We found an app that lets you buy anything for $0

*20+ hours of investing wisdom:* https://clickhubspot.com/cbah Episode 836: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talk about people who have turned their lifestyles into millions, plus Nick Sleep’s investing genius. — Show Notes: (0:00) fringe creators (13:14) Nick Sleep's shared economies of scale (24:41) lloyd blanfein's personal finances (31:14) David Rubenstein, the man (39:09) Nat Turner's crazy new business (50:13) a brief masterclass in valuing denim — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton (joinhampton.com): My community for founders. Average member does $25m/year. Many of the guests are members. Get after it...apply: http://joinhampton.com/mfm — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Shaan's weekly email - https://www.shaanpuri.com • Visit https://www.somewhere.com/mfm to hire worldwide talent like Shaan and get $500 off for being an MFM listener. Hire developers, assistants, marketing pros, sales teams and more for 80% less than US equivalents. • Mercury - Shaan uses Mercury for banking across all of his companies. you can too: http://mercury.com/ Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column, N. A., and Evolve Bank & Trust, Members FDIC • I run all my newsletters on Beehiiv and you should too + we're giving away $10k to our favorite newsletter, check it out: beehiiv.com/mfm-challenge My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by HubSpot Media // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano /

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

• 0:00Shaan Puri?

  Sam, we've been doing it all wrong. This whole business thing, this building thing, we've been doing it all wrong.

• 0:14Shaan Puri?

  See, we thought you have to build a product, that product has to do something, has to add value, solve a problem. And here, I will read you this tweet. This is from Next2TV. They say, "Dopamine websites are the new trend in South Korea. These services let users endlessly browse food delivery menus, read reviews, fill their shopping carts, and even track their shipment. But the only catch, none of it's real. You're not really placing an order for anything. There are also virtual smoke breaks, where you can join anonymous people in chat rooms to recreate the feeling of taking a smoke break without having to smoke a cigarette. The idea is simple: give people the familiar dopamine hit without them having to actually spend any money, leave the house, smoke, or do anything else along those habits.

• 0:57Shaan Puri?

  And these are becoming incredibly popular in South Korea, apparently."

• 1:01Speaker 01

  Is this the same country that's having a massive birth rate issue?

• 1:05Shaan Puri?

  Unrelated.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  It checks out if they're gonna create virtual smoke groups and fake buy stuff. What the heck, guys?

• 1:12Shaan Puri?

  So the trend started, you know, this year, and it's basically Korean Gen Z. They sort of realized that a lot of the fun in online shopping is just browsing. It's just putting things in the cart, hitting checkout. You know, getting the actual product is, you know, sure, that maybe that adds some value, but there's a lot of fun in just the other side of it. And so you can see, here, I can pull one of them up. Let me open, and so this is an app called Food Never Comes.

• 1:42Shaan Puri?

  And, uh, alright, so check this out. So you open up the app, and you can select rabbit or turtle delivery, so fast or slow. Do you want to, you want, should we pay for fast or slow?

• 1:53Sam Parr?

  I guess we should pay for fast. I want to get it.

• 1:55Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, fast.

• 1:55Sam Parr?

  I want to get my fix up quickly.

• 1:56Shaan Puri?

  Let's treat ourselves. Okay, so now there's a fried chicken restaurant, so we can have the half and half crispy chicken, the cheese balls, gotta go with the cheese balls, maybe the soy glazed chicken, we'll go spicy, we'll add a cola, add to cart, and then we can go ahead, we could check out, we put in our info here, and then we could watch this delivery make its way to our house, never actually come, and that's it. It's the blue balls of entrepreneurship, Sam. Are you in or are you out?

• 2:24Sam Parr?

  Dude, how can this group of people who have brought us such amazing things, like the Kia tele ride, or Samsung.

• 2:31Shaan Puri?

  We pop Demon Hunters.

• 2:32Sam Parr?

  Yeah, like go and do something so stupid. The Koreans, you guys really are like the barbell strategy of life. They're bringing us such amazing, wonderful goodness and such silliness. I guess I don't get this. Why are people doing this?

• 2:44Shaan Puri?

  On behalf of our huge, I'm sure, South Korean followership, I will defend this by posting a picture of the White House this weekend, where there was a giant motorcycle doing a backflip in front of the White House in preparation for UFC 250 to celebrate the birth of America. Two dudes in their underwear beating each other up in the White House lawn.

• 3:07Sam Parr?

  You don't think that a fistfight on the White House lawn is appropriate? An organized fistfight?

• 3:13Shaan Puri?

  Where a Frenchman beats up a Brazilian?

• 3:15Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 3:16Shaan Puri?

  America!

• 3:16Sam Parr?

  Yeah, dude. Look, I didn't say that we both can't be stupid. I'm just saying that this is wild. Are these things actually popular?

• 3:25Shaan Puri?

  No, I can't tell. So obviously this makes for an amazing headline. There's also a reason that I opened up the show with it, because it's just funny to talk about and make fun of.

• 3:32Sam Parr?

  But there's not a lot of Korean people on Twitter, so they can't exactly refute this. It feels like Japan. It feels like Japan and America have like separate internets. Like, have you ever gone to like a Japanese website?

• 3:44Shaan Puri?

  They kind of do.

• 3:45Sam Parr?

  Like, when I, it's kind of challenging to use, obviously, even if it's just translated, it's still like totally separate, and it's quite hard. And so like, are there any like proper Korean people on Twitter to refute this story? Or can we just make up falsehoods about like?

• 3:58Shaan Puri?

  I think we just make it up. It's like the good version of like the Hunter Biden laptop story, is the South Korean fake DoorDash story. Have you ever studied like Eastern internet?

• 4:10Shaan Puri?

  You know, people study like Eastern philosophy. Have you ever studied?

• 4:13Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 4:13Shaan Puri?

  Internet?

• 4:15Sam Parr?

  Yeah, like Maso-san from SoftBank. I believe he's a Korean guy who lives in Japan, or is he Japanese who lives in Korea? Anyway, yeah, I've studied him and then I've studied like some of the Chinese websites or the super apps. They're like so like mega that it's quite hard to understand what they're about.

• 4:32Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, there's so many crazy apps and sites. So just for example, I remember when we were looking into live streaming. So my first company that sold Bebo, it was the live streaming space. We sold Twitch, which is the big American player. But live streaming is far more advanced in Asia than it is in the West. And if you go look at like, I forgot which ones it was, YY.com or whatever. There was a whole bunch of these where you would see somebody on video and then horizontally from right to left, streaming across the screen would just be the entire chat. And it was the most bizarre experience ever because you would see that 7,000 people are watching this girl eat noodles

• 5:12Shaan Puri?

  while text flies across the screen and people are spending thousands of dollars sending her virtual roses. And we were looking at this studying it like, you know, it's like, you know, when you study like a tribe and you're like, so they they just eat it? And you're just like, yeah, this is what is exactly what they do. And then we tried to recreate as many of those variables as we could because these sites were incredibly popular.

• 5:35Sam Parr?

  Isn't there, isn't there one where I like where it's like fat people eating? It's like Bang Bang or isn't this like?

• 5:43Shaan Puri?

  Mukbang. They don't need to be fat.

• 5:45Sam Parr?

  Oh, I thought there was one guy like named Nico Avocado or something like that.

• 5:50Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah. He got really fat doing it and then he lost a lot of weight, came back. He's kind of a weird guy. But yeah, Mukbang is basically watching other people eat, just like you watch other people play video games. You watch other people play basketball. Turns out people want to watch other people eat and they like having that high definition sound, watching them slurp and chomp on their food.

• 6:08Sam Parr?

  I get joy from that, by the way. I always, I buy candy and sweets that I want to eat for other people. And I'm just like, I'll hand it to them.

• 6:16Shaan Puri?

  For other people?

• 6:17Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I'll hand it to them. I'm like, eat it. Tell me, tell me how it feels. Like, I definitely can get like secondhand like sugar highs from other people.

• 6:27Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so you're in. So we started out and now you're in.

• 6:31Sam Parr?

  Dude, there's this whole genre of Indian barbers who shave people's heads who have dandruff and you could like, it's like the oddly satisfying of like, oh, we found it. Let's wipe it off the head.

• 6:42Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, the oddly satisfying stuff is crazy. There's other sites that I think are like the kind of the current trend of like, what's big in the east that's not yet big in the west. So before there was live streaming, that was obviously a huge one. Mobile gaming, so internationally, the biggest, the most popular games were all on your phone. There weren't Xbox, PlayStation. There really didn't have like big console or PC culture. And so games like Free Fire or PUBG Mobile were huge. And then Fortnite became the version of that in the US soon after. And so you could sort of see these trends moving over. Live shopping has been huge in Asia for a long time. Now whatnot is the US equivalent of live shopping worth $10 billion.

• 7:23Shaan Puri?

  And so you can kind of look for these products that are over there and try to see when and how will they translate? So right now, the big one is, we've talked about this before, but the short drama. So serial drama. So basically it's Netflix, but you watch on your phone vertically. Each episode is like 30 to 60 seconds. And it's basically soap operas of all different types of genres that people get incredibly addicted to. Huge in Asia. So huge in kind of like the China, Japan, Korea area. Now getting big in India. Only a matter of time till it's also just as big in the US is my guess.

• 7:58Sam Parr?

  I just pulled up these notes that I have from, I think, 2016. So there's this guy named Kevin Ryan. He's been on the podcast, friend of the pod, and he founded a bunch of companies, the biggest one being MongoDB, multi-tens of billions of dollars company. But he also famously was the co-founder of Business Insider. And so I called him one time and he like gave me some tips on like how to start a media company because I like didn't know anything and I emailed him so many times that he relented. And I have these notes and I, something always stuck with me on this framework. So he said,

• 8:35Sam Parr?

  On this show, we have spent hours talking to some of the best investors alive. Well, lucky for you, the team at HubSpot, they have pulled out the principles that matter most and turned it into a very simple, easy to read wealth guide. It's 35 principles from the top investors. We're talking guys who have been on the pod like Howard Marks, Manish Prabhar, Morgan Housel, Kathy Wood, and a ton of others. So these are all their frameworks, their mental models, their rules, basically how to play the long game and how to avoid ruin. You can get it in the link below.

• 9:07Sam Parr?

  He didn't, he didn't use all these exact words. This is me like typing, this is before Grinol existed. So he goes, um, he's like, "The Business Insider strategy is sort of what Honda did in 1985 versus General Motors." He was like, he didn't say this, but this is my notes. "Start with shitty quality and get traffic to our website and improve. Shit quality, but we'll improve."

• 9:29Speaker 01

  He said it in his all hands inspiring all of his employees.

• 9:37Sam Parr?

  He didn't say it that way, but he was like, we're, he said, um, like Honda in 1985 versus GM. Honda was considered sort of a joke. GM cars were these like big, like heavy duty vehicles that made a big thunk when you like shut the door and Hondas were like rinky dink. But the difference is, is that with Honda, as well as with Business Insider, the quality of car that they were making increased, but their cost, they stayed the same, which is why Honda eventually won. And Business Insider, we make content a lot cheaper than Wall Street Journal, but we think that our quality is just going to continue to rise. And that was like his whole strategy. And I always thought that was really interesting. I thought that was a really cool analogy, which is you could start like, kind of like

• 10:21Sam Parr?

  so-so and just slowly get better while keeping your costs the same. And he always referenced, he referenced in our call, he was like Honda did this, Toyota did this. And I started thinking about this and I've always thought about this like, um, strategy that a lot of Asian companies did. If you remember, do you know TCL TVs?

• 10:37Speaker 01

  I've never even heard of that, no.

• 10:39Sam Parr?

  So TCL, if you were to go on Amazon six years ago and buy a TCL TV, they were The worst. They were like pretty, maybe 10 years ago. They were junky TVs, but you get a 65 inch flat screen TV for like literally $200. And over, I'm like a gadget nerd. And so over time, TCL is now a baller TV company and you can still get a 65 inch highest def fanciest TV for $200. It's actually, I don't even know how this is possible. And I've always thought about this strategy of like Asian businesses and I've noticed, I don't know if it's particularly an Asian thing, or because I, he referred to Asian car companies. Now I always think of it that way. They'll offer something where like the quality is so-so, but just good enough. But over time, like it's sort of like Hyundai or Kia or Genesis, like particularly, you know,

• 11:24Sam Parr?

  Asian car companies. That's how I think of them is they're kind of like crappy at first, but they just get so much better. And then the prices stay the same.

• 11:30Shaan Puri?

  What I like about this is it's the opposite of the normal white guy referencing Asian culture thing. Where normally we take these like amazing Zen practices. We're like, the Japanese use the word kaizen for the continuous pursuit of perfection. And that's what we do here at our company. Or it's like wabi-sabi, the beauty and imperfection. It's like always like these high and mighty things that like we're borrowing. And he's like, we use the term Hondification, where you start with shit and it stays shit for quite a while. But eventually the shit becomes a little less shitty. And that's what we do. It's like the first honest white guy. We give him

• 12:11Shaan Puri?

  an award for like, he's doing all of the like the tone and the hand gestures, but he's just saying the truth.

• 12:19Sam Parr?

  And we didn't stop there. We took the shit that we had and the year after, just a little bit less shitty.

• 12:25Shaan Puri?

  Because they, they don't know the difference.

• 12:30Sam Parr?

  And we told our consumer just.

• 12:36Shaan Puri?

  There should just be like a whole service. We're just like honest business translation. You know, like Google Translate, but just like corporate translation. It's like, take any company, put their mission, values and earnings calls into this generator. And it just tells you the truth.

• 12:50Sam Parr?

  Yeah. That's so funny. One of the greats, Kevin Ryan, probably no longer a fan of the pod.

• 12:57Shaan Puri?

  No longer a friend of the pod. Former friend of the pod, Kevin Ryan.

• 13:04Shaan Puri?

  I told you that in confidence, Sam.

• 13:07Sam Parr?

  There was a statute of limitations on notes, by the way. Once it's been 10 years, I can talk about it. So like anything that happened, you know, from pre 2016, I'm allowed to bring it up.

• 13:17Shaan Puri?

  All right, so I was nerding out on something kind of related, so I'll segue into that. So you were talking about how for the TVs thing, they're like, they charge 200 bucks. And at first it's kind of a shitty TV, but eventually it's kind of a great TV, but still for 200 bucks, which is different than I would say most companies, which assume, you know, over time, the goal is to raise our prices, increase our margins, increase our profits. So I was studying this investor called Nick Sleep.

• 13:41Sam Parr?

  Oh, man, dude.

• 13:43Shaan Puri?

  For those who weren't there.

• 13:43Sam Parr?

  Ever since you brought him up, I've been on him.

• 13:46Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, so, you know, his story in short is he was an investor, basically raised money, was an investor about 15 years, averaged more than 20% compounding, billions of dollars. He won the game, shut down the fund and moved on. And most of the fund was concentrated in three positions, Costco, Amazon and Berkshire Hathaway. For the longest period of time, he was just holding those. And so the interesting part isn't, oh, wow, here's a guy who picked right. You know, it's kind of like, oh, I'm a lot, I'm interviewing a lottery winner to ask how they, how they guessed the numbers, like this is his daughter's birthday. It's not, not really that. It's if you ask, what is Nick Sleep's philosophies, core investing strategy? He had this idea of consumer surplus.

• 14:28Shaan Puri?

  So his, his main realization was, look, there's many ways to invest. You could do what Buffett and Ben Graham are trying to do, which is buy a company that's trading for less than it's worth. Or you could look at some of these companies that today look overvalued, like Amazon at that time. And, you know, the 2000s is like, wow, this thing's got a crazy price to earnings ratio. And he realized that the best predictor of long-term value for him was something that he called shared scale economies. All right, so what do those mean? So scale economies is usually when, let's say you're Amazon, you have a large customer base, you're able to open warehouses in a bunch of different places and you get what's called economies of scale, which is that over time, your cost to serve each additional customer go down because you've, you're serving so many customers, you're able to like, almost like amortize the, the investment cost across a large customer base.

• 15:13Shaan Puri?

  Now, what he, what Nick Sleep identified was called shared economies of scale.

• 15:18Sam Parr?

  Was that a word that he, did he make this up?

• 15:21Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, so he, I don't know if he made it, if he invented it, but he was the one who really, yeah, he really bet on it, you know, and he really like made it the foundation of his investing strategy. So he realized like, let's take Costco. So Costco's goal is to basically get economies of scale, meaning they buy in bulk. They have tons of locations. So they have a lot of pricing power. They're able to buy things in bulk at cheap prices. And instead of what most retailers do, which is they buy wholesale, sell retail, right? They buy cheap and they sell it at a markup. Costco's goal was to make the markup as small as it could and pass all of the savings of buying in bulk to the customer. So he did the math and he realized like, okay, let's say that a Costco membership

• 16:04Shaan Puri?

  costs a hundred dollars, let's just use round numbers, right? And he realized that if, for the average person who shops groceries at Costco, they're gonna save on their grocery bill. Let's call it a thousand dollars a year on, just by buying Costco, because Costco's passing on all those savings of buying in bulk to the customer. So the customer saves a thousand dollars, they spend a hundred dollars. And so the surplus that they, they've generated this thousand dollar surplus and then they're only charging a hundred dollars for it. It's a no brainer proposition. And they basically take the, so what, what happens is instead of increasing their prices and increasing their, their profits and increasing the money to the shareholders, they pass the profits to the customer,

• 16:46Shaan Puri?

  which makes a juicier value proposition, which attracts more customers, which gives them more scale, which allows them to create even more surplus. And so what he realized was that the companies that would do this, that would start early on and pass on the, the savings to the customer, they would run away from the competition because they would have such a, such a juicy value proposition. They would build so much trust with customers and have such an incredible offer to the customers that they would pick up all the customers. And so Costco, for example, they make no money essentially on any of the food that they sell. They make all their money on the membership, which is like pure profit is the membership.

• 17:19Sam Parr?

  How much, um, so I'm just looking this up. I, I knew that they were, it was a baller stock. It does 300 billion a year in sales. How much in, uh, subscription, in the membership sales, do you know? Five billion.

• 17:32Shaan Puri?

  Five billion, yeah. So, so what he realized at that time was he said, wow, everybody just looks at, I think, let's just say it was a billion dollars at that time, is like when a traditional analyst will look at this company, they'll just see a billion dollars of profit. But what I see is five billion of surplus that they're passing on. And they passed on four billion last year, five billion this year, it'll be seven billion next year, 10 billion the next year, and they're just going to keep passing on so much surplus that it's going to run away from the competition and it'll do, create so much trust and so much loyalty that they'll never have any problems attracting customers. And so he's like, that's an invisible metric that doesn't show up on the balance sheet, it doesn't show up on the P and L, you have to sort of manually calculate the shared economies

• 18:14Shaan Puri?

  of scale, how much of the surplus they're giving to the customers. And if you track the growth rate of that, the, you, what you want is companies where that growth rate is increasing. And he said, Amazon was the same way. For 20 years, Bezos basically did not try to extract profits. He just reinvested all the capital to give people wider selection, faster shipping and lower prices. And he realized that every year, they're investing more money in giving people wider selection, faster shipping and lower prices, the three things that consumers care about the most. And they have the Prime membership, just like the Costco membership. And so he invested heavily in that. And I just thought, oh, wow, this is a good, pretty brilliant insight, a way, a way of looking at businesses that I've never thought about.

• 18:50Sam Parr?

  Yeah, that's actually, it sounds stupid, but that's sort of like a, I don't know, I need a lesser word, but a groundbreaking like stat, you know, that's like a, that's actually very interesting. I've never, ever have heard of a company that measures that, like just how much savings we are passing on to you. That's pretty interesting.

• 19:09Shaan Puri?

  Hey, let's take a quick break. You know that feeling when strategy is done, the brief is written, everyone's aligned, and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create all the content? That someone is usually you, and it's due tomorrow. Well, the Breeze Assistant from HubSpot can help. It works right inside HubSpot. You can draft a campaign copy, blog posts, emails, all in your brand voice, all using your actual customer data. So you don't create just content, you create content that converts. Check out hubspot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses.

• 19:37Sam Parr?

  But who else does that? You have to do it with a company that's huge and where mass appeal or mass and then you need like a membership, right? Like a Prime thing?

• 19:45Shaan Puri?

  Well, it doesn't have to necessarily be a membership. There's other ways to do it. But you know, the two biggest examples he did was the membership because it's the beautiful way to monetize, right? It's like, I'm going to give you so much value in the thing you're buying that giving me an annual recurring revenue membership is a no brainer for you. And that's what Prime is. That's what Costco membership is. And so it worked out beautifully for those two cases. But it's not, it doesn't have to be that. It's just that. So for example, like I was talking to AI today and I was trying to say like, well, what other, study other companies. If there's these thousand companies, which other companies would Nick Sleep see as having a high surplus and how would he look at it? Right? And so it's a, AI is not great at doing analyses like this, but one of the examples it brought up was SpaceX.

• 20:30Shaan Puri?

  And basically it's like, look, SpaceX is going to lower, has been, it has already lowered the cost to orbit by a hundred X. So it's, it's reduced its cost by a hundred X, but it didn't keep the same prices to the government or anybody else. It also lowered, it passed on the savings to the government, which is why it now takes like 80% of all payloads. It like, it took all of the business, it took all the market share by doing that. And they're trying to reduce another hundred X and they're putting up all these satellites and they're trying to again, pass the savings on to the subscribers for the, for Starlink Internet. And so here you're going to have again, recurring annual membership, a no brainer value proposition to a mass market of people.

• 21:11Shaan Puri?

  Everybody on earth wants the internet and they are getting economies of scale because as they improve their, their launch costs and their launch rates, they're not going to raise prices. They're going to pass it on and they're going to create a membership. So it's like SpaceX would be in a weird way, like again, same thing as Amazon today looked at as highly overvalued, but potentially undervalued. If you, if you could figure out how to measure the surplus and see that the rate of the surplus was growing every year, it might look like one of those businesses. Now, I'm not, again, I'm a new with this stuff. So like, I'm just sharing kind of like my beginner, my learnings with this, just with you. I'm not saying that this is, is or is not the case, not financial advice or anything like that, but I do find this idea to be pretty interesting. It's an idea I hadn't really heard popularized before.

• 21:54Sam Parr?

  This guy is so interesting to me. He's he's got everything that I want and

• 22:00Shaan Puri?

  Does he have like long hair, nice calves?

• 22:01Sam Parr?

  Yeah, like he you Google his name.

• 22:04Shaan Puri?

  Is he alive?

• 22:05Sam Parr?

  He's got a beautiful set of hair and only one photo. If you Google him, it's the same headshot used for everything.

• 22:11Shaan Puri?

  Nick Sleep, come on the podcast. I mean, how many times are you gonna let me podcast? Make out with you before you just finally get on here, okay?

• 22:20Sam Parr?

  Yeah, do you want to break decades of being anonymous? It's come on the pod. There's literally only one photo of him. I'm for real.

• 22:29Shaan Puri?

  It's like I got to this hotel and I paid like

• 22:34Shaan Puri?

  Disgusting about a buddy, but they had free snacks when I walked in and I was like, honestly, love this place. Great value. They gave me this. They gave me like, you know, cake pops for free when we walked in. This is incredible. My kids are so happy. And I feel like that's our pitch to Nick Sleep. It's like, yes, you've been anonymous for 20 years and you value your privacy and You've turned down, you know, every opportunity under the sun. But we got peanuts and snacks. If you want to come on our pod, it'll be great.

• 22:58Sam Parr?

  He he's 58 years old. He's he's not old. This guy's cool. There's an article Called How to Retire at 45 and it's about him. So I guess he's taking it easy. But I would love to have this guy on. That would be so fascinating. Him and Paul Graham. It's just there's something so mysterious about people who who claim I've had enough and they like opt out. I think that's interesting.

• 23:20Shaan Puri?

  Well, one of the other takeaways real quick is you only need one or two. Forget the word insight. I'll call it secrets in the Peter Thiel terms, right? You only really need to understand one or two secrets in your lifetime to become fabulously rich. And this is one of them. For example, there's a good example of one. I think Peter Thiel Did this with network effect businesses. So understanding, you know, PayPal, Facebook early on and just understanding like the power of a network effect and how unbreakable those those monopolies become. And then the other, you know, another example is, you know, Buffett, for example, He doesn't invest in network effect tech companies or anything like this. What he looks at is What's not going to change? And he's basically like the moat, which is the pricing power. So he gives an example of

• 24:03Shaan Puri?

  I don't know if you saw this exchange, but Elon was talking about how lame moats are. He's like, oh, I don't like the idea of moats. If you need a moat, that's lame. You should be innovating faster than everybody else. That's how you win. If you think a moat is going to protect you, yeah, that's not what protects you. Fast innovation is protection. This is Elon saying this.

• 24:19Sam Parr?

  You're like Elon. I don't think the word moat means what you think it means. You definitely have a moat.

• 24:25Shaan Puri?

  Buffett replied and he was like, I don't know. He's like, let's say you go to a corner store and you ask for a Snickers. And they say, hey, I got a Musk bar for 10 cents less. He goes, I don't think anyone's buying the Musk bar. And he's like, in fact, if you go test this, if one place doesn't have a Snickers and they have an unbranded, unlabeled chocolate bar with peanuts in it. But the place across the street has a Snickers bar, the customer will just walk across the street and go buy a Snickers. And he's like, so yeah, he's like, I look for Coca-Cola, Snickers, you know, Gillette, American Express, I look for these brands and French, Apple, I look for these brands and franchises where you'd have to pay someone to switch and even then they wouldn't want to. I mean, he's like, he's like, that was his core insight of like, you just need to find

• 25:09Shaan Puri?

  these great American franchises and invest in them.

• 25:12Sam Parr?

  Did you see, I want to bring up a person who we talked about somewhat recently, but we didn't dive into, but really quick, did you listen to the Lloyd Blankfein interview that we did, that I did with, and he talked about like his family finances and stuff like that?

• 25:26Shaan Puri?

  No, I only was, I've listened to the first five minutes, but I'm on vacation. So I hadn't, I hadn't had time to like get my phone and, and listen to it. Why, what did he say about his family? By the way, did you know this guy before? Am I dumb? I never heard of this person.

• 25:38Sam Parr?

  And then. Yeah, I knew of him.

• 25:40Shaan Puri?

  All about this guy suddenly.

• 25:41Sam Parr?

  Well, when you and I were younger, probably in high school, that was like his peak prime. And so like during the.

• 25:47Shaan Puri?

  So you knew him back then or only now?

• 25:49Sam Parr?

  I knew him as a famous, like, he was like the face of banking. He was like the Jamie Dimon of 08, particularly when Occupy Wall Street was a thing. He was like the face of evil because like the name Goldman is like, and, and, and there was this funny line that he told me where he was like, yeah, they like protested outside of my house and everything. And I was like, how does that feel? He's like, well, two things, like one, like go and try to get a mortgage from Goldman. Like you can't. So like, I didn't cause the mortgage crisis, so I don't know why they were so angry at me. And second of all, they, you know, were camping outside of my house protesting, but like, that's what Doorman is for.

• 26:28Shaan Puri?

  He's like, I shouted out from the window on the fifth balcony in my house. We wouldn't give you a mortgage, even if you tried. That didn't seem to help.

• 26:38Sam Parr?

  No dude, he was super likeable. He was so charming and charismatic. Basically Lloyd is, um, I like, you could look up his career earnings at Goldman because when Goldman went public, he was like forty-three years old. And I think at that time, he told me, he told me, uh, his shares were worth like a hundred and sixty million dollars. And this was when he was forty-two. He's seventy-two, I think now, so thirty years ago. And then he, the course of his earnings are all public while it was public and it was many, many, many hundreds of millions of dollars a year. And so presumably, I would have to imagine he's worth like two billion plus. But he grew up in a poor Brooklyn family and he somehow, and he's very self-deprecating. His father was a post office worker. His mother, I think, was a stay-at-home mom.

• 27:21Sam Parr?

  He's like a pretty like, he calls himself the blue collar CEO. And he was like, I wasn't even that smart, but somehow I got into Harvard and they paid for my school. And he's like, one time when I went to Harvard, I had to go to the like, the office or whatever they call it, the, the financial aid. He was like, I don't have any money to eat. Like, can I please have money? And then they're like, they gave me five hundred dollars back then and it like changed my life because I had food. And so he goes to Harvard and he gets a job as a lawyer. He's like, this sucks. I don't want to do this. And so he gets a job at a ragtag like subsidiary of Goldman. And he's like, I don't even know what Goldman is. I don't know what banking is, but they thought that I was this like hard-nosed, blue collar guy who went to Harvard. And they're like, you check the boxes because he, um, was a commodities trader at this little like ragtag group, which at the time was considered a very lowbrow thing.

• 28:06Sam Parr?

  And so he slowly, over the course of many years, worked his way up to eventually become partner and then CEO of Goldman. And when he was in my office, he had this very blue collar vibe where I could tell that he, it felt very authentic. He like looked me in the eye and like knew how to like riff on like silly stuff, but also I'm like, dude, you're like acquaintances with Putin. Uh, like, you know, like he's like, like I could see.

• 28:29Shaan Puri?

  He saved in your phone as putty, putty call.

• 28:32Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Yeah. Like I could see how this guy is charming and how he worked his way to the top.

• 28:37Shaan Puri?

  And can you imagine being the shark in the sharks? Like how much, how insane it is to work your way up at Goldman amongst all the sharks and become the CEO? Can you, what does that even take? Like that's sort of mind-boggling level of difficulty. Like, I know people that have made more money just building a company, but that's actually not as hard as playing the, the, the, like corporate game inside Goldman and rising up amongst all those kind of like corporate sharks.

• 29:05Sam Parr?

  He's wild, but he came off, like during the podcast, I told him, I'm like, man, you are making Goldman seem likeable, which like is not easy. Like you're making it seem relatable and likeable. That's a very hard thing to do. And for some reason, after talking to you, I'm like, oh, I can do this, even though obviously I can't. He told this story, I asked him about personal finances. I was like, hey, who, how does your personal finances work? Because he told the story about how he grew up poor and he's still cheap. He was like, I buy the, is there like a cheaper tier of Netflix that has ads? He's like, I won't even pay for that. I do the cheap one because there's something about it that like, because I grew up poor, it still bothers me. He was like, when I, he said, I, I think he said 80% of his net worth is in public equities,

• 29:46Sam Parr?

  of which 90% of that 80%, something like that, he still day trades. And he was like, I day trade, I'm obsessed with it. I love the game so much and I want to check my phone all the time. But like, when I do research on different stocks, I'll get to like a Bloomberg publication or Wall Street Journal or something like that. And I don't buy the subscriptions because like it kind of hurts me to like pay for it. And I just thought that was incredibly fascinating to hear like how a billionaire manages their finances.

• 30:13Shaan Puri?

  How billionaire mismanages his finances is what I heard.

• 30:17Sam Parr?

  Well, he did the right.

• 30:18Shaan Puri?

  None of that makes any sense.

• 30:20Sam Parr?

  The top.

• 30:22Shaan Puri?

  I wasn't there, so I could talk shit. If I was there, I would also be like blushing and saying how great he is. But you know, just hearing it from the outside, just to be the outsider for a second. You're day trading a billion dollars while not paying for Netflix because you, you're cheap. Like, why do you understand what you're talking, you don't pay for, for, for premium news?

• 30:42Sam Parr?

  The point being, it's not, it's not a logical thing, but it was like, he was kind of like saying like, here's all like how I'm messed up, just like the average Joe. And it was so fascinating. And at the end of the interview, did I tell you what I tried to do with him? I was like, hey, like I have this like Instagram, do you want me like, I was gonna do this.

• 30:59Shaan Puri?

  Like a secret handshake?

• 31:00Sam Parr?

  Well, I was like, I was like, I have an idea, like I can like act like I'm reviewing your book. And I'll just be like, ah, screw it. I'll just bring Lloyd in. Lloyd, just tell them what your book's about, will you? And he was like, he goes, I'm too old for that stuff. I'm not acting cute on Instagram.

• 31:16Shaan Puri?

  That's the most likable thing you've said so far about him.

• 31:19Sam Parr?

  I was like, oh Lloyd, it's not like cute.

• 31:21Shaan Puri?

  Billionaires, they're just like us, but just that one of like, I'm not gonna do that.

• 31:26Sam Parr?

  I was like, I wouldn't describe it as cute. I mean, it is cute, but that's all, it's more like fun. You don't like fun? He goes like, that's too cute, dude. I'm not doing that. And I was like, yes, sir.

• 31:39Sam Parr?

  I'll walk you to the elevator.

• 31:43Sam Parr?

  It was pretty good, but he was fascinating. And then another guy who, we had a guy on the other named Barry, who talked about David Rubenstein. Had you ever heard of him before David or Barry told you about him?

• 31:54Shaan Puri?

  From Carlyle Group?

• 31:55Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Do you know anything about this guy?

• 31:57Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Only, only surface level stuff, yeah.

• 32:00Sam Parr?

  I want to fill you in on a little bit about a story because I've actually always been a fan of his, but I mostly knew him as an author of history books, not particularly of like a business guy. And I was researching him. It's pretty fascinating and he's kind of like my new man crush a little bit. He kind of like got his foot in the door because when he was in his twenties and thirties, he was a lawyer, but he quit being a lawyer because he wanted to work for the Jimmy Carter administration. And he like made a joke where he was like, when I joined Jimmy Carter, he was up by like 31 points. And then he eventually won by one point and Jimmy Carter went to David and was like, so what contributions did you make? And so he like, had like this kind of like funny, self-deprecating humor, but he like worked for Jimmy Carter and it eventually Jimmy Carter was a one-term president.

• 32:45Sam Parr?

  He doesn't get reelected. So David Rubenstein, he's 31 years old. He's like, well, what do I do now? And there was this amazing article that I found written by Michael Lewis. You know, Michael Lewis, the famous author. He wrote this amazing article in 1993 called The Access Capitalist. And it's a 10-page or so article written about David and it's from a while ago and I loved that. And he said, David got his start using what people are calling the great Eskimo tax scam of 1987.

• 33:16Shaan Puri?

  Tell me more.

• 33:16Sam Parr?

  So the story is, is basically David had this amazing Rolodex. He was really well-connected. In Washington DC, he was known as being likable and like a really good networker and reliable. And so he just like knew a little bit of everyone. And so he's out of work at the age of 31. And he's like, what do I do now? And he hears about this like weird tax loophole. Where if you were a native of Alaska, you were given a certain amount of tax losses automatically. I don't know why. I think it was like to incentivize people to live there. And so what he did is he organized a bunch of buyers and sellers. Meaning if you wanted, they could sell $10 million in tax write offs

• 34:00Sam Parr?

  to willing buyers for $7 million in cash. And thus, the buyer got a reduced taxable income of $3 million. And David like heard about this and he's like, that's interesting. And so him and a couple of friends organized roughly $2 billion in these like, in like, in transacting these tax losses. And after doing that for two or three years, they had made something like $20 million. And that's the money that they used three years later to eventually start Carlisle Group, which is now one of the largest PE firms in the world. I believe they have $500 billion in companies that they own. And David was like, I thought I had a pretty good IQ myself, but I was seeing a lot of people make a lot more money than I was, who I thought maybe weren't as smart as me.

• 34:46Sam Parr?

  And so I decided to try this PE firm. And so he raises a little bit of money, uses the money that they made from the tax saving scam. Scam, sorry. No longer. I guess he just canceled his booking with us.

• 35:00Speaker 01

  Schem. Never friend of the pod.

• 35:02Sam Parr?

  Schem. I meant to say schem. It was cold outside. I meant to say schem.

• 35:08Sam Parr?

  And he used this thing and he started in the PE business, which at the time in the eighties was like, like just killing it. Like it's felt like that's when all the big PE firms were built, because this idea of a leveraged buyout was brand new. And so he raised a little bit of money and he like did a couple of deals. It didn't really particularly work that well. I think he said his first deal that they tried to buy was a Mexican restaurant called Chi Chi's. And he's like, yeah, like it wasn't going so hot.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  He went from the Eskimo scam to Chi Chi's.

• 35:37Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 35:39Sam Parr?

  Not doing so hot, but then he had this idea where he was like, well, like I know everyone in DC and I know that like a lot of jobs in DC are pretty cyclical. Like after four years, you're like quit and you're like, what do I do? And I know a bunch of interesting people and I know those interesting people know a bunch of interesting and powerful people. But you don't want to like sell access to these people. That would like be borderline unethical and sometimes illegal. And he's like, well, what if I just like got all of these like powerful people who no longer have jobs at the government to come in like work at this PE firm? And we start or when we start buying companies where it would help to have like friends in government. So you can get meetings to like big, powerful companies. And so Carlisle eventually specializes in defense contract style companies. And so that is sort of how it took off.

• 36:24Sam Parr?

  But the more interesting part about all of this is what he's done while he was building the company. So he has like five or six books, which is how I've met him or know of him. So he's got a book called like The American Stories about like where he just interviews historians. He's got a book called How to Lead, The American Experiment, How to Invest, The Highest Calling, which is conversations about different presidents. He has a show on Bloomberg called The David Rubenstein Show. He's got.

• 36:48Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's what I've seen. His interviews are great.

• 36:51Sam Parr?

  Amazing thing, but listen to this shit. He owns all this amazing stuff. He owns one of the, I think it's one of the last privately owned copies of the Magna Carta, which is the historical, one of the most like historical documents of all time for $21 million. He bought it. He owns one of the last pieces, one of the last bits of the Declaration of Independence. He owns a Lincoln signed emancipation proclamation. He funded the Washington Monument when it needed to get rebuilt. He funded the Lincoln Memorial when it needed to get rebuilt. He funds all these amazing things. So like the Kennedy Center, he helped do. He helped produce, he helps produce a lot of Ken Burns documentary. He funds them. He's just like this crazy guy that does all of this interesting stuff.

• 37:31Sam Parr?

  And what, and his side hustle is basically like buying these documents, meeting the people who are like around the documents, writing books about the documents, becoming board, on the board of the museum in which he loans the documents to. And he just has this like crazy like.

• 37:46Shaan Puri?

  Fascinating. I mean, that's an epic. Chakravarti Board career, you know what I mean? Like, just a little bit of this, a little bit of that. They work well together. You know, he's kind of like the white knight of Washington DC. I kind of love it, you know, like, I, I always love people who are not sort of one dimensional in the way they operate. Uh, you know, the one dimensional people I appreciate for their laser focus and obsession, and I take inspiration from it, but I don't take guidance from it. You know, I, I take more guidance from people like this, who I think have a more interesting, varied career. Personally, I, I find that like, just really compelling.

• 38:20Sam Parr?

  I love this guy. Google or go to his Wikipedia page and like, look at the things that he's contributed to. I, I mentioned just barely any of them, but it's like-

• 38:28Shaan Puri?

  David Beckham's wisdom teeth.

• 38:31Shaan Puri?

  Like, just play a game. Things, you know, two truths and a lie. Rubinstein's collectibles.

• 38:38Sam Parr?

  Dude, it's, it's so awesome what he does. And I just think that guys like this are really cool. And he's actually coming on the podcast in August. And, um, so, you know, sorry, Dave, I didn't mean to, I didn't mean to insult you if I got any details wrong, but-

• 38:53Shaan Puri?

  Well, he's coming on? Okay, I'm so excited now. That's amazing.

• 38:55Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's amazing. I think that he's been doing this kind of like baller giving philanthropic stuff and like history stuff. I think he's been doing it along the way and not just like in the end of his career, which I find really fascinating. And he like makes this joke where, first of all, he says like, my whole shtick is I love self-deprecating humor because it disarms people and like, he's kind of like a, a self-deprecating guy, which makes him very likeable. But he was like, I'm not really like that good of an investor. I just like work pretty hard and I know kind of everyone and I'm pretty good at connecting people. And I also have really good business partners who's helped me start Carlisle. And that's one of the reasons why it's the way it is. And I thought that was really fascinating.

• 39:33Shaan Puri?

  I like that a lot. It, it also sounds like he had a, you know, a cool second act to his career, maybe a second and a third act to his career. Today's podcast is brought to you by my friends at Mercury. They make the world's best banking product. I think you know this already. I use Mercury for all of my businesses. I think I have like maybe seven or eight businesses. We use Mercury as our business banking across all of them. And now they actually just launched a personal banking account. So I have my personal account there. I moved off of Wells Fargo and Chase. I'm just all in on Mercury. Why? I like products that are easy to use. I like products that get me and the problems that I have. So like very easy to make a joint account with my wife. Very easy to spin up virtual cards. One click and I get savings yield. It just has all the stuff that I need in one place. So if you're looking for the best banking product on the market,

• 40:18Shaan Puri?

  it's definitely Mercury. I will fist fight anybody who disagrees with me on that. Go to mercury.com slash personal and learn more. Mercury is a fintech, not an FDIC insured bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group and Callum N A. Members FDIC. Can I tell you about a business that I think is really cool? That is someone's second act. And I think you know, I think you know, the person, but I don't know how much time you spent thinking about this business. And so the business is PSA. And PSA is, if you ever want to go buy a rare, you know, Charizard, well, you'll want to know the PSA grade of that card. Dude, we gotta get this guy on. Yeah, so Nat Turner bought this business and Nat Turner, I think he, I think his last company was like in healthcare or something.

• 41:02Shaan Puri?

  He sold it to Roche and he's always been a nerd, a collector. And he raised some money and he took private or he bought this company. I think it's called Collector's Universe or something like that. They own PSA. And I just found this category of business to be pretty fascinating. So let me, let me tell you a little bit about this business. Here's, here's one way of looking at it. So it's a business that controls something like 70% of its market. So absolutely dominant in its market. They have $400 million of orders just sitting in the queue. Haven't even got to it yet. 400 million. What? If I'm wrong, we'll fire our researcher, but that's, that's what we, that's what we have here. Want to get a cancel your Claude subscription?

• 41:47Shaan Puri?

  I'll give Claude a nasty talking to.

• 41:52Shaan Puri?

  Basically, they they they've dominated this space of of grading cards. And if you think about what that is, the broader category of problem that they solve is something called credence goods. And so I was kind of nerding out on this. And what a credence good is basically it's a good that even after you've consumed it, even after you have it, you still don't really know the quality of it. So like medical care is a good example. You have surgery. Oh, how'd you like your surgeon? I don't know. I have no idea. I have no way to assess the efficacy of my surgeon if they were if they were, you know, I could probably tell if they're terrible, but I can't really tell the difference between good, great, and world class. And the same is true and same was true for collectibles. So let's say somebody had a original, I don't know, Sammy Sosa rookie card.

• 42:37Shaan Puri?

  And the big kind of home run boom was happening when him and Mark McGuire were hitting a bunch of home runs and people were buying up these cards. And the problem, you know, the problem without a third party, a trusted third party here is that one, you know, the owner says it's in excellent condition. And then they show it to a buyer and the buyer says, I don't know, it seems fair. And then the buyer owns it, then he says it's mint condition. And there's all this arguable, and you know, and that's just the condition, let alone is it even authentic? Is this real? Was this actually a first edition? Is this a second edition? Does this actually have this? Does it actually have that? And so you need third party trust in these systems where there was no structure. And so coins was like this, cards was like this, Pokemon cards, sports cards.

• 43:20Shaan Puri?

  And so there was this like entire like industry of collectors who were very passionate, but they had no structure and it needed third party trust. And this exists in many industries. So for example, if you ever go through an M and A process, you'll have to go get a Q O E or you'd have to get a third party audit, you know, Deloitte, Ernst & Young. They built built multi-billion dollar businesses just doing an attestation, just saying, yes, this company's financials are sound so that the seller and the buyer can do a trusted transaction because the buyer knows that they don't have to go and verify themselves that the the company's books are actually what they say they are. And so attestation, credentialing, these are huge businesses that are just some of the most beautiful business models because you become

• 44:06Shaan Puri?

  basically a trust tax on an entire industry. You don't have to be the best buyer or seller. You don't have to own anything. It's super capital light. All you have to do is become the trusted third party. And that's hard to do, but once you do it, it's an incredible position to be in. And I think what Matt Turner did buying this company is absolutely brilliant. I think they bought it for eight hundred, nine or a million. This is going to be a multi-billion dollar company because being the dominant market share and there's a network effect, right? Like if I have a card that I think is valuable, am I going to go to the third rate greater? Because I can save a little bit on my, on grading my card? No way. I'm going to go to PSA because if it's PSA certified PSA 10, that makes my card more valuable.

• 44:49Shaan Puri?

  And so the trust sort of compounds and it becomes the known unit of account on the street. You see everywhere you go, you're just going to keep seeing PSA, which means when you need to get your cards graded PSA. And then they add it on top of grading. They have a vault. So they store a million cards in their vault because they're basically like, you know, a hybrid. It's like, you know, one part Moody's where they're, they're grading asset class. And on the other side, they're Fort Knox where they have this giant vault storing a billion dollars worth of cards or whatever it is in their, in their vaults.

• 45:20Sam Parr?

  With this business, so I'm just looking it up. So like it's called collectors.com now. It's like a, it's like a portfolio. I think they own like the ones you mentioned, plus like three or four other ones. And the, like they have this cool Jackie Robinson card, like on their photos and it's created by TOPS, TOPS Cards. And I was like, you know, I bought so many of those. And TOPS is owned by Fanatics. Because it's not like a regulated thing. It's not like money or gold or anything like that. What's to stop Fanatics from making more? Like, it's not like a limited supply. Do you know what I mean? And it's not like, it's not like

• 45:55Shaan Puri?

  Incentives is what stops them. So, so it is a limited supply. If, if TOPS can't be trusted to not flood the market with more cards, people will stop buying TOPS. The more supply there is, the less valuable each card is. So TOPS has an incentive to control the supply tightly, to manipulate the supply artificially. And so TOPS has an incentive to do that. That's in line with the incentives of the buyers and the holders because they, we need, they need scarcity for this to be valuable. And then PSA sits as a layer underneath both, which basically grades and authenticates that this is this is real, it's not a fake card, and that it's it's in good condition

• 46:37Shaan Puri?

  and it's valuable. And they also, because they see so many cards, they know the absolute scarcity. So they know how many of these cards really are out there circulating in the market. They know the liquidity of each card market. So there's like a there's like a market cap for like Charizards. There's a market cap for Jackie Robinson cards because they know how much how much liquidity there is, how much circulating supply there is. They know the relative value of a card because they know, wow, this is in mint condition versus this is in good condition. And so they're all kind of in cahoots with each other, and in a way that is symbiotic.

• 47:12Sam Parr?

  It's sort of like, have you ever like seen how McDonald's does the the like Monopoly game? Like, the way the Monopoly game works is there's only like four or two winning pieces. And like, they guard it like, kind of like crazy, although they were scammed once. There's a whole documentary where they're like, one of their like, janitors.

• 47:29Shaan Puri?

  Guys on the inside, yeah, yeah.

• 47:30Sam Parr?

  They like took, they like took them. And so it would be very interesting, like they found the like, the corner of the office where they kept them, and they're like, you know, yoink, it's mine. I would have loved to know, like, when they're making these cards, they must know in advance which ones potentially might be valuable and how they place them in a pack. Because they're just like in little like bubble gum, like five dollar or five card packs.

• 47:50Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I would love to see that, yeah.

• 47:52Sam Parr?

  Dude, Nat Turner was 35 when he did this. So he had recently sold Flatiron Health, I think that's what it was called, for, I think, like $2 billion in 2018. So he must have sold. So I think he sold one company for $40 million when he was 23.

• 48:05Shaan Puri?

  Like a media company, yeah.

• 48:07Sam Parr?

  It was an ad tech company. I forget what it was called, but it was like, a cool thing, whatever. He sold it for 40, I think 40 billion to Google. Then he starts this cancer thing because someone in his family, I think, was sick. And him and his partner, I think his partner is Zach, they're like whip smart. Like, you could, I could just tell, by the way, Zach is like kind of a feisty guy online, and he like, he's very sharp with his words, where you see guys talk like this, and you're like, that's not someone I want to argue with, because not only is he sharp, he's argumentative and he won't back down.

• 48:35Shaan Puri?

  He calls bullshit, yeah.

• 48:36Sam Parr?

  And so this guy Nat seems like a little bit more of a nicer version of that, but still has it. They he seems so smart and wise at a very young age. I've been very fascinated by him as well. And I also thought when he did this, I was like, huh? Like, it was like totally like, I don't like, that's, and then you go to the website, and you're like, this is, this is awesome. This is good for the soul.

• 48:56Shaan Puri?

  I mean, the math on the, just the queue alone, right? 14 million cards in the queue. The price, the cost to grade a single card is, you know, 20 bucks on the low end, 1,000 plus on the high end. Let's call it like 30 bucks on average. So 14 million cards in the queue times 30 bucks is 400 million sitting in the queue. It's probably more if you, if you think the average cost of the card is higher. And so that's, if that's just their backlog. And by the way, this is one of the reasons he bought it was because there was a one year wait to grade cards. He's like, dude, this is terrible. And so he bought it to try to modernize it with technology, with efficiency, with just intensity. And say like, we have to be able to do better than that. And I'll take it public again, once we've implemented like

• 49:38Shaan Puri?

  a more tech forward approach to doing this, because you can't just have like a multi-year backlog and cards waiting to be graded.

• 49:45Sam Parr?

  If you go to his Instagram, um, it's called Nat Turner's Cards. And it's just photos of him showing off his card collection. Like he owns like what looks like a Yao Ming rookie collect, like a rookie card. And it's just him showing it off. This is so cool. I wonder what their office is like.

• 50:07Sam Parr?

  This is awesome.

• 50:07Shaan Puri?

  The Yao Ming, the Yao Ming rookie card just for some reason got me. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know what their office is like. I don't know what their, I don't know what it's like. I just think this is kind of an amazing move. No, I've never met him. I'd love to have him on. I think this would be really fun to.

• 50:21Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I think this would be great.

• 50:22Shaan Puri?

  I also just think this is my, my sickness, my disease is anytime I discover a great business model, the, the envy in me is like, ooh, how do I have one? I want one. And so there's a question of like, where else are businesses like these? Or where could you build a business like these? And, um, you know, my brain goes into like human capital. So like, how do you, like, for example, could I create a PSA grading system? For the top 1% of Ivy League graduates? Like, could I basically score them in some way? Could I do this for sports, right? Just like they do with the combine in the NFL or NBA? Like, could you do this with youth athletes? Like, basically, where would there be an aligned set of incentives?

• 51:04Shaan Puri?

  The demand for it, they want to have structure and a sort of a scoring system that can be trusted by all parties? And where's the economy big enough? Like, you know, collectibles was a big enough economy. I think it's like a, whatever, 10 billion-ish industry. It was big enough to support these types of revenues. And so I wonder where else you could build one of these? Like, third-party trust, third-party grading systems?

• 51:31Sam Parr?

  Dude, but there's also, I mean, you're just scratching the surface with different collectibles. So if you want to get really nerdy, I'm part of like all these like vintage denim communities online and people will post, yeah. Look, if we're gonna-

• 51:44Shaan Puri?

  There's tens of us.

• 51:45Sam Parr?

  If you're gonna say this guy who's got an Instagram who's 38 years old, dedicated to his magic cards-

• 51:50Shaan Puri?

  For some reason it was cool and heated, but when you said it, I felt differently.

• 51:57Sam Parr?

  What, you don't like Lee Jeets from 1947?

• 52:03Sam Parr?

  But there are all these, like, they do this for purses and handbags, too.

• 52:06Shaan Puri?

  Tell me, when you appreciate denim, is it a, like, with wine, you're tasting it. With, you know, colognes, you smell like it. What do you even do? Is it a feel? Is it a smell? Is it a look? What do you even look at? What is the, what traits do we even evaluate? The premium, the best stuff or the worst stuff?

• 52:25Sam Parr?

  There's all types of terminology. You want to look at the honeycombs, which is the fading that's on the back of the knee. You want to look at the back patch near the butt. You want to see, does this patch, is it made out of cardboard and paper? Or is it made out of leather? And has it shrank a little bit or not? You want to look at, are the copper rivets just a little bit green? So you know it's real copper? Are they hidden or are they visible?

• 52:48Shaan Puri?

  Is there like a famous pair, like of jeans, like the Honus Wagner baseball card? Or like the rare Charizard? What is the most valuable collected denim?

• 52:57Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so Levi Strauss was invented, Levi Strauss was a man, he invented it in the 1800s to help gold miners in San Francisco, so California and Nevada. And so if you can find, it's called buckle back, so where they have the buckle on the back to like, it's called like a cinch. If you could find any of those in an old mine and assume that's, and you can date it to the 1800s, those could be worth 20 grand. And so collectors, particularly Japanese collectors, love them. But then there's this whole subgenre of people who make reproductions. Predominantly Asian companies, Japanese companies, they're the ones who make the best ones. Japanese replicate American shit so good. I'm wearing a pair right now of Levi's.

• 53:41Shaan Puri?

  Stand up, stand up, let's see it, let's see him.

• 53:44Sam Parr?

  Look at this high rise.

• 53:45Shaan Puri?

  Give us a toral, give us a toral.

• 53:46Sam Parr?

  This high rise, look at the roping, the roping, this is beautiful roping fades. That's what you're looking for, you're looking for that chain stitch hem. That's not made by a normal sewing machine, that's made by a union machine that they don't even make anymore. You gotta find, you gotta.

• 54:01Shaan Puri?

  Preman died hemming that.

• 54:03Sam Parr?

  Yeah, you gotta find, that costs $70 to get hemmed, okay? You gotta find that good, good, and it's actually quite challenging. And so like a 19.

• 54:12Shaan Puri?

  What is the most expensive denim artifact, art piece you've bought? Are you, are you a buyer or are you just a casual?

• 54:20Sam Parr?

  No.

• 54:20Shaan Puri?

  Are you a voyeur?

• 54:21Sam Parr?

  I'm a, I'm a voyeur, but I like $500 for like a vintage jacket.

• 54:25Shaan Puri?

  Have you considered, have you been tempted to be like, ooh, 15, Sarah? Do we need that 15 grand? Do we need to go on vacation?

• 54:33Sam Parr?

  I have, so there's like, like a 19, a pair of 1947 Levi's that use like the green for the pockets because back then we were like provisioning out materials and so every material was green for the war and getting some of those real deal, you know, the real deal Holyfield ones, yeah, I want those stuff. But my point is, is that there's this whole subreddit dedicated to two things. One, looking at the fade of your denim, it's called Reddit Raw Fades is what it's called. So it's raw denim that fades nicely, I swear to God. It's literally just photos and photos of photos.

• 55:05Shaan Puri?

  It would be hard to make this up.

• 55:06Sam Parr?

  It's beautiful, but I do know there's people who do this for other types of clothings, which are far more desirable, like purses.

• 55:12Shaan Puri?

  So you're saying you could do niche PSA?

• 55:15Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 55:16Shaan Puri?

  If you, if you specialized in different clothing, you know, clothing and bags, yeah.

• 55:21Sam Parr?

  Denim is too niche, but like.

• 55:24Shaan Puri?

  But maybe there's a long tail of things like denim.

• 55:27Sam Parr?

  Well, particularly handbags. I've seen this all the time on handbags, like on eBay and stuff. Like I've bought my wife like a vintage one for like two or three grand and I'm just trusting the person's eBay profile that they have like five out of five stars. But yeah, there's like a bunch of like cool, collectible like genres that are still really prime for some of this stuff.

• 55:47Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So by the way, like I know it's amazing that like a woman has decided to marry me, even though I'm still into this stuff, but we exist, guys.

• 56:00Sam Parr?

  Oh my God. Nat Turner, obviously we're nerds as well. If you'd like to come on, we would love to have you.

• 56:08Shaan Puri?

  Rubenstein, Nat Turner, come on the podcast, guys. Don't we seem like a good hang?

• 56:16Sam Parr?

  We've insulted ourselves just as much as we've insulted you. So it's like, we're good.

• 56:23Sam Parr?

  That's something. You should wear a white tank top more often. I think that it brings out something special in you.

• 56:30Shaan Puri?

  Should I just go skimpier and skimpier with each episode?

• 56:37Sam Parr?

  I just saw the flex on the shoulders. Congratulations. It seems like, by the way, for the past two years, everyone is commenting about on your body every single episode.

• 56:46Shaan Puri?

  That's great. Love it.

• 56:47Sam Parr?

  Yeah. All right. So go to Spotify.

• 56:50Shaan Puri?

  My click farm in India, who is continuing to comment on how, how, how, how much better I look and how, how I'm getting in great shape and it shows. Keep it up. It's working.

• 56:59Sam Parr?

  PSA is going to grade you. They're going to give you a, they're going to give you a, it's fine.

• 57:06Shaan Puri?

  Fair condition.

• 57:08Sam Parr?

  It's fair.

• 57:11Sam Parr?

  All right. That's it. That's the pod.

• 57:23Shaan Puri?

  All right. Let's take a quick break to talk about a podcast because if you're listening to this, you like podcasts. And what's better than one podcast? Another podcast. And let me tell you, another podcast you should check out. It's called Success Story. If you like hearing about different success stories and hearing Q and A sessions with successful business leaders, or hearing keynote presentations, or just checking out conversations about sales and business and marketing tactics, this is a great podcast for you. So check it out wherever you get your podcasts.