Recapping the Mr Beast Joe Rogan Interview, The Billionaire Who Owns the Sports Jersey Market, Betting on Yourself, and More

Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) and Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) recap Mr. Beast's interview on Joe Rogan, talk about people who find their passion early in life, discuss Michael Rubin and how he has taken over the sports jersey market, and more. ----- Links: * Fanatics - https://www.fanatics.com/ * Mr Beast on Joe Rogan - https://open.spotify.com/episode/5lokpznqvSrJO3gButgQvs?si=b931061285fd4e84 * Whatnot - https://whatnot.com/ * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. * Want more insights like MFM? Check out Shaan's newsletter. ----- Show Notes: (01:35) - Recapping the drunk ideas episode (3:00) - Mr Beast on Rogan (6:55) - Betting on yourself (13:00) - Michael Rubin and Fanatics (19:45) - Growing your market (22:05) - Whatnot ----- 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?

  But I thought his approach was smart and one that people should take, which is he goes, right now, there's like 5 million people who collect sports cards. My question when we bought TOPS was, how do we get 50 million or 500 million people to collect? And like, that's the only game I want to play is expanding the total size of this market from 5 million people who do this thing to 50 million people who do this thing.

• 0:33Shaan Puri?

  Dude, I listened back to our last episode, the drunken episode. It was good. We were funny. People liked it.

• 0:41Sam Parr?

  I, I've heard that. What, what did you think was, here's so.

• 0:44Shaan Puri?

  I listened to the whole episode. Imagine how good it must have been for me to listen, sit there with a cringe of my own voice.

• 0:50Sam Parr?

  Well, for people listening, people will usually message Sean and I together, but sometimes separate, and they say, I liked the, this episode. And the response that we always have is, why? What did you like about it? What part?

• 1:03Shaan Puri?

  We fish, we fish hard for that compliment.

• 1:06Sam Parr?

  Well, no, I mean, it's not rooted in, I do want it in, I like, what, I did, we need to do more. What was funny?

• 1:14Shaan Puri?

  I think I literally came across as sort of like giggly drunk. The whole episode, I was already, I, I just felt like I was having a good time. Like watching myself have a good time made me have more fun. The second was y'all's reactions were really good. So I'd pitch a kind of harebrained idea. And then you were, your reaction was on point. And then Ben came in with like, not like, you know, reasonable calm Ben, Ben was like, that is a terrible idea. Or he was like, no, Sam, you're dead wrong. This is a great idea. Imagine crawling onto this big ass bed and like blah, blah, blah. You know, he like really played into it. So I think it just had good energy and good vibes.

• 1:49Sam Parr?

  That's good. Yeah, we had, we had people reach out to us about it. So that's good.

• 1:54Shaan Puri?

  So I'm gonna try to maintain that. Dude, right before this, I was watching, you, you saw Mr. Beast went on Joe Rogan. I don't know if you, you caught the episode at all?

• 2:01Sam Parr?

  I didn't, I, just a couple of the clips where they said like, what do you do with your money? And he's like, not much. He goes, I, I used to have a roommate up until recently and we each split our place for $700, but I got a fancier place because someone broke into my house. So I needed like some security, but it's still like pretty normal of a house.

• 2:17Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I didn't see that. So I've only seen one clip and it was basically the clip of like, how did you make it on YouTube? And it's a great clip, right? Like it's.

• 2:23Sam Parr?

  What's he say?

• 2:25Shaan Puri?

  So he goes. So he's 23 now and he goes, I started doing this when I was 11. And Joe's like, what 11? He's like, yeah, he's like, I came home and I, he's like, I started to do this when I was 11. And he's like, I sucked, obviously at the beginning. He's like, so he's like, he's like, look at me now. I don't look cool now. Like, imagine me at like 12, like, I was like, you know, pimply, you know, pimply face, scrawny, awkward, mumbly kind of guy. And like, here I am trying to like, make videos. And he's like, back then also YouTube really, there wasn't a thing like, YouTubers wasn't like a thing 12, 13 years ago, you know? So it's like, He's like, yeah, I just was doing it because I liked it. He goes, I hated school. He's, I never, he's like, in high school, I just never even brought a book home.

• 3:07Shaan Puri?

  Like, he's like, I remember doing zero studying. My parents got so mad at me. He's like, and then like when I turned 18, um, he's like, he's like, basically, so his, his went in three phases. He goes, From 11 to 13, I was trying to make videos, but I was like, super embarrassed because they were so bad. And Joe's like, are they, do they still exist? He goes, no, I deleted my channel when I turned 13 because like, I got like, I don't know, like bullied in school a little bit. I felt embarrassed. So I deleted all those videos, but I like started fresh, uh, again at 13 and like, whatever, it kept going. He's like, so then from 13 to like 17 or 18, I was just trying to make like videos all the time because my first video randomly got like 20,000 views. He's like, that was the best thing that ever happened to me. I got like this instant hit and I was hooked.

• 3:50Shaan Puri?

  And then like, it didn't happen again for a while, but like, that first one, which was about like, He like hacked some video game, like here's a, here's a, beat this level in a video game or whatever. He's like some obscure game and it just like, people wanted to know how to do that hack. So that's how I got popular right away. Um, or he's like, that's how that video got popular. And then I got, I wanted to chase that, that, that feeling again. So he's like, I wasn't making any money. He's like, finally I got to a point where I was making a dollar a day. And he's like, yes. And he's like, so I saved up for like a few months and I bought a microphone. And I was like, yeah, like now I sound good. Like, here we go. And he's like, I just kept doing that. I kept like, Making a couple bucks, saving it and then like buy a camera or buy like, you know, like a better computer. So I could like, Edit the videos or screen record or whatever.

• 4:32Shaan Puri?

  And so he just kept doing that for like six years. He's like, my whole goal was that by the time I graduate from high school, Can I like just make enough money doing this? Cause I don't want to do anything else.

• 4:41Sam Parr?

  What was his, his number?

• 4:43Shaan Puri?

  So it did not happen. He's like, by the time I, he's like, by the time I graduated high school, I was making like 400 bucks a month or something like that. And he's like, you know, it's the 300, 400 bucks. He's like, so my mom gave me this ultimatum. She's like, you know, you're moving out or you're like going to community college. Like you're not going to do this video thing. And so he's like, ah, fuck. Okay. He's like, I didn't want to go to community college. He's like, it's like the worst thing in the world. Just sitting there, listening to this lecture. Like, it's not what I wanted to do. He's like, so I started skipping. He's like, every day I would just go to my car. And instead of going to community college, I would just edit videos in my car. He's like, I do that all day and I come home and my mom thought I went to school. He's like, and he's like, that created a clock. Because now she was gonna find out. By the end of this semester,

• 5:25Shaan Puri?

  I had zeros as my grades. Like, she was gonna know that I did not go to community college. So I had to like, I bought myself like one semester more of time. He's like, and in that time, I pulled it off. Like, I got to the point where I could like self sustain. I just moved out. And then I could like do this like full time moving on my own. He's like, and so that's kind of like the progression of how I did it. And I was like,

• 5:46Sam Parr?

  How awesome is that?

• 5:47Shaan Puri?

  How awesome is that? Exactly. Like, a bet on yourself story, where burn the bridge behind you, right? So, so you know, you, we say burn the bridges. I don't know why we say that. It's burn the boats. Like, if you want to take the island, you gotta burn the boats. And so he burned the boats when he, when he did that. And, and knew what he wanted to do, right? Because like, school's great, but school's not for everybody. If you, if you kind of know what you want to do, you're much better off, I think, competing in the free market on that thing than like competing for your teachers, like love and affection, you know, with writing the essay they want to grade as an A plus, right? Like, writing the thing they want you to write about, in the format they want you to write, in a way that will get them to give you the grade, right? Like, that's like, that's like

• 6:32Shaan Puri?

  not a real market. Whereas, you make videos on YouTube, you're competing in like a real market. Or you want to be an athlete?

• 6:37Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's just that most people think that they're like, gonna do something for life, and they aren't willing to, or they don't actually want to. I think, I think the rarity here is not, is someone 18 and capable. It's, do they actually love what they're saying they love enough that they're willing to dedicate 10 or 20 years to it?

• 6:54Shaan Puri?

  Right. Yeah, like, you know what I mean? Are you, do you actually have a thing you love? Uh, most people do not. Uh, my, I remember my sister, when she was going to college, my dad was like, all right, well, like, what do you want to major in? She's like, I don't know. He's like, well, what's your favorite subject? Like, what do you love to study? She's like lunch, like, you know, I just like, I'm not, I don't have anything against any of them, but like, do any of them make me happy? Not really. So what, now what? And like, I think that's how most people's careers go. It's like, all right, well, I don't hate it, but I don't love it, but now what? What am I supposed to?

• 7:24Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So I think that's the rarity here is that he actually, that he liked something enough. But anyway, that's a good story. I'll have to go and watch this podcast.

• 7:34Shaan Puri?

  We need. I'll also give you a shout out. There's, there's one, one more that's like that, that I think you'll appreciate. There's a guy who's visiting, a kid who's visiting, facing my, my brother in law's nephew. This kid, this kid named Sebastian. And he's in town visiting. I haven't seen him in like seven years. So I was like, oh, Sebastian, like, oh, you've, you hit puberty, you kind of grew up. So he's like, he's still like, he's like, kind of like, he's like a kid, right? He's still small, but like, he's like ripped. And from the age of, like, I met him when he was maybe five and back when he was five, he was so into like wrestling and, and like UFC and MMA. And he would like, he knew every wrestler's promos, songs, moves, everything.

• 8:14Shaan Puri?

  Like, I think a lot of kids do, but he could like, he would like practice them. He was like good at them. He could like do an impression of Stone Cold Steve Austin with The Rock or these guys. And then with fighting, he was like, got really into jiu jitsu early on and got good at it. To the point where he was like, by the age of, I want to say eight or nine, he was like, mom, like this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to do fighting. Like I'm going to be a fighter. So let's just like, do that. How do I go train like five hours a day? Cause that's what I want to do. And so from the age of like, he was already doing it when he was like a young kid, but that, I think from the age of like eight, nine or 10, somewhere there, he started training like a professional. He homeschooled himself. So he's like, okay, I don't need to go to school anymore. Like I'm going to do this. I'll homeschool to like, you know, continue passing these like grades or whatever.

• 8:58Shaan Puri?

  But like my real school is I spend five hours a day in this gym. And I get good at this. So, and he's now like. So he's 17 now. He's got his first amateur fight this year. He's one of the best jiu-jitsu players in the world. He's going to ADCC. Um, he's like the best in the, he's already the best in the state of Texas. He's one of, he's a number one or number two nationally. And now he's going to go to the international competition, see if he can win that, like the world championships at age 17. He's been training all his striking. He's doing his first amateur fight and this kid is so focused, so driven, so determined. And like, it's just kind of amazing to see like what a good kid he comes from. Like, you know, like single mom, household and like, you know.

• 9:35Sam Parr?

  But is he do, is he doing an MMA one with striking or just jiu-jitsu?

• 9:40Shaan Puri?

  No, no, he's doing MMA now. So he's like, I love, he's like, I love it all. He's like, jiu-jitsu, I'm already the best. He's like, my striking is coming along. He's like, I want them to want to take me down because my striking is that good. He just talks like, like dude, when I was 17, I didn't have a clue. I didn't have a clue about a clue. And so when I saw that, I was like, that's special. And it's just like, just the way I idolize, kind of like the, the billy of the week. I appreciate greatness when it's accomplished. I even, I like it even better when it's the raw talent that's just turning into a diamond. Uh, Sebastian, I think it's like, uh, I think it's like Olivera's or I don't know how you say his last name. It's like a Hispanic last name. I'll, I'll send it to you. I watch his. No, he's Hispanic. It's all, watch his videos.

• 10:22Shaan Puri?

  And um, jiu-jitsu is normally very boring. He's so athletic that his jiu-jitsu looks fun. And he's like a showman, like he comes out and the crowd has already heard about him. They've seen him on Instagram, like the, the announcers know that he's like more acrobatic with the way he does things. And so he's got like an aura about him already. It's pretty dope to watch. Like this guy's going to be in the UFC. It's crazy. I've seen him since he was like, eight or nine years old doing this.

• 10:45Sam Parr?

  What's uh, what's he weigh?

• 10:47Shaan Puri?

  He's a fly, he's like a flyweight. So he's very, he's very small. He's like maybe five, six, 125 pounds, like that sort of thing.

• 10:53Sam Parr?

  But maybe he'll, he'll fill out. I guess he's.

• 10:55Shaan Puri?

  He worked out with us and like, it was like, he put us all to shame. It was embarrassing.

• 11:00Sam Parr?

  He was stronger than you?

• 11:02Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, he he's he's like a dominant athlete like it's like, okay, we're gonna do this hip raise, you know, thing and it's like his explodes. It doesn't raise.

• 11:12Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but like size matters. So like even a like a like a like a not strong 200 pound person can is stronger than a really strong 130.

• 11:21Shaan Puri?

  You know, brother Aaron, as he's known on the pod, right?

• 11:23Sam Parr?

  So yeah, he's like a crazy man a little.

• 11:24Shaan Puri?

  He's 6'3", 6'4", he's 200 pounds and he's been training Jiu-Jitsu for maybe four or five years now. And he's like a whatever. He's like a blue belt or whatever. They rolled and he got tapped like 15 times in the same. He got embarrassed by a 125 pounder. He's like, it wasn't close. He's like, I can't, I couldn't believe it. Like I thought the size and strength would just let me kind of maul a little bit. And he's like, no.

• 11:46Sam Parr?

  Dude, I'm, I'm gonna Google him after this. I want to see what he looks like. All right. You have a lot of stuff. I actually didn't research much at all because last time you said, I've got so much.

• 11:55Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, well, I might've been talking out my ass there, but we'll, we'll do it anyways. So I'll start with a couple of business things and then we'll go from there. So did you, um, did you see, uh, like what Michael, like Michael Rubin did?

• 12:09Sam Parr?

  So we talked about him a little bit. To be honest, I don't entirely understand what his business Fanatics does, but I know that like, he's got three different companies right now. One of them was worth like 50 billion. Another one's worth like a billion. Another was worth like five or 10 billion. Like it's just like crazy. It's like there's Fanatics and there's like three spinoffs of it.

• 12:29Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. So, um, I don't have like a ton of, uh, you know, kind of like research on him or whatever, but basically Fanatics itself is worth over $10 billion. And what Fanatics does is they basically are a merch company, but for sports. And so what they do is you want to go buy a Steph Curry jersey, whether you buy it in the NBA shop, the Warriors shop, or you just Google Steph Curry jersey and you land on Fanatics.com. It's Fanatics that's printing and they're actually like printing the jerseys and then shipping them out to customers.

• 13:01Sam Parr?

  I get that. I just don't understand how can just like a rookie, like a noob, I mean, he's not a noob anymore. He's been doing this since he was 21. He's probably 55 now. How can just like a guy come in? And then just like muscle like the people who have had those contracts for 20 decades.

• 13:14Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 13:14Sam Parr?

  For 20 years.

• 13:14Shaan Puri?

  I also had that same exact question. Now, I know he was kind of like successful before this. I think he had done a.

• 13:21Sam Parr?

  It was called a GSI, I think, commerce and he sold it to eBay for, I forget exactly how much, but he made like 80 or 90, I think. And then it didn't work out at eBay, so he bought back some of the stuff. And he grew that to be big. And then he also spun out a few things. So this company called ShopRunner, which was quite popular. It's basically like Amazon Prime for people who aren't on Amazon. He built that business and a few other things.

• 13:46Shaan Puri?

  And so.

• 13:46Sam Parr?

  He started as like a ski shop when he was 18, I think.

• 13:49Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. Ski, sort of a ski business, whatever, then became like kind of apparel logistics. So that's GSI Commerce. That's sports. Again, sports commerce. He sold that to eBay. I think, I don't know if you said the price, 2.4 billion.

• 14:01Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I think he only walked away with like 80, which is a lot, but I don't think he, I think he like gave up a ton of equity.

• 14:07Shaan Puri?

  And he was like in his late 30s at the time. And then, and then, yeah, I don't know how he got the contracts, but he basically just like continued licensing. I don't think he guys exclusive. So I think he got the licenses to print, print the stuff and then over time demonstrated that like they had the best product with the best delivery, with the best quality assurance and all that stuff. And so they ended up being like, we'll just power your shop. Right? We'll be the, we'll be the default one when you go to like the team's websites.

• 14:34Sam Parr?

  Well, he also bought a, recently started a cards company that is making cards and they just, and then he was like, you know what? Let's just buy tops while we're at it.

• 14:42Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 14:43Sam Parr?

  So I don't understand how, he's totally just kind of brute force his way into this, it seems.

• 14:48Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So he, exactly. So he bought tops, which is kind of like a pretty interesting move. We've talked about trading cards. We talked about, you know, like this whole thing. What they're, what it seems like what they're going to do is they're going to say, all right, we got the licenses from the, from the sports teams. We can get, we can, we know licensing as a business. We can get the licenses for cards as well. We know printing and manufacturing. We can do that with the cards as well. But then also with cards, there's like, basically it's the same customer. It's the same fan. So if I buy a Steph Curry jersey, odds are I'm going to be like somewhat interested in like a Steph Curry rookie card. And what hit, the reason I want to bring him up was not because like I had some like deep insight on his like business plan, although I think it's pretty simple, which is like, we have the sports fan as a customer. What do they buy?

• 15:30Shaan Puri?

  One of the things that they might buy is collectibles. Okay, let me go buy tops and like, we'll sell them collectibles. But I thought his approach was smart and one that people should take, which is he goes. Right now, there's like five million people who collect sports cards. And so the whole business is like these five million people. And nobody is like taking a like big approach to this. It's been this like hobbyist kind of underground. And that's like the charm of it. Like if you go to like the annual sports card conference, it's like this dump in Cincinnati. That's like, you know, these hobbyists bring their cardboard boxes and like some special shout out to like, you know, Kentucky Fried Chicken for sponsoring this year's conference, whatever, right?

• 16:10Sam Parr?

  And like Eric's Moms for bringing cookies.

• 16:12Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 16:16Shaan Puri?

  Third year running. Thank you, Mrs. K. So they're like, you know, that's the conference right now. So he's like, dude, why is that like that? But like Sneaker Con is like this fucking state of the art thing. And CES is like this epic show that's like, you know, like cutting it. So he's like, I'm going to do all that in the trade. No, he's like, nobody has spent a dollar on marketing collectibles. Like nobody, like it's like this hobbyist passion industry, but nobody goes out and markets this thing. He's like, but the people have done that for sneakers and other things. So I think what he's going to do, one, one smart thing, I like this part of the plan was he's basically going to athletes that like to collect in general. He's going to like make it known that these celebrities, oh, did you know like the whatever, you know?

• 16:58Shaan Puri?

  The, the guy from Billions, like the hedge fund manager has like two million dollars worth of stuff.

• 17:02Sam Parr?

  He's going to build like a media company on top of this a little bit, like a media company. Or it's a, it's going to be a slick media play and they happen to sell the cards.

• 17:10Shaan Puri?

  It's going to be, he's going to make it cool to collect, right? It was just a smart thing. And the reason why, again, like, okay, that's just part of a plan. The one part I really liked is he goes, there's five million people who collect today. And what anybody else in the space has tried to do is try to get as much, take as much as they can from those five million. My question when we bought TOPS was, how do we get 50 million or 500 million people to collect? And like, that's the only game I want to play is expanding the total size of this market from 5 million people who do this thing to 50 million people who do this thing. And I just thought like, that's, that's a really powerful mental model for how you, how you build businesses. And I've talked about this before. That's the same, it's the same framework as the, the one that the guy from Slack did when he created Slack. He's like, yeah, there's work chat

• 17:55Shaan Puri?

  tools and some people use them. But he's like, the reality is eight out of the 10 customers that we talk to, companies that we talk to, they don't use a live chat tool. They use email. So he goes, his memo was called, we don't sell saddles here, right? Cause he's like, if we just go to the existing people who like horseback riding, they probably already have a saddle. We try to convince them to switch because we got a better saddle. They're kind of familiar with their ways. We're always going to be in this like tiny niche. But if we sell the dream of horseback riding and show people how fun it is to go horseback riding, we increase the size of the overall market. And then when they say, oh, wow, I love this thing, but my butt hurts. We'll say, great, we have a saddle for you. And so that's like, just like a general approach to business that I think more people should

• 18:35Shaan Puri?

  take is increasing the, um, the size of the number of people who even want your category before saying, pick me.

• 18:44Sam Parr?

  Have you, I, I agree. That's a really good insight. And an example of that is have you seen, uh, so Kevin Rose, this tech guy for years, Kevin Rose, for some reason, after, I forget where he was. He was either, I think he was at Google, leading like their venture arm. He left and he became the, I think he became a part owner and the CEO of this blog called Hodinkee. I think that's Hodinkee. And I remember hearing about that. And I was like, what? He goes, yeah, it's a blog for watches. And I was like, what are you thinking?

• 19:13Shaan Puri?

  There was a middle step. So he created a studio, a lab to incubate ideas. And that's why he was even more crazy. He's like, yeah, we're creating this like publication or this thing for watch collectors. And then that got acquired, I think by either Hodinkee or that was called Hodinkee and it got acquired. I'm not sure which one.

• 19:28Sam Parr?

  Yeah, they sometime this guy already had this blog. Kevin was tinkering with it and they became one. And he started working on that. And I was like, what the heck, man? You're like

• 19:38Shaan Puri?

  Who gives a shit about watches?

• 19:39Sam Parr?

  Yeah, aren't you like?

• 19:39Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 19:40Sam Parr?

  And like a blog? Like, what are you thinking? And then I started watching some of their YouTube videos and it was either Kevin or the other guy who started the site. And he was sitting with John Mayer and they were talking about their watches. And I sat for like 20 minutes watching this like, John Mayer was like, yeah, this watch is actually special for this reason. And I was like, that's, that's amazing. And they had this show on YouTube where they were doing that. And I'm not a watch guy because I don't want to spend, I don't get joy out of, I get more stress out of spending $30,000 for something on my wrist. I kind of get annoyed with it. But I was watching his stuff and I was like, I want to, I want to own this. You've turned me into a connoisseur, or I want to be connoisseur. I want to be part of this.

• 20:19Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. I want to want this. I don't know how yet.

• 20:22Sam Parr?

  Yes.

• 20:22Shaan Puri?

  It's like sushi and wine. There's always a whole bunch of these things where I'm like, oh, I kind of like the idea of getting into this hobby. Golf, right? Like, I want to want it.

• 20:31Sam Parr?

  Yes. And that's how I felt with him. And I could see myself wanting to do this with cards. I, when I was a kid, did you ever collect magic cards?

• 20:39Shaan Puri?

  Not magic, Pokemon for me, but yeah.

• 20:41Sam Parr?

  I did, I did magic. And I don't even remember how to play it. And I remember like, I was like, just let me look on eBay, see how much some of those are. And I was like, I'm just gonna buy some. This is, this is fun. It'll remind me of my childhood. And I would totally do that with sports cards, even though I don't pay attention to sports now. Just remind me of my childhood. I would buy like a Mark McGuire card or something like that. But yeah, this is cool. I think that's a really good framework, actually.

• 21:04Shaan Puri?

  Have you heard of this startup called Whatnot?

• 21:07Sam Parr?

  No.

• 21:07Shaan Puri?

  Oh, did go to this. So just go to whatnot.com. W H A, W just spelled how it's spelled. Whatnot. So this startup, so I'm gonna let you look at this. So this launched in, let's see, whatnot.

• 21:24Sam Parr?

  This is slick. This is a really nice site.

• 21:27Shaan Puri?

  I think in like the last two years, or launched in December 2019. Guess how much whatnot is valued at right now?

• 21:36Sam Parr?

  A hundred million?

• 21:37Shaan Puri?

  Over a billion dollars. There's a billion dollar startup you've never heard of, and what do you do? So if you go into one of these, I don't know if you've opened up one of the livestreams. So it's basically a live streaming site. And all you do is you open up the livestream and it's somebody who's got a pack of cards. And you could buy the pack and then they'll open it live and tell you what you got. And so like you could open up, you know, a Pokemon card pack or, uh, you know, an NBA card pack.

• 22:01Sam Parr?

  Wait, I'm, I'm gonna buy it from him and he's gonna open it live for me?

• 22:05Shaan Puri?

  For you. And then he'll ship it to you.

• 22:06Sam Parr?

  And then he's gonna mail it?

• 22:07Shaan Puri?

  And then he'll ship it to you.

• 22:08Sam Parr?

  Oh, wow, this is sick.

• 22:10Shaan Puri?

  So like I have here.

• 22:11Sam Parr?

  Dude, their traffic is just like going up like crazy.

• 22:16Sam Parr?

  This is really cool. It basically just kind of looks like a TikTok knockoff.

• 22:20Shaan Puri?

  So I tried to invest in this and these fuckers didn't let me in, but, uh, you know, I should have.

• 22:23Sam Parr?

  Why not?

• 22:24Shaan Puri?

  I should have tried harder. Yeah, why not? Exactly. Why not? What not?

• 22:27Sam Parr?

  What did they, what did they say?

• 22:29Shaan Puri?

  Well, they were just like, hey, we got like a lot of, we were oversubscribed. Let me see, and I joined the process a little late in the process. So they were like, let me see how much room we can make. And then it was sort of like, eh, we can't really make any room. Um, you know, like we kind of have people who want all the allocation already.

• 22:43Sam Parr?

  How, how'd you find them?

• 22:45Shaan Puri?

  A buddy of mine, uh, Justin had sent it to me as like, hey, I really, I'm really bullish on this one. He invested and I was like, oh, great. And I got the in and I was like, you know, and I saw it and I was like, I understand this. Dude, I like did a bunch of stuff at Twitch and live streaming. Like I can help you guys. Uh, look at me, I'm such a nice guy. And like, this was pretty early, like the podcast wasn't very big yet. Um, so I didn't have as much of a brand in any way. Twitter wasn't that big yet. And, uh, and also I didn't hustle hard enough. Like I could have hustled harder, but it was already like a decent valuation at that point. I think it was like a, it was a pretty pricey, it was a decently pricey round. I mean, still it's up 10x since then.

• 23:22Sam Parr?

  Are they young? Are they kids?

• 23:24Shaan Puri?

  No, they, uh, the guy, the founder Grant, he had a pretty impressive background. I don't remember exactly what it was, but like, look at this. So, so I went on, uh, I immediately went on whatnot, but whatnot at the time was more for like, uh, Magic and Pokemon and things like that. I like sports cards, so there's like other versions of this that are for sports cards. And so I went on one and so I did this, so I end up dropping $700 on these useless cards that I end up getting. I got nothing good out of my pack. The guy who's opening was just like, oh, you know, like the best one, this one he sent in the, in the, the frame is somebody named Ignas Bradzikis on the Knicks. Never heard of this guy, like, you know, he literally. You know, in college, you average 14 points a game. So like, I don't know who this guy is.

• 24:10Shaan Puri?

  I don't think he plays. And that was the best card I got out of it, but I dropped 700 bucks. Cause you could just with Apple Pay, you're like, oh, I want to buy a diamond pack.

• 24:17Sam Parr?

  Oh, that's how they do it?

• 24:18Shaan Puri?

  So you're just Apple paying and I'm just clicking, I'm face IDing and just dropping a hundred dollars at a time on these packs. And it's like such an addiction because it's like, dude, it could be a Luca card. It could be a Yanis card. Like you could get one of the big ones in this thing. And it was so dangerous. I was like, I can't open this app ever again. You know, this is, you know, this is a small divorce bomb that I'm, I'm looking at here. I need to like just distance myself from this.

• 24:43Sam Parr?

  Do you remember when, uh, we talked about this thing? I forgot what it was called, Ben. Maybe you can look it up. But basically when you're buying fancy art that costs like millions of dollars, you want to store it in a a free port. That's what it's called. So basically I, I, I'm gonna, I don't want to sound like too much of an idiot because we talked about this like two years ago. But I think when you're buying art, as long as you keep it in a particular type of country, you don't need to pay sales tax, I guess, on it or something like that. And, uh, so people will keep them in certain countries because they're like, I don't want this like 20 million dollar thing. I don't even want it in my house. I just want to store it. Or I'll just store like a lot of my collection. And I wonder, we, we talked about free ports for like some of these, for some of these newer collector items. And we talked about that two years ago.

• 25:27Sam Parr?

  I actually think I would like to see if there's an update, if there's anyone that launched anything like this.

• 25:32Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So basically a free port lets you store your art for an unlimited amount of time without taxation, I believe. I think they're like, you don't have to declare it. Um, so like you, you could sort of put your art there and you don't, because it's like, it's like in limbo. It's like neither here nor there. And so therefore

• 25:50Sam Parr?

  We're just, I'm holding it for a friend.

• 25:52Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. And I don't know exactly how it works. Like, I don't think it's a total free lunch. Um, in fact, I was actually, I was literally watching a video about this yesterday and then I like paused a third of the way through because I didn't do something. There's, there's a, there's a good video about this on YouTube of a guy explaining like eight minutes, uh, how free ports work. And basically, uh, yeah, it's like, uh, I think the, the entire art market is like very money laundry. Um, and even within that, then free ports are like this, like extra hack on top of that. But, uh, I want to get back, I want to get to the bottom of how free ports work. If you know, I don't think it's that complicated, but I just haven't looked into it.

• 26:27Sam Parr?

  I don't think it's that complicated either, but I wonder if you, let's say that you bought that $700 pack of cards and there was something in there that potentially was worth $5,000. Like if you could just send it to a third party just to hang on to it and then when you're ready, just click a button and sell it, maybe you would want that.

• 26:42Shaan Puri?

  Right. And there's this other thing, which is like people, like rich people will donate their art to a museum, take the tax write-off, but the museum is like a cottage on their, it's like a part of, it's like the west wing of their mansion. It's like they create these like nonprofits, like they're these nonprofit museums that exist like on their estate and things like that.

• 27:02Sam Parr?

  Is that really how it works?

• 27:03Shaan Puri?

  There's some stuff, I was in the video, he was talking about that or he mentioned that. I don't, that's not what a free port is necessarily, but I think that's just like yet another thing, like why do these people buy art for like, you know, $50 million and donate it? And it's like, well, because you know, X, Y, Z.

• 27:21Sam Parr?

  All right, that's the episode.