Favorite Finds: From McDonald's to Twitter Famous, Pelosi's Finances & How To Close A Deal

Episode 498: Shaan Puri (https://twitter.com/ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (https://twitter.com/theSamParr) talk about the coolest stuff they’ve seen this week—like why Nancy Pelosi may be out-investing Warren Buffet and how Cultural Tutor is winning Twitter by taking it more seriously than everybody else. Want to see more MFM? Subscribe to our YouTube channel here. Want MFM Merch? Check out our store here. Want to see the best clips from MFM? Subscribe to our clips channel here. — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com/ Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Try Shepherd Out - https://www.supportshepherd.com/ • Shaan's Personal Assistant System - http://shaanpuri.com/remoteassistant • Power Writing Course - https://maven.com/generalist/writing • Small Boy Newsletter - https://smallboy.co/ • Daily Newsletter - https://www.shaanpuri.com/ — Show Notes: (0:00) Intro (2:00) Bill Gurley exposes the grift of regulation (7:00) Deion Sanders on “60 Minutes” (14:00) CFO Secrets on negotiating like an M&A master (21:00) The Cultural Tutor’s obsession with writing one tweet — Links: • Bill Gurley's All-In Talk - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9cO3-MLHOM • Autopilot: https://www.joinautopilot.com/ • Deion Sanders “60 Minutes” interview - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8PSWeRLGXs • Deion Sanders Jr’s YouTube Channel - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_n7zvkh3y3PLBIUA1lHkjw • The Score Takes Care of Itself - https://tinyurl.com/jtspe367 • CFO Secrets - "Uncovering The Mystery of Working Capital in M&A" - https://www.cfosecrets.io/p/working-capital-adjustment-peg-m-a • The Cultural Tutor on David Perell - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pBxikHRCXI • The Cultural Tutor twitter - https://twitter.com/culturaltutor • Vacation Sunscreen - https://www.vacation.inc/ — 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. — Other episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto • #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

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

• 0:00Shaan Puri?

  And he said this line that I love. He goes, that sounds silly. I understand that that my whole day is just about posting on Twitter. But everybody's just got a thing. That's my thing. Okay. And he's like, we've all got one thing. That's my thing. It's like, I love it.

• 0:25Sam Parr?

  All right. We have a special episode. We're going to talk about cool content that we've consumed. This might be short 20, 25 minutes, but you want to kick things off?

• 0:32Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Well, I want to say why I think this is a good type of episode to do. We, um, you know, one of the best ways to change your life is to change like your, if you want to change your body, you'll go change your diet. Uh, or your habits, your workout habits, or your eating habits. Uh, if you want to change your mind, you need to change your info diet. And so one of the questions I like asking, and I know you do too, which is like, you're like, it's like the dorkiest question ever. We probably should find a better way to phrase it.

• 0:57Sam Parr?

  No, it's a great question.

• 0:58Shaan Puri?

  But it's the answer is so good that we don't even care how lame the question sounds, but I've heard you say this before, like, so what media are you consuming? So what are you like, what are you reading nowadays? Or like, what content do you like to consume? Which is,

• 1:12Sam Parr?

  I do that in job interviews and people will be like, oh, I read like the New York Times. I'm like, no, come on. Like what subreddits are you like consuming? Do you use Reddit? What about Twitter, on Instagram? Who do you follow? What, where are you getting it? Who, who's influencing you?

• 1:24Shaan Puri?

  We asked Palmer Lucky this. We were like, what reddits, what subreddits do you go on? Cause his brain was, and it was like, he's firing off all these awesome things and all these different areas. It's like, that doesn't just happen by accident. That happens because he's got a set of interesting inputs that leads to a set of interesting outputs. We as MFM want to be one of those interesting inputs for you so that you become a more interesting, smart, uh, you know, person based off of listening to this, but we're just one thing. So what we want to share is what are the best of the inputs that we read, listened to, or watched this week that maybe you should go check out. So that's the premise of this. I, I wish more people did this. Of people that I find interesting, I wish they would be more, um, I wish they would curate for me like, yo, here's the one or two best things I read or watched this week or listened to,

• 2:09Shaan Puri?

  just to get my mind going and show me cool things I should go, go do. Anyways, that's the spiel.

• 2:13Sam Parr?

  I want you to kick it off. Um, I want you to do the top two. Uh, all three years are good. So why don't you kick it off with the top one?

• 2:20Shaan Puri?

  So one of the best things I watched this week is Bill Gurley's talk at All In. Have you heard his, his talk that he did at the All In conference?

• 2:29Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so he did a talk, I believe it was about Uber and regulation and like some of the surprising things they found.

• 2:35Shaan Puri?

  So Bill Gurley was the like lead investor in Uber. And he goes to all in and I expected him to talk about, I don't know, venture capital, business, investing, but he's now retired. He's a retired VC. So he's like, kind of in the no fucks given mode, which is great. Like, you know, when you get a really smart person who now feels like they have nothing to lose, they can go off. And I feel like that's the best way to describe this. It wasn't a talk. Bill Gurley went off. And so what he does is the talk is titled, I think it's like 2851 or something like that, some number. And he is basically, the talk is like, that's the number of miles between Silicon Valley and Washington DC. And what he does is he talks about regulation and how screwed up

• 3:19Shaan Puri?

  it makes business. And so he goes through example after example. And if it, to me, it felt almost like a John Oliver, you know, when John Oliver does those last week, tonight things where he just has a monologue, he's like exposing something that's screwed up or like Coffeezilla does this on YouTube where he'll go in and it'd be like Logan Paul's scam people and let me just expose the whole, the grift. He exposed the grift of regulation. And he's like, dude, look at this, like COVID happens. So they passed these laws about COVID testing. And look at this, the same test in the UK or Germany costs like, you know, seven times less as it did in the US. Why? Because in the US, it was mandated that only these two companies tests were going to be allowed. And in Germany, it was a free market.

• 4:04Shaan Puri?

  So the test, the cost went way down. Or he would give an example of, he's like, you know, here's the guy who passed this law. And he says that these are the only three vendors that the government can use. And so they charge this crazy amount. And then guess what? Here's his LinkedIn. Oh, what do you know? Five years later, he's on the board as the chief whatever at that same company that he handed this prize to. And it's like, the grift is real. And the thing I loved about this, because you're like, damn, that was a great talk. He's like, I've been working on this for like 15 years. He's like, basically for the last 15 years, every time I saw something that was just complete grift, I was screwed. Just to F'd up that part of the system, I wrote it down. I made a note. And so he's like, this talk is

• 4:45Shaan Puri?

  basically 15 years in the making of me kind of observing what's screwed up about the way that Washington works. At the end, his mic drop is basically like, he's like, I called this talk in 2051. That's the number of miles between San Francisco and DC. And when I talk to people in DC and they ask, you know, how does Silicon Valley, you know, do so much innovation? It's because we're so fucking far away from Washington DC. Like, we're just away from the poison of the way that that place works. And we're the farthest possible place away on the map in the United States from, from DC. So I love that talk.

• 5:16Sam Parr?

  Was there any like promising parts of it where like this is gonna change? Or is it like, eh, this is

• 5:22Shaan Puri?

  Well, at the end, they're like, what do we do about this? Can this change? He's like, well, the first thing is this, we have to like expose this, right? Like, you know, you gotta shine light on it. You know, the bacteria sort of grows in the dark. And the second thing was, he was like, you know, it's hard because the incentive is the people who could change the laws that would say, hey, you know, maybe if you write the laws about these companies, you can't trade their stocks, for example, right? Like,

• 5:47Sam Parr?

  We've said this on the pod.

• 5:48Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, but the people who need to pass that law, they're the ones who are profiting from this. So he's like, it's almost impossible to change that incentive. Like, it's like, they would have to do that. They need so much pressure in order to make those changes because they're not incentivized to do it. In fact, the opposite. Their entire incentive is to keep the system the way it is.

• 6:06Sam Parr?

  There's this interesting thing that's going on where I don't know anything about the government. I don't remember if it's the Senate, Congress, whatever it is. But it was like one of the few things that both a handful of like hard right Republicans and hard left Democrats were agreeing on where they're like, all right, we're gonna create like a political index fund where you could only have, if you're a politician, you have to, you can, you can have money, but it must be in this particular index fund. And so like you can't own individual stocks. You know how Nancy Pelosi's accused of like doing whatever? And then how I think it was the head of, was it the New York Stock Exchange? There's a, one of the companies, like, like two weeks before the government shut down with COVID, they sold a bunch of stocks. And like, this all looks suspicious. And so they're, they're trying to like, argue that there needs to be a political index fund. It seems like a pretty cool idea, actually.

• 6:51Shaan Puri?

  By the way, there's a startup called Autopilot. I don't know if you've ever heard of them, but they do like, Like it's like a automated money management or like, you know, basically it's a way to what you can do is you put your money in the app and then you could be like, oh, I want to copy the Michael Burry portfolio and you could just copy their public portfolio.

• 7:07Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's cool.

• 7:09Shaan Puri?

  What they did that was really so the business doing okay. And then it's like growth took off. And I was like, dude, what happened? Like incredible chart. He's like, we made this Twitter hander called the Pelosi tracker and they have the Burry tracker, the Pelosi tracker and whatever. And the Pelosi tracker has 339,000 followers and it basically every time she makes a trade, they, um, they post about it. And so they just dig through the filings and they post about the things and, and her gains that she has. And like, of course, somehow Nancy Pelosi is like, happens to be, you know, she, you know, she's, uh, happens to be up 30% year to date. Like she's outperforming Warren Buffett. She's outperforming your favorite hedge fund guy. Like, how does this

• 7:51Shaan Puri?

  government, you know, official do this? It's like, well, maybe they know some things before, some things.

• 7:56Sam Parr?

  It's insane. Um, it's corrupt.

• 7:59Shaan Puri?

  That was a genius growth hack that they did.

• 8:01Sam Parr?

  Um, all right. I'll give you one. So this has been going around Twitter, but I went and watched the whole thing. Uh, it's pretty amazing. So Deion Sanders, I'm not, I'm not a football guy. You're going to know, I'm not a sports guy. You're going to know a lot more about this than I am. Deion Sanders, he's now the coach of, what is it Colorado?

• 8:15Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, the Buffaloes.

• 8:16Sam Parr?

  The Buffaloes and he, um, he was on 60 Minutes, I think like two weeks ago and it was pretty amazing. They did like a 12 minute segment on him and it was really fascinating because I remember Deion Sanders as being like this, like cocky, like showboat guy. And he is still a little bit of that, but he's incredibly insightful. And so basically, uh, what's any, what, what university was he at? It was a historical black college. Was it Jackson State where he was?

• 8:38Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. I forgot the name of it. Yeah.

• 8:40Sam Parr?

  Some not very popular school. He gets into coaching. He, he, he does a decent job there. Then he gets recruited to go to Colorado, which is a big deal. But what he does is he, He's doing two interesting things. The first interesting thing that he's doing is one of his sons is filming the whole thing. It's like his Gary V thing. And so his son is like filming behind the scenes and posting it on YouTube and driving interest. It's really fascinating what he's doing. Have you seen that?

• 9:03Shaan Puri?

  It's amazing. So one of his sons is the quarterback, the starting quarterback.

• 9:06Sam Parr?

  I think another son is on the team too.

• 9:08Shaan Puri?

  The other son is like, you know, what the cornerback or the, yeah, I think he's a cornerback, which is what Dion used to play. And then the other son, the son that's not playing football, is basically the Gary V vlog guy. And he's just in the locker room. He's documenting the whole thing and sharing it on social as they go. And they're just doing a better job of it than like, you know, anybody's doing following that stuff.

• 9:30Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's awesome. And the second thing that he did was his leadership skills are really good. And they're kind of shocking because I just thought that he was just like a meathead and he was just this really cocky guy. No, man, the guy's really insightful. And so basically, they show like a clip from one of his first meetings with the team and he basically, he goes, I'm here to encourage most of you to quit. The reason being is you guys are, the team's lost so much. I think last year you were like one in 11. So you lost most every game. You barely won a game. And the coaching staff, they're all out. We got rid of them. I'm here. I brought a bunch of my guys here who I know are good. And look, here's the deal. The coaching staff is to blame, but you know who else is to blame? The kids, because the coaching staff

• 10:11Sam Parr?

  probably recruited a bunch of losers and I'm here to get you losers to quit. And he, and the guy on CNN was like, hey, man, that's a little harsh. Like, these are kids. He goes, well, look, if you are willing to quit the team because I said that, you're probably weak and you're not an asset to this company. And if you're going to let words scare you, I need you out of here. And I need the tough guys to stay and I need you to be an asset and not a liability.

• 10:34Shaan Puri?

  And he reramped the roster. He brought like 40 players, 40 new players in, which is half of a football team roster.

• 10:39Sam Parr?

  And 50 left, and 50 left. They went into the transfer portal and he goes, he's like, Truth is good for the kids. This is what I'm here to teach you football. I'm going to teach you how to, how to live life and be a good man. And what you guys need is truth. I need to tell you the truth. I need to prepare you for the real world. And we're gonna, I want a winning team. And he does this other thing where he goes, uh, the interviewer goes, so who do you think is the best football, uh, football coach right now in the NCAA? He goes, well, do you have a mirror that I could hold up so I could see him? He's like, it's me. He goes, I'm going to be the best coach. But then he does a good job of being like humble. He's like, well, I learned a lot from Nick Saban. He's forgot more about football than I'll ever know. And so I'm looking for little crumbs from him. But it was really inspirational because I think that

• 11:24Sam Parr?

  this type of like, uh, pound your chest leadership, the way that he delivered it was really good. It was very inspiring on how to lead a business.

• 11:31Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you know, I'm usually not, uh, believe it or not, that big of a believer in, uh, like the effect of the pregame or halftime speech. Like, that seems to be like probably overrated, uh, in terms of what a coach can do and vastly underrated is the systems and, uh, like habits and standards that you like enforce and instill. Um, and so what people are seeing a lot, because it's super viral. You share the halftime speech, you share the, the, the pregame speech or the postgame speech. And they're, and Deon, I don't know if you know, between football and, uh, this, uh, between playing football and this, he like became like a pastor, like part-time. And so he was like, very religious and he was like giving sermons. I remember watching him on TV, giving

• 12:13Shaan Puri?

  sermons in a big white suit. Um, but if you, but if you watch, one of the other things he does, he set a bunch of standards. So he's like, you know, day one and almost in the, uh, like that book, The Score Takes Care of Itself by, uh, Bill Walsh, where it's like, okay, yeah, we want to win, but the score will take care of itself if we do these inputs.

• 12:30Sam Parr?

  And like the famous stories, like he makes the people answer the phone in the front desk appropriately. Yeah.

• 12:36Shaan Puri?

  And John Wooden did the same thing. He's like, we're going to learn how to lace up your shoes. If you can't, if you don't take the time and attention to figure out how to lace up your shoes, just to make a point of like, what we do out there is a result of how, of what we put in. Let's, let's understand that. It is a direct result of what we put in. And so we're going to, we're going to monitor that. And so, uh, one of the things that, that they show in Deon's stuff, and I saw this when I was at Duke with Coach K, is like, it's the little things that they set as the standard. So for example, he's like, you know, If you are on the field, he's put up, he put up footage from the previous practice. He's like, look at what's happening here. Can anyone tell me what's wrong? And it's like, I don't know, it's not even a play. What are you talking about? Like, this is just us walking in between the drills. Like, he's like, exactly, you're walking. If we were on this field, we run, we do not walk.

• 13:19Shaan Puri?

  And he's like, basically created a new set of standards. And so he's like, if you're in a team meeting, where do you sit? How do you show up? Do you use your phone? Do you do? And he's just like, kind of like instilling new standards. So while the speeches are getting a lot of the, the, the shine, I think the more interesting thing is basically in the how we show up, the daily standards of the inputs that go into it. Now, of course, you know, they're undefeated right now and they're doing really well. And I think it's more because of that.

• 13:48Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's awesome. And he, the, he did a good job where he was like, when the guy was like, when he did the whole thing, like, let me hold up the mirror. And he was like, well, look, here's the deal. I tell my kids, I go, I expect you to be the best, so I'm going to be the best too. And he's like, you're, I think you can win the Heisman Trophy, and I think I'm going to be the best coach. And so he does a really good job of balancing this, like, cocky, we're going to take over the world and also high expectation. So I thought that was really inspiring. What do you got?

• 14:14Shaan Puri?

  All right, I'll do another one. This is in the nerdy realm. So there's a guy who has a Twitter account I really like called CFO Secrets.

• 14:21Sam Parr?

  I love this guy.

• 14:22Shaan Puri?

  He has a newsletter that I didn't subscribe to, but I just saw one of his posts that was really great. It was, it was called uncovering the mystery of working capital and M and A. I was like, okay, that sounds like, you know,

• 14:35Sam Parr?

  boring.

• 14:35Shaan Puri?

  Has a market size of like three people right now. It's just like,

• 14:38Sam Parr?

  Dude, when we, when I sold the HubSpot, it took me a week to, for them to explain what working capital was, and I still don't understand it.

• 14:46Shaan Puri?

  Read this post, it's really good. So one of the things that I look for is like, you know, you can tell when somebody actually knows their shit. And off, honestly, like, sometimes when I go on Twitter or I go on YouTube, I just want to delete my account because I'm like, It's so annoying that the most vocal people just don't know what the hell they're talking about. Um, and there, and what, what happens is some people know what they're talking about. They produce content. Everybody loves it. But then some people, instead of taking that content and going and executing on it, they're like, I too will create content about how to be successful, although I am not successful yet. And then they do it. And then there's like a ladder below that. And they're like, I will tell people how to do sales, even though I've never done sales, even though I don't know anything about sales,

• 15:30Shaan Puri?

  even though I've only sold $10,000 in my life, right? Like, and it just ladders down in that way. And then, and those people have the most time on their hands. So they're the most like active publishing stuff. It's crazy. So seeing this guy's newsletter, I was like, oh, finally, somebody who knows what they're talking about. So he has this thing about M and A. And if you ever sold a company, so much of what he says rings true. He's like, so he, he's like, the post starts like this. I'm just going to read you some of the best parts of it. He goes, it always starts the same. We're tired, they're tired. Everyone's been sprinting to get this over the line and we're sprinting because time kills deals. And he's like, if you've done deals, you know this momentum is what oils the deal wheels. And he's like, there's always a point where the deal is mostly agreed. We've agreed on the headline valuation number and that took a lot of negotiating.

• 16:13Shaan Puri?

  It's tired us out. And now there's only two or three points left to agree in the deal. He's like, most of these are boring stuff like reps and warranties and the legal documents. And we want to leave that to lawyer. There's maybe one commercial point left. And so the other side picks up the phone and they say, hey, we just, uh, we just need to iron out this one detail about working capital peg. And he goes, I'll say something like, oh, thanks for the ride. I've been so busy on the, on the documents. I haven't had much time to give that thought. I'll get back to you tonight. But I've thought about it. I've been thinking about it. I've been thinking about the working capital this whole time. I'm just setting up my position that way that, oh, I haven't really brought it, you know, haven't put much thought into it. And then I'm going to bring them a very well thought through thing that I think is going to make sense. And he goes, there's one last trade left in the negotiation.

• 16:56Shaan Puri?

  In my experience, this is 1% to 3% of your total enterprise value is just this last thing. And it's a pure win-lose negotiation between both sides. You're tired, they're tired. Who's gonna feel like, ah, screw it, let's just get the deal done. And I'm like, and you know, we just went through a negotiation. So you know, this is true.

• 17:14Sam Parr?

  By the way, that's what I learned from you about negotiating. You're, you had a line that actually changed me, which was the, the person who can be comfortable with the most amount of uncomfortableness will, will win.

• 17:23Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. Yeah. The, the short version of that I say in every negotiator is the more stubborn party wins, always. People think that the person who wins a negotiation is the one who has the stronger logical case. Hell no. It's the person who is more stubborn who wins, always. And how do you be stubborn? You need to be comfortable in the, in the discomfort. And I would say honestly, when we did this negotiation, which maybe we should do by, say, by the way, a breakdown on the whole thing. One of the, one of the things I think we did not do a good job of was this last bit. The last point, which is that last, you know, 1% to 5% of value. And we were just so tired. We just wanted to get the deal done. I don't think we did a good job of it.

• 18:00Sam Parr?

  It took like four months.

• 18:01Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. And I think that the real way to do that is that's when you need to like dig in the most because it's that last deal point that like you can get and you'll thank yourself later for it, even though in the moment you're feeling tired. It's like any workout. It's like, do I push here? Or do I just say, I'm tired and I stop? And like anybody who knows about workouts is like, no, push through. Yes, you're tired, but you'll feel so satisfied. And all the gains will come on that, those last two reps of pushing it. So anyways, he talks about this and then he gets into the nerdy part where he's like, all right, here's a spreadsheet. Like, you know, you have your enterprise value. And then you have your equity, your value, your actual valuation. What's the difference between the two? It's like, well, your enterprise value includes the debt and the capital that's in the business. And then your valuation, you know, you're the, the actual equity value is what's left

• 18:46Shaan Puri?

  after that. So I think just a very useful doc, a very useful newsletter for people who are gonna go through that or going through that. Probably overkill to read this early. But if you're gonna do M and A, it really, really pays to have somebody who's good at M and A on your side. When we were doing our negotiation, I was basically trying to convince you, hey, let's have our buddy who's done more M and A than both of us, like. Help us think this through at the beginning.

• 19:10Sam Parr?

  You did, you did good. You led that one and you did really good.

• 19:14Shaan Puri?

  And I would say I'm still like intermediate, maybe at the, I'm at the early stage of intermediate. There's people who are way more advanced. And so anyways, this is a newsletter. It's a very nerdy find for M and A.

• 19:24Sam Parr?

  I'm going to read this. I, I went through this. I went through a deal that involved networking capital. I still don't entirely know what it means. Um, it was, this was very challenging and the guys, this guy's writing is really good. He, and he actually sets it up perfectly where like networking capital was thrown in at the last minute. And I'm like, oh, I don't, I don't even know what that is. I'm dead. I, I want to get this done. It's supposed to close in eight days.

• 19:46Shaan Puri?

  I just want to get this done. Yeah.

• 19:48Sam Parr?

  Hey guys, really quick. So you may know this, but my beginning in business was being a copywriter. I'm a self-taught copywriter and what that means is I figured out what motivated people. And then I figured out how to use the written word to get them to do what I want them to do. So that could mean selling them a product. That could mean writing a speech or even giving a speech and getting someone to buy into a particular movement. It could be recruiting. Hell, you could do it for dating. It just basically means figuring out what motivates someone and how to use the written word to take an action, get them to take an action or to think a certain way. And the way that I learned how to copyright was I did this thing called copy work. And copy work is this famous technique that's not really popular anymore, but it used to be really, really popular. And you basically take writing that is great, writing that you love, and you write it out by hand and you copy it.

• 20:31Sam Parr?

  And you make notes of what particular thing that that writer's doing that makes it special. This is the exact same way that you learn how to play the piano. When you want to learn how to play the piano, you learn how to play happy birthday. And then you learn how to play like Jingle Bells and then maybe like a rock and roll song. And then maybe like a hip hop song. And eventually you can combine that all together after a few years and you learn how to make music that's your own. Same thing with writing. That's how I learned how to write. I locked myself in a room for six months and I just did this for many hours a day. I created a program to make it easy. So you could do that. It's called copy that, copy that.com. You can go there and you could check it out. It's a 10 day exercise to make it really easy to learn how to write. If you want, you can just go do this on your own. You could find great writing and just literally copy it by hand. I know it sounds crazy, but it works really effectively, but I made something that makes it a little bit easier. So check it out, copy that.com and we will talk soon and back to the pod.

• 21:16Sam Parr?

  You want to go to, to the last one?

• 21:18Shaan Puri?

  Oh yeah. Okay. So do you know this account, Cultural Tutor on Twitter?

• 21:22Sam Parr?

  Awesome. Follow, awesome. Follow.

• 21:24Shaan Puri?

  So the story's kind of crazy. I didn't really know about it, but he, he went on David Perell's podcast, which I think you, you were going on to or something.

• 21:30Sam Parr?

  I just, I just recorded an episode with them last week.

• 21:32Shaan Puri?

  So David Perell, cool guy, lives in, I think Austin, and he's a, teaches people like about writing online. He's got a new podcast. So he did an episode and the set itself is beautiful. It looks like they're in like, you know, the Royal Library in the UK or something. Beautiful set. So he has this guy on. I've never heard of this guy. And then I was like, oh, I did see one of his threads go super viral. He did a thread about like, why all's architecture designs all look the same now.

• 22:01Sam Parr?

  They're all minimalist.

• 22:01Shaan Puri?

  And that thing got like a hundred million likes or some shit like that.

• 22:05Sam Parr?

  It was really good.

• 22:06Shaan Puri?

  Insanely viral. And it's not even about like a thing you would think goes viral, but it hit a nerve. And so this guy, he does this interview and I've only honestly, I've only listened to the first 10 minutes of this. So like many books I recommend, I got a lot of value out of the first 10 minutes and I was sort of satisfied. But he said something at the beginning. So he's like, this guy was basically working at McDonald's. Literally, he was like flipping burgers and doing french fries. And he's like, um, they had like a mutual friend, this guy Harry Dry, who's cool. And then David, I think David like basically sponsored him. He became like his patron. He's like, you want to write? What if I just paid you to write? So he quits his job at McDonald's. He just decides, okay, I'm going to write every day. And David like funds him for whatever reason. I don't know exactly how the shit worked, but like, I'm sure they explain it in the other 50 minutes of the podcast.

• 22:53Shaan Puri?

  But the important part is not that. The important part is this guy then decides, okay, I'm going to write one amazing Twitter thread a day. And he says this line that's great. He's like, um, he's like, and then David's like, what's your schedule? He's like, he's like, yeah, I wake up at like 4:00 PM. And then I just start thinking about my thread and I smoke cigarettes. I go for walks. I write. I go for another walk, smoke some more cigarettes. And then I, you know, I'll eat some food if somewhere in the middle there and then I'll just write. And then I publish and then I pass out and I do it again the next day. And he's like, that's crazy. He's like, yeah, um, I don't, he's like, you know, I'm not the guy who's going to tell you my morning routine. Don't follow me, but like this is what I do.

• 23:35Shaan Puri?

  And he's like, I just, my whole day is about publishing one amazing Twitter thing. And he said this line that I love. He goes, that sounds silly. I understand that. That my whole day is just about posting on Twitter. But everybody's just got a thing. That's my thing. Okay? And he's like, we've all got one thing. That's my thing. It's like, I love it. And he's like,

• 23:55Sam Parr?

  What have the results have been so far?

• 23:56Shaan Puri?

  He's got 1.3 million Twitter followers. He's got an insane Twitter following like he's built a map in like a year.

• 24:02Sam Parr?

  Is it making money?

• 24:03Shaan Puri?

  I don't know. I don't think he makes any money off it yet, but he can, right? Like, you know, it's not that hard to turn attention into money. Once you have attention. You know, it's harder to turn money into attention than it is attention into money, to be honest.

• 24:14Sam Parr?

  He has 1.5 and he has a hundred thousand person email list.

• 24:18Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, he's doing fantastic. That's, that's incredible, right? So he's doing, doing very, very well for himself, uh, you know? But I just love the intensity this guy was gonna bring to something. And I've actually noticed this as a common trait, which is if you bring a level of seriousness to something that everybody else considers not serious, you can actually win much bigger than most people realize.

• 24:39Sam Parr?

  This is how we felt about newsletters. I was like, well, I'm doing the math. I think this could be a legit thing and we sold early, but we definitely, the business could make a hundred million dollars a year. You know, Morning Brew is close to that. And I always say, one of the reasons why is people thought this was silly, but if you did the math, I'm like, I don't know. I think the math is out there. I think this is gonna be a real thing. Um, and I think that's the same thing with my latest business as well, which is we're just taking something seriously that most use as a hobby.

• 25:02Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I don't know if that's true. Is that true? Aren't there like, you know, does YPO not take this seriously? Do those guys not take it seriously?

• 25:08Sam Parr?

  They do, but most, uh, there's a, there's a few that do, but many, many, many others in the space. They think that it's just like, uh, it's like a small thing that you charge a hundred dollars a year for or something like that. Um, there's a lot of, there's a lot of hobbyists.

• 25:21Shaan Puri?

  The better frame, I think for what you're doing, to be honest, is just the, is that we joke about it, but it is the beautifully done.

• 25:29Sam Parr?

  Like, I am trying to do that.

• 25:30Shaan Puri?

  Your shit is just more stylish and more cool and more desirable for a variety of intangible factors ranging from design to people feeling FOMO to content to, um, you know, the, the, the, the first hundred members that you added to your thing.

• 25:49Shaan Puri?

  Like, I remember getting sales calls to join whatever, Vistage or whatever the hell.

• 25:53Sam Parr?

  They missed the mark. They missed the mark. Well, what I, I love guys like Cultural Tutor, because what I do for a lot of my brands is I follow people like him and I look at like, what was cool in the 60s and 70s that I can just reuse today. So for example, our color for Hampton, it's the color of this really cool Jaguar car that was popular in the 70s. And then when I made the branding, I found old Rolex ads because I'm like, what was cool then? That could still be cool now. There's another example. Have you seen the sunscreen company? That's doing that. Vacation where like, it looks like an 80s or early 90s, like aesthetic.

• 26:27Shaan Puri?

  The guy who did Vacation, this guy Jeremy Summers, he

• 26:30Sam Parr?

  He's amazing.

• 26:30Shaan Puri?

  Did the branding for us for Milk Road.

• 26:32Sam Parr?

  Oh, really?

• 26:33Shaan Puri?

  Character, but he helped us develop the whole brand. And then the last bit was, we didn't love the character. And then we had a different guy do the drawing, the illustration for it. But he did our branding. Yeah, that for Milk Road. Jeremy did an amazing job. And he's, that's specifically his aesthetic, is that kind of like, I don't know if I shouldn't say that. He's really good at that aesthetic, which is the like, kind of vintage classy, like, you know, nostalgic, beautifully done, sort of aesthetic.

• 27:00Sam Parr?

  By the way, I'll, we'll wrap up with a quick story about David Perel. I went to his apartment. So basically, he lives in Austin. He has an apartment in the building, but then he also rented this other apartment. And when you walk in, it feels almost like an Airbnb, or maybe like you're walking into like a restoration hardware store. Everything is perfectly set up. And David is really OCD. And so like, he's got this two bedroom, or it was a three bedroom apartment. They knocked down one wall. So they went all in on this thing. And then one room is like the studio where we sit. And then another room is like the guest room, where if you're a guest and you want to fly in, you could stay there. But like, there's like a record on the wall, or there's books on the shelf. And I'm like, David, all of these have a meeting. He goes, of course, you know me. You know, every single

• 27:42Sam Parr?

  here, every single thing here has a purpose and has a story. And so he like, perfectly like picked everything in the studio. And what is that?

• 27:51Shaan Puri?

  Oh, would you like to see this cream colored book that's on my bookshelf? Does it even have pages in it? Maybe. This book says, I don't know if you can see that.

• 28:02Sam Parr?

  What's it say?

• 28:03Shaan Puri?

  Tango lessons.

• 28:05Sam Parr?

  Tango lessons?

• 28:06Shaan Puri?

  Did I read this book? No. Did I go on Etsy because somebody said, go buy cream colored books to put in your background? Makes you look classy? Bet your ass I did.

• 28:15Sam Parr?

  Dude, everything at David's place is on purpose and it all has a story. And I sent you a video and I'm like, we have to step it up. This guy is so particular. It's, it's, he's the Deion Sanders in my world of podcasting right now. He did a-

• 28:28Shaan Puri?

  Outrageous comp.

• 28:29Sam Parr?

  All of his standards were perfect. And like, I saw his trailer, oh my God, the guy is sweating the details. David's awesome.

• 28:36Shaan Puri?

  He does a great job. He's gotten way further with a topic that I think is incredibly boring. Like, he makes millions of dollars a year doing rite of passage, like getting people to become like fucking novelists or something. I don't know how he does that. That's not even a thing I think people want to do, like, you know, write long essays, like, um, I'm a ma- like, to me, that is, you know, 10 out of 10 execution on a 4 out of 10 opportunity. You know, like, if he was doing like, whatever, used card sales, he'd be the, he'd be like a trillionaire, right? Because it's like-

• 29:05Sam Parr?

  Dude, he's obsessed with it, though. He loves it.

• 29:08Shaan Puri?

  Of course, of course. He's doing it for, for the right reasons.

• 29:10Sam Parr?

  He's so obsessed for it. I, I think he said this publicly. I met him two years ago and he's, he's, he's Jewish. He ethnically, I, I, I don't know, religiously, I don't know if he was as well, but he went to a Bible study class every day or once a week. And I was like, why are you doing this Bible study class? He's like, well, the Bible's really important because it's just like part of culture.

• 29:29Shaan Puri?

  Best-selling book of all time.

• 29:30Sam Parr?

  Yeah, he's like, I'm just so fascinated with like writing and like, I've noticed there's a lot of Bible references. So we started going to this Bible class. Well, I see him again after about a year and he's like, I've converted to Christianity. They got me. Like, like, I just read it so much and I thought, you know, I really want to go one step further and I want to become a Christian and see what this thing is all about. Like, he is an academic in like a very, like, in the coolest way possible. But he's like, bought into this whole thing hardcore.

• 29:56Shaan Puri?

  I was trying to flirt with him. I said, instead of sending nudes, I just sent him a font and he was over the moon about it. Loved it.

• 30:03Sam Parr?

  It's like, oh, is that Duran? That made me weak at the knees.

• 30:09Shaan Puri?

  Let's recap them real quick. So we got the Bill Gurley Talk, that's a YouTube video. The David Perel interview with Cultural Tutor. Watch the first 10 minutes, it's great. And, uh, what was yours? Yours was the-

• 30:21Sam Parr?

  Deion Sanders on 60 Minutes.

• 30:23Shaan Puri?

  Deion Sanders, 60 Minutes, and then the Secret CFO Newsletter about nerdy M&A stuff. There's like a series, it's like a 19-part series and I read two of them and they're very good.

• 30:32Sam Parr?

  All right, that's the pod.

• 30:37Speaker 02

  I feel like I can rule the world, I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.