#73 - On-Demand Appliance Technicians, Credible Authority Businesses & Homesick Food Delivery

Sam (@thesamparr) and Shaan (@shaanvp) shoot the shit about Airbnb's layoffs (3:21), Sam's carnivore diet & Goldbelly.com (5:52), Lambda school for technicians (14:07), Credible authority businesses like Gartner and HBR (24:31), Is buying youtube channels really a good business? (35:22) and the art of storytelling (43:41). See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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

• 0:00Shaan Puri?

  All right, we got a friend of the show here, Jordan Harbinger. He's one of the guys who's been advising us on how to build this podcast because his podcast is way more successful than ours, has been around, he's been doing podcasting for like 12 and a half years, which, Jordan, that's gotta be as long as podcasting has existed, right?

• 0:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think podcasts have been around for like 14 years and I've, or 15, and I've been around for 13 of those. So yeah, when I started, there was no way, there were no iPhones. So you couldn't get podcasts on your phone. You had to use an iPod to play them.

• 0:30Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, straight to cassette. That's how, that's how long this guy's been doing it. Um, so, so Jordan, uh, you know, I like, I like your show. I've been binging it while in quarantine because, you know, what else am I gonna do besides try to learn something new or improve myself in some way? And I gotta say, I like it because you do the, you know, the interview style show where you go deep with a guest. I think, uh, you know, you had, I was listening to the one with Tony Hawk, which was pretty awesome. And I gotta say, I like that you don't do the kind of surface level, you know, just, just, you know, pitty patting around with the questions or trying to do, you know, inspirational fluff where you're just saying, go, you can do this. Um, so with that episode with Tony Hawk, what was that like? Cause Tony Hawk's an icon. How was it, uh, you know, interviewing Tony Hawk?

• 1:10Speaker 01

  It was great. He's a really interesting guy, really open and fun. And he told some pretty funny stories. One, which was very apropos of what's, what's going on right now is one day he walked into his agent or some sort of marketing team that he'd hired. He walked into their office. This is like at the height of video games where he's making, I don't know, well, 50 million bucks off these skating games and these brands. And he goes in and he says, look, I got this backpack that was made pretty shoddily and it's got my name and face on it. I don't want any more stuff like that.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  And as the agent marketer, whatever, is sort of nodding his head in understanding, Tony goes, wait, what's that on your shelf? And it was a roll of toilet paper with Tony Hawk's name, face and logo on it. And he goes, what the hell is that? And the guy goes, oh yeah, anything we put your name and face on does so well. We were joking that we could put your face on toilet paper and we'd still be able to sell it. And he fired them on the spot because it was clear that they didn't value his brand, which I thought was a funny story. And he's got a ton of stuff like that, that he talked about on the show.

• 2:12Shaan Puri?

  That is epic. Uh, you know, I actually met Tony Hawk. Uh, we went on a trip to Africa, a charity trip together. And believe it or not, we were halfway up a, up a mountain in Ethiopia where, you know, it's a, like, this is a mountain village. And somebody saw him there and they were like Tony Hawk, you know, that's probably the only English word they said to us all day. They identified Tony Hawk on a mountain in Ethiopia. That's how famous that guy is. So that's an amazing guest to have on the show.

• 2:37Speaker 01

  Imagine being that famous that you get recognized in the middle of countries where like nobody speaks your language and they maybe don't even have skateboards.

• 2:44Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, we were there trying to give people clean water. They didn't even have water, but they knew Tony Hawk. That's how, that's how famous that guy is.

• 2:49Speaker 01

  Amazing.

• 2:50Shaan Puri?

  Awesome. Well, if you want to hear more from Jordan, we're going to be having him on more and more. He's a friend of, friend of the house and you should listen to his show. It's one of the podcasts that I would recommend. If you like Tim Ferriss's stuff, if you like our stuff, you're going to like his stuff. And so go check out the Jordan Harbinger Show on iTunes, Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts, you'll find him there.

• 3:21Sam Parr?

  Layoffs happened yesterday at Airbnb. My wife works there. She was not laid off. Still suck.

• 3:25Shaan Puri?

  What did she say about it?

• 3:26Sam Parr?

  I mean, I'll say this because it's not like she's like showing me this stuff, but we live in a small house. So when she, when she talks, when her company talks to her, I definitely hear some of it, even though we're in different rooms. And I think Brian handled it wonderfully.

• 3:38Shaan Puri?

  I read the letter he put out and it was great. And I think a couple of weeks ago, we kind of capped on somebody who had done an announcement that we didn't think was great. And I thought this was an example of one that was pretty great. I also liked that they let people.

• 3:49Sam Parr?

  In a previous, well, in a previous meeting, Brian referenced that letter.

• 3:52Shaan Puri?

  Oh, did he? Okay. Nice. What did he say?

• 3:53Sam Parr?

  I don't remember exactly, but he was like, yeah, you know, it's good that he was able to do that. I don't, I don't remember. I don't even want to, I don't even want to be quoted because I don't remember exactly, but I, I think that he complimented it, but he handled things, Brian handled things differently. Um, I think he, he did great, you know, he, he was crying. The other day we interviewed Sophia Amorosa. Um, I think that I will speak for both of us because I think it's true that we both really liked her.

• 4:17Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. I, I tweeted this today. I usually actually hate having guests. I prefer if it's just me and you shooting the shit. Um, I think a guest kind of changes the dynamic, the flow a lot, but guests are good for growth. So we book them. And also I actually liked the conversation with the guests. It's just, I don't think the podcast is very, is, has the same zip to it.

• 4:34Sam Parr?

  Exactly.

• 4:35Shaan Puri?

  But um, she was great and she was great for like this, what sounds like the stupidest reason, which was she was just really honest and um, just like said what it is and didn't try to make it sound better than it is and didn't make it on worse than it is, didn't make it more dramatic, was just like, here's what happened, here's how much money, you know, we got offered, we turned it down for this reason, I kind of regret it, I guess I kind of learned from it, but you know.

• 4:55Sam Parr?

  She even said an urban retailer tried to buy them.

• 4:58Shaan Puri?

  Right. Yeah, exactly. I was like, oh, okay. So urban outfitters. Is there any other, I don't know if that's like, if my brain's too literal or what, but I just thought she was really candid and uh, we've had guests, we've run, I would say, two or three episodes with people that we literally just didn't publish because we were like, this person came on, they weren't real, they didn't share real stories, real numbers, they kind of stayed on the surface and it's kind of a, not an infomercial, but like, it definitely was too guarded. And so we just didn't run the episode. We just have it in the, in the vault. Um, and this was the opposite of that.

• 5:29Sam Parr?

  Yeah, she did great. I really liked her. I uh, I followed up with her and just said, thank you. Um, and I don't do that a lot. Well, I should do that with guests, but I don't.

• 5:36Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, we should do it all the time, but we didn't. I have it, I have it written down. I'm sending one out today. Uh, also thanking Eric, cause yeah, it was good. Uh, anyways, let's, let's talk about a bunch of ideas.

• 5:45Sam Parr?

  I have some cool ideas to bring up. Can I tell you something that I've done though since Saturday? And I didn't mean to do this, but I was like a day in and I was like, let's just try this. Since Saturday, the only calories I've consumed, other than a little bit of almond milk in my coffee, has been meat.

• 5:58Shaan Puri?

  Oh, you're going carnivore?

• 5:59Sam Parr?

  No, I'm not like going carnivore. I was just like, meh, you know.

• 6:02Shaan Puri?

  You happened to do it?

• 6:04Sam Parr?

  I just, it just like, it worked out that way. And I was like, let's just pursue this thread and I've already lost weight, but uh.

• 6:09Shaan Puri?

  So what, what are you doing? What's, what's breakfast?

• 6:11Sam Parr?

  I, I don't, I don't typically eat breakfast. I, my first meal is typically at noon. Today I had um, hot wings. So just baked chicken wings with Frank's Red Hot, which I guess that is a calorie, but I thought Frank's maybe was, um, but uh, it was just chicken wings. Last, yesterday I ate a lot of ribeye and I ate uh, ground beef and chicken.

• 6:30Shaan Puri?

  And then are you planning to keep this up or what?

• 6:32Sam Parr?

  Um, I don't know. So like I'm eating healthy because I challenged this guy to a race. So I'm, I gotta lose weight in order to get fit. And I have a planned cheat day on May 17th and I've already ordered all my food that I'm going to eat on that cheat day. And so I won't keep it up until then. I ordered from Goldbelly, which was, is the coolest thing I've found in a long time. Have you heard of Goldbelly?

• 6:51Shaan Puri?

  I've never heard of that till you, you, you talked about it, you tweeted about it or something. And I was like, that's a good name. What is this? And then it's like pies? What, what the hell is it?

• 6:58Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So this is business talk. So I'll bring this up. So what Goldbelly does is it's goldbelly.com. I think they, it's Goldbelly with one L, which I think is stupid. But, um, what they do is, so let's say Sean, you're from, uh, well, you're not really from anywhere because you've been all over the place. But let's say you grew up in, um,

• 7:13Shaan Puri?

  Like I grew up in Texas. I spent, I spent a lot of time in Texas.

• 7:16Sam Parr?

  You grew up in, let's say Dallas, and there was this one bakery that you love there and they sell, I don't know what a Texas dessert is, but let's say it's a bun, a cake or I don't know, some Texas-y thing. And, um, you can only get it in Texas, which is the case, which a lot of mom and pop places. And you want it, you call them and you're like, hey, can I order like this one thing you guys have? And it's like a pain in the ass. Well, they're just a store that helps facilitate that. So Lou Malinotti's is a famous place in Chicago for pizza. I ordered a pizza from there. There's a bunch of pie and donut and cake places in New York and there's bagel places that I ordered from. And then, uh, there's some places in St. Louis, where I'm from, that is just, is, you don't see that anywhere else. And so it's just like, um,

• 7:54Shaan Puri?

  Dude, that's super interesting. So they mail it in some way that kind of like preserves it and it's a, it's in like, if you ordered a pizza from Chicago.

• 8:01Sam Parr?

  So the restaurant mails it. The restaurant mails it.

• 8:05Shaan Puri?

  What happens when you get a pizza from Chicago?

• 8:06Sam Parr?

  It's in a Goldbelly box. It's in a Goldbelly box and it has ice in it. That's all it is. Um, which ships really well typically. So they just freeze it ahead of time. So I ordered a deep dish pizza from Lou Malinotti's. It's a, it's, it was pre-frozen and then they threw ice, an ice pack on top of it and I'll probably get here in three or four days.

• 8:21Shaan Puri?

  That's amazing. Okay. I, I actually like this concept. Is it doing well? Is it a small thing?

• 8:27Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So, um, the guy who started, his name is Jason, uh, I forget his name, but he, um, they went through Y Combinator. Previously he was the CEO of Deliver.com. So he has a history in the restaurant. Business, they raised close to thirty million dollars and Joe, Joe Ariel is his name. He, their office was up the street from my house. I live in a residential neighborhood and they had a house they lived out of and they went to Y Combinator. And I have to imagine they're booming right now. They're booming so much so that the pizzas all have delayed delivery due to high demand. And so, and the delivery charges.

• 9:03Shaan Puri?

  Interesting.

• 9:04Sam Parr?

  The delivery charge is very hefty. It wasn't cheap. Ordering two pizzas was like eighty dollars.

• 9:09Shaan Puri?

  Right, but they know they're playing on the sort of nostalgia, the like special moment type of thing. Like if I gave somebody, if I gave my wife like her favorite thing from her hometown, it's like an amazing gift. It's so thoughtful. And food is like, you know, the universal gift. So a couple of things. So yes, they raised thirty three million. It's gold belly with two L's. So normal belly, normal belly.

• 9:27Sam Parr?

  It was gold belly with one L's before.

• 9:29Shaan Puri?

  Ah, okay. Got the second L. Good. Okay, so this is kind of cool. So this could be a thing. So like I grew up, you said, all over the place. One of the things that happened was in high school, I moved to Beijing, right? So I finished high school in China. And then I hopped around. I lived in Indonesia. I lived in Australia. And one thing that happens is you, if you're kind of an American living over there, you're called an expat, an expatriate. And so expats, like you start to have these expat cravings for just like simple things that you just can't find in Beijing. It's like, oh dude, what I would give to have a box of Reese's Puffs cereal right now. And you'll pay like twenty two dollars for that box of Reese's Puffs cereal. And there are stores there that just do this. They just import the like your favorite snacks from America and they just sell them at like a five X upcharge.

• 10:11Shaan Puri?

  And then other people, they, they're sort of this sort of like drug, you know, camp drug donkey or whatever thing where it's like, okay, you fill up a suitcase with this one rare item that people want. And you bring it back when you go for a trip. And so I could see this, you know, this gold belly thing. It sounds kind of, when you first started describing, it sounded kind of stupid and now I'm pretty convinced.

• 10:29Sam Parr?

  No, it's not stupid. And one, one of the reasons why it's not stupid is if you go to the website, they've done a wonderful job of creating the brand. So they make it seem fun, but also they have so many photos and they tell the story of the brand and they do a really good job. And two other examples of people who do this wonderfully of telling the stories of the products. The first is Huckberry. So what? The business of Huckberry, it's basically a huge email list of one to two million guys. And what they do is they find really cool clothes and they tell the story behind it. So for example, they had a duffel bag that was made from a, the founder was an army guy who used to skydive. And the duffel bags were made out of old parachutes because apparently that's like an interesting material. And they told the story about this and they just blasted out in the email and they just take a cut of the revenue.

• 11:14Sam Parr?

  And it's like a bootstrap company that does probably 20 or 30 million dollars a year in sales. And so telling the story behind what you're selling is really important. And the second people who do it is Airbnb. They do a really good job of telling, of helping craft the story.

• 11:26Shaan Puri?

  Okay, I like this. So I've never seen Huckberry either. So, okay, so here's what I would do. If I'm listening to this and I'm an entrepreneur and I got some time on my hands right now. You know, there's a version of this that is, you know, like Tim Ferriss and these other guys, they are kind of like connoisseurs of products. Like, you know, Kevin Rose, it's like, oh, you know, what, you know, what coffee mug do you, or what coffee blender do you use? It's like, oh, I use this one. It's made of matcha wood and it does this other thing and it's so special and you can only get this in Puerto Rico or whatever. And so there's all these products where people care about sort of the best of, the most well-made is how you define best here. And so, you know, whether it's wallets, headphones, it's this type of stuff you find on like mass drop or whatever.

• 12:08Shaan Puri?

  But if I was somebody, I would build a brand, I would build an email list around what is the absolute best of X product? And maybe it's something that you can only find in a local geography, like, you know, that's what kind of Gold Bell is doing. It's like the best pizzas. Oh, you want Shake Shack, but you live in, you know, Arizona and Shake Shack's not in Arizona here. It literally, like I see it on the website, it's $49 to get Shake Shack delivered to you in Arizona. And so if you can tell the story of how crazy good this thing is, how people go nuts for this thing? And how it's the most well-made, well-crafted pocket knife or whatever those items are. I think you could get a lot of people to impulse buy and like, yeah, I want one. If you could just, your email list is telling the story.

• 12:47Sam Parr?

  I do that constantly. I buy stuff, I go to Wirecutter on a daily basis and I'll buy interesting things. Like I love gadgets, so I bought a power washer from Wirecutter. I don't really need one, but I bought one because it just looked like a nifty. Cool gadget. Wirecutter has a long article on the best aluminum foil. So I bought it just to try it. And so there's a few other, but I think it's called, I bet you Abreu knows. But all the YouTubers, they get asked the same question, which is what equipment, microphone and camera you're using? And so at the bottom, they have a link to like my kit and you click it and you go to like Casey Neistat's equipment kit. And, and, and if people buy that stuff, they get an affiliate fee. And so I think that those business models are fantastic.

• 13:27Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, there's something cool here. I like this. And I think Goldbelly is one of those sneaky good ideas, I'm gonna say. It's sort of Airbnb-esque in a way where it's like tapping into this thing that people want that sounds a little unusual. It's like, how many people really want to do that? How many people really want to stay in a, you know, a stranger's home rather than a hotel? And it's sort of like that. It's like, how many people really want to order the best bagel from New York? And it's like, you'd be surprised is the answer.

• 13:49Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I think, um, I think that it's a pretty good idea with amazing execution. I'm very into Goldbelly. I just discovered them in the past month. And I think that had I discovered them prior, I would have loved to have invested.

• 14:02Shaan Puri?

  Right. Okay, cool. What, what are some other ideas you got? You want one or you want me to throw one at you?

• 14:06Sam Parr?

  You do one and then I got another one.

• 14:07Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so here's a company that I am interested in investing in. I've been talking to the founder of a company called Nana. Maybe I shouldn't even say this because I kind of want to invest before I say it, but whatever. Let's put it out there. So the company called Nana, I discovered it because my dryer broke at home. And, you know, I got in that shitty shitty state where you've run the dryer three times to dry one load. And it's like, oh, fuck, what's happening? This is not how it's supposed to be, but I don't know how to fix a dryer. And like, my wife's looking at me like, are you a man or not? And it's like, no, no, we already know I'm not. I can't fix this dryer. And so then I'm like, okay, cool. Where am I going to look in the manual? God damn it, that's gonna suck. And so what Nana does is they solve this problem of appliance repair. But the way they're doing it is very interesting. So there's this extreme shortage of technicians who can repair appliances. There's more appliances that need repairing than there are technicians available.

• 14:52Shaan Puri?

  Technicians tend to be older, they're aging out of the workforce. And young people are not really going into that profession, even though you can make a lot of money. So the backstory here is the founder of this company, he's kind of like a small time hustler entrepreneur. He like had a clothes, like a jeans store in Israel in a mall. And then he had this other little thing that he was doing there. He's kind of hustling and making it work. So he built a couple of small businesses. When he was in America, he needed to pay off his student loans. So he was like, all right, how do I pay off like 200 grand in the next like 18 months? And what he did was he saw his friend was repairing appliances and was making like 20K a month. And he's like, whoa, okay, how do I learn how to do that? And so he started learning how to repair appliances. He started doing it and he ended up building a little like a one man service company that he hired up a couple of other technicians under him. And then he was doing like two million a year in revenue.

• 15:37Shaan Puri?

  He paid off all his loans and he built a company overall over the kind of two, three years. It did about five million in revenue on his repair company.

• 15:43Sam Parr?

  Wow.

• 15:44Shaan Puri?

  So then he was like, all right, I'm going to build. And what he's built is basically Lambda School for technicians. So you can say, okay, I want to make this much money. I want to, you know, you pick your own hours, but you can make good money if you're a technician. And, um, but you don't know anything. And so he's like, cool, I can train you in one month to repair one appliance. And then in the next month, I can teach you a second appliance. And, you know, within a few months, you'll have all the appliances, but the whole time you could actually start working. After one month, you could pretty much start working and start making money repairing, let's say, dishwashers or fridges or whatever. And so on one hand, he's training up a technician workforce. So it's a trade school for technicians. And on the other side, he's partnering with the manufacturers of these appliances who get the customer complaint that says, hey, my thing's broken.

• 16:25Shaan Puri?

  And these companies are looking to dispatch a local repairman to go fix it. They don't want to run that local repair, you know, fleet themselves. So they used to use Sears. Sears had like, I don't know, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of technicians in their workforce, but Sears has kind of gone downhill. So he's trying to be the like best option for getting every lead when somebody needs a repair. It's like, cool, we're like Uber. You tell us where the repair is, our guys do a good job, you push a button, they get dispatched. And so I really like this company. I'm trying to invest and I just love the concept in general.

• 16:54Sam Parr?

  Okay, I like that. I, um, I don't know the economics out of it, but I do know iCraft. You know, iCraft?

• 16:59Shaan Puri?

  Yep.

• 16:59Sam Parr?

  It was a little bit similar where what they, so.

• 17:02Shaan Puri?

  Explain what they did.

• 17:02Sam Parr?

  From, so what iCraft does is if you broke your iPhone eight, it's, you take it to the, the store and it's typically pretty expensive, $350 to fix the screen for some phone. And what iCraft did was, well, regardless of which phone you break, uh, an iTech will come to your home and fix it for you. Now, these businesses are actually a little bit sneaky. And I would, I want to, maybe you could tell me about Nana is typically the way they work is they're a little bit more of a e-comm or marketplace than you think. So they're, the name of, the secret to their business. Ones like it is getting loads and loads of IT techs. Um, and then on the other side, getting loads and loads of leads. So they just have to go out and buy advertising, rank on Google for repair my iPhone.

• 17:45Sam Parr?

  And then someone comes into their system, they go, all right, I need an iPhone. And then their technology dispatch, or I need iPhone fix dispatches that lead to any IT tech in the neighborhood or in the area. And they also have to make sure that this IT tech is like clean and nice and

• 17:58Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 17:59Sam Parr?

  Reliable and things like that and trained. And the way they make money typically is they take a small cut of the fee, which is pretty small, small enough that it's almost like their, um, it's like Legion. And then they sell the IT techs, all of their, uh, screens, repair tool and tools. And so is Nana kind of like that?

• 18:15Shaan Puri?

  No. So, so basically they, uh, so it's similar in some ways, but I think the economics are a little different. I think they'll end up with like a 20 to 25% margin per job. So like average job will be like, I don't know, 200 bucks. The technician will make about half of that. Um, there, there's a parts cost and then there's what they take, right? So like, let's call it round numbers, just for, just to sort of, I can't give away exacts, but let's say a job is about 200 bucks. Half of that will go to the technician, 25% will go to the parts cost. And then 25% is left over for them to take at the end, 20, 25%. And so they don't charge the technicians, uh, they're not trying to make money there. In fact, they're going the other way, which is they're trying to hand technicians sort of a career in a box. It's like, hey, do you want to be making 80 grand a year, 150 grand a year, whatever it is, repairing these things?

• 18:59Shaan Puri?

  Like, watch, you download this app and it's like Uber. It's like a job will get dispatched to you. You can choose to take it or not. And, uh, you wear this brand and this brand means that you, you're a trusted technician. And, um, it's like a franchise model basically for, for these freelance technicians. So I, I like

• 19:15Sam Parr?

  I think it's awesome. Let, let's talk about reasons why this would suck.

• 19:18Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 19:18Sam Parr?

  The first reason why it would suck is, so the reason why I think home joy and cleaning services, uh, are really hard. And a lot of them went out of business and a lot of them are only okay businesses is because for two reasons. Well, yeah, two reasons. The first is when you have a cleaner who comes in and out, often they're just shit. Like a cleaner is good after you get to know them for a handful of tries. And they understand the difference between each person's clothes or they understand where the everything goes. Uh, and so it's, it, it, the second reason is also a matter of trust. You really want to trust them and you can't always trust that with home joy. I mean, you get a little bit of like, well, they represent the brand. I know the brand will reimburse me. And then the third reason is if I find someone who's really good, I say, hey, fuck this platform. Just come to my house every two weeks and I'll just pay you.

• 20:00Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 20:00Sam Parr?

  And so that's, those are the three reasons why I think this would not work.

• 20:03Shaan Puri?

  But this is different, right? Because this is not repeat. You don't have a broken appliance every two weeks where you're gonna like disintermediate the platform and say, hey, let's just do this direct, right? So this is a very infrequent thing you do. The other thing is that they're not acquiring customers directly. So they're not like Homejoy or Cherry, which was a car washing company, which is basically spending a ton of money trying to get a customer and then trying to make back the money. What these guys are doing is they're getting free customer leads because they are solving a problem for the B2B vendor, their B2B partners, which is like, you know, the maker of the washing machine. The maker of the washing machine has the lead. They're just gonna decide, who do we dispatch this lead to? And if these guys can prove that we are faster and we do the job and your customers will stop calling you saying the thing is broken, then they will become the preferred partner.

• 20:46Shaan Puri?

  And so they're proving right now where they're getting, they're becoming the preferred partner for a whole bunch of these different vendors. And that's like the unproven part. But it's much better than if they were trying to just generically market on Facebook or Google and say, hey, Sam, if you ever have an appliance, use Nana. Like, hopefully, I'm putting my ad here while you have this problem, which would be really, really hard to do. And so instead of like-

• 21:05Sam Parr?

  No, I don't think that, no, I actually disagree. I don't think that would be hard to do at all. And I think that's actually a great thing to do because when you search locksmith or broken-

• 21:15Shaan Puri?

  Search is different, right? Search, search makes sense. I'm talking about just Facebook ads or whatever words.

• 21:19Sam Parr?

  Oh, no, no, no. You need, what's the difference in advertising contextual and, I forget. But you, you, you need search. You need-

• 21:27Shaan Puri?

  Search where there's intent. I needed my fridge fixed, right? That's different than just I'm scrolling on Facebook and somebody says, we fix fridges.

• 21:34Sam Parr?

  Why did they raise money? A business like that could be profitable pretty fast.

• 21:39Shaan Puri?

  So the reason why, this is, I think, the real challenge, which is they have to get all these different, it's a, it's a local type of business. So you have to build up supply density of technicians and demand in every single city for this to work. And so that's why they're gonna need money because they're gonna have to bridge this gap where you know, the vendors aren't gonna give them leads if they don't have technicians. The technicians aren't gonna come on board if there's no jobs to do. And so they have to figure out how they're gonna bootstrap Atlanta and then Peachtree, Georgia, and then this other suburb of Georgia, right? Like, city by city, they're gonna have to build up supply and demand like Uber did, basically. And, and so I think that's- The main challenge and that's why they're gonna need money to be able to do it. But that if I was gonna say, why did it fail? It's because damn, solving that local supply demand thing is not easy. It's like dating apps have this problem too.

• 22:24Shaan Puri?

  If I download a dating app and I have nobody nearby to match with, I delete the dating app and I move on. And the dating apps that win aren't ones that make you a better dater. They're ones that figure out how to get a bunch of guys and girls in one city on the app at the same time.

• 22:37Sam Parr?

  I like this though. I like people who are hustlers like this guy that good.

• 22:41Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, the best, the best part is that he did it himself as a, as a repair guy for two years or whatever. That's like where you're like, okay, you're not just the typical sort of like opportunist who's like, oh, I researched this market and I saw there's lots of appliances in the world.

• 22:55Sam Parr?

  Did you say he, and did you say he's Israeli?

• 22:58Shaan Puri?

  I believe he's Israeli. Yeah, I could be wrong.

• 23:00Sam Parr?

  I have a whole bunch of Israeli, in Tennessee, I was friends with, I ran around, I dated a girl who was friends with all these Israelis. So all my friends ended up becoming like a bunch of Israeli guys and they, they all were locksmiths. Like they all had like side hustles as locksmiths. And I was like, uh, this guy's name was Ram. I was like, Ram, what is this locksmith shit? He goes, dude, I make like half a million dollars a year as a locksmith. Because I like, I learned how to rank on Google and anytime I get a lead, I just send it to my friends. And a lot of my friends came here from Israel and I just said, hey, come, I'll give you like a $25 an hour job. And they come here and like, you know, they rely on me, so they all work hard and, and, um, anyway, this whole, this, this is part, and he told me, he was like, this is part of Israeli culture is this, this industry. And it's super interesting.

• 23:45Shaan Puri?

  I love that. I think I've told this before, but I'll say it again, because I, I love this thing. I read this thing once, which was like, if you, I want to look up, if it's like, if it's a, there's a tool for, tooltip for hiring. It's like, let's say you wanted to hire a locksmith, you don't want to hire the best locksmith, the guy who's best at fixing your lock. You want to hire the guy who's named his company AAA locksmith. Why? Because he's thinking about in the Yellow Pages, how do I be the first listing for locksmith? It's like AAA locksmith. It's like, that's the person you want to hire, which is somebody who's good enough at unlocking the doors, but is actually thinking through how to grow and how to get business and customers. And not just a locksmith who's spending all their time getting better at repairing locks and not thinking about how they're going to get customers. So I always say, I'm trying to hire AAA locksmiths and nobody knows what the fuck I'm talking about.

• 24:27Sam Parr?

  I'm gonna name all my businesses.

• 24:29Shaan Puri?

  All right. What else you got?

• 24:30Sam Parr?

  Just fucking rank. Okay. Um, a few weeks ago, we talked about JD Power. Do you remember that?

• 24:34Shaan Puri?

  Briefly, not really, actually.

• 24:36Sam Parr?

  That's okay.

• 24:36Shaan Puri?

  I said briefly as if I did, but I totally didn't.

• 24:39Sam Parr?

  Okay, I'm gonna talk about a similar business, okay? And I've talked to you about them. Do you know what Gartner is?

• 24:43Shaan Puri?

  I've heard the name, but I couldn't explain their business to you.

• 24:46Sam Parr?

  Okay, so I just subscribed to this guy's subscription. It's really good. I'm gonna give him a shout out. It's called Scuttleblurb, and he's just this dork like I am. And he just talks about interesting companies, but he does incredible breakdowns. And he had this one on Gartner, and I've known a lot about Gartner because I think our company can almost become something a little bit similar, but not quite. But it's in the similar ballpark. So Gartner, before the Corona, it was worth about $40 billion, I think, or $20 billion. Whatever it's worth now, it was worth double that. And so it's a big company, like $3 billion a year in sales. It was, I read the biography of the guy who started it. He's interesting. Another is really good.

• 25:22Shaan Puri?

  Hold on, what does Gartner do? What do they sell?

• 25:25Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I'm gonna explain. And so, okay, and so the way in which people explain it, it's not, it does not make sense. But when, let's dive deep, and it will make sense. So what they do is they research a variety of IT tools. So like, what's the best tool for HR stuff? What's the best marketing tool? What's the best sales CRM? What's the best finance tool? And if you're a big company, you pay them a subscription fee ranging from $20,000 a year to $200,000 a year. And in exchange, you get access to a database of research that examines this, as well as a consultant who you can call and they can answer your questions. Now, that sounds like a stupid thing, right? Like, why would you need that? Like, why can't you just pick? And that's weird. And in a way, it is weird.

• 26:08Sam Parr?

  But the reason why they're so successful is for three reasons, okay? The first reason is that people say they want, like, if you, so there's 100,000 companies in America that have an IT budget north of $10 million a year. And so they have to research in order to make sure they're like spending their money effectively. And so they want Gartner's research, and apparently their researchers are really good. But they're not that good. Now, the second reason why it works, and now this is what's interesting, and this is the angle I want to get at in a second, which is they buy it because any executive or IT person who's making a decision on their, like, which, like, they're gonna buy, like, you know, 5,000 laptops. They say, well, Gartner said we should use this one, just so they don't get fired. Because the execs trust Gartner.

• 26:49Sam Parr?

  And so they only do it, they not only, but one of the biggest reasons they do it is so just to cover their ass. Like, well, I don't, don't blame me, Gartner. And then the third reason why, and this is where shit gets also really interesting. It's because their sales force, they have this training where they, where you get hired and they take you away for like a few weeks. They throw you in a hotel and they indoctrinate you on how to sell and you sell through their process. And then at the bottom, they find like the 20% of people who they just don't think are going to make it and they just fire them right away. And so they create like a fraternity or sorority of like a hazing process of salespeople. And a lot of analysts think the reason this company is any good is because their sales culture is so phenomenal.

• 27:31Sam Parr?

  And I find that to be incredibly interesting because that is not what most people would think. But having like a pretty good research department, but it's not significantly better than all the other competitors. But a super good sales team is what made this company work out well. And that is interesting.

• 27:44Shaan Puri?

  And so when you hear this and you're like, okay, you said, I think we could do something like this. Do you actually think about that? Like, okay, what is the modern day version of this? Or how do we, what would be our version of this?

• 27:53Sam Parr?

  Well, yeah. So here's a few examples, which is Harvard Business Review. Do you know Harvard?

• 27:56Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I'm pretty familiar with them.

• 27:58Sam Parr?

  Harvard Business Review makes $300 million a year in sales and it's like half profit. Harvard Business Review, like the publisher, makes more revenue than Harvard Business School tuition.

• 28:08Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. If you, if you want to, all the annual reports are online. So it's great to go look at Harvard's Business School reports and the Business Review as well, HBR.

• 28:16Sam Parr?

  And they make money through subscriptions and then they also sell like millions of case studies a year. And why do you buy a Harvard Business Review case study? Well, just because it says the name Harvard on it. So it's real, that's the moat is building a brand that people like just trust and know. And so that's kind of hard, but that's definitely doable if you have the right skill set. But the second thing is, once you get entrenched into your sales force gets entrenched, which a lot of people who are building stuff, they don't know this. Because they think to themselves, if I just have the best product, I'm going to win. That's not true. And so when I think about this, I'm like, well, I want to have the best product, but also like, how do I just like build this massive sales culture? And so what I want to know to you, Sean, is first of all, what are other things in which people need to cite someone else so they don't get fired?

• 28:59Sam Parr?

  Because that's where like the op- that's like an interesting human psychol- like that's like an interesting psychological trick to exploit. But then, how do you feel about this whole sales thing? Because you read about people like, I have no idea if this is true, but let's just say like Elon Musk, he's like, no, fuck salespeople, which I think might be true. They don't hire salespeople. And that's like sexy and like romantic, but do you?

• 29:18Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so let's talk about the first one. So the first thing is the, uh, the learning as an entrepreneur, which is a lot of people buy your shit not because you have the best product. They buy the shit, like what is the job to be done of Gartner? Like you're saying, it is to inform. Yes, for sure. I'm gonna get some information from this, but really, it's because when I present my proposal that we're gonna spend eight million dollars this year on XYZ, I need that to not be me, Sean, saying that we should spend eight million dollars. I need that to be saying Sean thinks that we should take the Gartner recommended path and do this. So it is CYA, cover your ass. So I do think there's that. Now, this is just a general, and I see this with a whole bunch of different research things, right? So like, um, there's a whole bunch of market research things that, uh, right now at my company, when somebody says, hey, we wanna go after this opportunity, and they

• 30:03Shaan Puri?

  present their research, and, um, you know, the source cited is, is super important. And we pay a lot for these research reports, thousands of dollars.

• 30:11Sam Parr?

  Who?

• 30:12Shaan Puri?

  So it'll be like, uh, like, for example, in the esports world, Newzoo, uh, is a niche one that really talks about gaming, and they talk about esports a lot. And so you see Newzoo all the time. Forget about the fact that Newzoo, if you just go back and read their report from four years ago, they're like, oh, esports will be at X billions of dollars. And then this year, now four years later, it's a smaller number than they predicted. Like, the prediction now, for four years from now, is smaller than it was four years ago about today. So like, they're wrong a lot, that we, we should not take their word as like, um, you know, any good here, but, you know, because they're predicting, and humans are shitty at predicting. But I see that, I see it on the like, um, kinda like market, market data. So we need data about like, um, smartphone penetration in a country, the wireless, you know, what is the wireless speeds, uh, what is the disposable income

• 30:55Shaan Puri?

  in this country? Should we go into this country or not? All these things, or there's not us like Googling, like we have to get to some like Deloitte paper that we pay three thousand dollars for, or some, some subscription we have, that gives us this data that we can say, look, I'm not the one. estimating these numbers, that's them and they're a big brand. And so I think that McKinsey is another brand like Harvard. I think if Google or or Amazon wanted to get into this business and say, hey, these are Google case studies. They could compete with Harvard, but I think as an individual person, I've I've looked at this because I was like, dude, I could make it. I could write better case studies for business schools than Harvard Business Review. I know it. I've bought their case studies and I know what I could do, but I'm like, it doesn't matter because they're not trying to buy the best case studies. They're trying to buy Harvard's case studies because that is better for their business school brand.

• 31:39Sam Parr?

  So I hear you on that. I hear you on that. And that you say in a way to persuade people not to do this, or you persuade yourself.

• 31:46Shaan Puri?

  I persuaded myself.

• 31:46Sam Parr?

  I totally get it. Yeah, I come from the other end, which is wow, that's like their mo. So it might take me a little while to do it, but once I do it, man, I'll make money for a hundred years.

• 31:55Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think that's true. Like you want to be in a defensible business and unfortunately, defensible businesses are pretty hard to to to overtake. So it's like the barrier to entry is the same reason you want to enter in the first place. Now, I do think if you can find an angle, like you go after a niche that they're not aware of, that's cool, right? Like I've thought about doing this, which is instead of doing case studies on existing sort of legacy industries and businesses. I know that these incumbents are really shit at at the cutting edge. And so I'm like, I could make the school of the future and we talk about cryptocurrency and we talk about a whole bunch of stuff that Harvard Business Review is not going to talk about for four years. And so you could become the the thought leader or the stamp, the sort of credible authority in that new space. Like you guys could do it with D to C or trends or whatever, right? Like that two PM guy, right?

• 32:39Sam Parr?

  Well, that's what we're doing with trends. This is what we're doing with trends. So this is why it interests me. But what space would you do?

• 32:45Shaan Puri?

  I think I would do, so like you went on Pomp's podcast and I think he's been trying to do this with cryptocurrency. Now, he's trying to do it towards consumers, but I think you could sell knowledge about this to existing financial institutions at a very, very high price. I think you could just be scraping data about the current, you know, the 2020 cryptocurrency Bitcoin landscape. And I think you could sell that for thousands of dollars to all the consulting firms, all the financial institutions. And you could get to single digit millions in revenue pretty quickly there. Then you add a conference and then you kind of go from there. And so I think that's one where I would. Go towards a niche that the existing big brands don't cover because it's not their area of expertise. And also it's small today. Um, and so they're, they're still covering all the big spaces like agriculture or whatever else.

• 33:30Sam Parr?

  Okay. And what do you think about having a, I personally, when I started my company, um, I was like, oh, I don't want this to be a sales organization. I hate salespeople. I, uh, I want to only be around like nerds, not like alpha loud, obnoxious.

• 33:42Shaan Puri?

  And now you've won eighty.

• 33:43Sam Parr?

  No.

• 33:43Shaan Puri?

  You love having a sales team, is what I mean.

• 33:46Sam Parr?

  I like the results and our salespeople are, our salespeople are in fact the most fun. Like they're just like gregarious fun to be around. That's like their job is to be likable. But, um, I think if you have a sales driven organization, it, it isn't always.

• 33:59Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I, I don't think so either. I also think you gotta be, uh, so my, my take on that sales thing is every business is selling. It's just a question of are you selling with salesmen? Are you selling with digital ads? Are you selling with, like Elon is clearly one of the greatest salesmen of all time. And then he talks about how they don't employ salespeople, blah, blah. That's part of his sales pitch is that our product is so good, we don't need salespeople. And, um, you know, he does his sales through Twitter and through video presentations, like on stage and all different types of things where they, you always gotta sell. It's just a question of what's the vehicle? I think you should just choose the tool that fits your product, right? So like, if you have a high priced enterprise product, then you should have a, a fleet of enterprise salespeople.

• 34:39Sam Parr?

  That's not always the case. So Atlassian claims they have no salespeople.

• 34:42Shaan Puri?

  Sure. You could try to be the outlier, but I'm saying like, if you're trying, and, and all these companies do switch, right? So like Slack and whatnot, I believe now as they're trying to go get multimillion dollar contracts with companies.

• 34:53Sam Parr?

  Most of their revenue comes from.

• 34:55Shaan Puri?

  Right. It comes from direct sales. Um, human salespeople do going out and doing things.

• 34:59Sam Parr?

  And, and this is a fact, by the way, this is in their filing, which is most of their revenue is driven by a handful of.

• 35:04Shaan Puri?

  Right. And so I think like, you know, depending on what your product is and the price point of it, that dictates it. If you have such a low price point item, you just can't afford salespeople. And so you gotta get creative and be like, okay, I'm going to sell through content marketing. I'm going to sell through, you know, digital ads. I'm going to sell through these other methods, but you're always selling one way or another.

• 35:20Sam Parr?

  So we, where this podcast is going to be relatively short, you want to talk about, um, oh, well, okay. So last week we were, um, talking about YouTube's.

• 35:29Shaan Puri?

  Did we bring this up on the podcast or this was on Twitter, somebody was talking about it?

• 35:32Sam Parr?

  Um, I don't remember. It all is one world to me, but you, someone brought up is buying a YouTube channel a good idea. I think in most cases, it is a absolutely horrible idea and you should never do it. Now, I was part of, a friend bought a, a, a website that was a content site that got a fair bit of traffic and he, uh, it came with a YouTube channel that had maybe 2 million subscribers. And so I went and get, took a screenshot of the revenue. And so the revenue starting in January of 2019 to December 31st, 2019, your estimated revenue is $242,000 and that is with 80 million views.

• 36:15Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 36:16Sam Parr?

  And so.

• 36:16Shaan Puri?

  Let's just say that again. 80 million, 80 million views translated into 240 grand.

• 36:20Sam Parr?

  Yes. So to me, the answer is that sucks and, um, I would not want to do that. And it, it, it's definitely.

• 36:29Shaan Puri?

  So what, what the person was saying was, hey, you guys had Andrew Wilkinson on, he rolls up internet companies. Hey, why don't you roll up YouTube channels that monetize well? You could buy a whole bunch of them, niche ones and, uh, and own them. And that's fantastic. And I was like, this is a horrible idea. YouTube videos are often very dependent on talent, like a personality. And when you buy them out, you sort of take them out of the game. Um, the second thing is YouTube videos are very dependent on the platform, the algorithm and the search, the, the way that the YouTube search works. And, um, that can change on a dime. And when it does, you're thinking, go, and our friend actually, uh, has a YouTube channel that's like this, that it was doing X and now it's doing, you know, X divided by five overnight because the algo changed and there's nothing you could do about it.

• 37:11Sam Parr?

  Now, it is valuable in the case of like you're Nick Bear and you are like a, or you're Sophia, which she doesn't have a YouTube channel, but like her Instagram page is probably the same thing where I bet she could just pocket a quarter of a million dollars a year just off the, the occasional ad on her Instagram. But the real value is her saying, I am the CEO of whatever company I'm the CEO of, here's my product, check it out, buy it.

• 37:33Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 37:33Sam Parr?

  That, that is valuable.

• 37:34Shaan Puri?

  YouTube channels can be valuable. I'm saying buying other people's YouTube channels, I think is a poor way to buy. Buy your way into cash flow. If you're gonna buy your way into cash flow, buy a, you know, an apartment building that's spinning off cash, or buy a business that's not dependent on a personality. It's a, you know, a piece of software that just runs. That's what I would do if I was, if I wanted to buy cash flow.

• 37:52Sam Parr?

  Now, I'm gonna make a, I'm gonna make a point that disregards everything we just said, which is, uh, the company Group9 Media, which, uh, owns Thrillist, Ben Leers, the CEO, um, he bought Seeker, and Seeker, I, I became friends with the guys who run it. It was ran by five to ten guys in the dog patch here in San Francisco, and they would make educational videos on a variety of things, and they bought it, and, uh, they bought it for a couple million bucks. So that is an example of a YouTube channel that is not...

• 38:19Shaan Puri?

  So I was gonna bring up a similar one, which is...

• 38:21Sam Parr?

  Those people I think are stupid. They still shouldn't have bought it.

• 38:23Shaan Puri?

  So, so I had a friend...

• 38:24Sam Parr?

  Unless the price was, unless the price...

• 38:26Shaan Puri?

  So, so we've talked about my friend, uh, on the podcast before, uh, Steve Bartlett. So Steve was a, a young guy. He came in, I think, as kind of like an intern, basically, but he was, you know, I hired him when he was 20 years old. He wanted to come work with us. I worked with him for a bit. Um, honestly, he was kind of a shit employee, but he's turned out to be a great entrepreneur, and built a company that's now, you know, sort of semi-gone public in Europe or something weird. But he's built, you know, he's built a fortune of tens of millions of dollars for himself. And, um, and what, the way he got started was by buying Twitter and Instagram accounts that were not owned by a personality influencer, but by a theme account like I Love Food, or whatever. They have, I think, Love Food. It's got like six million or seven million Instagram followers, and they bought that account. And he was figuring, he figured out pretty early,

• 39:07Shaan Puri?

  wow, the people who run these accounts with a million, million followers, it's an 18-year-old kid, and I can offer him a thousand bucks, and I can get the account, and he's just, you know, doing affiliate links for protein powder. But if I aggregate all these, I can go sell this to Spotify as a great way to reach the masses. And I can control these. They're not based off of a person's face and a personality. They're based off of, you know, Harry Potter memes, or whatever. And I can just, I can just hire, you know, a whole bunch of fungible people to keep posting on those accounts. That was a smart business plan. That, it did have some platform risk, but the cost was so low, and the personality risk was also zero, and that was a pretty genius way of going about it.

• 39:44Sam Parr?

  I'm definitely a little bit allergic to schemes like that, because I, I don't wanna hate on him for doing that, because it, it seems like it worked to him. I personally think, I would never tell someone to do that, though, because I think that is short-term money that can go away in a heartbeat. Now, some people definitely pull it off, but I'm allergic to that shit, where I, I'd rather not have stress about, like...

• 40:06Shaan Puri?

  But I think you're wrong about that in that he was spending so little on it. He was making his, if you're making your money back in one month, then there's no risk. It can go away and you still like, you still will end up ahead. So it's all about what's the payback period on the thing? Is it a high priced item? These were so low priced that he was making his money back so quickly. He's just free rolling from there. And so that.

• 40:25Sam Parr?

  I'm not disagreeing with the result. It worked out wonderfully for him. Or I don't know. It seems like it did. But I just personally would not want to do that because I'm like, dude, if you're going to spend like 10 years of your life doing something like make it, make it something kind of cool. Like, uh, it's just, I, it just would be hard for me to like, love that. And I don't think a lot of people would love it.

• 40:45Shaan Puri?

  Really? That's crazy to me. I, I think if I'm 21 years old right now and I was running the sort of, you know, he could push a button and make things trend on the internet all over the place. Right? And so I think that's an awesome thing to do. For somebody who's, you know, you don't have capital, you don't have investors, you don't have like any real hard skills, can't code, can't design, can't do any of those things. I thought this was a great sort of entrepreneurial thing to do from age 20 to, I don't know how old he is now, 27 or something like that. Um, and he.

• 41:11Sam Parr?

  I'm not hating the player here. I'm not hating the player here. I think the game is stupid, but if you got, he got results. I just think that it's kind of like a soulless, uh.

• 41:20Shaan Puri?

  But isn't it the same thing as a media company, right? So like, all he was doing was saying, great, I'm going to buy these media properties. This is a brand with an audience that cares about food or fitness or whatever it is. And I'm going to create content that they love. And occasionally I'm going to run sponsorships. How is that different than the hustle?

• 41:33Sam Parr?

  Um, on paper, it's not.

• 41:34Shaan Puri?

  So you own an email list, so hustle's better that way, right? Cause you, you instagat, like what happened was a lot of their Twitter accounts.

• 41:40Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I don't care about that.

• 41:41Shaan Puri?

  But you can't really get shut down.

• 41:42Sam Parr?

  I think, um, I can't get shut down. It is a little different though. Uh, from my perspective, it's, uh, on paper, it is the exact same thing. It's a little bit different because I actually give a shit, which maybe he does give a shit about his people, his audience, but, um.

• 41:57Shaan Puri?

  Gotcha. So you love the topic more and the audience as well, the community of, of people. That would be the difference?

• 42:01Sam Parr?

  Yeah, like I love the idea of building a brand that people know and love and trust. So like, um, which maybe some people do love these brands, but like, let's say like, let's say, let's go with news. So let's go with CNN, which is on the left and Fox is on the right. Like to their audience, they're. Like a source of truth, which people can debate all day if that's true or not, but they are. Now compare that to like fringe, like far left, uh, like news things that are just like clickbait and far right. That's clickbait. It's like, that's the difference. It's like, well, what's the difference between porn and a, uh, a documentary where there's nudity, like you know it when you see it. And so this is like one of those things where it's like, well, it's both nudity. Like, well, it's a little different.

• 42:39Shaan Puri?

  I, I also think that like, you know, the way BuzzFeed kind of started with the stupidest of the stupid listicles and quizzes. And now does like a bunch of investigative journalism and create a tasty and all these other things. I think you can evolve that, like they did this with, with their stuff too. They used to buy little meme accounts and post stuff all the time to go viral. And over time they built then, uh, a woman's fashion, like athleisure brand where they were selling products into that community. They built a, a news channel that's sort of like ESPN, um, that's focused on sport, but in a, in a millennial kind of way. And so they ended up upgrading the like, I'll say level of quality around their things, but it's because they had this asset that could make any of their pages big. Um, and they, that was like their renewal blast.

• 43:17Sam Parr?

  I agree with that. I, I think that's, I think that's possible. I think that's possible. I just personally don't find it to be incredibly exciting, but I buy, I understand it.

• 43:24Shaan Puri?

  Okay, cool. I like when we disagree. It makes for good, good conversation. All right. Let's try to squeeze one more in. I got two minutes left. Uh, what's one more thing we could talk quickly about?

• 43:32Sam Parr?

  Do you have something in mind?

• 43:33Shaan Puri?

  Um, okay, let's do this one. So.

• 43:35Sam Parr?

  Why did?

• 43:35Shaan Puri?

  Uh, what were you gonna say?

• 43:36Sam Parr?

  I brought you have some stuff, Elon weird tweets and, uh.

• 43:39Shaan Puri?

  Okay, let's do this one real quick. So I tweeted this thing out. I said, hey, um, uh, you know, give me a book recommendation. Get, uh, what's a book that you read that changed the way you see the world? Um, and I tweeted this out and I got like 500 replies, which was probably like the most, uh, replied to tweet I've ever had. Everybody gave me like 10 books, which is way too much, right? I can't read that in one lifetime. Um, but ironically, so I ended up with a good book recommendation out of this. So I got, I got a list, bought all the books. I start, I started reading one of the books, um, it's a book called Storyworthy. And I fucking love this book and nobody, I never, it was only one person who recommended this book out of the whole list of 500 reply, repliers. And so Storyworthy is a book by this guy, Matthew Dix. Who's Matthew Dix?

• 44:20Shaan Puri?

  He is a teacher, I think in Connecticut. He, um, you know how people do like slam poetry at these like open mic nights? So whatever. So there's a version of that for storytelling called like the moth storytelling competition. You just go to this little bar or whatever on

• 44:33Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I love the moth. I listen to it all the time.

• 44:35Shaan Puri?

  So he is the like 20 time moth champion storyteller.

• 44:39Sam Parr?

  Oh, cool.

• 44:40Shaan Puri?

  He is the Michael Jordan of the moth. The problem is the moth is so small that nobody knows about it. But anyways, this guy is just a

• 44:45Sam Parr?

  Dude, the moth's not small. The moth is big.

• 44:47Shaan Puri?

  If we're polling our audience, I bet less than 1% know the moth or something.

• 44:52Sam Parr?

  It's like NPR where it's like, it has a large audience, but maybe they're not like 19 year olds who wear

• 44:57Shaan Puri?

  Right. And so, so I listened to one of this guy's stories. I was like, oh, that's a pretty good story. But I read this book and this book is awesome because this book breaks down the art of storytelling. And you will like, I already feel like a better storyteller just from reading. I've read three fourths of the book so far. And I'm like, wow, this is one of the most useful books I've read in a long time because I walked away being like, oh, that's why the stories I love. That's why I love them. And for the stories that I go to, I have my two or three go to stories that I'm like, these stories kill. I know, I now know why they kill and I know why my other stories don't kill. And so I'm like, this is

• 45:30Sam Parr?

  And you know how to like take advantage and capture people's attention and convince them to do stuff now.

• 45:34Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it could be used for persuasion, but I don't think that's really, that's definitely not his intent because he's like a, you know, sixth grade teacher or whatever.

• 45:42Sam Parr?

  I know, but that's the, that's the intent of all stories. It's capture attention to make them feel something.

• 45:45Shaan Puri?

  It's to move somebody, you know, emotionally, right? So it's like, it's to get somebody to feel something. Now you can use that to get them to feel excited about your product or you can get that to make them feel like they'd like you and they want to just hang out with you more or whatever it is, right? And so I think storytelling is a superpower. This book story worthy is fucking legit. You should read it. And uh, next time I'm going to do an example of like, good story versus bad story, but I ran out of time today.

• 46:06Sam Parr?

  Awesome. This was a short one. Give us a review, please.

• 46:09Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 46:10Sam Parr?

  I, we, I, we both, Sean and I, um, look at the feedback every single day and uh, iterate based on your guys' feedback. So leave us a review. Awesome.

• 46:19Shaan Puri?

  Cool. We're out. See ya.