#70 - Making Money In 48 Hours, Fat FIRE & How To Collect $2M

Sam (@thesamparr) and Shaan (@shaanvp) discuss today Kanye West's billion-dollar shoe empire (3:59), /r/FatFIRE: Retire living a lavish life (10:36), Ways to generate passive income in 48 hours (23:03), Best interview questions they've been asked (33:01), Stupid D2C gimmicks making millions a week (39:37), Engaging with haters/trolls - someone owes their friend $2m (47:17) and Xprize.org but for enterprise (57:58) 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, 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.

• 3:08Sam Parr?

  This guy, he was owed $2 million and I was like, why didn't you fly over to where he lives and get that fucking money? And he was like, oh no, it'd ruin my reputation. And I was like, they'll create your reputation as someone you don't like.

• 3:23Shaan Puri?

  Sam, what's up dude?

• 3:26Sam Parr?

  Nothing.

• 3:26Shaan Puri?

  You got a fresh haircut, but we already made all of our jokes off the air. So I don't know, we can't really repeat them now.

• 3:32Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I've got a shaved head. My head was itching, so I just did the damn thing.

• 3:38Shaan Puri?

  Okay, cool. Do you want to just jump in or should we do a little small talk patty cake? Or how do you want to do it?

• 3:46Sam Parr?

  Um, jump right into, okay, so I want to talk about a few resources that I like and it stems off of what you tweeted.

• 3:58Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 3:59Sam Parr?

  Um, talk about Kanye West.

• 4:01Shaan Puri?

  Okay, let's talk about Kanye West. We'll start with Kanye. Kanye was the Billy of the week for this week. So I read this article in Forbes that I just thought was hilarious. So basically the article comes out and it was saying, okay, Kanye West is a billionaire, which is cool because I feel like it wasn't too long ago. He was either broke or saying that he was broke and like asking people for money on the internet. I forget who he was asking. He was asking like Mark Zuckerberg for money and he was like, I can do this.

• 4:32Shaan Puri?

  So anyways, but the funny part of the article was that it wasn't Forbes just reporting that Kanye was a billionaire. It was Kanye telling Forbes, I'm a billionaire, write about me. And he, and so the article is basically saying Kanye came to us. He's really upset that he was not on the billionaire list or something like that. He tells us he's worth $3 billion. And so, and then he gave us all his financials so that we could verify that he's worth it. They're like, you know, good news, he is a billionaire. Bad news, it's not 3 billion, we think he's worth 1 billion. And, um, and then Kanye's like disgruntled about this. He's like, it's three. Okay, it's three. And so they're, they're just going back and forth. And so I just thought it was pretty, pretty interesting to see.

• 5:12Sam Parr?

  And he, he also told everyone he wants, uh, he wants them to be, he wants his name to be Christian. What was it?

• 5:22Shaan Puri?

  Like, I didn't see this part.

• 5:24Sam Parr?

  Yeah, he's like, I am so mad about this. I'm going to change my name to Kanye Christian Billionaire Good Guy West. Or something, or no, like Christian Genius Billionaire West. Or something like that.

• 5:37Shaan Puri?

  Name change is always a great celebrity move. Uh, Chad Ochocinco was the, the first I remember. You know, Ron Artest becoming Metta World Peace was hilarious. Uh, you know, that's when you, when you've really gone off the deep end and you do the name change.

• 5:53Sam Parr?

  Um, yeah, so talk about the numbers.

• 5:55Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so he owns, okay, so from, from music, um, you know, he doesn't have sort of, uh, the billionaire status, right? So like, they think that his label and music sort of is worth roughly 90 million bucks. Um, then outside of music and forgetting about his Yeezy brand, he's got 17 million in cash, 35 million in stocks.

• 6:17Sam Parr?

  Wait, he, he had 17 million in cash?

• 6:19Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 6:20Sam Parr?

  Wait, I didn't see that.

• 6:20Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, so 17 million in cash assets, 35 million in stock assets, 81 million in buildings and improvements and 21 million in land. And then they were saying, you know, the 81 million and 20 million of land and, and homes that he owns. They're like, those aren't going to be worth that because when you do this ultra high-end real estate. The next buyer wants to customize their own shit. They don't want to buy your custom.

• 6:42Sam Parr?

  Well, yeah, so he, well, he cut, he built his own homes and when you build like highly, it's like Michael Jordan's house, which is still for sale.

• 6:49Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 6:50Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 6:50Shaan Puri?

  Uh, and so he, uh, and then he has a hundred million dollars in debt. So, uh, you could definitely think he's rich. I think we both liked that one book by, uh, what was his name? Dennis, Dennis Phillips?

• 7:01Sam Parr?

  Felix Dennis?

• 7:01Shaan Puri?

  Felix Dennis. Um, and he has this line in there, which is if you can count your money, you're not rich. Um, and it seems like Kanye's in that boat where he can't exactly count, calculate his net worth. It's like you have to make a bunch of approximations. Yeah. About, uh, you know, approximately this, approximately that. So he's definitely rich. Uh, on the Yeezys brand, which is his kind of shoe line that came out, I don't know, five, six years ago, maybe. He owns a hundred percent of it, but it's like produced and manufactured and distributed by Adidas. So he has some, some split with them. So 2019, he did 1.3 billion in sales on the Yeezy brand, which is

• 7:37Shaan Puri?

  kind of insane actually, uh, that a rapper was able to sort of have a Jordan-esque, um, brand there. He gets an 11% royalty, which is 140 million on that. So every pair of Yeezys, he gets 11%. He did 140 million last year, but then there's a big question mark, um, like what is Yeezys worth? Well, you do, you, you have to apply some multiple to this, you know, this cashless source. And you have to assume some things about how long this is going to last. And also could he even sell this? Because once it's not associated with him, is it worth anything? This is kind of like the Kylie cosmetics problem where, uh, it's so tied to her brand that in some ways it reduces the asset value. Um, so what did you think of all this when you were reading this stuff about Kanye?

• 8:23Sam Parr?

  Well, I, I just wanted to like the headline. I mean, I wanted the headline or the sub headline to be like, he's now a billionaire. Uh, and he did it by marrying into the Kardashian family. I, I mean, I think that, I think that, um, I think they're geniuses. I think they're amazing.

• 8:40Shaan Puri?

  And he, I don't really, he was excited, according to the, the author, he was excited that he was worth, you know, 300 million more than Kylie, who was just at 1 billion, a petty 1 billion.

• 8:49Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I, I, I think that, uh, I don't give a shit about this. I think that, uh, it's kind of, it's interesting to see. What's more interesting, I like seeing how people allocate their money. And so that's cool. I don't give a shit about Kanye. I think he's fine as a musician. I like some of his music. He's, I think he's a crazy person and, I don't care about him, but it's cool. I, like, I wonder why he has 17 million in cash. That's crazy.

• 9:17Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I don't know. It, it also might be, that might be part of the loan. It's just cash he hasn't deployed yet. And so anyways, I, the thing I found most interesting was how much more he's been able to make off Yeezys than his music. Right? So like, uh, this is yet another example of, you know, Michael Jordan made, at his peak, I don't know, 30, 40 million a year playing basketball and, and his salary there, which, you know, after taxes is going to be like 15 million bucks. And, um, but he became, you know, sort of billionaire status because of his shoe brand. And, uh, you know, the Kardashians also, you know, they get the fame in one place, but the money, in a, from another direction. And I think that like, it's very interesting to see how celebrities are going to use their assets. We were talking about this with Lance Armstrong.

• 10:02Shaan Puri?

  How do you use your brand in a way that's going to monetize at a much higher rate than like it does today? You know, your direct job did. So I'm, I'm interested in that. I think the Yeezys, the fact that Yeezys are doing over a billion dollars a year in sales on their shoes is, is pretty crazy.

• 10:17Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I think that's, that's a far more interesting angle. I mean, that's like what we're doing with this podcast. We're not, not going to make that much money from the podcast, but we'll make way more money.

• 10:26Shaan Puri?

  And our shoe line will be fucking sick. And, uh, you know, we won't have ugly shoes. Yeezys are ugly. Uh, so that's the other thing. I mean, who bought this, you know, billion dollars worth of these ugly shoes?

• 10:36Sam Parr?

  Okay. So have you heard of this subreddit called Fat Fire?

• 10:40Shaan Puri?

  Yes, I like this subreddit a lot.

• 10:42Sam Parr?

  I love Fat Fire.

• 10:43Shaan Puri?

  Explain what Fire is and then Fat Fire.

• 10:45Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So Fire stands for financially.

• 10:49Shaan Puri?

  Independent.

• 10:49Sam Parr?

  I actually don't, what's it?

• 10:51Shaan Puri?

  Financially independent, retire early.

• 10:53Sam Parr?

  Got it. Okay, so traditionally, this was like people who were had white collar jobs and they'd like work their hardest to save a million dollars and that meant that they can live off of forty to eighty grand a year and live relatively frugally, but they try to get there by like thirty or forty. Cool, great. There's a lean fire, which is people who try to live like five hundred thousand dollars and they move to Thailand or something. So and there's subreddits for lean fire, there's subreddits for fire, and then there's this other subreddit called fat fire and by this fat, meaning you, it's people who want to live wealthy lifestyles while being fire. What's it stand for? Financially independent retire early? Yeah, I think so.

• 11:37Sam Parr?

  So there's no definition of this. It just basically means whatever you want you could have. And so if that means you want to fly private, then it's all talks about that. Typically, it probably means people who want to have income of five hundred thousand to a million dollars a year off of their assets. Now, it's a subreddit with maybe twenty or thirty thousand members and it's pretty cool. And so the top headlines are, which I'll read, I was just reading it the other day, it was some, okay, so and you have to take this with a grain of salt because sometimes you don't know who's posting and if they're legit. But alright, so here's some posts that have a lot of comments. How do real estate investors pay zero dollars on their real estate income? That's incredibly interesting.

• 12:21Sam Parr?

  Do you guys find it hard to be happy and just relax? That's an awesome post. Am I crazy to buy a two million dollar house in the Bay Area while on my way to fat fire? And then finally, this one was interesting, which was, oh, how much cash do high net worth people keep in their bank accounts? And then one more, there was one more, which was like, I'm an heir about to retire, about to inherit a billion dollars in businesses. How do I set things up? So something like that, like, I don't know if that's actually true. Here's another, oh, here's one more. How has your significant other affected your fat fire plans? So it's a pretty cool subreddit and my, okay, so there's a lot of pros and cons. The cons to this is I think these people are naturally pretty pessimistic. And so that's, you have to be careful with that.

• 13:06Sam Parr?

  What makes you say that?

• 13:09Shaan Puri?

  Like they're planning for the downside, you mean, or something else?

• 13:14Sam Parr?

  No, a lot of the people here are are people who are

• 13:20Sam Parr?

  who like started a plumbing company and they just grew it after 20 or 30 years. And so I think that they're not that risk adverse. And that's good. That provides value, though. But you have to understand who you're getting a feedback from. I also think that a lot of the people who are part of this subreddit are people who work at Netflix and have worked there for years and are climbing up the chain and make amazing living. But if they got laid off, they would be fucked. So they're not necessarily like traders. But it's still really interesting to see how people think about money, how they spend. It's a wonderful subreddit. I've learned a ton. It's great for resources. People and it's all anonymous. And people be like, here's how I allocate my money. I keep this here, this here during this whole payment protection thing, this

• 14:04Sam Parr?

  this loan thing that's going out right now. I learned a lot on how to do it in the subreddit. I learned a lot about taxes. It's an incredibly interesting subreddit. So you've been spending time on it?

• 14:15Shaan Puri?

  So I don't go to the subreddit regularly, but I did dive in at one point when I was like, I first heard about it through the Mr. Money Mustache guy, which he's like one of the kind of like, I don't know, forefathers of this, or he's one of the kind of leaders of the movement. And I like it because it's it's not just, you know, personal finance. It's a very specific lifestyle. And so just a high level, they have these ideas, right? So you have your savings rate. So what percentage of the income you have today are you saving? So maybe you're at 25%, 50%, 75%. So one big piece is how do you save more? Because that gets plugged into, okay, if your savings rate is, you know, X,

• 14:52Shaan Puri?

  and you're going to work for Y years, then you're going to have Z years of savings, you know, pent up. And then they have this kind of like 4% rule, which basically means like, you want to be able to, if you have, you know, sort of 25 years of life expense of life expenses, then you're sort of at the 4% rule where you're able to withdraw money for living every year, but you're not like depleting your assets, your net worth. And so anyways, I like the idea behind it. I think it's great. I think everybody wants to be financially independent. Everybody wants to be able to retire early if they so choose, meaning not be obligated to do any specific type of job or work. But

• 15:34Shaan Puri?

  You know, obviously, the way to get there is very tricky. And I like Fat Fire because I found that when I first looked into the fire movement, I was like, oh, this is cool. All I gotta do is move to a small town in Nebraska, ride my bike to the grocery stores, so I don't have a car and don't pay for gas. Like, you know, buy the cheapest food possible, go home and like, you know, make my own fire out of sticks. Like, I was like, okay, yeah, that's like, yes, I'm retired, but like, this is not the lifestyle I want. So Fat Fire is good because it's like, hey, look, I want to have this baller lifestyle. I want to have this fat lifestyle. I'm not looking to like, cut back and like, live well below my means. That's not exactly what I'm interested in. So I like this subreddit a lot more than when I first discovered the fire movement.

• 16:19Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's cool. It's been fun to read.

• 16:22Shaan Puri?

  And there's some good stuff, like I saw this post just now when you linked the subreddit, which is like, the Fat Fire Guide to Prenups. And there's just like interesting stuff that you don't hear talked about everywhere. And so, you know, I like to check those out.

• 16:34Sam Parr?

  Yeah, or there'll be a guy who owns like, 500 apartment units. And he'll say, I actually make the most amount of money off low income housing. And, uh, and then there's another, and which I never, I'd never in a million years would have thought that, that you make it for more from like Section 8, uh, housing projects. Or there'll be another one where a person is in real estate and they go, yeah, like, stop thinking about like, you're gonna live here. You're not gonna live here. So just as long as it just looks good enough, like it has a clean coat of white paint, you're good.

• 17:05Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 17:05Sam Parr?

  And like, just little bits of like, advice like that, I have found that subreddit to be amazing.

• 17:11Shaan Puri?

  And if I was you, uh, you being the listener, I would, uh, check out some of these Facebook groups. So I've discovered all these different Facebook groups, uh, along the, along the way that I've really liked. So, uh, my buddy Tyler started this one called the Passive Income Club. It's not that great of a group. I think it's kind of fizzled out now, but it maybe four or five years ago was really active.

• 17:29Sam Parr?

  Tyler who?

• 17:30Shaan Puri?

  Tyler Hayes. And the passive income club was cool because it was just people who were spinning up passive income projects and they would just talk about them. And I thought that was cool. It was always interesting to see, oh, this guy's trying to like, you know, sell soap over here and he's generating $4,000 a month of passive income. And then there's another one, which is I like joining White Coat Investors, which is a doctors, it's a club, it's a Facebook group for doctors who are who want to talk about how to invest their money. And I just find that interesting because doctors think so differently than people in Silicon Valley. But there's like a lot of doctors out there. So I like that group. There's the same one for real estate investors. And then there's other ones that are like, like, you know, the trends group obviously is a good one where people are always talking about business. The podcast

• 18:12Shaan Puri?

  has it has a group where sometimes people talk about their businesses. But I just find it interesting to sort of surround yourself like with just a steady diet of information around the different ways that people sort of make and save money and the different ways they sort of lead their lives. Like, I think that it's just much more interesting to me than my normal Facebook news feed of like, whatever, you know, stupid life pictures. They go, you're at a barbecue. Great.

• 18:36Sam Parr?

  Speaking of passive income, Sean, do you have

• 18:41Sam Parr?

  income from products or businesses that you've made over the last couple of years that are still bringing you revenue?

• 18:48Shaan Puri?

  No, not really. So I have, I basically get probably 2,500 a month off of passive income. Not a lot. Not not counting like a stock investment or anything like just an actual revenue stream that comes to my pocket that I don't manage. I don't do work for that business. But it's not a lot. And because I've I've found over time that like, you know, sort of the passive income dream, the four work week dream where you create this muse and it just magically gives you 10k a month. Like, it takes actually quite a bit of time to get there. So yes, if you do get one set up, great, it's, it's awesome when it is passive, but it's extremely active to make something passive in the first place.

• 19:28Shaan Puri?

  And so I always get like sort of two days into it or two weeks into it. And I'm like, well, You know, this is taking up so much time just trying to architect a passive business. And I tend to be like, usually like I'm running a startup or I'm like, you know, have a like, okay, I'm on the exec team at Twitch. It's like, I have something already that is active that makes me a lot more money than these little side things would do. And I remember a long time ago, my dad told me that, you know, a small project and a big project both take up all of your time. So just choose the big one. And so I believe that that's true during the creation phase. Now, it's true now, some people do get it going where they get it to the point where it's truly, it's truly passive.

• 20:11Shaan Puri?

  And so the active phase stops. I just haven't spent the time to like, do that yet. And I don't, I don't

• 20:18Sam Parr?

  That's good.

• 20:18Shaan Puri?

  I don't think I ever will at this point because

• 20:23Shaan Puri?

  like, I would want like 20K a month coming in from it to like, feel really good about it. And I don't think it's, I think it gets hard to get past businesses up to that level. I think it's easy to get it to where my current one is 2,500 a month. I think that's easy.

• 20:37Shaan Puri?

  I think getting to 10 or 20 or 30K takes more time and it ends up looking a lot more active than you think.

• 20:43Sam Parr?

  I have a few things that roll in regularly and then a few things that roll in irregularly. So I've had a few investments start it. So I have, well, first of all, not now, but up until recently, stock market was paying great.

• 20:58Shaan Puri?

  But that's just your stock appreciation, right? That's not like a dividend or something.

• 21:03Sam Parr?

  Correct. But that was passive. I guess technically it wasn't income.

• 21:07Shaan Puri?

  If you count that as passive, then I do that.

• 21:09Sam Parr?

  Uh, right. So, and then I had, um,

• 21:11Shaan Puri?

  You have like a rental property as well, right?

• 21:15Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I don't, those like, I did it some with family. So I don't, but that's not, I don't own all of them. And then I, I did angel investments that paid off. So that's a lumpy.

• 21:23Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 21:24Sam Parr?

  That was passive, but lumpy. It's not every month. I own parts of other companies, but I take zero cash flow out of them, but they're profitable. But then I also started blogging in 2012 and I still make hundreds of dollars, sometimes many thousands of dollars a month off of little affiliate revenue

• 21:43Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 21:43Sam Parr?

  from blog posts.

• 21:45Shaan Puri?

  Like we and then I all you make off this podcast, we don't consider that passive because we

• 21:49Sam Parr?

  No, this isn't. This is income, but it's not passive income.

• 21:52Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 21:52Sam Parr?

  Um, but that, so I have affiliate revenue of just stuff that just has been sitting there accumulating. But then I also made a guide, like an ebook on, I don't even want to say exactly what it is. Cause uh, but basically it was a guide on moving to new cities. And for a long time, it was making like five grand a month and it still does pretty good.

• 22:13Shaan Puri?

  That's awesome.

• 22:13Sam Parr?

  Um, and I just logged into Gumroad and it's like, okay, there's money there and it's pretty cool.

• 22:18Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it is great. You know, like in more part of the, I want to hear a bunch of other passive businesses because I just find them interesting.

• 22:26Shaan Puri?

  But I, I guess like my, I, I went through the sort of um, excitement phase and then the experimentation phase. And maybe I just suck at it, but I definitely found that like, it takes a lot of energy to get it to, to get it to that point where it's just spitting you five to 10K a month of like passive income.

• 22:44Sam Parr?

  And it's not always, it's not most, most of the time. I mean, other than investments, like it's not necessarily passive. It's just something you, you build a business and then you just don't spend a lot of time managing.

• 22:56Shaan Puri?

  Mostly automated. Yes.

• 22:59Sam Parr?

  Um, what else you want to talk about?

• 23:00Shaan Puri?

  Okay, let's pick another, uh, okay. So here's kind of, here's a related one. All right. So there's this guy. I don't know how to say his last name, but Nikita Beer. I don't know if you knew who this guy is. So um, he started a company that was called TBH. Do you, do you know TBH?

• 23:17Sam Parr?

  Um, was it an app?

• 23:18Shaan Puri?

  It was an app and it got like viral, it got bought by Facebook. It was a viral Facebook. It was a viral.

• 23:23Sam Parr?

  Like a hundred million dollars, right?

• 23:24Shaan Puri?

  Got bought for a hundred million bucks and these guys had been cranking for, for like six, seven years. Like when we were doing our idea lab, these guys were also just building social apps for I think five, six.

• 23:33Sam Parr?

  They're the guys who figured out how to create viral niche apps, right?

• 23:38Shaan Puri?

  No, they, they were doing uh, this thing called TBH, which was like a kind of a quiz, uh, quiz style thing. That was going viral for high schoolers in America.

• 23:47Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And, and he tweeted about how he did it, which was they created viral communities.

• 23:52Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. They, he, yeah, there's a good, um, if you just Google, I don't know, Nikita Beer, like Facebook leaked memo, leaked email or something like that. He basically writes an email to the, to his colleagues, I guess at Facebook after he got acquired and he's like, hey. You know, we're talking about growth, like here's the system we used at TBH to grow this thing. We would create an Instagram page for the high school. It would be called this. It would be, the profile would be all black. The bio would say, this is launching on, you know, March 22nd at 4:00 PM. And we would go follow all the people who are from that high school and we would have our account on private. So they would request to follow us. And we would not accept any requests until March 22nd. Then we would accept all of them at once. And then they would all get a notification and then they would come

• 24:36Shaan Puri?

  in and the app would be there in our bio and they would download it and then they would all get notified that the friend has the app. And he was like, was talking about this whole system of how they activated these high schools.

• 24:45Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it was amazing.

• 24:46Shaan Puri?

  It was, it was great. It was very scrappy, very much a hustler. So anyways, he tweeted this out the other day. It was very controversial, which I'm surprised at. He goes, my favorite PM interview, so product manager interview question is, if you had 48 hours to make money on the internet, how would you do it? And, uh, and so a lot of people were responding being like, this is a stupid, uh, interview question because why would a product manager need to know how to like, get rich quick on the internet? That's not the job.

• 25:14Sam Parr?

  Who the fuck would say that? Of course they need to know.

• 25:16Shaan Puri?

  Tons of people were saying, it was crazy. And they were like, yeah, I don't see how this will tell you if someone's gonna be an effective product manager. And he was, and so he, he was like, uh, he was, cause you know, if you're in a big company, right? You're in a company like Facebook. It's not like when you get there, you need to like, generate cash flow in 48 hours. That's true. But his point was, um, he was like, look, I wanna know, I wanna hire somebody who really understands how the internet works and how distribution works and how monetization works on the internet. And, uh, if you can't explain how you would do it, then I don't think, you know, I think there's a lot of PMs out there who just like to make PowerPoints.

• 25:50Sam Parr?

  Yeah. His top reply is, I, he goes, alright, so he tweeted out, he goes, an interview question that I use to filter out product managers, managers who are not scrappy or are internet illiterate, you have 40 hours to make money on the internet, how would you do it? It got 2100 likes and his, and he replied immediately. He says, I apologize to all the PowerPoint wizards who are upset by this question. There will always be a home for you at Accenture.

• 26:13Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 26:13Sam Parr?

  Oh, this guy's awesome.

• 26:15Shaan Puri?

  Great reply.

• 26:15Sam Parr?

  This guy's awesome.

• 26:17Shaan Puri?

  And so, uh, okay, that's your interview question, Sam. What would you say? How, how, what would your answer be if you were put on the spot with that?

• 26:25Sam Parr?

  Do I have a name or am I Sam Parr or am I, can I not use my name in audio?

• 26:29Shaan Puri?

  You're a normal person. You're Sam Jones.

• 26:31Sam Parr?

  Forty-eight hours?

• 26:36Sam Parr?

  Well, the easiest thing is you go on Fiverr and offer a free, a cheap service. I wouldn't want to do that, but I would do that.

• 26:42Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 26:42Sam Parr?

  If I had the skills I had, it would, I would, I would create a Fiverr job, probably around some type of writing or editing. And I would, and I would say, I'm going to make this, yours better by 300% or your money back.

• 26:55Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 26:56Sam Parr?

  And I could probably make money off that right away. Or I would go to AliExpress and find some shit cheap product.

• 27:03Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 27:04Sam Parr?

  Probably 10 of them, and I would spend money to advertise against them.

• 27:07Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 27:07Sam Parr?

  And get sales. What else would I do?

• 27:16Sam Parr?

  I would create a, a post. I would sell some type of information. What could I sell though? Something using Gumroad.

• 27:27Sam Parr?

  That's a great question. What would you do?

• 27:29Shaan Puri?

  So very similar. So my first instinct was, okay, the time constraint here is the 48 hours. That's the tough part. So you have to do something that can be, that can start generating revenue quickly. So drop shipping was the first thing that came to mind. So I would do the, I would do the AliExpress. I would spin up 10 stores and I would be running quick Facebook ad tests to figure out which of these products is there demand for? And I would start selling them. And I would actually first start by just opening up my Instagram feed and I would see what products are already selling. And then I would go clone that ad and I would just clone them and compete exactly. I would, I would do no, I would, because I don't have time to take risks. So I would literally copy their ad, copy their product, copy their AliExpress thing and spin up the store right away. So drop shipping, I think is the easiest one.

• 28:14Sam Parr?

  Or no, I think the easiest one would probably go to Goodwill and take pictures of loads and loads of stuff and put it on eBay.

• 28:19Shaan Puri?

  So there's flipping, which you could do, like even the Fiverr upwork route. So first I was like, okay, one category is guaranteed income. You, you don't want to take risks, but you're not going to make a lot, but you're going to make something. And I think that's where the Fiverr upwork, like you might make a couple of hundred bucks type of thing. Another way to do it, and this is kind of like, I kind of cheated because I told you, okay, you're not in Sampar. But I was like, another way to do it would be, I would immediately create a course and I would offer it to all the podcast listeners. And like, I could generate tens of thousands of dollars, I think, just within 24 hours of that. I could pre sell a course. The other one is you could email your whole network and be like, hey, you're gonna get five months of consulting, but you gotta pay upfront. You know, right now, if you if you want my time, but I need money in the next 48 hours.

• 29:04Shaan Puri?

  Whoever wants my consulting for the next five months. There you go. So there's some things like that. The other I thought interesting things were. Somebody linked to something that I thought was pretty hilarious. I had never heard of this before. So somebody first linked to a million dollar homepage, which I knew about. They're like, oh, I'd create this. Now, that's a dumb idea because you needed to go viral. So you're, you know, low odds of success. But then somebody else linked to this thing called savetoby.com. Have you seen this?

• 29:29Sam Parr?

  No, I'm trying to find that.

• 29:30Shaan Puri?

  So I think it's old. I think it's like gone now, but I read it. And here's here's the story. So somebody put up a website with this really cute bunny. This is messed up, by the way. This is like a total like messed up thing to do. But I thought it was very interesting that this actually happened in real life. So somebody put up this picture of this bunny. And they were essentially like, you know, this bunny is gonna get. I'm gonna cook this bunny for dinner unless you donate whatever it was. I forgot like $25,000 to this to this webpage right now. And they're like, you know, tomorrow's dinner will be this bunny Toby. Unless Toby gets paid for. And so people started. And so this obviously goes viral because people think it's so messed up. PETA gets all crazy about it. Some people think it's hilarious.

• 30:15Shaan Puri?

  People start calling the governor, they start calling Go Daddy and be like, hey, Go Daddy, take this down. This guy's like a, you know, terrorist. He's like, you know, holding this bunny ransom. And Go Daddy was like, hey, there's no rules against eating rabbit. Like you can eat rabbit. People do that. So we can't tell this person, you can't. You can't say that you're gonna cook a rabbit. That's what people do. And so I just thought this was like a really crazy internet thing that I somehow was not a part of when it happened.

• 30:42Sam Parr?

  That's a good idea. Okay, here's another one that's similar to that. Abreu, do you own your own? Actually, Sean, you own your own domain name?

• 30:49Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I do. You just take someone's domain ransom?

• 30:52Sam Parr?

  Abreu.com is taken first, but I could pay $70 somehow and get it. But what I think what you another thing I would do if I had to make money is I would find 50 of my friends and see whose domain name I could buy for hopefully $10. And I would email them and be like, for $100. You'll have, I'll have a website and I'll put your, I'll post your resume on there.

• 31:12Shaan Puri?

  Right, yeah, I'll make your portfolio up there.

• 31:15Sam Parr?

  And I think people would do that.

• 31:17Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you know, this is an interesting, this is an interesting question and I think everybody should think about this because it's gonna, you're gonna, it's gonna challenge you to think about something, right? Like where are the, there's the obvious ideas you gravitate towards and then what are the non-obvious ideas? What are the, what are the unusual ways to do it? I remember me and my, my, in my very first startup, we were broke and we were like really frustrated with how slow our project was coming along. And we did this challenge, we did a 48-hour challenge, actually the whole blog is up. I'll put it in the show notes, but we did a 48-hour challenge where we were like, alright, screw it, forget this whole, you know, cloud kitchen restaurant thing. We're, we're gonna do a business in the next 48 hours, this weekend, we're gonna make money.

• 31:58Shaan Puri?

  And we, essentially, we didn't know what dropshipping was, but we ended up doing that where we created these little, it's called, it was called fat bands. There's this fat wristbands that were like these silicon wristbands that you can write custom text on. And we were like, great, we could sell these to sororities, fraternities with their name on it and they'll buy it for their events, their mixers, their whatever. And we ended up doing it, we made a few, I don't know, a few hundred bucks, 500 bucks, something like that. Within 48 hours because we sold it to, of all things, someone in our, someone in our friends group, their dad was having their 40th birthday party. And they're like, oh, this is great, we'll give it out to everybody at the birthday party. And they placed a big order or whatever. And so that was our, we did this in real life.

• 32:41Sam Parr?

  This is a great question and I'm gonna use it.

• 32:45Sam Parr?

  I'm, I'm using this question.

• 32:46Shaan Puri?

  In your interviews?

• 32:48Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 32:48Shaan Puri?

  Do you have any other interview questions that you like to go to?

• 32:51Sam Parr?

  Well, I already told you some of them, on a scale of 1 to 10, how lucky do you feel?

• 32:56Shaan Puri?

  Oh, that's right.

• 32:57Sam Parr?

  And then the, did I tell you about the bottom fourth of the resume that I like to do?

• 33:00Shaan Puri?

  No, what's that?

• 33:02Sam Parr?

  So I do this particularly for writers and I was gonna write a post or a tweet storm on interviewing writers, but a lot of people don't know how to interview writers. And one of my favorite things to do is I ask them about the bottom fourth of the resume. So at the bottom fourth of the resume, it talks about fun stuff or stuff not related to work. So for example, where you went to college, what clubs you're a part of. And so what I like to ask people is they'll say, I studied history at Duke University. And I'll say, I'll look at that and be like, all right, you studied history at Duke. What was your favorite course and why? And I want them to be able to entertain me and I want them to be able to tell a story and I want them to be able to convince me of something interesting because if they're

• 33:45Sam Parr?

  not able to do that, then I don't want to work with them because they're probably just either, they're for sure uninteresting. If you spend tens of thousands of dollars in four years doing something and you can't be passionate about something, then I doubt I want to be around you. And B, in particular for a writer, if you can't interest me on something you spent all that time and money on, then you for sure can't do something that's, you know, like on anything else.

• 34:06Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 34:07Sam Parr?

  And so I love asking about the bottom fourth of their resume and seeing how, if they have the ability to hold my attention and to intrigue me.

• 34:16Shaan Puri?

  Nice. I like that. I think I might have, I think we did talk about this once, but I had one like this that I learned from this guy, which was, he would say, at the end of the interview, he would be like, oh, by the way, you know, I have a friend coming to town this weekend. You know, what's something fun we could, we should do? What should I do with my friend? And, and then people will usually just be like, if I asked you that, like you might just be, I don't know, what would you say?

• 34:44Sam Parr?

  I would say, yeah, I mean, I would tell you a tour of what I think you should do in San Francisco. I would say, go to Twin Peaks and then drive down through Ocean Beach and then go have lunch at the Cliff House.

• 34:53Shaan Puri?

  Right. So most people do an answer like that. And what this guy was looking for in his role, because he was hiring for It was like, I think it was like a marketing role, cause he had a marketing agency or an ad agency. So what he was looking for was if the person would ask a question first and be like,

• 35:10Sam Parr?

  Like what, what interests them?

• 35:11Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, like who's your friend? Is this like your aunt or is this like your buddy from college? You know, what, what are they into? And, oh, you know, and he's like, cause the core thing for his, his agency's philosophy, and they were very public about their philosophy, which is like, you start with the audience and you figure out, okay, what are they already into and how do we appeal to those, uh, you know, those, those topics as well as the like emotions that they want? And then you're like, okay, cool. Once I know that, I then I create my content to, to fit them. And so he, he said he liked that. He, he said he, he was saying that the best people he hired for, for his company, for his marketing agency, they would first try to figure out more about the person before just giving an answer. I was like, okay, that's pretty good.

• 35:51Sam Parr?

  I'm gonna tell you about this other interview I did one time. Zane and Jack, so my good friends started, uh, Vungle, um, which just sold, uh, about a year ago for eight hundred million dollars. And, uh, I, I'm, Jack's my best friend. I actually interviewed to work there in two thousand and twelve. And I didn't know Jack at the time at all, other than he was the guy who I was supposed to talk to. And I was applying to be a salesperson and Zane, who now I'm good friends with, he's, he's weird. Zane's a weirdo. He's one of my good buds, but he's fricking weird. Um, he tries to be a hard ass and I, he comes in, he goes, so what are you like really good at? I was like, I'm pretty good at convincing people stuff and I'm pretty good at getting to know just about anyone. And he goes, well, there's about twenty employees in that room.

• 36:35Sam Parr?

  Go out and walk around and introduce yourself to all and like get them to know you. And I was like, right now? And he goes, yeah, go, go do it. I was like, all right. So I just walked out and I just started walking around and talking to people. And, uh, and he, and I came back and he goes, he's like, hang on one second. And he went out and walked around the room to see who all met me and what, like if they do anything about me. And he came back, he goes, all right, you seem like you did okay job of getting to know them. Like, it was so weird. It was so weird.

• 37:00Shaan Puri?

  Dude, I had that for when I joined Monkey Inferno. Um, they, I showed up at the office and the guy, the main guy, it was all engineers. And the reason they wanted a product person was because They were like, oh, the reason we're not succeeding is we're not talking to users. We don't understand our users well enough. So we want to see if you can understand users. And I was like, well, yeah, for sure. And they're like, cool, let's go. And we walked over to Westlake Mall or Westfield Mall right here in San Francisco. And he's like, okay, I want to get feedback on our product. So go like, get me five people to give me feedback. And so I had to walk around and basically like a pickup artist. I had to go up to people in the mall and be like, hey. And I was just straight up like, I was supposed to get them to come over to this table and do a user interview with them. Like as they walk through the website and like get them to talk about what they think about the website.

• 37:46Shaan Puri?

  And so I was like, okay, how am I going to do this? These people do not want to spend their time doing this. In the real world, I would just offer them like, you know, some money for this. But in this case, I was just like, hey, I'm on a job interview right now and you can help me get this job. I need you to go over here and talk to this guy for five minutes about his web, about this website. They're testing if I can recruit users. And so it would really help me get this job. And everyone's like, yeah.

• 38:07Sam Parr?

  Did you get it?

• 38:08Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, no problem.

• 38:09Sam Parr?

  I mean, of course he did.

• 38:09Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, they were like, no problem. And he didn't know that that's, you know. The, he was just like, wow, this guy is like very persuasive. He was able to recruit all these people real quick, but I was like pulling the like, you know.

• 38:19Sam Parr?

  That's a good one. Yeah, I could see you being great at that. Here's another thing. Here's something similar. I, and I used to do this on my own. I started doing this in grade school and I would do it in high school. In order to learn how to sell, sell people stuff, I would pick, this was when phone books existed. I would go through. Or the white pages and I would just call a number and my goal was to get them to recommend a movie that I should go and see. And if you can get good at that, it's a lot easier to do other things.

• 38:47Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I'd be like, like, hey, like, hey, Sarah. And they're like, oh, no, this is Brad. I'm like, oh, it's not. Well, shit, I was going to call my friend and ask her for a movie recommendation because I'm about to go meet someone. What the hell? Just go ahead. Tell me, what should I see? Like, you know what I mean?

• 39:00Shaan Puri?

  So you were literally doing this to practice.

• 39:03Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I used to do it a fair bit.

• 39:04Shaan Puri?

  Where did you get this idea?

• 39:06Sam Parr?

  I just read about it online. Um. It was originally meant for like picking up girls, but I wanted to do it on how to sell stuff and.

• 39:16Sam Parr?

  It worked. It works great. It's a really good tool to learn how to do it. I could still, I mean, I'm, I'm definitely good at it. I can do it now.

• 39:22Shaan Puri?

  I might do it right after this. Okay, great. All right. What else we want to talk about? I see a couple of things on the list. Do you have one that jumps out to you?

• 39:30Sam Parr?

  No. I mean, they all are interesting. You go first.

• 39:33Shaan Puri?

  All right, I'm gonna give you one. All right, so this is a-

• 39:34Sam Parr?

  Oh, no, let's do the, uh, this guy.

• 39:37Shaan Puri?

  Okay, yeah, talk about it.

• 39:39Sam Parr?

  Okay, so someone posted this in the Trends Facebook group, and our Trends Facebook group, if you want to join, I'm gonna plug it, go to trends.co, sign up, it's $300.

• 39:48Shaan Puri?

  And you guys actually have like ecommerce specific ones. This was in the ecommerce specific vertical you guys have now.

• 39:53Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so we have, we do research on lots of different opportunities, and now we have an ecommerce specific, ecommerce specific one. And one of the more active members, his name is Drew Crawford, he, uh, I think he has an agency, so it seems like he knows his stuff, and he found these guys called jaw, uh, what is, how do you say that? Jaw size?

• 40:14Shaan Puri?

  Jaw, jaw, jaw or size. It's like, it's like jaw or size.

• 40:18Sam Parr?

  It's like a horse bit, like where you see like a horse chewing on. It's like, uh, this like size of a Tic Tac box, and you put it in your mouth, and I think you just like clinch down on it, and, and they say that it makes your jawline more chiseled. So, for the record, fucking bullshit.

• 40:38Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 40:38Sam Parr?

  It does not, I, I don't, I, I just don't think that that's how this works. I mean, I think the best way to get a chiseled jawline is you have to lose weight. But these guys are selling these products for $40, and he listed their landing page and all types of stuff, and according to him, they are, he put their numbers in here. He did his research and he said, um, uh, that they're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a day on ad, oh, they're spending $200,000 to $250,000 per day.

• 41:11Sam Parr?

  Oh, sorry. They're making $200,000 to $250,000 per day in revenue.

• 41:15Shaan Puri?

  So someone else from the group was like, hey, I kind of have the inside scoop here. I know the people who are the people behind it. They're doing between 200, 250K per day in revenue, which is crazy. And then the other guy was looking at the YouTube video because he's like, they must be spending a ton to market this because the videos behind the YouTube ad, the YouTube ad has like 2.1 million views. And he's like, you know, that would cost you, you know, a couple hundred thousand dollars of ad spend because these are not organic views that they're getting. These are paid ad views. And so he was kind of just looking at, he originally said, these guys must be printing money because look how much they're spending on this thing. And then somebody else came in and said, yes, they basically are printing money.

• 41:54Sam Parr?

  It's crazy. Sean, what is your take on getting rich selling?

• 41:59Shaan Puri?

  Bullshit?

• 42:00Sam Parr?

  So I, yeah, so this, I don't think that this is, um, I want to be careful with my words because we've been criticized for this. Okay. So this isn't a scam, I don't think, because they're saying something and they, they definitely on the site say like, this is not maybe approved by, I mean, you don't have to be approved. So they're definitely not like breaking any laws here, but I think it's bullshit.

• 42:23Shaan Puri?

  It literally says on the website, the only, in all caps, the only natural way to chisel your jawline, which is frankly, not true.

• 42:31Sam Parr?

  Okay. So that is bullshit. Okay. I didn't see that, but it's like-

• 42:34Shaan Puri?

  And the video has 21 million views, not 2.1 million views, which is crazy.

• 42:37Sam Parr?

  But what's your take? And by the way, the site, super ugly, just proof that copyrighting and all this shit matters way more than anything.

• 42:44Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 42:45Sam Parr?

  What is your take on, like, what do you think about this stuff? Like, does this make you?

• 42:49Shaan Puri?

  So let's say there's a spectrum, right? On one hand, on the far left is like, I hate this, this disgusts me and you know, these guys are crooks, basically. And on the right is like, you know, total respect, um, you know, Mother Teresa, this is the best thing ever, right? So that's the spectrum of like possibilities. And I'm, you know, somewhere in the middle. So the reason why I'm in the middle is, I don't, I, I, I personally don't really judge people for kind of like the, the, um,

• 43:22Shaan Puri?

  The stupidity of their schemes. So, you know, if you want to do that with your time, I view that as like your prerogative. Uh, now, do I think you should defraud people? No, right? And so this is on that line where I don't care that they made a stupid product. I don't care that they're even kind of claiming that it can help your jawline, but it depends how much they're gonna claim here, right? So like, you know, the only natural way to chisel your jawline? Yeah, I don't really believe that. But it, but the other part where it's like, you know, this is, this provides a workout to your jaw. It can help slim your thing. It's like, if you say it can help, okay, I'm cool with that. So like, to me, they're not in the fraud bucket, where they're just literally stealing or taking people's money and not delivering a product,

• 44:06Shaan Puri?

  or delivering something with like total false health claims. I personally don't put them in that bucket, because I've seen what that bucket looks like. On the other side, I think there's a lot of merit to like, building simple things that, uh, appeal to people, making money doing it. And, uh, you know, while I don't think that's a good career move, and it's kind of a waste of potential, like, these people could also be doing better things. Um, you know, who am I to judge how someone else spends their time? If you want to spend your time doing this, more power to you. I, I personally don't have the sort of, people get friggin enraged by this stuff, and I don't. I think that, you know, if somebody wants to piss away their time doing this, let, let them do it.

• 44:46Sam Parr?

  We, um, I'm friends with this guy on Facebook who has this business called Snow. Have you heard of it?

• 44:52Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 44:53Sam Parr?

  And he, yeah, and what it is, is they, it's like, it looks like a mouthguard, and you put like some goo on it, which I imagine is actually the whitening part. And then you put this light on, next to it, and it like somehow, they say it whitens your teeth.

• 45:08Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 45:09Sam Parr?

  I think, I, I don't think that shit works.

• 45:11Shaan Puri?

  I, I think it works. I think it works. I've tried that before. I've used a, not Snow, but I've used a different product like that before, because Sonya was doing it before our wedding. And so she was like, try this thing. And so I tried it. Uh, it just made my tooth feel real sensitive, but, so I didn't really like it, but.

• 45:25Sam Parr?

  Was it Crest White Strips, or was it?

• 45:26Shaan Puri?

  No, no, the White Strips have been around. This was the, this was the put in your mouth, UV thing, and you do it for like, whatever, 10 minutes, and it's supposed to make your teeth whiter. And it did make hers teeth whiter. I personally was like, this is annoying. I don't want to do this every night, but, uh, you know.

• 45:40Sam Parr?

  See, I, I.

• 45:41Shaan Puri?

  I think it does whiten your teeth. I think it's temporary, though.

• 45:44Sam Parr?

  No, I mean, I read reviews from dentists. I did, I went down. So the reason why I bring this up is he posted that they, his screenshot of their backend and it was $2.8 million this week in sales. Which is, you know, that's a hundred million dollars a year. And I was like, I think that's a scam. Like, I don't think that product is legit. And I don't, I think dentists universally would probably say, no, that's, that, that won't do it. So I don't know the, but I don't know the truth. And I wonder, like, would I be willing to do that for that amount of cash? I don't think I would. I don't, I don't think I would be able to, to do that.

• 46:24Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you know, I think it just comes down to, is it an actual scam? And like, if it's a scam, then obviously.

• 46:30Sam Parr?

  No, I don't think it's a scam. Like this jaw thing, I don't think it's a scam because like, it might work a little.

• 46:36Shaan Puri?

  Right. It might actually exercise your jaw muscles, which is, you know, what it's claiming to do to your cheek. Does that give you a chiseled jawline? No. Does Snow actually whiten your teeth? I personally think it does, but is it the best way? Probably not. So, you know, I don't know, like, like, it's like those infomercial products you would see back in the day of like, you know, the electrical stimulation on your abs. It's like, just sit there and watch TV and eat chips and watch. This will work out your muscles for you as it shocks your muscles. And it's like, okay, you know, if I'm dumb enough to buy that, shame on me. That's kind of my, my feeling on it.

• 47:17Sam Parr?

  Can I bring up something funny? Because it just popped up. So one, one thing that I love, I just saw a notification. One thing I love to do is engage with trolls and just idiots. So with the hustle, we have, you know, well over a million people who subscribe. And people reply and a lot of times we don't reply to them because it's just like stupid stuff. But this guy was like, You're, uh, he goes, you're linking to the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Like you must be getting paid by them because they're paywalled content. And I replied with, um, I wish they paid us, but they don't. But, uh, I'll go ahead and unsubscribe you. And he replied back just now and he's like, you're showing how unethical you are.

• 48:00Sam Parr?

  And he talked, he's talking about how I'm in cahoots with him and he has his phone number at the bottom. I'm just, I'm just think I'm gonna call this person and be like, walk me through this process. Okay, pull up the URL that I linked to from the New York Times and show me how I'm able to make money off of that.

• 48:14Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 48:15Sam Parr?

  Because I wanna know, I wanna make money off of this.

• 48:17Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 48:18Sam Parr?

  This is awesome.

• 48:19Shaan Puri?

  If I could.

• 48:20Sam Parr?

  Do you engage with like people like this? I do all the time. I love it.

• 48:25Shaan Puri?

  Uh, I don't and I usually don't as a policy. And sometimes on Twitter I can't resist and I'll do it. But for the most part I don't, uh, cause I've also had these things like escalate. Like I've told you, people have sent weird stuff to our office before. I've had like mystery pinata show up and I'm like, is this somebody who loves us or hates us? And I don't know what's inside this pinata. I've had people send me a full manuscript, 250 pages of, uh, of a fake movie where I'm the character. And so is my CTO and my chief, chief marketing officer. And we're just talking and it just makes us, it's like, it just shows how much we're idiots. And, uh, like somebody wrote that screenplay, that's kinda weird. So there's just people escalated, there's people have called me threatening me saying, uh, you know, there's one guy was just like, you are spamming me. I'm like, no, no, sir.

• 49:10Shaan Puri?

  Your friend emailed our thing to all of their contacts. Um, you know, yeah, that's not, you didn't maybe want this email, but like your friend sent this to you. Uh, I did not send this, send you this email. And he was like, you know, sending me the can spam laws and all this stuff. And so I've, I've gotten into some weird situations where I'm like, why are, you know, I'm not actually doing anything wrong, but people are, you know, either mega fans and it's weird, or they're mega haters and it's weird, but like, I don't know, I'm trying not to, to get too mixed up in it.

• 49:43Sam Parr?

  Well, and let me bring up one more, which is you, me, and one other person who we won't name. I don't think we're saying anything bad, but we won't name them just in case we do. We're talking about what would happen if a person owed you money, like a customer owed you a lot of money and they didn't pay.

• 50:00Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 50:00Sam Parr?

  And my response is, I'm showing up to their house and I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna hurt anyone, but I'm knocking on their door when they're at home and I'm asking for that check. And he thought that was ridiculous.

• 50:14Shaan Puri?

  Right. It was ridiculous. I think it's ridiculous.

• 50:17Sam Parr?

  Why is that ridiculous? Walk me through how that's ridiculous. How would you not, why would you not do that? If someone owes you, in this particular case, this guy owed this guy seven figures.

• 50:26Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 50:26Sam Parr?

  If someone owes me 10 grand, I'm doing that.

• 50:28Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 50:28Sam Parr?

  Okay?

• 50:29Shaan Puri?

  It depends also.

• 50:30Sam Parr?

  If someone owes me, if someone owes me 1,000 and they live within an hour, I'm showing up their house.

• 50:34Shaan Puri?

  It depends if you know the person, but it's, I mean, that's just like, that's like, you know, that's like the thug move, right?

• 50:41Sam Parr?

  The thug move is stealing.

• 50:43Shaan Puri?

  Sure, but I guess what I'm saying is like, you're putting yourself in a pretty risky situation, right? So like, what can happen there? It's going to, like, you're putting yourself right at the line of escalation. So what's gonna happen? Either something physical is gonna happen, or you're gonna be threatening the other person and like, I don't know, it's just like, you're trying to go to jail? What are you trying to do here?

• 51:04Sam Parr?

  I'm trying to get paid. I'm trying to, but more importantly, I'm trying to, if someone, I don't care about contracts. If someone shook my hand and we agreed on something and they don't follow through, I'm gonna do everything necessary to, to get them.

• 51:17Shaan Puri?

  Everything?

• 51:21Sam Parr?

  I would only ever break the law if like my temper got the best of me and I, I would regret it.

• 51:26Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 51:26Sam Parr?

  But I think I would be, do a really good job of controlling my temper and be like, look, I'm not gonna hurt you.

• 51:32Shaan Puri?

  I see what you're saying. It's like.

• 51:33Sam Parr?

  I know where you live, though.

• 51:34Shaan Puri?

  It's easy for that person to hide. And you're just not making it easy for them to not pay you what you're owed. You're showing up and you're reminding them, I'm owed this money. It just reminds me.

• 51:44Sam Parr?

  Why would you not do that?

• 51:45Shaan Puri?

  It reminds me of every, you know, gangster and every gangster movie that I've ever seen. It's all like, would I realistically do that? No, I'm a strongly worded email kinda guy. I'm a phone call kinda guy. I am not gonna show up at your house, or I believe the suggestion was actually to send two guys to their house to remind them.

• 52:06Shaan Puri?

  I think that that's where it's like, all right, this is some gangster shit.

• 52:10Sam Parr?

  I've, I'm, I don't want to say incriminating. I, but like if I, all right, I've got a bunch of,

• 52:17Shaan Puri?

  hypothetically.

• 52:17Sam Parr?

  Let's say St. Louis. I grew up in St. Louis. I've got friends who are, um, maybe they're, they're kind of tough guys in St. Louis. And I would be like, hey, man, can you just go knock on this guy's door for me? Like, I'm not in St. Louis. And just, can you collect that this cat? Don't do any, don't hurt anyone, but just like, can you go and grab that for me? What, why wouldn't you do that? Let's say you own like a flour mill and a bakery, like took like, you know, tons of flour. And you're like, hey, you haven't paid your $10,000 bill. You're not going to go to that bakery and like demand.

• 52:48Shaan Puri?

  No, I would, but it's, I would go with just basically like a legal threat. I'd be like, okay, cool. You owe this money. If you don't pay, this is going to get collected on. It's not going to be collected on with physical, like physically, it's being collected on legally.

• 53:00Sam Parr?

  I never said I was going to hurt anyone. I never said I was going to hurt anyone.

• 53:03Shaan Puri?

  It's implied. When you show up at the door, you're like, hey, you owe me money. And they're like, nah, I'm not paying you. What do you do after that?

• 53:13Sam Parr?

  Um, I, I,

• 53:15Shaan Puri?

  They're like, I don't have it.

• 53:17Sam Parr?

  I'd be like, all right, I'll be back tomorrow. And then, and then I would, I'm like, I'll, I'll come tomorrow. I mean, I'll, what do you, what do you mean? I'm just going to show up again. Like, I'm just going to annoy them to death. But I like, I, well, I guess my point is, is I firmly believe in crossing this threshold of internet and going face to face.

• 53:37Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 53:37Sam Parr?

  100%. I firmly believe that. I've done that before of like someone tried not to paint us. And I was like, all right, I'll just walk over to your office. Like it says right here where your address is. I'm just going to walk over and I'll ask your secretary, like, can you please grab this person? They owe us money.

• 53:54Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I'm definitely a fan of that. In, in other cases also, like I, I advise us a lot, like a lot of our team will be like, yeah, we sent them a message. I'm like, yeah, but you need to like, like call them on the phone, go talk to them, you know, like whatever. And it's not about collecting money. This is just in general, when they need to remind somebody of something, or you need to basically break through the noise and get somebody's attention. Now, uh, in terms of collecting money, I don't know, to each their own. I, you know, on behalf of this podcast, we do not officially endorse the physical collection.

• 54:23Sam Parr?

  Oh, I don't endorse, uh, I'm not endorsing breaking the law. And I, I don't think, I, I actually, I don't know what the law is. I, I, um, I uh, I had this guy who owed us money and he goes, fuck you, I'm not paying you. That's what he said. I was like, look, Mark, it says you have to pay me. Like you, I did a service for you, you're not paying me. And he goes, he goes, I have other bills to pay. You're at the bottom. If I get to it, I get to it. If I don't, I don't. And I contacted our lawyer. I go, hey, can I like tweet out this whole, can I take a screenshot of this and tweet this out? And like, what, what can I do to publicly shame this person?

• 55:02Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 55:02Sam Parr?

  And they're like, you, you can't do that. And I'm like, why the fuck not? And that's when I learned that if you're a debt collector, you can't, there's rules as to who you can talk to.

• 55:10Shaan Puri?

  Interesting.

• 55:10Sam Parr?

  Which is, I got, I understand why those rules are there. But I wanted to ruin this guy. Like to this day, it was, it was only $2,000. This happened six years ago. To this day, I know his name and I like, I all, I see him, I would totally confront him. He lives in Oklahoma, but if I saw him, I would absolutely confront him. It bothers me so much.

• 55:31Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 55:32Sam Parr?

  So much.

• 55:33Shaan Puri?

  You know, uh, I think they, they did this in, uh, in like therapy or coaching. It's like, okay, that's how you feel. It's like, you know, they, they sort of drill in like, so what value of yours do you feel this other person violated? It's like, I can tell you're that person where it's like integrity, right? It's like, I'm a man of my word. If I tell you something, that's how it is. And if I feel like you've told me something and we've shook hands on it or wrote it down, doesn't matter.

• 55:59Shaan Puri?

  If you violated that, it's like, you know, violating your core value there.

• 56:04Sam Parr?

  Totally. And it, it actually hurts me every once in a while, but I don't, I don't do a lot of contracts. A lot of times I'll just do stuff like me and you, or me and someone else will come to an agreement. I'm like, all right, let's do it. And there's never anything signed. And then eventually stuff does get signed. But I'll, I'm like, all right, you said it, I said it. And, uh, often what I've learned now is to do that via e, via email, because I think that actually can count as a contract. But, uh,

• 56:31Sam Parr?

  Anyway, this guy who me and Sean are talking about, he was owed $2 million. And I was like, why didn't you fly over to where he lives and get like that fucking money? Like it just like ruin this person. And he was like, oh no, it'd ruin my reputation. And I was like, they'll create a reputation as someone you don't like. That's like someone who like holds their bond and like you don't fuck with that guy.

• 56:56Shaan Puri?

  The funny thing is, uh, now that you've shaved your head, you look a little bit like the guy from Breaking Bad, who, you know, built his reputation as, as the enforcer. And so it's all just working right now. It's great. I love it. The image is, the image is built.

• 57:09Sam Parr?

  It just boggles my mind that like our friends who are all internet nerds, I'm like, you guys, you gotta just show up and get it. And so I'm curious what the listeners are, are gonna think of this. And, and, and just, I had not once did I ever say, I want anyone to break the law, unless showing up is breaking the law, which then, yeah, I did say that. But I didn't say hurt anyone. I didn't say threaten anyone.

• 57:30Shaan Puri?

  You're talking about like a landlord. You go and you say, hey, the rent's due. Hey. The next day, I still need that check. I still need that rent check. Hey, you got the rent check yet? Hey, you got the rent?

• 57:41Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I, I'm, I'm not saying harm anyone. I'm against violence in most cases, but uh, it's like, get, get my money.

• 57:48Shaan Puri?

  But you work out just in case. All right. Let's, uh, let's cool it down with, uh, I have one random idea and we'll treat this as a cooldown, uh, because this podcast is getting heated. So, um, okay, I had this idea, which was based on my experience, uh, with my last company. So with the last company, we were building this tool that was really useful for, um, a live streamer for a video game, which was basically Twitch is the biggest player, but YouTube is around, Facebook cares about live game streaming, that sort of thing. And we hit a point where we were like, you know, this is probably not going to be a huge business, but this is definitely a useful tool. It solves a real problem. And ultimately what we ended up doing was selling to, uh, to Twitch.

• 58:30Shaan Puri?

  Now, um, I am surprised that companies don't do this proactively. Meaning, why don't companies do X prizes for their company? So if you don't know what the X prize is, X prize is a thing created by, I think, Peter Dymandis. I don't know how he says his last name, but.

• 58:47Sam Parr?

  Where is this on the sheet, Sean?

• 58:48Shaan Puri?

  Um, it's kind of at the middle bottom.

• 58:51Sam Parr?

  Oh, I see, I see. All right.

• 58:54Shaan Puri?

  So, okay, so the X prize basically is this foundation that was created by, you know, kind of a wealthy guy thinking about the future. And I don't know which one the first one was, but the first one that came to mind for me was there was a X prize for a private uh, moon, uh, moon landing expedition. And they basically said, hey, if you can get a, they had all these rules. If you can build a rocket that gets to this, you know, part of orbit and, uh, you know, satisfies these requirements, you'll win the X prize of $30 million. So they put a big bounty on top of it. What that ended up doing was you had 10 teams or 20 teams each investing, you know, $3 million to try to go get a $30 million prize. So they built a small team, they were, they didn't have to go recruit these people or hire these people. People just came out of the woodwork, say, I think I could do this.

• 59:40Shaan Puri?

  And they worked like day and night, like it was their startup to make this happen. And they wanted to win that $30 million prize and do build something awesome. And what ended up happening was at the X prize, they would put up 20, 30 million bucks. But overall, $100 million would get invested into the space by all the different players who were trying to achieve it. So it's this like high leverage thing, you know? Um, if you, you want this outcome to take place, you want a whole bunch of people in parallel trying different approaches. And you only have to put up one third of the total amount that gets invested. And so why don't companies do this where they could say, you know, for example, with Twitch? Um, one of the things that Twitch needed was a tool to, to stream, like stream gameplay live. This was like, not that easy to build. It took us two years to build it. Two other companies spent two years building this as well.

• 1:00:25Shaan Puri?

  And we were all competing. Now Twitch is building their own. It's taken them two years to do this and probably cost them 10 million bucks to make it happen. And why not just upfront say, hey, we'll give out $10 million to the team that could build the best live streaming tool that does A, B, C, and D. And, you know, you have a year to do it.

• 1:00:41Sam Parr?

  Pretty awesome.

• 1:00:42Shaan Puri?

  And then you have a guaranteed payout. And so it's not like a startup where you're like, oh, I hope I win the lottery. And I have to like raise round A, B, C, and D. It's like, no, there's a fixed payout. For a fixed thing that and any team can go apply to this. So like for the hustle, you guys could do this. I don't know. I don't know what yours would be.

• 1:00:58Sam Parr?

  I did this for software where I told everyone I need better pay, uh, paywall software. That's an interesting idea. So let's start with, why wouldn't people do it? Or why, why this is a bad idea?

• 1:01:07Shaan Puri?

  It has to work for the company and it has to work for the like, you know, participants. So.

• 1:01:12Sam Parr?

  So I think it's a cool idea. So 99designs does this really well where it's a little similar. I say, I go, I've just given 99designs $2,000. I need a homepage designed. Here's what I need. All 20 of you designers start making them. The best one gets my 20 or my two grand.

• 1:01:28Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:01:29Sam Parr?

  And that works so well.

• 1:01:31Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:01:31Sam Parr?

  I'm shocked at how well that works.

• 1:01:32Shaan Puri?

  You use that a lot, right?

• 1:01:34Sam Parr?

  All the time. It's so good.

• 1:01:36Shaan Puri?

  And I know that designers kind of don't like it because they're like, oh, what are the odds? Mine will win. I'm going to do all this work for nothing. But I think because.

• 1:01:42Sam Parr?

  I don't think they do that much work though. It's a lot of, they just reuse the same stuff.

• 1:01:45Shaan Puri?

  Right. So I think it's a low stakes version of what I'm talking about. I think when you raise the stakes, two things happen. One is that people have to commit more time and energy. They can't just reuse it like 99designs. So that's a downside. People have to put more in. But on the upside, like the prize is there and you're not competing against, you know, a hundred other designers. It'll probably be like three teams, four teams, five teams.

• 1:02:06Sam Parr?

  Well, let, let's talk about why that's a, let's talk about why it's a stupid idea and why people wouldn't want to do it.

• 1:02:13Sam Parr?

  Maybe Twitch would, I don't know.

• 1:02:16Shaan Puri?

  Companies often believe they can do a better, so companies just believe, well, we can, we can do a better job of it ourselves, right? So there's.

• 1:02:22Sam Parr?

  Which they typically can't.

• 1:02:23Shaan Puri?

  DIY syndrome. Yeah. Which is totally wrong, but like, you know, that, that's one case. Some companies wouldn't be interested because they think their, their home cooking would be better. There's another that is they don't want to sort of publicize, you know, what their needs and requirements are and where their gaps are. That could be a thing, you know, it's not, I don't think that's the reason why this wouldn't happen.

• 1:02:44Shaan Puri?

  I think there's a non guarantee of quality. So like a bad case scenario would be, let's say Twitch has come out and said, hey, 10 million bucks for the live streaming app. That's the best. But the best wasn't that great and you gotta pay 10 million bucks for that. So it's kind of like in 99 designs. If you put up your two grand and you're not really happy with the output. There's no guarantees.

• 1:03:03Sam Parr?

  Logistically, it's really hard, but what's interesting is, is a service that aggregates all types of problems that different companies have. So builders can address them. That is quite interesting. It's really cool. That is a really cool idea.

• 1:03:17Shaan Puri?

  You want to tap into like the wisdom of the crowds in a way, right? So like another piece of this. So a good example of this is actually what Elon Musk is doing with Hyperloop. So Elon Musk has published his like white paper, which was like, hey, I think we can make super high speed transport, right? Get from LA to San Francisco in 40 minutes using this technology. And the next step would be to like build a prototype and build a test track of one mile, right? And instead of him building it or starting a company, he just published it openly on the internet. And then three different teams, I believe, three different companies got funded with tens of millions of dollars to build the Hyperloop off of this design. And then he's like, cool, I'll be involved. I'll show up at the test track competitions. I think they got a bunch of university students to like do little mini versions of these competitions for Hyperloop.

• 1:04:03Shaan Puri?

  And for him, he's like, great, this is a talent pipeline to hire from because either these guys actually do it, which is amazing, problem solved, or I just find awesome engineers and I get to see what they can do. And then we hire them and they're kind of like in our orbit because they've been working on this thing.

• 1:04:18Sam Parr?

  I think this is great. I think that this is almost like your import export list or whatever you're calling it.

• 1:04:24Sam Parr?

  I think this is a very fascinating concept, which is you're trying to just meet, you're trying to, there's no connection between what a company needs and them voicing their needs to people who can solve it. And so for example, maybe Twitch says like, man, I have this need. And for all we know, there's some startup out in the middle of nowhere who's doing something similar, but not the same. And they're like, huh, you know, we actually could solve that if we just slightly repackage our thing. Maybe that's the way we go. That's super cool.

• 1:04:51Shaan Puri?

  I'm gonna ask Emmett, who's the CEO of Twitch, I'm gonna be like, hey, how come we don't do something like this? Or like, let's walk through a scenario. Would we do something like this? And I'm gonna see what he says. He's a smart guy. He might have a very credible reason that this is a really dumb idea. But I just think that. It works on two levels. Number one, for startups, it should not be this like all or nothing game. Where you're like, it's gonna be zero and you, you know, you basically walk away with nothing. Or we need to like build a billion dollar business and that's why we get funding for, for these things. Or I need to have this super profitable business. And so this gives a sort of a new a- asset class, which is like, hey, if you can build something awesome that fits our spec, then you get a guaranteed payout.

• 1:05:31Sam Parr?

  It's like built on demand.

• 1:05:32Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's better than a job payout, but it's not, you don't become a billionaire, but you become a millionaire. And it's like, I think there's a lot of people who would rather do that. And then for the company, it's like you get out of your own way because companies are so much bureaucracy and such a lack of innovation that it's like instead, farm it out, let five different innovative teams work all night in their little tiny two man, three man, four man office. And I bet you're gonna get a better output than if we kind of assign a group of people in our company to do this for 12 to 18 months. And, you know, they work on it nine to five and we get one crack at it. And so I, I think it's, I don't know, I'm excited about it.

• 1:06:05Sam Parr?

  I love that idea. I think that's great.

• 1:06:07Shaan Puri?

  Cool. All right. We can, we can kind of wrap it up on that note. Uh, we're gonna be back in a couple of days with another episode. Anything you wanna?

• 1:06:13Sam Parr?

  We have a guy, we have, um, 1-800-FLOWERS. So last Friday or Thursday, this guy emailed me and I was actually kind of rude. I wasn't rude to him, but he had emailed me a question that I thought was obvious. Like, how do I sign up for this thing? And I just sent him this quick one-off fast email. And he replied like, oh, thank you. I love your work. And then I like looked at who it was and it was the founder of 1-800-GOT-FLOWERS. And, uh,

• 1:06:40Shaan Puri?

  It's 1-800.

• 1:06:41Sam Parr?

  We invited him on the podcast. So when he comes, I'll, I'll apologize to him. I, I wasn't rude, but I was just like, it's on the website. That's all I said.

• 1:06:48Shaan Puri?

  Right. So we'll have him next week. People.

• 1:06:52Sam Parr?

  Yeah. I, no, I don't even treat normal people that way typically. I'm usually pretty polite. I was just angry because I was like, I thought that I had answered literally 18 questions, the, the same question that day. All right. Talk to y'all soon.

• 1:07:06Shaan Puri?

  Okay, cool. See ya.