0:37Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, welcome to Fugazi Inc. We make supplements for dogs. They'll never tell you if it works or doesn't work.

• 0:50Sam Parr?

  What up?

• 0:51Shaan Puri?

  What up?

• 0:52Sam Parr?

  Are we supposed to like, start with like a catchphrase now?

• 0:57Shaan Puri?

  Hey, boys and girls, welcome to the business show where you learn how to make so much money that you'll get taxed out the ass. That's what rich people care about taxes. If you don't care about taxes yet, you ain't rich.

• 1:09Sam Parr?

  Do you care about taxes?

• 1:11Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:12Sam Parr?

  I like, I don't, I don't, I'm not going to live my life according to like where the low taxes are. But like, it's like the number two or number three thing that I'm thinking about. So I'm thinking about this whole New York, Texas thing. And I like do the math and I'm like, damn, like imagine I got to rent a place for, let's just say like 20 grand a month. Like that's how much taxes I'm paying by moving here versus staying or, you know, whatever it is, like a lot of money a month.

• 1:34Shaan Puri?

  Well, you have a good thing. You could do the like Texas is your main residence and spend four or five months out of the year in New York. So that's not so bad.

• 1:41Sam Parr?

  That's not so bad. But I need to do it with New York and Florida because Texas winter is not like winter, winter that's desirable enough that you want to winter there. You know what I mean?

• 1:54Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah. Dude, have you heard about this, like, the teddy bear law? The teddy bear rule?

• 1:58Sam Parr?

  What's that?

• 1:59Shaan Puri?

  So I was asking my tax guy, I was like-

• 2:02Sam Parr?

  Where you keep your, like, possessions?

• 2:04Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, basically, I was like, so what's the rule? Is it six months out of the year? What does it take to have residency in some place? And he was like, well, it's, there's a bunch of little factors. He's like, but one, he's like, there was a famous case with Derek Jeter, the New York Yankees shortstop. They're like, Jeter wanted, Jeter played for the Yankees in New York, but he didn't want to pay New York taxes. He wanted to pay Florida taxes because he's like, look, this is my home. This is where I live, blah, blah, blah. But you also have an apartment in New York and you play in New York. So you work there, your home is there and your kids go to school there, I think. And there, and so they ended up, it got ruled in court and they call it, I think, the name they call it is the, I haven't looked this up, is like the teddy bear law. And it's basically like, where would you keep your teddy bear? So the place you would call home.

• 2:47Shaan Puri?

  So like factors like where your kids go to school, where are the possessions that you love? It all goes into this like umbrella to be like, where do we actually think your home is? And, and actually, when I first heard this, I was like, wow, that's really like subjective for like a ruling or a law. And actually, it's one of the laws I kind of agree with. I actually think that that is more like how it should be done, which is like, dude, what's the spirit of this? Do you actually live here? Or do you just like stay here for exactly six months and one day every year? And I have to, you know, I don't actually know where you are at any given time. But if, you know, if you're working in a place, your kids go to school there, all your possessions are there, all your friends are there, your family is there, like, that's where you live.

• 3:27Sam Parr?

  As an avid listener of Dateline, one of the easiest ways to catch the husband who kills the wife is like three weeks before he either bought like, you know, a trash bag and like a shovel, or he Googled like how to dispose of a body. And last night I found myself Googling, and I was so embarrassed to do this. So I went to an incognito window. I was like, I can't Google this. Like, they're gonna know that I killed her. Yeah.

• 3:55Sam Parr?

  And it was like, how does the state that you're visiting know, like, like if I'm renting, and I didn't even know what to Google, by the way, I was trying to figure out how to phrase this. But if I live in Texas, how does New York even know that I'm there if I'm just renting a place?

• 4:10Shaan Puri?

  Dude, that's so funny. You said that. I did the same thing. And like, my queries sound exactly like, does the IRS really know? It's like, somehow, somehow that's how it's like formatted in my search.

• 4:23Sam Parr?

  Yeah, like I would Google what like, dude, Google needs to understand italicized.

• 4:27Shaan Puri?

  Really? Like the asterisk and everything. It's like, there's one browser that's just like, hmm, this guy's only ever incognito. And he's either looking at porn or taxes. Like, what's this guy's life like? Right? Because like, basically, it's like, you know, I'm trying to Google like,

• 4:44Shaan Puri?

  when you get, you know, if the IRS does this to you, is that like jail or just a fine?

• 4:51Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Are we breaking a rule or a law?

• 4:56Shaan Puri?

  Are taxes a recommendation or a requirement?

• 4:59Sam Parr?

  Well, when I learned Googling this, Googling this was the IRS, and I, it makes sense, but I didn't even understand it. IRS is for federal. So like, but I pay my federal taxes no matter what. But I'm like, okay, so then how does the state of New York actually know that I was ever here? And I'm trying to like, figure, I want to, I'm Googling that to follow the rule, but I am curious.

• 5:21Shaan Puri?

  And I was like, to be clear, in case they also listen to podcasts, I'm Googling this, A, for a friend, and B, to enforce the law on my friend, because I'm not here for anything else.

• 5:32Sam Parr?

  And I was just curious. I'm just curious. I'm like, literally, how does the state of New York even know that I exist?

• 5:38Shaan Puri?

  I'm the same way. I have the same way where I'll go down this rabbit hole. Then I'm like 30 minutes in, I'm like, why am I even looking for this? This is not applicable at all to me. But I'm like, I just want to know how it works. Like, I'll be like, when you keep the receipt, does anybody ever go read the receipts? Like, you know, what, what actually happened? Or like, you know, there's this Twitter account I love called How Stuff Works or something like that.

• 5:57Sam Parr?

  I love it.

• 5:57Shaan Puri?

  And today they posted a thing of like, it was like, how luggage gets loaded into an airplane? So there's a guy in the back of the airplane, and then there's like a conveyor belt shooting suitcases at him. And he's stacking it like a perfect Tetris grid. And I'm just like, dude, I love this account because it's always these, these things where I'm like, dude, how does the world actually work? Like, you know, I know I give them my suitcase, but what happens after that? And it's like, sort of the same thing with like, either taxes or like, Uh, I'll Google just like, you know, rich people don't pay taxes, dot, dot, dot. But how like, you know, like what are these loopholes that I hear about? Are there, are there really these loopholes? Like, are like, you know, universities have this endowment. What the hell are they doing with that?

• 6:39Shaan Puri?

  And I'm just like, always trying to get to the bottom of like, I want to have like an actual understanding of the, what's going on. And I feel like I have so little understanding about so many things on earth.

• 6:50Sam Parr?

  But it's so funny that you, you brought that book. I actually wrote, I'm like doing the thing with Maven again, the ideation bootcamp course. And, uh, I started talking about the book that I had as a kid called how stuff works. And there's another one where they just like split like a power tool into two. And you just see like a picture of like how a school bus like operates or whatever. And I'm like, the reason why researching, which is what you and I do for this podcast is cool is because whether you like it or not, America and the rest of the, well, most of the world is, you know, guided by capitalism and commerce. And so like, if you understand how like a business works, just like these books show you how like the luggage guy works, then you kind of understand like what's possible and what's not possible, why laws are the way they are, why art is the way it is, like you can, you, it's not just money making, but it's just like the earth, like just how the world and society.

• 7:35Sam Parr?

  And so, uh, I actually was just writing that yesterday and I totally agree. And I think that's why I like studying businesses is cool.

• 7:43Shaan Puri?

  And by the way, like, I think most people do this for science. They're like, you know, why is the sky blue? And like, there is an element of that, I'm talking about just like, here's a perfect example. Uh, we'll use the luggage one, for example. It's like, question, what happens if you just never pick up your suitcase? Or like, what happens if you just simply, like, I see those bags over there that say that they're waiting for someone to come get them? What happens if they don't like, is this just going to pile up forever?

• 8:07Sam Parr?

  You want to know what happens?

• 8:08Shaan Puri?

  Game of Dr. Mario? And then, yeah, I do know, yeah, I'll tee it up for you. Then there is an answer and it's actually kind of fascinating for somebody who goes and digs in and says like, okay, but then what? Right? Or like the, you know, like a kid, like, well, why do they do that? And why do they do that? And why do they do that? And then you get to what's it called unclaimed baggage or whatever it's called like that.

• 8:26Sam Parr?

  Was that the name of the company? So basically the hustle wrote about it. So if you go like the hustle unclaimed baggage, there's a company in like rural Alabama. I think it's Alabama or Arkansas called unclaimed baggage. And they sell $300 million a year worth of unclaimed bags. And they, it's like a huge thrift store, you know?

• 8:43Shaan Puri?

  Right. And, uh, And, uh, same thing with like the, uh, Like, you know, the shampoo at a hotel, like, you know, I use this thing once. What do they do with it? Do they just refill it and give it to the next person? I'm curious.

• 8:54Sam Parr?

  What do they do?

• 8:54Shaan Puri?

  It's like, oh, actually, there's the whole company that recycles these. They take the half-used shampoos from hotels and they said, they tell the hotel, hey, we'll pay you nothing for it, but we'll come collect it for you. We'll take it off your hands because you can't give that to the next guest. And then they take that and then they have like a basically a way to repackage and resell those and their brand is around lessening waste on earth. And they, that company does extremely well. And so you actually find companies at the end of all these because, again, this is like a giant little business ecosystem, just in the same way that like, you know, there's plankton that eat stuff off the whale's head or whatever. It's like, you know, basically, there's a little business that's going to solve every one of these edge cases all around the world, right? There's a person whose job it is to do that thing. And if you

• 9:37Shaan Puri?

  keep going far enough, you'll like, find those, those little nooks and crannies.

• 9:40Sam Parr?

  Well, which is a perfect segment for what I want to talk about today because here's, here's what I, I want to, I'm going to give you a bunch of examples of things that I've, I'm calling frame breaking businesses of like, things that I've discovered that have changed how I thought about stuff. And there's a story. And by the way, today, I was, I was thinking, I was like, today's my leg day because I'm putting you on my back and I'm carrying us for this episode. I, I, I've got a, I've got like,

• 10:07Shaan Puri?

  Side note, by the way, my mom yesterday, while I work out with my mom sometimes and she was like, Sam Parr's legs. She always calls you Sam Parr, full name. I love it. I don't know if she knows that's like your first and last, but Sam Parr's legs, man, he's got strong legs. And I was like, yeah, he's great. And she's like, I was just looking at his legs in the last video, the Mr. Beast video, because you were wearing like shorts on the couch or whatever. I was just looking at his legs. I didn't hear anything.

• 10:36Sam Parr?

  All right, mom. Hey, Sean's mom texts me. I'll send you some more pics and I'll send you some pictures of my legs. I got you.

• 10:45Sam Parr?

  It's genetics. So people, people comment on my legs. It's just, it was, I was born that way. So thank you. I appreciate the love though. Um, all right. So basically the reason I thought about this was because, uh, dig. So there's this website called dig. It's actually not that popular anymore, but if you're above 30, you probably know it. Dig and Reddit were competitors. And for a long time, dig was kind of beating Reddit, but they're both like the whole like front page of the internet type of businesses that had like tens of millions of monthly uniques and Kevin Rose, the founder of dig was on the cover of time as like meet Silicon Valley's new wonderkin, the guy who is 28 years old and worth a billion dollars or whatever. He was like the Mark Zuckerberg, like the next Zuckerberg and dig ended up not actually

• 11:27Sam Parr?

  winning this battle and they're currently for sale and I linked to their financials. Someone just sent this to me on Twitter. So it's not like I got this through, um, like I didn't like sign up for a service where I had to agree to confidentiality, but someone just sent this to me.

• 11:40Shaan Puri?

  Right. You signed to FDA, a full disclosure agreement where you're like, I will put this on blast if you send this random shit to me. Anonymous Twitter account.

• 11:49Sam Parr?

  That's exactly what happened. Someone just sent it to me. I didn't ask questions and I just looked at it, but I'll give you like the overview. The overview is that over the last year, they had 27 million users. So what's that? Two million a month? So which is not a lot. The hustle gets more than two million a month, just on our website. And we don't even try to get traffic on our website. So two million a month, their revenue.

• 12:07Shaan Puri?

  Slam, slam on dig. Nice. Keep going.

• 12:09Sam Parr?

  They're, okay. So their revenue for the year was something like a million or like 1.3 or like, it was like 1.2, 1.3, nothing, shit. Dig, which was supposed to be like, you know, a great website, only like, uh, 80, 70, 91,000, 44,000 a month in revenue. Horrible.

• 12:35Shaan Puri?

  Certified small boy shit. Yeah.

• 12:37Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And, but here's the thing is that this rep, this, this discrepancy, we're gonna call it the gap. The gap between how much we talked about them and their prestige and like, you know, the accolades that they get as but from, but the, the gap between where they actually are in reality, that gap is huge. So instead I'm gonna swap it and we're gonna have some frame breaking companies and we're gonna talk about the actual good type of gap. Um, and I want to show you a few businesses that people don't talk about that are actually phenomenal and really interesting. So I'm going to give you the first one, the first one I, we maybe talked about before, but I was, uh,

• 13:18Sam Parr?

  looking at Michael Bisping, Michael Bisping is a YouTuber for MMA and a VPN company sponsored him. And I thought that's kind of strange. So I just Googled like, what's a good VPN? And maybe I'll start buying a VPN, basically a VPN. If you're in America and you wanna like, tell the internet that you're in Europe, you use a VPN or if you're in like North Korea or one of the Koreas, whichever one would this would apply to, and you wanna act like you're in America, you use a VPN. That's a, that's a, that's a, or if you just wanna like, just search the web anonymously and you wanna Google stuff about taxes. Um, and that's what the VPN just for. And so I Googled best VPN and I came across this website called Compare Tech. That was kind of intriguing. So I linked to it. Do you see comparetech.com slash VPN?

• 14:03Sam Parr?

  So I started reading it and I was like, this is kind of an interesting site. And I looked them up on similar web and they get millions of views. And I scroll all the way to the bottom and I noticed that they're based in England. And the thing about England and the UK is that if you're a UK company that-

• 14:16Shaan Puri?

  Name all the things you love about, about England. Uh, maybe the tea, maybe you like the queen. And you like the fact that all companies' numbers are publicly available.

• 14:26Sam Parr?

  Yes. A lot of people don't know this, but if you are a company in the UK, I don't know what the threshold is. It could be as low as five, it could be as high as 10 million and you do over 10 million in revenue. You have to, there's this thing called Companies House, which is a very British name. It's like they're, I don't know if it's like, is it like their IRS or something like that, where you can go and log in and see all these financials from privately held companies. And I was curious about this little website called Compare Tech. So I went and looked it up on their, on Companies House. Can you see what their financials are? Do you have it up?

• 14:59Shaan Puri?

  I don't have it open now.

• 15:00Sam Parr?

  Okay, so I'm gonna pull it up and I I linked to it down there. It said financials. Basically, oh, fuck. The link broke on me, but basically their revenue for the trailing 12 months was 12 million. And their profit was 10 million. And this little website. That just reviews VPNs. It's I'm sure it's more sophisticated than what it looks like, but it's not good looking. It's not like, uh, doesn't have like the best design. And I believe this website ended up selling for like $200 million. And I think it only gets like a million visits a month. It sold, uh, last year. Or six, six or 10, six or 12 months ago. Interesting site, right?

• 15:44Shaan Puri?

  That's crazy. It was also only started in 2015. So sometimes I see these sites that I'm like, oh, wow, this thing gets so much traffic and they just send clicks out to whatever. You know, basically their business model is they write about which VPN to use. And then they link you to the VPN and they get a kickback from any whichever link you click of the 10. They'll get a kickback from all 10 for, you know, some, some dollar value, right? If the VPN says, cool, every customer's worth $300 to us, we'll pay $100 to anybody that refers as a customer. And so these guys will do, you know, some, some numbers like that. Normally, when I see that those like really high trafficked sites that sort of just look very basic. It's like, you know, this was started in 2004. I'm like, well.

• 16:25Shaan Puri?

  Okay, props to you. You had the foresight to know that, like, very early on in like the, you know, the, the internet days or Google's days. Somebody was like, I'm gonna start reviewing credit cards. I'm gonna start reviewing VPN providers. I'm gonna start reviewing what email software is best. And they made what email software is best.com and like, you know, that they rake in $6 million a year. You know, 90% profit margin, something silly like that. And like, you know, the person is, has spent the last 15 years trying to figure out, you know, the meaning of life because they, they won the business game already. And so that's normally what you see, but 2015 is like pretty new for a site like this.

• 17:00Sam Parr?

  It's pretty new. And here, here's their financials. I went and found them on company's house. In 2021, they did 15 million in revenue. And 13.2 million in profit. The year before that, 10 million in revenue, 9.5 million in profit. That's crazy. This is crazy, right?

• 17:18Shaan Puri?

  Right. Yeah, I'm a big fan of these now. By the way, do you ever, do you play with SEO a lot? Cause growth tactics are like martial arts. It's like you could be a black belt in jujitsu and know nothing about karate, right? Or you know karate and you're nothing about taekwondo or judo. You don't know how to do any grappling and any throws. And that's how I feel about growth channels. It's like, I've spent a lot of my career figuring out virality. Spent a lot of my career figuring out paid marketing now with e-commerce, things like that. The thing I've never touched is SEO.

• 17:54Sam Parr?

  Dude, I know.

• 17:54Shaan Puri?

  I'm like an absolute novice on it, absolute beginner.

• 17:57Sam Parr?

  I know SEO like an Ivy League architect knows about construction. Like, maybe I can have a conversation with a construction worker who's gonna build my project and like kind of know, but like, I'm not gonna be able to reference like which rivet to use. And you could kind of lie to me sometimes and I wouldn't exactly know if you were or were not.

• 18:16Shaan Puri?

  Right, right. You put me on the job site and I'm gonna ask for some gloves. Cause I don't wanna hurt my hands.

• 18:22Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I'm just gonna, everything's gonna be called a monkey wrench. So like, I don't entirely understand SEO, but I do believe it's the, maybe the best one. Like, it's like, like if you nail it, I think it's the best thing to nail or one of.

• 18:36Shaan Puri?

  It's like that, that seat in the office when Dwight's like, you know, trying to ignore Jim. And then Jim's like Dwight, they're doing like a job interview. Which bear is best? He's like, that's a stupid question. There's, and he's like.

• 18:49Sam Parr?

  Well, there's basically school, yeah. Well, there's basically school, two schools of thoughts here. Wrong. Yeah.

• 18:57Shaan Puri?

  That's how I feel about like, you know, is SEO best? It's like, I don't know, is a brown bear best or is a black bear best? Like every, every one of these growth channels is like, has something awesome and then something terrible. And the one you're in, you know it too well usually, and you're like, this thing is awful. I wish I could just go on Facebook and spend money and get two, well, spend a dollar, get two dollars back. And the Facebook guy's like, oh my God, you can get free traffic on Google. And the Google guy's like, holy shit, this thing grows virally? Wow, what is that? You know, and so I think there's, there's no best.

• 19:25Sam Parr?

  I, yeah, I would agree. And by the way, this site Compare Tech, it was sold for, uh, yeah, it was sold for over a hundred million dollars, I believe this year, 2022. For like one

• 19:37Shaan Puri?

  Alright, give me, give me another frame breaker. That's a great first one.

• 19:40Sam Parr?

  Alright, another one. A company called

• 19:41Shaan Puri?

  By the way, can I give a PS here, just in case something good happens? A PS is, uh, with the Milk Road, today we run, or like our business model is, is newsletter ads. And I had asked Ben, I was like, Ben, if we were going to sell a product, our own product, instead of advertise other people's products, what, what would be, what product would work best? What bear is best, Ben? And he was like, VPN dude.

• 20:04Shaan Puri?

  He's like, we should just launch our own VPN. Fits the audience.

• 20:07Sam Parr?

  You gotta come up with a better name though.

• 20:08Shaan Puri?

  Business model. We just have to buy an existing VPN and plug in our distribution. And so if anyone does a VPN, they want to sell me, uh, I'm happy to either buy one or build our own.

• 20:16Sam Parr?

  Yeah, you gotta come up with like some cute branding, like VP Nope. You know what I mean? Like, can't track me. You know, like, you gotta come up with something cute, just like you do at Milk Road and so

• 20:24Shaan Puri?

  I think we gotta just get, get rid of VP and N. That's just too whatever. It needs to be like, you know, a whatever, Mysterio, or like, you know, some like, you know, you know, secret juice. And it's like, oh, I use secret juice.

• 20:37Sam Parr?

  I'm on board with that.

• 20:39Shaan Puri?

  Don't tell, don't tell, you know?

• 20:41Sam Parr?

  Yeah, just call it Don't Tell Mom. Uh, alright, the next one. Quinn Street. Have you heard of Quinn Street?

• 20:46Shaan Puri?

  Hmm, no.

• 20:48Sam Parr?

  Alright, Google Quinn Street and go to their website for me.

• 20:52Shaan Puri?

  Alright, I'm going.

• 20:55Sam Parr?

  And tell me like what the

• 20:56Shaan Puri?

  My guess is, I thought this was a fashion brand, if you told me nothing else, but okay, I'm guessing it's not. Alright, Quinn Street, I just see a guy and it says, where performance drives digital. And then there's like another stock photo and it says

• 21:06Sam Parr?

  And this guy

• 21:07Shaan Puri?

  Accessing high intent prospects.

• 21:09Sam Parr?

  This guy's a horrible stock mod. Like, these guys on here aren't ugly enough to be like a stock model. They're not good looking enough to be, like, they look like they're like, out of like, a, like, Spanish or, like, geometry textbook.

• 21:24Shaan Puri?

  Telemundo.

• 21:25Sam Parr?

  Yeah, like, they, they just look like, just normal, you know, it's like, it's, they're so normal that they don't even look

• 21:31Shaan Puri?

  Why does your skin have like, you know, normal people wrinkles and blemishes? That's not right? Stock photo, you need to be perfectly airbrushed.

• 21:38Sam Parr?

  Right.

• 21:38Shaan Puri?

  Is this the founder? It looks like the founder.

• 21:40Sam Parr?

  I don't know. I don't know who the founder is, but it's like a simple ass website that's not good looking. All right.

• 21:46Shaan Puri?

  This dude, I'm going through the slideshow. This slideshow is hilarious, dude. This looks like, you know, Meredith from The Office.

• 21:51Sam Parr?

  This is like. That's what I'm saying. They're like so normal that they're not that, that it looks silly. So this, this company, I'm going to explain what they do. I'm going to tell you how big they are. So what this company does is they used to own, and I don't know if they still own these sites, but I'll tell you what they, what they still own now. But they used to own websites like Directory of Schools.com or CampusCorner.com or LearninginLife.com or FindTheRightSchool.com. Just like these like boring websites that don't look that cool. And when you Google Ohio Insurance, Ohio Auto Insurance, they come up number one. You enter in information and they sell that information to the highest bidder for insurance people. This website, it's like ugly looking. It's simple looking and you like, a lot of people disrespect it.

• 22:36Sam Parr?

  They made about 600 million in revenue last year.

• 22:40Shaan Puri?

  It's publicly traded.

• 22:41Sam Parr?

  It's publicly traded. That's crazy, right? This is, this is another frame breaking company. Like they have, if you click their about page on Quinn Street, they're about, or one of their forums, like it doesn't work. Like it's like, it goes to like a 401, like they don't have it set up.

• 22:58Shaan Puri?

  Dude, okay, you know, when you meet someone and you're like, I can't tell if this person is absolutely a genius or if they're completely idiotic. Or if you're in San Francisco, you see somebody walk into a fancy restaurant with like a hoodie and like, you know, they're like wearing one Albird and one croc. And you're like, all right, this person's either homeless or a billionaire, right? Like, that's like a pretty common situation in San Francisco. That's how I feel when I go to websites like this. I'm like, these are either the biggest dummies on earth and don't, because I can't, I can't understand what they do, right? Their website is full of pages.

• 23:30Sam Parr?

  It just says like, "Performance are our product" or something like that.

• 23:33Shaan Puri?

  It's like going into a video game and like you taught, you bump into one of the, the stock characters that just like, is like, oh, hey, didn't see you there. Hello. And this is like, keeps repeating on loop some random shit that doesn't make any sense. That's their website. So these websites, they're either like absolute money printers or it's like, you know, someone's aunt who's got some dream of like, you know, being successful and they're never going to make it because this makes no sense. I can't tell. And now when I get to finally, then I see the key money tab, investor relations. If you got an investor relations tab on your, on your website, like it's working, right? Like, you know, put in the Bill Clinton clip where he's like, I did not have relations with that woman. That's how, that's how I feel when I see the investor relations tab. I know some shit's going down.

• 24:13Sam Parr?

  That's hilarious.

• 24:18Speaker 02

  Our software is the worst. Have you heard of HubSpot? See, most CRMs are a cobbled together mess, but HubSpot is easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous. I think I love our new CRM. Our software is the best. HubSpot, grow better.

• 24:33Sam Parr?

  It's kind of, this whole website and this whole brand, it reminds me of like a fourth grade classroom with like the, like, you know, like teamwork and like each letter, like it spells a certain word. Do you know what I mean? Or like,

• 24:43Shaan Puri?

  It's like teamwork. T is for teamwork.

• 24:49Shaan Puri?

  Everybody.

• 24:51Sam Parr?

  That's what this whole website looks like, but it makes 500, 600 ish million in revenue. Market cap isn't very great because it's a lead gen company and those typically just don't have good market caps, but it's just crazy. They just ignored all the unimportant stuff, like how good does their website, their like, public facing brand website look? And they only focus on just the results, I guess. And they own all these other websites that don't look so bad and they clearly get results. But it's like a really interesting company and it's another frame breaking business where they just don't give a shit about the things that most people care about. And it works. It's effective.

• 25:30Shaan Puri?

  So I recently met two guys who run a business like this and they've run three other businesses like this and exited them. I'm going to share, I can't share the story now, but I'm hoping one month from today, I could share a kind of crazy story about them. So I'm just going to put that there. A teaser for a future, one month from today, you know, there will be a crazy story about these two guys. I might even have them on the podcast. I don't know yet, but, but this is, this is insane. This is a Sam Parr special. How did you find Quinn Street? Where, where were you? What was in, what VPN and private browser did you have open when you were searching for this?

• 26:09Sam Parr?

  Two ways. One, a guy named Jackie Chu, who I like, just like tweeted at this, tweeted me this a while ago and I just saved it. And then number two, Joe Spicer, my partner in a bunch of stuff. He told me he used to work with them. He owned an ad network and he was like in the early 2000s. Like I worked with them. They basically, right now they do car insurance and things like that, but they used to do University of Phoenix. So University of Phoenix, you, they would, you know, they owned all these school websites. You would Google like, what's a good online degree? They figured out that, and this, what, what, these guys look unsophisticated. They're not. They're very sophisticated. They like know how to get traffic to websites. They know how to do SEO. Like they look like a fat guy who like, it trains jujitsu, just like, just like you talked about,

• 26:51Sam Parr?

  like, oh, this guy, he's good. And, but then he'd like, you know, can like put you in a headlock, but in three seconds. That's what these guys are. And so anyway, I found it just by goofing around and talking to people.

• 27:03Shaan Puri?

  This is crazy. So they own insurance.com, insure.com, carinsurance.com, cardratings.com, moneyrates, banktracker, M1 and modernize home services.

• 27:11Sam Parr?

  And then they partner with way more.

• 27:14Shaan Puri?

  It's wild. By the way, that's a really great source for info is talk to people at ad networks.

• 27:20Sam Parr?

  Yeah, they know everything.

• 27:20Shaan Puri?

  People who like work at Google Cloud or AWS. They know everything. They see everything. They, they know who's making money and who's not. They know who's getting traffic and who's not. And like, if you ever wanted to go figure out your next gig, go be like, uh, yeah, I'll be janitor at this, like mobile ad network, or I'm going to go be janitor at AWS. My payment, all I need is like login credentials into the dashboard, right? Like to, I'll be a account rep for high value clients and therefore I need that list of the high value accounts that we have. And you basically just mine that and you're like, all right, which one of the, you know, whom I gotta copy?

• 28:01Sam Parr?

  Dude, there's a website.

• 28:02Shaan Puri?

  Going to a barber shop and you see like, I'll take the number 12, the fuckboy fade, please. The line on the side, exactly like that, please.

• 28:12Sam Parr?

  Do you guys do eyebrow lightning bolts? No? Okay, fine. I'll take the number 12 then.

• 28:22Sam Parr?

  Funny. Dude, all right. The next one is in your world. Not just because he's an Indian guy, but because he's an ECO guy.

• 28:35Shaan Puri?

  Come up with some reason, come up with some reason that it's not just that.

• 28:38Sam Parr?

  I don't know, man. Indian entrepreneurs, you guys are taking over the world. I'm sure you guys all are part of the same tribe. You know one another, kinda. There's only a billion of you. So this guy, all right. So I was looking at the Inc. 5000 list. Of all the list, that's the only one that like, kinda matters. It's still, you could still game it.

• 28:55Shaan Puri?

  Really, dude? I see this all the time. I see the random ass, some digital agency that I've worked with that does like, nothing special. They're like, we're a three-time Inc. 5000 winner. I'm like, what is this list based off of?

• 29:08Sam Parr?

  You could still, it's supposed to be based on revenue and they're supposed, so I don't trust Inc. anymore, but I used to. And when I did, they,

• 29:14Shaan Puri?

  Okay, listen. I clicked the link for 2022. BlockFi is number one. BlockFi basically just went out of business like three months ago. So I think that tells me everything I need to know about you and your goddamn list.

• 29:27Sam Parr?

  They'd already written the story, though.

• 29:31Shaan Puri?

  Greatest active athletes, Bill Russell. Like, he just passed away two weeks ago.

• 29:38Sam Parr?

  They like created the list and someone who works here are like, hey, uh, we gotta remove BlockFi from number one. And they're like, huh, seems like a lot of work. They're like, look, I don't make up the rules here. I just think them up and write them down.

• 29:53Shaan Puri?

  According to us is 245,000% this year. It's like, yeah, you forgot the negative side, dude.

• 30:03Sam Parr?

  They're like, bud, it's like, it's so far away, the computer.

• 30:10Shaan Puri?

  I don't know where my charger is.

• 30:14Sam Parr?

  That's what the Inc. 5000 is. You go to their office.

• 30:20Shaan Puri?

  No one knows where the charger is at Inc.

• 30:26Shaan Puri?

  We can order one, but we would need our computer to do that. I guess I could stream my best behind my way home.

• 30:33Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but they're like, oh, it's happy hour. Zachary's, have you ever been at a, have you ever been at like a company happy hour? And like, you'll hear news that something really, really bad has happened. And had you heard about that during the day, you'd be like livid.

• 30:48Shaan Puri?

  I'm gonna act on this.

• 30:49Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I'm gonna fucking kill somebody like this is livid. And then you hear about it like when you're laughing at happy hour, you're like,

• 30:55Sam Parr?

  yeah, and like,

• 30:58Sam Parr?

  that's what happened to you. You know what I'm talking about? You ever been at like a company happy hour, do you like hear bad news? And you're like, oh, fuck it.

• 31:04Shaan Puri?

  We used to do ours on Friday. It was called the Friday wind down and it was like wine and cheese and like whatever. You know, that office was pretty posh.

• 31:11Sam Parr?

  Don't seem like a bunch of wine and cheese types of guy, though.

• 31:13Shaan Puri?

  I know, but the office, before I joined, the office was pretty, you know, adult and mature and like sophisticated people. And then I joined, I started hiring people that would sleep at the office. It's like, it became this crazy culture clash. We ended up ending it, but it was so funny because it would be like Friday. You look at the numbers like, well, still don't have product market fit, I guess. All right, let's just head over to the, to the office bar and just drink for a bit. Like, oh, servers down is like, how much traffic do you think we get on the weekends anyways?

• 31:45Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 31:45Shaan Puri?

  And then one guy would go back to his desk to like fix the thing or like you check, they checked their email like, oh, we gotta go fix this. And then everybody else would be like, sort of watch them walk away. Be like, all right, if he looks like he's having trouble, I'll go too.

• 31:59Sam Parr?

  Like, no, don't.

• 32:07Sam Parr?

  That's how you talk. It's just the voice of like, well, let me know if you need anything.

• 32:17Sam Parr?

  I'm sorry, dude, I was looking at this eight, five, thousand, which apparently just bullshit. Blackbaud, I didn't realize, I saw Blackbaud was number one. I didn't, I didn't realize that that was the company that like went out of business with. So, yeah, the list is kind of null at this point. It doesn't really matter. I saw someone who's number six or number seven. It's called High Key. It's like a keto cookie business type of thing. And the guy's last name, I don't know if it says it on this list, but this other list I was looking at, it was Patel. And they use his real name, but I was like, wait, I think that sounds like AJ Patel. So, who I recognize and High Key was like six or five. Do you see what it is on the list?

• 32:54Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's number five or six. Yeah.

• 32:55Sam Parr?

  And they grew by forty one thousand percent. I think that just means forty one X, right? So like if it was a million, they're due forty two million now or forty one million.

• 33:03Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, again, these numbers. By the way, my new favorite word, fugazi. Have you ever heard this word?

• 33:10Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it just means like fake, right?

• 33:12Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, but I'm all about the word fugazi. I feel like I can own this corner. I don't know anyone who says it. And absolute pleasure, absolute treat to say that.

• 33:21Sam Parr?

  Yeah, fugazi. It's like, well.

• 33:22Sam Parr?

  It's like the most popular line in Wolf of Wall Street.

• 33:25Sam Parr?

  Fugazi, fugazi. Yeah, it's all fake. You know, just carry the twelve, you know, like I just can't do this type of math. So this guy, A.J. Patel, he started this thing called High Key, which I would imagine is in the thirty or forty million range. But listen to this guy. So he's probably in his later thirties, probably thirty five or thirty six. So in like two thousand twelve, two thousand thirteen, two thousand fourteen, he started a vitamin brand. And it only did okay. And then he started also tinkering with a skincare brand, which it actually did much better. It got to like ten million or so in revenue. He hired a CEO. The CEO kind of like drove it into the ground and didn't really do that well. And so he started focusing again to his vitamin brand. And he's like, look, it's doing okay. But who's the best customer of a vitamin company? Dogs.

• 34:12Sam Parr?

  Because this is, I'm not disparaging him, but like, do they work? Yeah, why not? Like fugazi, you know, like.

• 34:21Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, forgot. Welcome to fugazi, Inc. We make supplements for dogs. They'll never tell you if it works or doesn't work.

• 34:28Sam Parr?

  Yeah, you know what I mean? It's like, it's like, what's that memory loss game where it's like brain teasers? You know, brain dacity or brain acid. It's like, it's like.

• 34:37Shaan Puri?

  Neurocity, no, no.

• 34:38Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's like having like, like, like, like an ad campaign towards those with amnesia, like, or with like Alzheimer's. It's like, does it work? Yeah, maybe. So that's like what like these vitamins for dogs are like, who knows if it actually works? And he starts growing this company and he pivots from like, you know, normal vitamins to dog vitamins. And he starts growing this thing and it takes off after a while and he kills it. He gets to twenty five. Million in revenue and then he sells part of it to a PE company and he took $60 million off the table. Then he grew up for another three years and sold it for like $650 million and he still owned like half of it. So collectively he made 300, 400 million dollars at the age of

• 35:20Sam Parr?

  32 and this guy isn't in Silicon Valley. He's not in New York. He's not in Brooklyn. He's in Orlando, Florida, capital of Jorts, Jorts City, USA. You know, Jorts City, white New Balance Town,

• 35:36Shaan Puri?

  USA. 22 listeners in Orlando. They all just collectively looked down at their lap and came back and nodded like, well, facts of fact, baby.

• 35:45Sam Parr?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, like, you know, the England or Illinois is the land of Lincoln. Florida is like land of Dog the Bounty Hunter, you know, like, and that's where this, this, he's born in India, Indian immigrant, came over, decided for some reason, Florida's the place, and knocked it out the park and not really well known. And I was just like researching him and Hykey is now number six on this list. They grew 41%, 41,000%, so 41X. So if they were doing a million in revenue or 500,000 in revenue, they're doing 20 to 40 million in revenue now. So it's another nine-figure in value brand. And this guy's just quietly crushing it and I love it.

• 36:29Sam Parr?

  And I watched a talk with him. There's this thing, there's this website called capitalism.com.

• 36:35Shaan Puri?

  Dude, I'm reading the transcript of that talk right now as you speak. It's pretty crazy. So, so let me just recap. This guy's known mostly for, he sold Zesty Paws, that, that company for 600 million, I think, right? So the

• 36:48Sam Parr?

  It was over. In the, in the, in the transcript, he says, yeah, the public number is 600, but it actually got raised a little bit higher.

• 36:57Shaan Puri?

  Wow. And he, he also has Hykey snacks. In this thing, it says his first business, like his first kind of side hustle was he was selling, he's like, I played Zinga poker and I got to a million. By the way, I did this exact same thing. That's why this stood out to me.

• 37:11Sam Parr?

  I told you, you guys are brothers, man. You guys are cousins.

• 37:14Shaan Puri?

  Now I know the connection. So he got to a million chips. He sold it for 37 bucks. I did this on PokerStars. I grinded my way. I accumulated a million. That was my actual first million. It was a million fake poker chips on PokerStars and I sold it for $13. And I tell you what, I've never felt like more of a prostitute in my life. I was like, wow, I just worked so hard for like three months to get the, you know, like just grinding the free money game. And I got to a million chips and I sold it for $13 via PayPal. And then I proceeded to lose the $13 immediately on the real money tables. And I was like, I had never felt like, you know,

• 37:52Sam Parr?

  You should go take a shower. I feel dirty.

• 37:54Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I Googled like, can I declare bankruptcy just out of embarrassment? Is there, is there some like version of that? Cause I was so embarrassed of like the, the terrible trade I had done. He said he did that same thing and he started doing that as a like, as a market basically on eBay. And I think he made like a hundred or 200 grand. Just doing the, the fake poker chips, like buying and selling basically.

• 38:16Sam Parr?

  Which is, it's kind of like, uh, you know, it's kind of like a kid being good at chess when they're six. Like if you're doing that on eBay, it's like,

• 38:24Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you're gonna,

• 38:25Sam Parr?

  Yeah, well, just here's all my money. Just hopefully you'll figure it out one day. Just get me back where you can. Like that's what you do when you, when you meet people doing things like that. That's like,

• 38:33Shaan Puri?

  We, we need this guy on, uh, and I'll give you,

• 38:35Sam Parr?

  I'm talking to him. I've been talking to him on Facebook. I got him.

• 38:38Shaan Puri?

  He's, he clearly has, you know, he comes from our, he's cut from the same, uh, the same cloth. I don't know what, what kind of cloth that is, but, but it's definitely our cloth.

• 38:48Sam Parr?

  We'll assume it's silk. Uh, but dude, this guy, he, I started becoming friends with him on Facebook. Never talked to him in my life. There's a software that I needed to use. I don't want to out him, but there's a software I needed to use and it's like 10 grand a year. And I mentioned to him that I use it. He goes, oh, here, I have an annual subscription. Here's my password. And he's been letting me use it. It's free, like $10,000 a year subscription. So this guy, this guy is my guy.

• 39:10Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 39:11Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And so what's the second reason why, why we need him on here?

• 39:14Shaan Puri?

  Because I just Googled his name, A.J. Patel. Now here's a guy sold a company for over 600 million, sold another company. He's got high key snacks. He's sitting on store shelves everywhere in the, across the country. Guess what Google puts up in the like, Google thinks I'm talking about Patel AJ MD, the doctor in San Francisco. Dude, no matter what an Indian guy does in business, the doctor is still number one. He's still at the top of the ranks. And so he needs to come on this pod so we can, we can get this guy's SEO up.

• 39:44Sam Parr?

  But it's like, what's Jessica Alba's company, Honest? The guy who started that, his name's Brian Lee. He started like that shoe dazzle and like legal zoom. If you Google Brian Lee, like he ain't coming up.

• 39:56Shaan Puri?

  Oh dude, it's a wrestler. It's a, it's a guy who looks like Undertaker or like Big Show or something.

• 40:02Sam Parr?

  Yeah, like Brian Lee, like it doesn't matter if you're a billionaire or not, you know, you can, which by the way, fame is always way better than, than money. So wrestling, wrestling beats being a billionaire. But this guy in his talk, he said something amazing. So like he hired the CEO to run his skincare brand. And he says, yeah, like it stunk. This guy, like I gave him the reins and I told him to do it. And he totally talked slick to me and I thought he knew what he was doing. And he, and it didn't work. And the guy goes, um, the interviewer goes, well, was it a sad day when you fired him? Like it must've been hard, right? And AJ goes, no, it was awesome. Firing him was so easy because he was so bad and I felt so great, like getting rid of all the

• 40:43Sam Parr?

  dead weight. And I look at business as a living organism and like, I have zero emotional attachment. If someone doesn't serve the business and I'm willing to fire myself or anyone else, and I have zero sadness about it. And I saw that and I was like, hell yeah. I call that, you know what I call that? I call that Korean convenience store owner energy. You remember, you remember, here's why. You remember, um, remember like the Rodney King riots, like in the nineties? You remember like these pictures of like the Korean store business owners with like shotguns standing on top of their, like, they're like, no, we like, yeah, like, let's go. I was talking to like some people I invested in the other day, and they were telling me about their business and like how they're like, things aren't going that well. I'm like, well, can you do me a favor? Like do a

• 41:26Sam Parr?

  screen share? Let me see your calendar. And like, it was totally open and like they hadn't booked a lot. Like, I'm like, what? I'm like, every-

• 41:33Shaan Puri?

  Boarding meditation, afternoon walk.

• 41:36Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I'm like, dude, from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., it's gotta, you have to have sales calls set up with prospective customers and like, don't give me this nonsense of like, oh, well, you know, it went out of business, but we learned a lot. Or like, you know, like, we just couldn't, or the things that you're suggesting, Sam, they don't scale. I'm like, no, no, no, no, dude. Right now, you need to have that Korean store owner energy where it's just like, if you don't make this work, you don't feed your family and maybe you're gonna get deported. Like, you need to have that, like, like, that, that energy of like-

• 42:09Shaan Puri?

  Starvation with a side of deportation is how Sam likes his dishes served.

• 42:13Sam Parr?

  Dude, you have to have that energy sometimes. Like, of course, like, once things going, well, yeah, you gotta get like beyond like scale and all that stuff. But like, early on, it does, call yourself a startup, call yourself, it didn't matter what you call yourself, you're just a convenience store owner. And like, some convenience stores, you go there and they have every type of kind bar you could ever imagine. That's where I'm going. Other type of convenience stores, like, you know, they don't have what I want. I ain't ever going there again. You gotta be that convenience store that has every kind bar, every cliff bar, has a shtick and is just grinding and knows your name. They are willing to call me like, you know, like, what do you want? The usual? That type of, that's what like, a lot of startup founders need. And so, this guy, A.J. Patel, he's got that Korean store business owner energy, you know, that like immigrant hustle. I love it.

• 42:57Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, he's great and that's great. And I feel like we know so many people that it's like, I meet with them and I hear them talking and it's like, oh, let's just fast forward to the part where you write a Medium article called My Next Chapter or Our Next, Our Next Adventure. And then you're gonna sign off saying onwards?

• 43:16Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 43:16Shaan Puri?

  Like, you're a fucking captain of a ship in the 1700s. Like, ahoy, matey, your business is failing. Wake up. Do something. Don't just sit there and lose and then go work at Facebook and write my next chapter. I'm so excited to lead, you know, you know, digital, digital ad products at Facebook now for the next two years of my life before I go out and do this same stupid thing again. It's like, wake up, go figure this out, right? Figure out something that's gonna work. I don't care what you do. I don't even care if it's bad. But like, I need to see some like, some serious action being taken, you know, and like, realize your shit is not working.

• 43:54Sam Parr?

  And like I invest in startups and I know that the name of the game is you're gonna lose most of your money and only a few are gonna like return all the money. But when I hear like their updates, I'm like, alright, I I'm okay with swinging and missing. I'm not actually okay with it, but I know that's part of the game. And it's just a numbers game. But for those not swinging, it doesn't matter if I only invested $5,000. I reply and I'm like, oh, you're losing and you suck for these reasons and you need to improve because I gave you my hard earned money. So you can have a good shot at trying something and you are not trying or taking a good shot. And that's pissing me off. And I told some of my other angel investor friends and they're like, well, I kind of feel that way, but I never say that. I'm like, what are you like, what, what? Why not? Why wouldn't you say this? It doesn't matter how little or how much you invested.

• 44:37Sam Parr?

  You gave your hard earned money to someone to like, take a swing, step to the plate, dog, like swing, but don't like, give me this nonsense.

• 44:45Shaan Puri?

  We um, we have this phrase I use in all my companies, which is that, alright, people are gonna make mistakes, but there's two types of mistakes and you have to, you have to decide when you, when you make a mistake, which one is it? Did you make an error of action? Or an error of inaction? An error of action is you tried something and you did it wrong, or it didn't work, or had a bad result. You know, you were trying really hard to do something and you just messed it up. That's okay. That's a fumble. No problem. Then there's an error of inaction, which is your mistake was that you didn't do something. You didn't think about something. You didn't anticipate it. You didn't plan. You know, you just forgot to do something. You dropped the ball. And that's the unforgivable one, right? So it's like, I'm always like number

• 45:28Shaan Puri?

  one to be like, bro, no problem. This was an error of action? That's great. I love errors of action. That's how you get better. And like, never feel bad or sorry for an error of action. For an error of inaction, I now have a problem. And so I feel the same way with founders that I invest in. It's like, some of them, I'm like, oh, man, they're just banging their head against this wall. I will only ever say something to somebody if I feel like if it's, if they're making errors of action. When they're making errors of inaction, my experience, I did it twice now. And I was just like, hey, guys, like,

• 46:00Shaan Puri?

  You're like, your update makes it sounds like everything's okay, but like, read what you said. Everything is not okay. And like, you gotta do something. What can we do here? And I like rolled up my sleeves and I was like, helping them with their strategy and their pivot and then their investor deck to raise money because they're running out of money. And I same thing with the other one. I was like, hey, guys, like this is just not working. Like you don't have product market fit. You have like two customers after two years. Like, what's going on? And they're like, no, we're really excited about the pipeline. We think that's, that doesn't, that's not fair. And I was just like, oh my God. Not only were you like not aware of it, you're actually in denial of it. Wow. This is like, you know, a complete waste of my time. And, you know, sure enough, in both cases, they, you know,

• 46:40Shaan Puri?

  my like, several days worth of like full-time effort to try to help them resulted in nothing. And so, you know, I now I'm picking, I'm a little bit pickier where I'll test the waters and I'll see, does this person, if given a dose of reality, do they take it and say, more please? Or are they like, oh, I don't want this. And it's like, oh, if you don't want reality, then I don't want to, you know, I was just, it was a mistake on my part. I judged wrong, you know, my, my, my check was written to the wrong person here.

• 47:08Sam Parr?

  As the great Dr. Phil once said, don't piss on my back and tell me it's rain.

• 47:15Sam Parr?

  All right, I got one last one.

• 47:18Sam Parr?

  I have an interesting one. So it's like a Billy of the week, but someone who like, people never talk about, or at least they don't talk about a lot. And he's, he's got that gap. And when I say he, it's actually him and his wife, and his wife is actually the more interesting person. But this guy a little bit is more front-facing. His name's Stuart Resnick. Have you ever heard of Stuart Resnick? Do you know, have we talked about him?

• 47:39Shaan Puri?

  I don't know the name, but I just Googled it. And now I know they do the, the wonderful company or whatever. So, so give me his story.

• 47:46Sam Parr?

  All right. So listen to this guy's name Stuart Resnick, him and his wife, his wife's name is Linda. They're, they're based out of California. And so in the 1970s, he started a janitor business. And he just basically like was a janitor at one point, I think. And then he eventually hired a few more and he got contracts with buildings. And once he was in those buildings and had the contracts, he expanded to security guards. And at one point he had a thousand armed security. Guards on staff. So he like drew this janitor business into a security guard business. And it was amazing. He got some lucrative contracts to uh LAX and it turned out to be a great business. And he ended up selling it and he made a little bit of money. And with that money, he eventually bought the Franklin Mint, which at the time was one of the world's largest sellers of uh coins,

• 48:31Sam Parr?

  collectible coins. And oddly enough, you know who owns the Franklin Mint right now?

• 48:36Shaan Puri?

  No, no idea.

• 48:37Sam Parr?

  Former MFM guest. Ty Lopez.

• 48:40Shaan Puri?

  Does he really?

• 48:41Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 48:42Shaan Puri?

  That was my, that was a joke.

• 48:43Sam Parr?

  Yeah, basically, good job. So basically, like in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and even up to the 90s, like all the Marilyn Monroe coins and Elvis Presley coins, the Franklin Mint. They uh they're the ones who uh started it or uh who produced a lot of them. And so from there, he parlayed that into a couple of things. And now at this point, his company is called Wonderful Brands. They own a bunch of really interesting brands. They own landmark wines. That's not that interesting. Teleflora, do you know what Teleflora is? It's a pretty big $350 million a year business where you call, it's like 1-800-FLOWERS, a competitor. But here's the big ones that they own. The first is Wonderful Pistachios. You've seen those at the store, right? The second is Palm Wonderful. You know Palm Wonderful?

• 49:27Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, palm juice. Yeah, pomegranate.

• 49:28Sam Parr?

  Yeah, palm juice. And so basically, the wife Linda, she uh she's like, you know, I love pomegranates, but there's no, this was like in the in the 80s. She's like, there's not really a good pomegranate juice. Let's let's do this juice. And she goes, you know what? Pomegranate, it's good for your heart. It's uh, what else is it? And she like learns about what it's good for. And she was like, you know, it makes women have like an hour glass figure. Like it like is like good for you and like, you know, it makes you feel good, I guess. And so they made, she made the bottle like a, you know, it's like a, if you've ever seen it, it's like a

• 49:58Shaan Puri?

  Signature bottle, yeah.

• 49:59Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's like a signature bottle. Well, they own another company that has a wonderful signature bottle called Fiji Water. So they uh they also own Fiji, which has a square bottle. And at this point, they're privately owned. They're one of the largest producers of uh, one of the largest farm owners in America. So they own uh almond and pistachio farms and they do $4 billion a year in revenue.

• 50:23Shaan Puri?

  And it says, in 2018, they were the wealthiest farmers in the country.

• 50:28Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and this guy, you know, I believe the wife Linda, she's Jewish, but she's got this like Southern belle charm to her. Like she's from like Alabama or something. She reminds me like an old like, you know, Faulkner novel. Like she reminds me of like a character in Forrest Gump movie. And, and, but they're based out of California. And then he's got like a little New York vibe where he like, kind of comes off as like cool and hip, but they're farmers. They own, they're, they're huge farmers and they're like, have the best brands out there. Fiji is a great brand.

• 50:59Shaan Puri?

  And they created these. They're not just acquiring these, right?

• 51:01Sam Parr?

  No, they made them. Yeah. They, they make these brands and they own way more. Wonderful's a really good brand. I love Wonderful Pistachios. And so these guys just kill it. They're just quietly crushing it. And I think at this point, I think they're like 81 or 82 years old. And I still watch talks with them and they talk about how they go, well, how do you stay close to their customers? And they're like, well, I just read Twitter all day and I like read about, and like, sometimes I'll like-

• 51:24Shaan Puri?

  They're just like us.

• 51:26Sam Parr?

  Yeah, they're just like us. And so sometimes they, they just like, look at like what customer, they're like, we use Facebook and we just like skim like our page and we just see like which complaints are actually good and which are nonsense. And we reply and then we make changes and we just run our business that way. And they're really interesting people. So that's the Billies of the week. Stuart Resnick and his wife Linda.

• 51:46Shaan Puri?

  Linda. Wow. Yeah. She looks like the type of person that would give you a kiss on the cheek and then wipe off the lipstick.

• 51:51Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 51:53Shaan Puri?

  What just happened?

• 51:55Sam Parr?

  Yeah, yeah. I love those women. They always smell so good.

• 52:00Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 52:02Shaan Puri?

  Like going to the bathroom at one of the, at a woman like that's house is just an absolute pleasure. There's so many things you didn't even know, so many scents, scents you didn't even know existed. Like you'll spend 15 minutes just trying to wash your hands and get out of there. Cause it's like, oh wow, this, this is like a handkerchief instead of like a towel. This is amazing.

• 52:19Sam Parr?

  Yeah. At the end of this, you're going to be an expert on butterscotch candy. Like you're going to know all about, like those little like red, green and yellow candies that like, what the fuck? What are these things? It's like fruit punch candies. So I love this brand.

• 52:34Shaan Puri?

  This is amazing. And by the way, this Teleflora 1800 flowers thing, why doesn't somebody create?

• 52:40Shaan Puri?

  Like 1800 flowers, a teleflower flowers as just a ghost kitchen on DoorDash and on Uber Eats. Like, why is it, does that exist? Like, what, why can't I just order flowers? I've seen a flower thing when I go on there, but I think it's like DoorDash's own. I think you could create like either edible arrangements or a flower thing and just partner with local florists to fulfill the demand. And it's like, it's like way better than food, but I know whenever there's like a birthday or something like that, that's my go to thing now is just like, I'm gonna DoorDash them something, right? Cause it's like, I never planned in advance.

• 53:12Sam Parr?

  What's like a good enough?

• 53:14Shaan Puri?

  Like I'll do like, like the last one I did was like, you know, like a, a bunch of boba tea, like this person like really likes boba teas. So I sent them a bunch of boba or I'll send them like, you know, pizza and wings, or I'll send them a Cinnabon and whatever. Or I'll send them, you know, a bunch of ice cream or chocolate or whatever. Cause it's like, I can procrastinate until 30 minutes before like their birthday, you know, is over. And I could push this button and still be a great friend. Uh, so let me do that.

• 53:40Sam Parr?

  That's a great idea.

• 53:41Shaan Puri?

  Friend machine.

• 53:42Sam Parr?

  Noah Kagan for my birthday gifted me like 200 bucks worth of 16 ounce bottles of Topo Chico from Costco. And I like, that was, it was like, it was ease, it was like a month and a half supply of Topo Chico. And it's like all I drank for two and a half months or something. It was awesome.

• 53:57Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. On your birthday, I tried to see like, is there such a thing as gas station gift cards? But it was really tough to find anything that would work.

• 54:08Sam Parr?

  That's so funny.

• 54:09Shaan Puri?

  I was like, can I open a tab in my friend's name at your gas station? He'll walk in from time to time and you guys sell dip and like Coke Zero.

• 54:19Sam Parr?

  Do you guys sell nacho cheese?

• 54:23Sam Parr?

  What are you just the nacho cheese foods?

• 54:26Shaan Puri?

  If he brings his own cup, can he just walk out with some hot cheese?

• 54:33Sam Parr?

  That's awesome. That's disgusting.

• 54:36Shaan Puri?

  That's the episode. Dude, you really did carry that episode. That was amazing. This is, this is, this entire episode is going to be called the Sam Parr special. And it's just Sam bringing hit after hit after hit.

• 54:47Sam Parr?

  You want to know?

• 54:48Shaan Puri?

  Those quads to work.

• 54:49Sam Parr?

  You want to know what I'm most proud about? Guess how long that took me to prepare?

• 54:55Shaan Puri?

  I think you would be proud if you spent a long time.

• 54:58Sam Parr?

  Like 45 minutes.

• 55:00Shaan Puri?

  Oh, that went the other way.

• 55:01Sam Parr?

  It's 1pm now. We started recording at noon. I block off my schedule from 11 to noon is my research time. I did all of this in that one hour time. And I even took a bathroom break and I definitely did some pull ups. So.

• 55:14Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Did you like take the limitless pill? How did you do all that in like 45 minutes?

• 55:19Sam Parr?

  Uh, I just got a good brain. I don't know. I just.

• 55:23Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I just, my brain's good. I just was on fire today. I drank a bunch of coffee.

• 55:28Shaan Puri?

  Nice.

• 55:28Sam Parr?

  But that's it.

• 55:29Shaan Puri?

  All right, we're out of here.