How Dave Ramsey Built His $300M Empire, Trademarkia, And MFM Rip-Offs

Episode 428: Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) talk about Dave Ramsey's multi-million dollar empire, surfer Laird Hamilton's superfood business, the importance of trademarks, and so much more. Want to see more MFM? Subscribe to the MFM YouTube channel here. SHAAN'S NEW DAILY NEWSLETTER --> shaanpuri.com ----- Links: * Laird Superfood * Ramsey Solutions * MFMpod.com * Chambers * Flashes & Flames * Trademarkia * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. ------ Show Notes: (01:05) - Laird Superfoods (06:55) - Dave Ramsey (25:15) - Why Shaan is in a great mood (29:05) - Why you shouldn't buy domain names (32:05) - Chambers (39:50) - Trademarkia (45:40) - The people ripping off MFM ----- Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. ----- Additional episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto * #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

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

• 0:00Shaan Puri?

  Dave's back and Dave's back in a big way.

• 0:03Sam Parr?

  In a big way.

• 0:03Shaan Puri?

  Here's some things that David said. He says he has a $600 million real estate portfolio that is fully paid off. So $600 million of real estate equity that he owns. That's kind of insane. His media empire, which is like, you know, the combination of his radio shows and then all of the financial like courses, training, seminars, all that stuff that they do outside of that. He says on their website makes 300 million a year in revenue.

• 0:39Sam Parr?

  All right, we're live.

• 0:41Shaan Puri?

  What do you want to talk about today?

• 0:43Sam Parr?

  I've got a bunch of good topics. Let me bring up one juicy one.

• 0:47Sam Parr?

  Last year or two years ago, you asked me a question. You're like, who do you admire? I think you asked me that. And I said this guy named Laird Hamilton. Laird Hamilton is this like beautiful surfer dude. He's like in his 50s now, basically. He's beautiful. Like we get to acknowledge that. He's got like beautiful wavy blonde hair and like a nice skin. And he's pretty ripped for his age and he always was ripped. He's like this tough guy that surfs a big waves and whatever. He launched this thing called, what do you make fun of me? Cause I'm dreaming about this guy.

• 1:14Shaan Puri?

  I don't even need to make a joke. You've done it all yourself here.

• 1:17Sam Parr?

  He's a Ken doll. Like this is like, this is like objective. Like I'm just stating facts here. He's a human Ken doll. He launched this thing called Laird Superfoods. Have you heard of that? It's like a coffee creamer that's made out of like coconut, I think.

• 1:30Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:31Sam Parr?

  Anyway. I, they took the company public. I don't know why they did that, but they took it public at a 300 or 400 million dollar market cap. At the time they were doing 50 million in, in revenue. Look up the company now. Can you, could you go and look up the, do you know what their market cap is today?

• 1:49Shaan Puri?

  Let me find it.

• 1:51Sam Parr?

  I know what it was yesterday. I don't know what it is today.

• 1:54Shaan Puri?

  Why would it be said different? Oh, wow. Nine million dollars.

• 1:57Sam Parr?

  Nine million dollars. So this company, if you click, I have a bunch of notes here. You can click them and read them. But basically this company, they sell like a fair amount of like coffee creamer. So yesterday, I think it was 8.8 million. Dude, so listen, they have 20 million in cash, no debt at all. Their revenue is decreasing. So like in Q3, it was 8.8 million. In Q3 of last year, it was 10.9 million. So what's that? Like a, like a, like a four times eight. So it's a $48 million or $50 million a year business, but it's declining. They're, they have good decent gross profit. They have an okay balance sheet, but like the business, for some reason, it's valued so low.

• 2:38Sam Parr?

  I would have to dive deep into it and really look at the numbers, but it's kind of ridiculous, right? So you were talking about wanting to buy a company. You've said this before. This is your target, dude. You get to hang out with Laird Hamilton.

• 2:50Shaan Puri?

  Sounds like it's your target, dude. That sounds like this is like, you know, those things where it's like, we're auctioning off a date with Laird Hamilton.

• 2:58Sam Parr?

  Yeah, a hug.

• 2:59Shaan Puri?

  Why, why don't you buy this? Yeah. You, you just bought yourself a nine million dollar hug.

• 3:05Sam Parr?

  Dude, why is this, why is this company? You haven't looked at this, but why is this company so cheap?

• 3:09Shaan Puri?

  No, I don't know. I mean, I don't know how much debt they have, but.

• 3:12Sam Parr?

  None. I said that. So I read their report. They had their Q3 report.

• 3:17Shaan Puri?

  So I never understand.

• 3:17Sam Parr?

  21 million dollars in cash, zero debt, zero debt.

• 3:20Shaan Puri?

  So I never understand when, when companies trade this far below their just cash value. Cause you know, the obvious question then is, why do you not buy this thing for 15 million and just wind it down and distribute the 20 million to yourself and make $5 million, you know, like in the.

• 3:37Sam Parr?

  Or sell the inventory. They have like 13 million or something in inventory.

• 3:41Shaan Puri?

  Okay, interesting. So yeah, so I haven't, I mean, I haven't looked at this because you just mentioned it, but, but yeah, there's a bunch of these right now that are like this. There was one the other day that I, that I saw that was kind of in the same, same bucket, but there's a bunch of stocks that are down like 95% right now that seem like, you know, interesting takeover targets. And we have a friend who was interested in doing this. And so I made a list of like 10. I was like, here's 10 that I think you could buy.

• 4:10Sam Parr?

  Is this friend aggressive?

• 4:12Shaan Puri?

  It's an aggressive friend.

• 4:13Sam Parr?

  Got it. I know. Okay. I know which friend that is.

• 4:17Shaan Puri?

  How tight is that? By the way, just to be able to say, this is an aggressive friend. And you're like, I know who it is.

• 4:23Sam Parr?

  Does this friend, would this friend say to a butling entrepreneur, your business is one Google away from me ruining you?

• 4:33Shaan Puri?

  No, I don't think so, but maybe. They usually don't say things to their, to their faces like that. They, they're more just like another, like, you know, those sharks that swim only under the water. They don't put the fin out. He's more like that.

• 4:45Sam Parr?

  Got it.

• 4:45Shaan Puri?

  But like wish.com was the, was the other example that, that I had recently seen that was like this, which is a wish, you know, pretty big brand name because they spent billions of dollars marketing this thing.

• 4:55Sam Parr?

  $10 billion market cap at one point.

• 4:57Shaan Puri?

  Now 360 million. So 10 billion to 360 million has 700 million in cash with no liabilities.

• 5:06Shaan Puri?

  So, you know, so, so I don't know exactly, you know, I don't, I don't know exactly how you can buy these things. I think that's the, the challenge is like to actually acquire the majority. In doing so, you would push the price up because people would know what you're doing. So I think you'd have to make like a tender offer at a specific price. That's like, you know, whatever, whatever, you know, some, something above, but you know, the board will just reject it. They'll say, we have more cash than that on the, on the balance sheet. So we don't need to sell at this price. So I don't know exactly mechanically how somebody does this. I don't know if this is like, you know, fantasy math where you're like, dude, what if Shaq was in the, you know, the 100 meter race? He could just knock people over. It's like, dude, that's not, that doesn't make sense. It's not how things

• 5:47Shaan Puri?

  work in the real world. So, you know, this idea of like public company takeovers is not something that I understand.

• 5:55Sam Parr?

  Is that like a drug conversation you've had, which is can Shaq win the 100 meter dash?

• 5:59Shaan Puri?

  You know, the one thing about this podcast is the number of on the fly analogies you have to create. It just really brings, that's a different skill, that's a different muscle. And yeah, that muscle's not, not so strong yet. Still working on it.

• 6:12Sam Parr?

  So anyway, Laird Superfood, interesting company that I was, that I was eyeing. Laird, maybe a little less hot in my book now. Cause this company is worth only eight million, it's a 300. Now he's just a really hot fit guy. Before he was hot, fit and rich. So.

• 6:29Shaan Puri?

  He lost the third leg of the stool.

• 6:31Sam Parr?

  Yeah, he's still famous and famous Trump's wealth in most cases, in most people's eyes, but anyway.

• 6:38Shaan Puri?

  All right. Well, let me tell you, let me tell you about somebody who is rich. And somebody who is famous.

• 6:46Shaan Puri?

  But he's not hot.

• 6:47Sam Parr?

  Oof.

• 6:48Shaan Puri?

  Can I, can I tell you?

• 6:53Shaan Puri?

  Are you familiar with Dave Ramsey?

• 6:54Sam Parr?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Very.

• 6:56Shaan Puri?

  Tell me what you know about Dave Ramsey and I'm going to fill in some gaps for you.

• 6:59Sam Parr?

  So Dave, uh, he's like a personal finance guru. He's based out of Franklin, Tennessee. He's in his seventies probably now. He started as a radio host where it was just like Dave Ramsey, like show. And then he parlayed that into like the Dave Ramsey network. So now he has like four or 500 employees based out of Franklin, Tennessee. And they do like 400 or 500 million a year in revenue where they sell like personal finance stuff. A lot of his, I think he's pretty controversial because a lot of his like rules, a lot of his personal finance rules are based in like biblical like rules. He also believes in like zero debt and he, uh, he's pretty conservative. So people who aren't conservative aren't into him.

• 7:39Shaan Puri?

  Okay. Well, you do a lot more than I would have guessed. So. I live in. I guess the segment's over.

• 7:46Shaan Puri?

  Franklin, Tennessee. How you know this stuff? What's going on here?

• 7:49Sam Parr?

  He also bought all of his buildings without any debt. So he owns like a campus in Franklin, Tennessee.

• 7:55Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah. So I didn't know all this.

• 7:57Sam Parr?

  I don't know.

• 7:58Shaan Puri?

  You know, well. He spit in my food, but all right, I'm still hungry. So let's go. So Dave, he's 62 years old. Uh, he was a realtor turned radio host and yeah, he's from Tennessee. Uh, so basically what happened is by his mid twenties, this is like back in the eighties. So back in his

• 8:15Sam Parr?

  But you, you didn't know who Dolly Parton was and she's also a Tennessee person. So like,

• 8:20Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I guess I, uh, lesson learned. I'm not coming at you with any Tennessee trivia anymore. You're a ringer for that stuff. So by his mid twenties, he's got like a $4 million property portfolio, real estate portfolio, and it's kicking off some cash, maybe like 5% a year cash or cash returns. So he's making 250 K a year off his real estate portfolio at that stage.

• 8:41Shaan Puri?

  At this time, 1988, so the, you know, the year I'm born, his bank basically revokes his line of credit and, um, demands that he pays it back and he couldn't sell fast enough. So he gets foreclosed on and declares bankruptcy. This is like the trauma of why he's like, um, don't

• 8:59Sam Parr?

  No debt.

• 8:59Shaan Puri?

  Use debt, no debt. And he's like debt bad, debt bad. Why? Cause I burned my hand on the debt stove before this. And so he's like, he's got no money now. He's, you know, uh, his marriage is on the rocks. He says he's completely, you know, considering committing suicide. Uh, but you know, he gets back on his feet. So this is kind of like his story. So anyways, today, fast forward to today.

• 9:21Shaan Puri?

  Dave's back and Dave's back in a big way.

• 9:24Sam Parr?

  In a big way.

• 9:24Shaan Puri?

  Here's some things that Dave has said. He says he has a $600 million real estate portfolio that is fully paid off. So $600 million of real estate equity that he, that he owns. That's kind of insane. His media empire, which is like, you know, the combination of his, um, radio shows and then all of the financial, like courses, training, seminars, all that stuff that they do outside of that. He says on their website makes 300 million a year in revenue.

• 9:52Sam Parr?

  I believe it.

• 9:53Shaan Puri?

  Which is absurd.

• 9:54Sam Parr?

  You don't know any people that go to that?

• 9:56Shaan Puri?

  What's that? No, I've never met anybody that goes.

• 9:58Sam Parr?

  So dude, in the South, it's a thing. So I had Texas employees and like, if you're just like a normal couple where each employee makes, or each wife and husband makes like 60 or 70 grand a year, you'll like pay to go to like a Dave Ramsey, like he trains these financial advisors and they host seminars. And you'll go to this like five day weeknights thing where it's like, instead of Bible study, it's like, we teach you how to like save and like invest, I guess.

• 10:22Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's like Jesus on the front and a P and L on the back. It's like this new, this new remakes Bible, I love it. And so his company, this company Ramsey Solutions is just absolute juggernaut. It's insane. So, so, okay, let's break down now the media side. So he launches this thing in 1992 and basically he's done content for 30 years about the same seven steps. It's like this guy's just been talking about the same thing. I don't know how he feels like hours. I've never listened to it to like a full thing, but I don't know. He feels like four hours a day of radio.

• 10:57Sam Parr?

  It's a good show.

• 10:57Shaan Puri?

  Just saying the same thing every time, like, oh, you got debt? Pay that off, right? So he's got these seven tenants. So here's his seven tenants. All right. Number one, you establish an emergency fund of a thousand dollars. That's your first baby step to financial freedom and Jesus bliss. Second one, you want to pay off all your non-housing debts ASAP, starting with the smallest one. So that he calls this a snowball. So don't pay off like the highest rate interest, just pay off the smallest thing you can just to get momentum. All right, I like that. Then you increase your emergency fund to three to six months of income. Then you put 15% into a 401k or IRA. Then you start your five, five, you know, 529 plans or whatever, like the college funds. You pay off your mortgage and then you, now you're fully paid off. You got your, you got your safety net. Now you start to build wealth.

• 11:42Shaan Puri?

  And so that's his, like, those are his seven steps. His company Ramsey Solutions is a biblically based, common sense, financial education media company. And I'm not gonna lie, that's a bar.

• 11:56Sam Parr?

  It's a bar.

• 11:58Shaan Puri?

  You know, like, hey, YouTube editor, play that clip of like, you know, Jay-Z, the first time he hears like the intro to like, you know, With Timberland? Timberland's playing him a beat and he's like, ooh, that's nice. That's how I feel when I hear the biblically based common sense financial education media company. So that's amazing. Then he's got, you said, you talked about this like Nat, like his Tennessee like empire he's got. He's got a thousand employees working there. He owns all the real estate. So he's got, uh, he owns, I don't know if this is correct. The researcher might have just gone off the rails. Dude, he owns a lot. He owns a lot.

• 12:40Shaan Puri?

  He owns two office towers that are 200 million square feet. That sounds absurd. That's, I don't, that's too much. Not real. Um, yo, we gotta get the researcher, you know, stop drinking your, your product that you were selling from, from, from college. Yeah, strike one. But, but he's got basically like, you know, a 50,000 square foot event center. He's got 60 acres of just like property land that he bought for $10 million. So owns a bunch of land, uses that land to run his kind of like, you know, you know, common sense biblical financial empire out in Tennessee. He's doing his show for three hours a day, five days a week. People call in and they're basically like, all right, Dave, you know, long time listener, first time caller. Uh, and you know, there's part of it that's the sort of like

• 13:23Shaan Puri?

  my first million. I actually think we should steal his shtick, uh, which is he goes, they'll call in, they'll be like, I'm worth $4 million and be like, how old are you? I'll be like, I'm 32 years old. It'd be like fantastic. 34 million. He's writing notes this whole time. And then he'll be like, um, how much debt? And they'll be like, yeah, I got my mortgage, you know, $800,000. And you could just hear him like, just hit someone with a little, a little tisk. Uh, you know, it's like dad's disappointed in me. And then he'll be like, you know, I'm making this much a year. I put this much away and blah, blah, blah. And then he gives him financial advice, which is kind of the same at financial advice every single time. But somehow people like get really into this, uh, this thing. And then the other things he does, which are just these hilarious segments that he has. Uh, so he's got everyday

• 14:07Shaan Puri?

  millionaire. So somebody calls in, he interviews somebody that's, that's worth a million dollars. But then he has, and this is good. The debt free scream. Have you seen this before?

• 14:18Sam Parr?

  Well, I, I used to think that it was like the equivalent of ringing a bell like they're, yeah, he had like a, he had a thing where people would call in and be like, I finally paid off my debt and they like celebrate it.

• 14:29Shaan Puri?

  They celebrate it with the debt free scream. I think there's things we could learn from this guy. I think we should steal some of this guy's shtick. Um, and, and so he's, he's, he's really got something going here. Anyway.

• 14:41Sam Parr?

  So you, you wait, you've never heard of him?

• 14:42Shaan Puri?

  No, no, I've heard of him. I didn't realize how rich he was. I just thought he was like someone's dad that gives basic financial advice. Cause it's

• 14:49Sam Parr?

  He's got the dad vibe. He, he's got the vibe of someone who calls diabetes diabetes. Like that's, you know what I mean? Like, like the thing above your head is definitely a rough to him, not a roof. Uh, he's got that type of

• 15:02Shaan Puri?

  Hundred percent on the diabetes thing. So good. End the podcast. Too good. I need to now laugh for 30 minutes. I don't want to do the rest of the podcast.

• 15:13Sam Parr?

  That's, that's his vibe. He's a little judgmental too. And he's like, uh, this is the only way.

• 15:17Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. He's opinionated. I mean, he's Dr. Phil for money. He's, you know, he, he's got his thing, which is like, this is how you do things.

• 15:24Sam Parr?

  He's like a guy with the big belly who wears suspenders vibe. You know what I'm talking about? Like, like that, like that type of vibe. So he's not wrong. It's just sometimes his energy, I think is a little bit judgmental.

• 15:35Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Um, yeah, exactly. Okay. Um, I was gonna make a bunch of jokes about his look, but I decided to, uh, to turn the other cheek or whatever he would want me to do. So his, his show is like nationally syndicated on radio, which I think is like the hack. So 20 million people a week apparently listen to this. I don't know how they

• 15:53Sam Parr?

  It's huge.

• 15:53Shaan Puri?

  But like

• 15:54Sam Parr?

  When I used to drive, I would listen to it all the time.

• 15:57Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah, of course you did. Of course you're his target market. Um, so you know, he's basically carried by like 600 radio affiliates. I think, think that's amazing. So he's got his books. He's got 23 bestselling books. I don't know what that even means. Uh, that's like their, that's their

• 16:11Sam Parr?

  What do you think that means?

• 16:12Shaan Puri?

  That's their personality. So he's got like his daughter does it now. And he's got these other people like Ken and Dr. John and like all these other people that he's created as other, other kind of personalities or brands. And they're called the Ramsey personalities. Um, so he's, he's got them in anyways. Live speaking courses, they got an app. They have, you know, all kinds of stuff. It's kind of crazy. So let me give you some of his, some of his tweets, some of his tweets or quotes. I want you to react to them with a hallelujah or a no brother, not for me. All right. So the first one.

• 16:45Shaan Puri?

  If you're working and paying off debt, the only time you should see the inside of a restaurant is if you're working there.

• 16:51Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Hallelujah. I'll give you that.

• 16:55Shaan Puri?

  A half hearted hallelujah.

• 16:56Sam Parr?

  That's fine.

• 16:58Shaan Puri?

  If you come to work late and they're paying you, you're stealing. Don't steal and expect to be promoted.

• 17:03Sam Parr?

  Hallelujah.

• 17:04Shaan Puri?

  I'm a capitalist pig. There's nothing socialist about me. I'd put my, my receptionist on straight commission if I could figure out a way.

• 17:10Sam Parr?

  100% hallelujah.

• 17:12Shaan Puri?

  Love that one. All right, Dave. Now you're, now you're talking my, my style. All right, here we go.

• 17:19Shaan Puri?

  If somebody calls in and they got more debt than their annual income, he'll say, that's a small shovel and a big hole.

• 17:27Sam Parr?

  I love that.

• 17:27Shaan Puri?

  Love that.

• 17:33Shaan Puri?

  Okay. Then he also says, he quotes, he quotes the proverbs 22 seven and states, "The rich rule over the poor and the borrower is a slave to the lender."

• 17:43Sam Parr?

  No, I think that that's wrong. I think that you can use debt like effectively to help you.

• 17:47Shaan Puri?

  For sure. Carries a gun. The guys, guys, guys, awesome. Guys, awesome. And I did not.

• 17:54Sam Parr?

  He carries a gun?

• 17:56Shaan Puri?

  Carries a gun. He carries a, a 45 with hollow point bullets, according to himself.

• 18:01Sam Parr?

  You know what a 45 is? That's a pretty big round.

• 18:03Shaan Puri?

  Uh, yeah, that's the biggest round I know of.

• 18:07Sam Parr?

  That's a big, that's a big round.

• 18:10Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So anyways, fascinating guy in his 60s that like, I, I could not believe his empire generates this much cash. 300 million a year is a, is a pretty absurd number for this.

• 18:20Sam Parr?

  Dude, and he's been doing that for decades.

• 18:21Shaan Puri?

  It just shows you how big the Tony Robbins empire must be. Like Tony Robbins says this thing during his, his things, he goes, my business is bringing in over $500 million a year. But I didn't know what that means. Cause like, it's like when a ad agency guy is like, oh, I've spent over a hundred million dollars. You know, you know, I've generated over a hundred million dollars in revenue. No, dude, you took a, the company gave you a budget, you pushed spend at the average normal rate. And you've done this for 10 years and you added up their total revenue number like that. That's not you. Or like, you know, a lot of people will say they own a hundred million dollars of real estate with. And like, okay, cool. You know, so what's your equity in that?

• 19:03Shaan Puri?

  And they're like, well, it's 80% bank loans. So the bank owns 80% of it. And then of the 20% down, I syndicated that out. And so I got a 3% broker commission on it and I own 2% of the, of the property. It's like, okay, let's be a little more real about it. So to me, it was pretty stunning to hear that he's got a $600 million fully paid off real estate portfolio and a $300 million year business empire. If those numbers are to be believed, I could also see this being totally full of shit, by the way.

• 19:30Sam Parr?

  No, no, no, no, no, no, it's not full of shit. It's definitely not full of shit. I don't have any way to verify it, but like I know his reach and I know that that is like very attainable.

• 19:38Shaan Puri?

  Antigod?

• 19:41Sam Parr?

  Dude, did you just read a book on words Christians say?

• 19:45Shaan Puri?

  No, dude, it's the flooding. It's, I just have a little special something in me today.

• 19:51Shaan Puri?

  Either I'm gonna get canceled or I'm gonna get a good laugh out of you and that is worth the risk to me.

• 19:56Sam Parr?

  Have you been south of the Mason Dixon line, man? Have you like been in the Midwest?

• 19:59Shaan Puri?

  What is the Mason Dixon line?

• 20:02Sam Parr?

  Apparently not. You went to Duke, but Duke's not really the south.

• 20:05Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I don't think my skin color is allowed south of the Mason Dixon line. I don't know what that is.

• 20:09Sam Parr?

  Have you hung out in like Tennessee, Missouri, Kansas, Alabama? You've never hung out in any of these places, have you?

• 20:16Shaan Puri?

  Hung out? Is there something to do there?

• 20:19Sam Parr?

  Have you ever even been?

• 20:20Shaan Puri?

  I drove through, but I came to California. I had to step through the mud of the Midwest to get here.

• 20:29Sam Parr?

  You gotta go, man.

• 20:30Shaan Puri?

  I was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma. All jokes aside, so you know, I got my, I got my southern street cred.

• 20:36Sam Parr?

  Dude, that's like, that's like saying you.

• 20:37Shaan Puri?

  My southern birth certificate.

• 20:39Sam Parr?

  Just because you've been to the airport, don't mean you've been there. That's like with this other thing, you gotta get out, man. Even just go to like, this sounds very.

• 20:46Shaan Puri?

  Get out is right. If you're in Tennessee, you do gotta get out.

• 20:49Sam Parr?

  Dude, just go.

• 20:50Shaan Puri?

  Exactly.

• 20:51Sam Parr?

  You're go drive an hour and a half north and go to a Walmart and just chill and just watch what people purchase and you gotta get out of your little San Francisco bubble, my man. You gotta get out and see like there's 350 million people in America.

• 21:04Shaan Puri?

  I gotta tell you a funny story. Yesterday I went to go, I left my house for a meeting. So I go meet somebody very interesting. I might tell you about this later in the pod. So I go meet somebody very interesting and I'm deciding if I want to save it to do a bigger thing or he's gonna come on as a guest or maybe I'll tell you about it. I haven't decided yet. So.

• 21:21Sam Parr?

  Do I know them?

• 21:22Shaan Puri?

  No. I don't think, because they're not in your world, right? Like you know about Dolly Parton, you don't know about like, you know, the NBA. So it's like a different, different.

• 21:30Sam Parr?

  Yeah, not a big baseball guy.

• 21:32Shaan Puri?

  So brought my, my wife and kids came with me. It was like a kind of a long drive. I was like, oh, why don't, why don't we all drive down there together? You know, nanny's out sick. Just drive down together. We'll go to McDonald's afterwards. My kids love like getting a Happy Meal toy. So it's like, we'll do that. There's nothing around us. We'll go out there. So we go to this McDonald's kind of out, you know, I've driven an hour away. We're going to this McDonald's out there and there's a, so I'm like waiting in what I think is the line, but you know, McDonald's kind of ambiguous with the line. There's not like, they don't have like the airport.

• 22:05Sam Parr?

  Order at the checkout or you have the self checkout too?

• 22:08Shaan Puri?

  No, there will, there's like self checkouts, like to the left and the right. Then there's like the cashier in the front. Then there's some people just waiting for their order. You don't know if they're in line or not. Like you don't know what's going on. And so there's a guy in front of me and the cashier is just like waiting and I was like, I was like, oh, you can go. She's ready. And then the cashier just goes, he doesn't have money.

• 22:27Shaan Puri?

  I like peeked my head in front. I'm like, oh yeah, sure enough. He doesn't have that money. And I was like, I thought it was such a funny thing for the lady to say, no, he doesn't have money. Like, that's so funny to me. Like, so outrageous of a comment. Like, why did she have to say it like that? But it was like the most direct line to the answer. Like, not like, no, you can go ahead. He's not, he's not ready or he's not ordering. He doesn't have money.

• 22:56Shaan Puri?

  And he didn't even, he just kept standing there just hoping that he could, I don't know, take someone's food that didn't show up or something. I don't know. What are you doing?

• 23:02Sam Parr?

  I was in the bathroom at the airport recently and there was like, there was like a line for the urinal, but there was also like a line for the stalls. And the guy walks up to me and he looks at the, the stall and he looks at me and he goes,

• 23:17Sam Parr?

  You waiting to poop?

• 23:34Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, dude. People say the weirdest shit, man.

• 23:39Shaan Puri?

  And then you have to answer too, right? You can't not answer at that point.

• 23:42Sam Parr?

  Oh, my God.

• 23:42Shaan Puri?

  Why am I, why am I paying it, playing into this?

• 23:45Sam Parr?

  It was just a dead face. He's just looking at it goes, you waiting to poop?

• 23:51Sam Parr?

  And I was like a 12 year old. I don't know why I thought that was so.

• 23:56Sam Parr?

  Oh, my God. Uh, I have another business. You want to talk about business or no?

• 23:59Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.

• 24:03Sam Parr?

  We're idiots. By the way, if you're listening in Austin, um, we're doing an event. Well, actually, we're doing two events, I think. The second one's not confirmed. The second one is Sean and I doing a live pod late April. We're gonna have more on that, right?

• 24:17Shaan Puri?

  Bro, that's, it's confirmed. We're doing it. We just don't know the venue yet.

• 24:21Sam Parr?

  We don't know the venue yet.

• 24:21Shaan Puri?

  We need to know, is it gonna be 300 people, 1,000 people or 3,000 people? That's, that's kind of the only thing that, that we're missing here is how many of you will show up to this live show in Austin where we can, we're gonna, we're gonna put on a little show. We're gonna meet and greet, have some fun, maybe do a little private dinner, uh, with some people afterwards. So, so I think we should, we're gonna do that end of April. Where do they go to like sign up for that? We'll put the link in the description here.

• 24:47Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and then go to, what, what's our website called? MFM pod.com?

• 24:52Shaan Puri?

  MFM pod.com, which is like my first million pod.com.

• 24:55Sam Parr?

  And then we're, we're doing another one. This one is not a we, this is a me. Sean's not coming to this one. It's just a casual hangout session. We're doing that, uh, mid, when is, when is that? Oh, in a week, mid March? Is it? March 15th, Wednesday, March 15th. It's free. You can just show up and we're just gonna hang out. And you can find that also on mfm pod.com or by the time this episode's air airs, I will have tweeted it. So you can go to my Twitter handle, the stand part and see it.

• 25:23Shaan Puri?

  Sam, I'm in a great mood. Can I tell you why?

• 25:25Sam Parr?

  Yes.

• 25:26Shaan Puri?

  I did something that I forgot is an amazing tactic and techniques. I'm gonna say it out loud here. So other people could do it, but also it's a reminder to myself to do it. Have you ever heard of something called flooding?

• 25:39Sam Parr?

  No, is that when you text someone a lot of? No, I have no idea.

• 25:43Shaan Puri?

  Could be a lot of things. Don't urban dictionary. It's probably something weird. But here's, here's how I learned about it. Tony Robbins talked about this thing. So he goes, somebody asked him, they go, what's a like, you know, marriage, like advice or a thing you do in your marriage that like, you know, makes it better. And he, he basically had like two stories that I really loved. I'll skip the first one for now. I've told it. I teach it in my course, but I'll skip that one for now. The second one that he had said was, he goes, about once a month, we'll do something called flooding, which is basically us, we sit down on the, on the couch, you know, like we're about to watch Netflix or something else. But instead of just mindlessly vegging out to some TV, we watch videos or photos, we go

• 26:26Shaan Puri?

  of some part of our past, some, some era of our past. So maybe like this vacation that we went on or our wedding or whatever. And you basically, you'll get this flood of memories and emotion that are linked and anchored to those moments. But most people don't like revisit it in a kind of like in, in a like, like a conscious way or an intentional way like this. And I do this in two ways. One, I'll do it with like life photos or memories, videos or videos or photos. The second one is, and this is the one I did before this, which is why.

• 26:58Sam Parr?

  Or blog posts or something?

• 27:00Shaan Puri?

  I will pull up a bunch of videos that were really funny to me back in like the day, back in college, like back when YouTube was like the new shit.

• 27:09Sam Parr?

  E-bomb world.

• 27:10Shaan Puri?

  And like, you know, things would go viral, but it was like, yeah, e-bombs world, like, things would go viral and like, everybody knew about that, that video, you know, whatever, that Charlie bit my finger or whatever. But there's this set of videos that were so funny to me and they're not even that fun. Now that I go back and look, it's kind of like an old movie where you're like, dang, this movie doesn't, it doesn't hold up. It doesn't, it doesn't have the same juice. Like, things are much funnier now. Like, the average TikTok is funnier than the best videos back in like 2006. Which, which videos did you look at? Okay, this is gonna sound dumb, but have you ever seen this video? You know, 12-year-old boy disclaimer, here we go. I've written this video of this cop pulling over this guy. He's got his hands above his head, it's like this. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 27:54Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah. And he goes, he's patting him down. He goes, he goes, all right, let me just check pockets, hold on, here we go. Up, hey, what, what's this? And the guy goes, that's my penis. And he goes, that's your penis. And then he continues on.

• 28:08Shaan Puri?

  And this video cracks me up, just the way he goes, that's my penis. And the guy goes, that's your penis.

• 28:14Shaan Puri?

  And so there's that video, but then there's just a whole bunch of these that were like, just goofy videos. Like, a lot of them were like, you know, the news anchors interviewing some, like that kid who's like, I like turtles kid, or like, the grape stomp video, or like, whatever. This is a whole bunch of these. And I watched like six of them and they just cracked me up in this like way. It's like, a simpler time. Yeah, the evolution of dance. Wife and a mortgage. I didn't have it, you know, it's just literally that was like, those videos were, just took me back. It just teleported me. And so, highly recommend this, this idea of flooding. You probably have done some version of this on accident, but like, make it a practice. It's pretty awesome and it just puts you in an amazing mood.

• 28:54Speaker 02

  This data is wrong every freaking time.

• 28:57Speaker 03

  Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated.

• 29:03Speaker 02

  Whoa, I can see the client's whole history. Calls, support tickets, emails, and here's a task from three days ago I totally missed.

• 29:11Speaker 03

  HubSpot, pro better.

• 29:14Sam Parr?

  So I did it recently. So I'm gonna tell a story that I, you and I were texting about, and I can't reveal what I was selling because it was kind of against the law and I didn't know it at the time, but I tweeted out recently.

• 29:25Shaan Puri?

  What's that thing, statute of limitations? You're way past that. It's been more than 10 years. Is that a real law?

• 29:32Sam Parr?

  That's definitely, that's definitely a legal.

• 29:34Shaan Puri?

  Figure of speech?

• 29:36Sam Parr?

  Here's what we'll do. We can mention, I'll say it was alcohol. That's all I will say. It was legal alcohol that I was selling. That's all I'm gonna say. I was like, so basically.

• 29:45Shaan Puri?

  Anytime you have to specify it was legal, probably not a good thing.

• 29:50Sam Parr?

  So, well, so here's the story. I tweeted out that I think, it always bothers me when people collect domain names. That's a, that's a pet peeve because I, because I'm saying if you're doing that, you're doing the wrong stuff because people will say, I'm gonna, I've got this great idea. I'm gonna buy a domain name or even worse, they'll say, I've got this amazing domain name. I should build something for it. I'm like, dude, don't build something just because you have a domain name. So anyway, I tweeted out, I'm like, just make money first and just use like a, you know, store name dot Squarespace dot com for like the initial like hundred bucks in sales and then go and get the domain name. Like, and someone's like, you can't do that. And I was like, oh no, I've done it a bunch of times. I'm like, yeah, well, you're doing it because you have a name. I was like, no, I did it actually in college tons and tons of times. In fact, I found this old website that I had and it was alcohol name dot wordpress dot com.

• 30:36Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 30:36Sam Parr?

  And I went and looked at the old stats and it's getting 5,000 views a month still on a wordpress dot com free website in this, it's a store, it's a quote, a store that is a blog post and a click to PayPal. And basically what I did was there was this really unique drink that was sold in Nashville and for some reason only one or two stores were carrying it, but this particular type of drink was popular across the country. And I thought, well, I should set up an online store to sell this stuff. And I did. And I made friends with the person selling it, the liquor store, whatever. And I go, hey, I'm gonna sell this for 3X markup, but I'll buy a bunch of it from you. So whatever. And I did it. And I

• 31:19Sam Parr?

  didn't, I'm an idiot. I didn't realize that like as this thing was growing, I was making Like a lot of money and I went and told the legal team at my college. I was like, hey, I think my business is like working really well. Do I need to set up like an LLC or something? And they're like, oh, you're breaking the law. Like you can't, you can't sell this without like a liquor license. I was like, but it's like a collect, basically this thing that I was selling, it was, it was a very rare whiskey that was in a very particular type of bottle. That was like a collector's item. And I thought like, oh, it was just like collector's item. I don't even know if people are going to drink this thing. So anyway, it was making like a thousand dollars a day sometimes. And I looked at the old blog post that I was selling this and it was hilarious and it reminded me like of a simpler time when I was sleeping on a mattress on the floor.

• 32:00Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 32:01Sam Parr?

  And life was good and I was building motorcycles in my living room and it was working out well. So I was like,

• 32:08Shaan Puri?

  I was building motorcycles in my living room, sleeping on the floor and selling collector's whiskey illegally on the internet.

• 32:19Sam Parr?

  It was a simpler time.

• 32:20Shaan Puri?

  You know, the American dream.

• 32:22Sam Parr?

  The American dream. I was one of those kids that had, you probably had this too. I didn't have beer, like you remember those college kids that would have like beer cases, the cardboard on their walls?

• 32:31Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 32:32Sam Parr?

  I wasn't that bad, but I did have an American flag. I definitely had the American flag. So I was pretty trashy. But uh, yeah, I was, so I was looking at my old like blog that I used to do and I couldn't even remember the password and uh, so I flooded myself a little.

• 32:48Shaan Puri?

  I'm just flooding my pants today. It's great.

• 32:52Shaan Puri?

  The good thing is, by the way, this whole, if you're not watching on YouTube, you're missing half of it. Cause Sam's wearing a Harvard sweatshirt while we tell these stories.

• 33:02Sam Parr?

  We just talked about selling illegal whiskey, waiting to poop. You made a bunch of jokes about the South. This is so stupid. Uh, oh my God. All right. I have something for you. So there's this company that's for sale that I came across. So check it out. Go to Chambers.com.

• 33:21Shaan Puri?

  Chambers? Okay.

• 33:23Sam Parr?

  Yeah, like that Harry Potter stuff, Chambers.

• 33:25Shaan Puri?

  Chambers and partners, is that it?

• 33:27Sam Parr?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 33:28Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 33:29Sam Parr?

  Okay, dude, check this out. So this website, they, I think they're mostly in Europe, but they are in America as well. Is they put out these rankings once a month or once a quarter, something like that. And they go and they interview lots of, I think they have 200 employees who do this, 200 employees who go out and interview different lawyers. They talk to your past clients and they try to like, see which cases you're winning and it's all done manually. Like there's not like a lot of like tech behind it. And then they create these rankings for like best legal firm or whatever like that. Or like, you know, a good firm for this, good firm for that, like different niches. And then they put out these rankings and if you're a lawyer, you can pay money and, and get like a plaque.

• 34:09Sam Parr?

  They'll send you a plaque and then also they'll allow you to use their like thing in the, in the, like when you send an email, it could be like, voted a top lawyer by Chambers. And you could do, and you could do all that. Dude, this company, they do 44 million euros or yeah, so, or sorry, 44 million pounds. So what's that in real, real money? That's like 60 million in revenue and then 18 million in profit. And they're selling right now for close to $500 million. It's a crazy company.

• 34:40Shaan Puri?

  You saw this like for sale somewhere?

• 34:43Sam Parr?

  Just like in a trade magazine for media companies that I follow. It's like a small thing called Flash and Flames. Because this, that website, they cover like B2B media stuff because I'm like, been obsessed with B2B.

• 34:54Shaan Puri?

  What's the name of the B2B media thing?

• 34:56Sam Parr?

  Flash and Flames.com. I love it. It's like my favorite site. I didn't even want to tell people about it because I'm like.

• 35:02Shaan Puri?

  I like how you tried to just mutter it.

• 35:06Shaan Puri?

  That's when you know it's a good one.

• 35:07Sam Parr?

  It's a good one. Like I'm a paying subscriber to it, which is like ridiculous. But dude, these lawyers pay like 1,500 to $4,000 a year. And they said they have like no churn. They're like, we have, we, no insurance from our, from us because these lawyers want it for so much. This, these lawyers want it for so much and I. I'm interested in this and I found like eight or nine other businesses. They call them like data businesses or databases or intelligence businesses and they're not really much tech. But right now, a lot of them are selling for eight to 10 times revenue. And I found 10 examples of companies that have sold in the eight to 10 times revenue range for one of these data businesses. It's ridiculous. It's crazy.

• 35:46Sam Parr?

  And this sounds like a scheme because what they do is they rank you and then they go, hey, if you want like to make like a special profile on our website, uh, we'll do that and it's $4,500 a year. And what we'll do is, uh, like once ranked, you could purchase this one pager where you get a profile on our site. It's almost like a Wikipedia page where they like, one of their journalists just writes like two paragraphs and it says like, this legal firm is known for X, Y, and Z. And then you could put that, if you're a lawyer, you could put that in your email signature and you're allowed to do that. And then people can click and see whatever. It's crazy, man. This is a caper. They're pulling it off and I, and I love stuff like this, you know, it's like JD Power. We talked about.

• 36:24Shaan Puri?

  You know, you know, they're smart because their logo is like, it looks like a medallion, like it's like, it looks like a special emblem or award. Like it's a sea with this, like, I don't know what you call these, but like the petals going around it. Put this on the YouTube channel. So like people could see it, but like.

• 36:42Sam Parr?

  A reef.

• 36:43Shaan Puri?

  It's, yeah, it's like, it's like a reef around it that like, just looks like, you know, what the Olympics in Athens would, would, would award their, uh, the top performers, right? So like you, they're, they're really playing into the whole thing with their brand. Uh, so I think that's pretty cool. I have a business that's sort of like this.

• 36:57Sam Parr?

  And their name is Partners. I'm going to create like something like this. Just, do you know, just.

• 37:01Shaan Puri?

  Partners?

• 37:02Sam Parr?

  Mayonnaise and Partners, you know? We'll just do something for the people, you know, we break, we rank best condiments, mayonnaise and partners. I gotta figure this out. We could put this on the logo, but I love these rating businesses. What's the one you have that's similar?

• 37:16Shaan Puri?

  So I was, have you ever done like, like a trademark search yourself?

• 37:22Sam Parr?

  No, what's that?

• 37:23Shaan Puri?

  Like, when you start a business and you want to look up, is this a good name? What do you do? Do you pay a lawyer and say, hey, could you just tell me if this trademark's available? Do you do that later, once you get going a little bit?

• 37:30Sam Parr?

  I do that later, once I get going. Is there, is there an importance to having a trademark?

• 37:36Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. It's very hard to sell a company without a trademark. Did you sell The Hustle without a trademark?

• 37:41Sam Parr?

  I didn't have a trademark.

• 37:42Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Typically, it's very hard to get acquired without owning your name, because it's a giant liability. So, for example, like, if somebody else owns the trademark, and you get six years in, you're gonna have to change your name, because the more valuable you get, the bigger your exposure is for them to say, I own the trademark to this, you have to change your name, or...

• 38:01Sam Parr?

  But maybe my name, I mean, it was called The Hustle. Maybe it was too broad of a name, you know what I mean?

• 38:06Shaan Puri?

  Well, I don't know. There's probably some troll out there who listened to this, been like, hey, hang on, let me go get this guy. So...

• 38:11Sam Parr?

  Dude, I'm past the reps and warranty, like, the escrow has been paid out, so...

• 38:15Shaan Puri?

  There's a great, uh, there's a great, um, story. I think, uh, the early episode where Mois came on and told the Native story. So, it's like, I don't know, episode 10 of this podcast. Uh, Mois tells a story about, like, when they tried to sell Native, um, they, they got in trouble with it. So, they go, they have a deal to sell Native. And as they're doing the diligence, or like, as they're prepping for the diligence, they're like, shit, we don't have the trademark for Native, uh, Native deodorants. And they're like, okay, well, let's just get it. And they're like, well, you can't get it, because somebody else owns it. And they're like, what? Who owns Native Deodorant? There's no other Native Deodorant. Look, I have the domain. And they're like, well, no, there's this guy, and I think it was like, someone in Palo Alto, if I remember this story correctly, I might be butchering a little bit of this.

• 38:57Shaan Puri?

  But somebody in Palo Alto, who was like, kind of like a patent troll type, that owned the name to it, and owned a bunch of names like this. And they were like, and he's like, okay, I guess I can go buy it off them? Because they're not doing anything with it. So, he goes to them, tries to buy it for like, whatever, 20K. They're like, no. But he's like, okay, you know, whatever, goes up 200K. No. And like, the guy wanted millions of dollars for this name, because he knows your business is valuable. You need this name. You're gonna change your brand name for your consumer package good? That's like, you know, you can't change Doritos to be called, you know, like, like Fluffies, you know, tomorrow. It doesn't work. You lose a lot of value. And so, they were like, going back and forth. I forgot exactly how it got resolved.

• 39:39Shaan Puri?

  I think he ended up buying it for $2 million or something like that, or...

• 39:44Sam Parr?

  Voisted?

• 39:45Shaan Puri?

  I think so, or, um... Something else happened where they like threatened to, they were just like, all right, screw you. We're not going to do it at all. And the guy like realizes like his last ditch effort and like, and they ended up getting it for whatever, some amount. Um, you know, I forgot, I forgot what it was, but they acquired it in the end. But yeah, anyway, so, so I've had this problem with the business of mine, which was that I up, I'm, I'm like you. I'm like, oh, I don't need a fancy domain. I don't need a fancy name. Let me just start the business and go. And then I start and it goes and it gets popular. And then I'm like, okay, I should probably like incorporate the company and do like payroll and do like all these things I should, I should have been doing at the beginning, but like, I didn't want to do all that stuff if there wasn't like a real business here. And so then you try to go back

• 40:27Shaan Puri?

  and some things are easier than others to correct going backwards. One of the things that's hard to correct is if you chose a name that wasn't right, you know, you have a problem. And so with one of my businesses, I had done the actual search myself. I should have just paid a lawyer to do it, but I went on the USPT search website, which I don't know if you've ever gone there. It's like, you know, imagine like a government, it's like a DMV website. And so you go there, you try to search and I searched for our brand name and nothing came up. But it turns out there's like a fancier way to search where it's like, yeah, that brand name or like with an S at the end or like with associated other words that would make it too close. And I didn't know that. And so I remember being so frustrated with this interface and I was like, somebody should make a, because this is a, it's a

• 41:10Shaan Puri?

  public database. It's like, somebody should just make a more consumer friendly layer on top. And then I found a business that does this and I got in touch with the guy who does this. So there's a business called Trademarkia.com. So it's like trademark with IA. So Trademarkia.com. If you go to it, all of a sudden, it's like, like if you just compare side by side, like in the YouTube chat, you should do this, like take USPTO and try to find even where do you go find, search for trademarks and then like how that looks versus this where it just says, search 11 million trademarks for free. Search your thing. Example, Mickey Mouse. And it's like, you could just type in your brand name. So like if I typed in, you know, the hustle, uh, I'm going to search for this and it's going to tell me what trademarks exist for this, who owns them.

• 41:51Sam Parr?

  This company kills it.

• 41:53Shaan Puri?

  What categories are there? Okay. So, so HubSpot, HubSpot owns it now. So it says the hustle, HubSpot owns it. It's pending and it was filed December 3rd, 2022. When did you sell?

• 42:03Sam Parr?

  Uh, December 3rd, uh, when did, two, two years ago? What would that be? 21?

• 42:08Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So, okay.

• 42:10Sam Parr?

  Wow. So they, yeah, I didn't own it.

• 42:13Shaan Puri?

  They also, it also looks like you abandoned one in 2020. So, you know, somebody did something on your team, maybe tried and didn't get it or whatever. It tells you what class it's in, et cetera, et cetera. So it's a great, great little thing and you could search for like associated names or whatever. It's a great website. And so I reached out to the guy who owns it. I was like, dude, this is a, and so I said, trademark is a great, great idea. Brilliant interface. You know, props to you. And he goes, so the guy lives in the Bay area, actually. And he goes, yeah, it's really cool website. You know, we have five million in ARR. And I can't, you know, we never raised VC, five million in ARR.

• 42:57Shaan Puri?

  It was kind of declining from the peak, but I just came back to the company. We removed the subscription. I got big plans now, you know, I want to talk to you about it. And, you know, he's going to try to make this like, he wants to go for like the billion dollar outcome. And I was like, dude, I think you have a five million dollar year cash cow. That you could probably get to like eight or nine with just like some simple tweaks and like, you know, chill. Like that, that sounds awesome. But, but I thought this is really cool website. Again, it's just a simple, like, these businesses are everywhere, man. These businesses are hidden in plain sight. And in this case, it took a public data set. It just put a much more user friendly wrapper on top versus what you were talking about with Chambers is they created their own data set. And then have, then they own that proprietary data.

• 43:40Sam Parr?

  It's called, you know, who was it? Anon from CBM sites was on and he was like, no, we just like taking public data that's messy. And we just make it a little bit easier to, yeah, we just make it clean. By the way, my first million is owned by advanced magazine publishers, which is a big company in New York. And it's a entertainment services, namely an online, non-downloadable video series featuring star athletes explaining their life as millionaires. I guess that's that GQ thing, which I search or where I see when I search on YouTube. But, uh, anyway, badass. I love this company.

• 44:16Shaan Puri?

  You want to, I'm going to go trademark this before this episode comes out because now somebody's going to go squat on this.

• 44:21Sam Parr?

  Do you, and?

• 44:25Sam Parr?

  A funny story about Native Deodorant. I've always remembered this story. I never brought it up to you. So you and I, the Hustles office and Twitch's office was just a block or like 50 yards from each other. So if, you know, there's, there was like turning or whatever you were, and then you were the left. If you go to the right, there was a little cafe that was lovely that I, that I really liked. And I believe Moiz, so Native Deodorant is a company called Native Deodorant. They sell deodorant. It was sold for a hundred million dollars in, in cash, and it probably does hundreds of millions now. And it has like a really cute branding. They make shampoo. They make everything. And I remember walking by this lovely cafe and I thought, huh, this cafe is called Native too. And their logo looks just like Native Deodorant.

• 45:10Sam Parr?

  And I realized that Moiz worked nearby. And so I put kind of two and two together. So if you Google Native Co SF.

• 45:20Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 45:21Sam Parr?

  You'll see a little, you'll see a little cafe. You'll see their Yelp page. They've changed their logo to green, but it used to be yellow or sorry, it used to be blue, the exact same as Native Deodorant. And so I have a feeling that he was just thinking of like good branding.

• 45:37Shaan Puri?

  I've walked by this and I was like, this is, I remember thinking, dude, boys, they're ripping off your brand. Are you doing it?

• 45:43Sam Parr?

  Exactly.

• 45:44Shaan Puri?

  And now it's realized the obvious. He was like, so all right, I need a name. Looked out the window, saw it. I was like, that's my name and my logo now.

• 45:54Sam Parr?

  That's mine. If you go to this, go, if you look up Native Co.

• 45:58Shaan Puri?

  The spacing is exactly the same.

• 46:00Sam Parr?

  It's exactly the same. And it used to be blue. It looked like they're, it looked like during COVID.

• 46:05Shaan Puri?

  It was exactly like Nivea blue.

• 46:07Sam Parr?

  It was, it was the same white background with the same blue. And now it's green. It looks like they closed in COVID and they moved to a new location. But that old location that we were at, it was the same logo and it was called Native Co. And I think Native Deodorant was.

• 46:19Shaan Puri?

  The domain was also Native Co for him.

• 46:22Sam Parr?

  Yes, it was. It was the exact same thing. And so he must have been just walking down the street and he goes like, yeah, that's me. That's mine now. You know, it's just like there's that meme on the internet of like a stick figure handing an item to another stick figures and hey, I made this. And the second stick figure looks at it goes, I made this. That's basically what just happened. And I don't think I've ever like said this to him, but I would love to hear what his rebuttal is. But he 100% stole the entire branding, the name, the everything from this company. I don't know if stealing is the right word, but kinda.

• 46:56Shaan Puri?

  I mean, that one's looks like stealing. It looks like he actually went to took a screwdriver, took all took their sign off their office, moved it across the street and put it on his office. It's the exact logo. I remember seeing that for years and being like, huh. And I just never like put two and two together. I didn't realize he worked there, but I was like, wow, they're really ripping off his branding.

• 47:17Sam Parr?

  No, that's that cafe has been there for years. I remember walking by it for years.

• 47:21Shaan Puri?

  Well, now they're shut down. That's that. I mean, this is like everything that's wrong in society. You know, he sells his business for a hundred million dollars. Poor cafe, you know, shuts down, you know, sadly during COVID, during the pandemic. This is the way the world is going. Dude, have you seen people ripping us off? I don't know if you've seen this, but.

• 47:38Sam Parr?

  No, but that's cool.

• 47:39Shaan Puri?

  In the next two weeks, you're gonna see Twitter threads, LinkedIn's, short videos on TikTok, other podcasts, talking about the exact same stories that we tell here. There's like this group of 10 people that just take our content and then they just say the exact same thing. And they just tell that exact same story. They're gonna be like, dude, Dave Ramsey, Dave, how Dave Ramsey built a $600 million empire, animation, this, that. And then they're just gonna be like literally steal our shtick. It's kind of annoying. I get it.

• 48:11Sam Parr?

  Michael from Our Future has done it a few times.

• 48:13Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, they do. Yeah, he's one of the 10 that does this all the time.

• 48:16Sam Parr?

  Who are the other nine?

• 48:18Shaan Puri?

  Uh, I mean, I don't even really want to give them shine of doing that. Yeah, this is literally, if you're one of those people, just, you know, this is have your own silent embarrassment. There's nothing wrong with sort of like taking ideas and remixing them. But what most people do is they just take the same idea, they just tell the same story, the same way that we already told it in their own Twitter thread or their own LinkedIn and whatever else, which is fine, but like give credit at least if you're gonna, if you're gonna say the same thing, be like, oh, I was listening to my first million and they told this great story. Check it out. All right. Now, yeah, that's, I think, a slightly better way to do it.

• 48:52Shaan Puri?

  But, you know, whatever. It is what it is.

• 48:54Sam Parr?

  But this is why, so I have a new project. I'm actually gonna announce it in about a month or three weeks. This is why I didn't announce it. I've been working on this for almost a year now. I didn't want to announce it. Copycats. Everyone, everyone talks about building public. I hate building in public. Building in public is not cool when you're popular. Building in public is really cool when you want to get popular.

• 49:11Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 49:12Sam Parr?

  But once you already have a following, I don't want to do it. Like the Milk Road, did you guys have a bunch of copycats?

• 49:16Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Yeah, tons. There's like, there's tons of embarrassing ones that are out there. There's like, people that literally just took the same exact newsletter and they would, some people would translate it. So they're like, oh, I'm, you know, leche, leche, whatever. And it's like, the Mexican Milk Road. And then they would translate it to Spanish and just like Google Translate and then publish. There's another one that, uh, there's one, I don't know if I want to put this guy on blast, but,

• 49:47Shaan Puri?

  someone who tried to buy the Milk Road and failed.

• 49:50Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I know.

• 49:51Shaan Puri?

  Then just tried to copy it in his own like way. And you could just, the funny thing is, they very rarely work.

• 49:58Sam Parr?

  They don't.

• 49:59Shaan Puri?

  And it's like, kind of surprising. Why don't they work? I kind of expected them to work. Like, for example, when people take our content and then write a thread about our LinkedIn, like, it does pretty good. Like, that, that kind of works for them. Otherwise, they wouldn't really keep doing it. But the copy the whole newsletter thing, like, for some reason, that doesn't really work. I'm not sure, not 100% sure.

• 50:17Sam Parr?

  I'll explain why. I know why. Do you want to know the, so basically, if, for people who have been raised on the internet, they have a very high bullshit detector. And do you want to know the best way to circumvent someone's bullshit detector?

• 50:30Shaan Puri?

  No.

• 50:31Sam Parr?

  Don't bullshit. You don't bullshit. Don't bullshit. That's how you circumvent that bullshit detector. You don't bullshit. And people could sniff this out. And so if they read something and it's like, dude, you're like a not cool older guy trying to act like a cool, younger person. I know that this is not good. Like, this doesn't work.

• 50:48Shaan Puri?

  I told you about the NQR, right? The KFC's in China, not quite right. It's like, dude, it's the same menu. Like, this is, this is the spicy chicken sandwich. And it's like, That's not quite right. And people, it just doesn't taste right. The taste buds reject it. Now, I believe that when it comes to, if I use one product and then somebody tries to copy it, I'm like, why would I want the shitty copy? I'm just gonna keep going with the original. But in markets where you're reaching a new audience or people who haven't heard of the original, I'm surprised it doesn't work. And I think my theory of why it doesn't work in those cases, I think you're right when it's, uh, when people have tasted the original that they don't really want the shitty.

• 51:25Sam Parr?

  Or when it's like, uh, community, community, brand, uh, like personality driven, you know, it's, it's that one moat that Peter Thiel doesn't understand, brand.

• 51:34Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. The one, the Asperger proof, uh, defense, that one Asperger proof, uh, weapon we have. So, you know, the, the one thing that I think is, is true, which is like this like iceberg theory, which is, which is like, if you look at an iceberg, like the part you see at the top is like, you know, 5% of the total mass that's there. And so what I think people get wrong when they try to copy a business is that they only see the top, the 5% and they're like, okay, I'm gonna copy that. But they don't know what goes on underneath. They don't know that basically the uncopyable thing is the, the people, the personalities, the engine underneath that's coming up with the creative ideas, that's coming up with the next marketing thing, because this one starts to decline.

• 52:17Shaan Puri?

  And so I think that's the part that's typically hard to copy. But honestly, I'm surprised that more of them don't work because if you're sufficiently talented, I think, I think it sadly does work more often than it doesn't.

• 52:33Sam Parr?

  We should do an episode where we talk about the things that people have copied and it's become better than the original. Um, like there's stories of the Samware brothers. So it's these three brothers in Germany and they have a company called Rocket Internet and it was a clone factory. And they basically, it's a, it was publicly traded until recently, but the reason they started this company was they like cloned Amazon and all these other companies, Zappos, Uber, things like that. But before they started company, started that company, they cloned. Other things and they sold it to the originals. So they cloned eBay in Germany and they sold it back to eBay for $90 million in like three months. And then they were going to do the same thing with Groupon, but they got bigger than Groupon and they realized, oh wow, once you

• 53:18Sam Parr?

  get huge, this business sucks. We gotta offload it. And then they tried to do that with Zappos, the shoe company, but they got bigger than the original Zappos. So the bigger, they were, their market cap was larger, so they couldn't sell it. And they, like, this is their whole strategy. It's a very fascinating strategy. And so far, it's not panned out for them, other than, like HelloFresh. They did HelloFresh and they copied Blue Apron and HelloFresh worked.

• 53:39Shaan Puri?

  Right. Yeah, I think there's an art, there's an art to copying. This is a whole, whole, I think we could do a whole podcast about like, if you're gonna copy, here's how to do it. Here's how to do it in a way that feels good to your soul, feels good to customers, actually works, and is not just going to result in like a massive waste of time. And so I think there's, there's a bunch of different little factors there. I think one thing the Samwar brothers did, one of the factors, for example, is they, they did the same business in a different country. And so I think, you know, geographic, geographic differentiation is important. I think that's one that, that, that you can, you can copy and make things work when you do geographic difference.

• 54:21Shaan Puri?

  But then there's some traps with that, too, that we could, we could talk about. But, all right, where do you want to, where do you want to finish up? I think we should, well, there is one thing that we should do. And

• 54:30Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I forgot about that.

• 54:31Shaan Puri?

  You're aware of it. I think I'm aware of it. I can't seem to find my pen, but I need

• 54:36Sam Parr?

  That's okay. You don't need, you don't need a pen. So basically,

• 54:38Shaan Puri?

  But I thought I had to sign something, some sort of agreement.

• 54:41Sam Parr?

  You do, but you, you sign it, but just with a click of a button. So basically, at this podcast, My First Million, our content, unlike every other content on YouTube, it's actually not for free.

• 54:49Shaan Puri?

  Right. Not a free podcast.

• 54:51Sam Parr?

  It's not a free podcast, because what you have to do, if you've seen one, more than one episode, you have to do this thing called the gentleman's agreement, which is, it's called that because we're not there. I'm not behind you to stare at your screen. That's why

• 55:02Shaan Puri?

  Honor.

• 55:02Sam Parr?

  It's a gentleman's agreement. It's an honor code. You have to basically go and click subscribe on YouTube, because we'll get more subscribers. That helps the algorithm. We get more views and then we'll do more dumb stuff for you. So it's called the gentleman's agreement. If you watch more than one video, you have to do this. Everyone's doing it.

• 55:17Shaan Puri?

  I have a, a, addendum to the gentleman's agreement. Came from a, from a listener. She pointed it out. She goes, not only have I signed the gentleman's agreement, I've signed the ladies' understanding.

• 55:30Sam Parr?

  What's the ladies' understanding?

• 55:32Shaan Puri?

  You know, there's not many phrases that will stop me in my tracks, but I stopped in my tracks. The ladies' understanding, I thought that was phenomenal.

• 55:40Sam Parr?

  The ladies' understanding, that's actually when you also click subscribe on the iTunes, or the, I always call iTunes, on the podcast app and the Spotify app.

• 55:48Shaan Puri?

  You go that extra mile.

• 55:49Sam Parr?

  Ladies' understanding. Go that extra mile and give us the ladies' understanding along with the gentleman's agreement.

• 55:53Shaan Puri?

  Since we started doing this, so two things about gentleman's agreement. Number one, it's funny because we're talking about copying. You stole the shtick from somebody and we're trying to make-

• 56:01Sam Parr?

  Dude, I stole it. He called me, by the way, and he was like, isn't that awesome? It works so good. And he invited me to go to a UFC fight.

• 56:07Shaan Puri?

  And you did it right because you gave credit to him. You put your own spin on it and yeah, you credited him, most importantly, as being like, this guy did this awesome thing. And I was like, wow, I gotta try doing this. So, you know, you credited him and that's cool that you guys are going to see a fight together. That's amazing. Now-

• 56:24Sam Parr?

  It's cute.

• 56:25Shaan Puri?

  The second thing is, we have grown a lot since we did this. So, we started doing this, we were at 100, would you, the first time you did it, I believe we had 145,000 subscribers on YouTube.

• 56:35Sam Parr?

  That's like a month ago?

• 56:35Shaan Puri?

  We have, yeah, that was like, yeah, maybe 45 days ago, something like that. And now we're at 180,000. And the people who watch the YouTube videos, they know this. In fact, I'm looking at a tweet right now, which he goes, he goes, at, he just at, mentioned us, he goes, watching on YouTube is better than Spotify. Yeah, no shit. I told you this. It is way better to watch the show on YouTube. And in fact, what I think we should do to really like juice the agreement, to even add more, you know, see appendix A of the gentleman's agreement. I think we should do a piece of content that is only good when you watch it. So, so here's my, here's my proposal to you, Sam. I think we should do basically like-

• 57:12Sam Parr?

  Shirtless?

• 57:14Shaan Puri?

  Sam's gonna be shirtless and I'm gonna screen share.

• 57:20Shaan Puri?

  But I think we should screen share us going through like a pitch deck and making, taking one from average to awesome or like good to great. Uh, and just show how we would tweak the copy, how we would make it look like better. And we'll use a real one. And so I think we should do that and put that only on the YouTube channel because it would only make sense to see it.

• 57:36Sam Parr?

  No, I think that you should log into chase.com and show, show your checking account.

• 57:42Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, okay.

• 57:42Sam Parr?

  And it will react, but we won't say the number.

• 57:45Shaan Puri?

  That's genius. You know, this is why, you complete me, bro.

• 57:52Shaan Puri?

  I gave you a shitty idea and you gave me the old yes and.

• 57:58Sam Parr?

  We're gonna go to chase.com or whatever, Bank of America, whatever you use. And you're gonna just, we're gonna watch you login and we're just gonna react and that's it.

• 58:06Shaan Puri?

  By the way, the yes, yes and is the corniest thing that the startup world tried to take from, from like the cool, like, you know, people who are actually funny world, because actually it's a no, but. Which is what you just did there. No, but we should do this instead is a better version of yes and.

• 58:24Sam Parr?

  Improv people are, are one step below a cappella people in terms of the nerds. So like, there's no way we're cool and improv people. You ever been around a dip? An improv person's like being around someone who does CrossFit, you know, like just stop talking about it. I can't stand improv people. They're exhausting. It's like, uh.

• 58:41Shaan Puri?

  It's CrossFit for people without muscle.

• 58:44Sam Parr?

  Dude, Theo Von said it's like, uh, it's like a blind Jack Russell. You know what those are? It's like that dog that's yapping everywhere and when it's blind, you just can't stop it's going all over the place. That's how I feel about an improv person.

• 58:54Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think you're, I think you're right. I did improv, so I can confirm this is correct.

• 58:59Shaan Puri?

  And you're correct that it's below a cappella, which is below anything that's actually cool.

• 59:05Sam Parr?

  Yeah, a cappella is the worst of the worst. I remember hanging out with people from New England and they like were bragging about a cappella and I was like, dude, shut up. Why are you talking about that? You don't want people to know.

• 59:13Shaan Puri?

  And they're like. A cappella people hang out with each other and they're like ordering or they're like waiting for their food at the table. And then one guy's like.

• 59:22Shaan Puri?

  And then it's like.

• 59:26Shaan Puri?

  Harmonizing is like, dude, you gotta stop like, you know.

• 59:30Sam Parr?

  If I hear the Lion King song one more time, I'm gonna put a bullet in my head. That's how I feel when I'm with these people.

• 59:37Shaan Puri?

  If I've ever trapped on a subway and like they do a flash mob around me and start singing.

• 59:42Sam Parr?

  Those people are above, flash mob people are, are above the a cappella.

• 59:47Shaan Puri?

  I'm gonna do something. I'm gonna start vomiting just to outrage them in that moment.

• 59:54Sam Parr?

  That's the pod.