#210 - How Celebrities Have Made Billions off Their Names

In this episode Shaan (@ShaanVP) and Sam (@theSamParr) dive into a few industries and talk about the players behind them. They start off talking about car dealerships and the handful of politicians who make major coin through them. They then transition to celebrities and how some have leveraged their name to make even more money. They finish the episode with a few anecdotes on how some people started to accumulate wealth and a snippet on anti-aging and scientific discovery. --------- * Want to be featured in a future episode? Drop your question/comment/criticism/love here: https://www.mfmpod.com/p/hotline/ * Support the pod by spreading the word, become a referrer here: https://refer.fm/million * Have you joined our private Facebook group yet? Go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion and join thousands of other entrepreneurs and founders scheming up ideas. --------- Show notes: * (0:59) Intro * (2:47) The Skip Barber racing school * (6:48) Digitizing the gun range * (10:57) The politicians making money with car dealerships * (23:06) The cool growth hack used by Spoonflower * (28:48) Celebrities making bank of their celebrity * (35:26) George Clooney hooking up his friends with $1M cash * (39:51) A feel good story about Shaan's trainer * (41:58) The Bar & Bat Mitzvah hack to wealth * (44:57) A unique twist on Universal Basic Income - the birth dividend * (47:35) Aubrey de Grey and how scientific breakthroughs work

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

• 0:00Shaan Puri?

  Once you've been in the market for 21 years and you look at that account and you get to see it going up, you're going to like realize the value of investing and that that's like the true path to wealth.

• 0:21Sam Parr?

  All right, we're live. What's going on? How was Steph?

• 0:24Shaan Puri?

  Nice fancy pants background.

• 0:26Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I'm in Mechanism. It's a fancy, it's a fancy pants office. Do you know what Mechanism is?

• 0:33Shaan Puri?

  I've heard of it. That's the agency guy who's a friend of yours. I kind of know him a little bit now.

• 0:39Sam Parr?

  Yeah, they have an agency, maybe a 200 person agency and they've got, as you do with agencies, you've got very fancy offices in Soho in New York and no one is here and I'm in the fancy office here right now.

• 0:52Shaan Puri?

  All right, good stuff. Yeah, you missed Steph. She was great as always. So she had a bunch of ideas. It's like, I know, it's funny, like we've had Abreu be kind of like our version of Jamie, like Jeff Rogan has Jamie, we've had Abreu, we now have Dan. And you get a sense, because at the end of every episode, we go, oh, Dan, how was it? Hey, Abreu, how'd we do? And I feel like they both like really keyed in on the same thing, which I don't know if listeners care in the same way, but like the more random tangents we go on, they kind of like, they kind of love it, but they kind of hate it at the same time. Whereas when Steph comes on, it's like, here are five ideas. We're going to do idea one, then two, then three, then four, then five.

• 1:34Shaan Puri?

  What a jam packed episode of ideas. And it's like, you know, me and her don't have the same chemistry me and you have of like, just being able to go on random tangents or just kind of bullshit a little bit. And so it's more packed with info, but it's less packed with detours. And I don't know if that's good or bad, but it's packed with info. So I think, I think definitely Dan liked it. I think a lot of people will like it. But it's interesting to me how that goes.

• 1:59Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and I've also noticed that a lot of the things that I like, the things that I, if I think it's gonna be good, I think it tends not to be good. And if I think it's gonna be bad, it's gonna be bad. That's what I've noticed with content. But the reason I wasn't here is, so let me tell you this funny story about Twitter. So, four months ago, three months ago, I tweeted out that I wanted to go drive race cars. So, one of my 2021's resolution was I wanted to do more adventurous stuff. So, I want to take a sniper class lesson. I want to go hunting. Yeah, I wanted to go hunting and kill what I've eaten, which I've never done before. I wanted to do a cross-country trip. I did it. And I wanted to go learn how to do race cars. And so, I tweeted out, I wanted to go to a driving class. This professional NASCAR driver

• 2:41Sam Parr?

  named Parker hollered at me on Twitter. And so, me and Jack Butcher, who's a buddy of ours and a buddy of mine, we drove up here out to the country, two hours outside of New York to Connecticut, and we took this class. It was $2,500. It was at this place called Skip Barber, Skip Barber Driving Class. We met the owner of the class. This is a business that's a driving school. It does like 15 million in revenue. Crazy interesting. Kind of cool. It was, an ex-cop owns it, like a, like a New York cop, like in this, like, was, he's like, I'll just try it, because I don't work as a cop anymore. It turns into a thriving business. He told me his goal is to hit to 100 million in revenue in the next five years.

• 3:20Shaan Puri?

  Off this one track? Or like, he has many of these?

• 3:23Sam Parr?

  So, here's what they do. So, it's called Skip Barber Racing. It's like a famous brand. It's from the 60s. He bought it out of bankruptcy. I imagine he paid like low hundreds of thousands of dollars. He bought the brand name. It's basically a website where they get leads. So, Skip Barber, if you're into cars, it's like a famous racing school. He owns the website. And so, people go and submit leads at where they want to go. And they go and find like tracks throughout the country, and they rent like 20 days at the track. And they show up with their tractor trailer with like 20 Mustangs that you can, that they drive. And then, it's like a traveling circus. They go from place to place to place to place. It was pretty interesting.

• 3:59Shaan Puri?

  So, what'd you drive?

• 4:00Sam Parr?

  It's-

• 4:01Shaan Puri?

  By the way, I know nothing about cars. So, you're gonna say something? And I'm gonna be like, oh, cool.

• 4:03Sam Parr?

  No, no, no, no.

• 4:04Shaan Puri?

  I'm not even gonna know.

• 4:05Sam Parr?

  It looks like a Mustang, but it's like, it's a race car. So, there's no seats. You're locked in. You wear a helmet. You're locked in.

• 4:11Shaan Puri?

  What do you mean, there's no seats?

• 4:13Sam Parr?

  There's only a driving seat. Like, on the inside, it's like, it is, it's a race car. There's a roll bar. There's no like AC or radio or anything like that. But it looks like a Mustang from the outside. Anyway, that's where I was. Crazy fascinating business.

• 4:26Shaan Puri?

  That's pretty cool. While you were saying that, you said something about he used to be a cop. And we had talked about the retired, the mafia tours in New York business.

• 4:35Sam Parr?

  I'm going on it.

• 4:36Shaan Puri?

  A great idea. So if you don't, if you didn't hear that episode, it's basically retired cop in New York. Takes you on a walking tour of New York City to the different like areas where the mafia families lived. And he kind of tells you stories. It's like, we all like crime TV shows or whatever. And, uh, and this is like basically crime TV walking tour. And so you get to hear all these stories. Yes, you're going on it. That's cool. And we had said, he had done over a million dollars in sales on his Airbnb experience of doing this, which is pretty freaking awesome. So, um, this thing you're talking about though, uh, I think there could be a really cool version of that that somebody makes, which is basically a cops and robbers, like a cop chase, a car chase, basically.

• 5:18Shaan Puri?

  So they could just have a, a, a driver who knows what they're doing as the kind of like main driver. And then you get to be in a cop car, like they just take some junk cop car. And you get to drive that thing. You get to be talking on the little radio, try to get their license plate. And it's basically like a, you know, controlled simulation of a car, a cop chase, like an actual cop chase. You go, you get them, you spin them out, then you get out of the car and you get like, you arrest them as the end of it. And I feel like that would just be A, super fun and B, a lot of people would pay for that and the video of it.

• 5:54Sam Parr?

  I, uh, yeah. So we paid, I paid $2,500 for this. I think I paid an additional $300 for a video.

• 5:59Shaan Puri?

  For the video, of course.

• 6:00Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Man, it was awesome. It's fun. It's fun to do this stuff to get out of our comfort zone and do exciting stuff. Uh, so that's where I was.

• 6:08Shaan Puri?

  Nice. Uh, okay. I love that. All right. Let's do, um, let's do some ideas. I have an idea that's kind of related to this. So I was watching Dana White, who's the president of the UFC. And he was doing this YouTube video.

• 6:22Sam Parr?

  With the Knuckle Boys.

• 6:24Shaan Puri?

  No, not that one. There was this one that he was just goes, check out how sick my hotel room is right now in Houston. Did you see this?

• 6:29Sam Parr?

  Yep, and he had, uh, go.

• 6:32Shaan Puri?

  Go ahead, describe it and I'll tell you the part.

• 6:34Sam Parr?

  If I remember correctly, he had a movie theater in his hotel room. I think he had a full or no half sized basketball court.

• 6:41Shaan Puri?

  Yep, that was painted like the Rockets basketball court with the official scoreboard on the, on the, on the wall and stuff.

• 6:47Sam Parr?

  And what else did he have?

• 6:49Shaan Puri?

  He had a bunch of stuff. So he had that. He had like a full gym, like, so, you know, like hotels have a gym. His hotel room had a gym, which is kind of amazing. And then he's got like, whatever, cool bed, bathroom, full steam room. But the thing I thought was interesting, he goes, check this out. And he grabs this huge rifle off the wall. It was like a rifle, a shotgun sitting next to each other. And he was like, this is cool. It's like a virtual shooting range. And then he like, and he, they kind of panned over, they went over it real quick. So I couldn't even really see what it was, but in my head, I just immediately thought of, you've seen these like golf driving ranges that are basically, it's a green screen. And then you swing a real club and you hit a real ball into the green screen and it like simulates where it would have landed if you were on a real golf course. And those are like semi-popular.

• 7:34Shaan Puri?

  So he's got this rifle off the wall and I started thinking, oh, that's kind of cool. Basically, if you've ever held a real gun, it feels totally different than like, you know, the duck hunt gun or like an arcade gun. Like a real gun has like weight to it, has like a recoil if you fire the thing. So I was thinking, somebody could probably build a high end version of this niche business, which is basically virtual shooting ranges. So you have either a screen, like a green screen or like a plasma, like a big flat screen TV. And then you give them like what feels like a real gun, but it's like a digitally enabled thing. So you don't have to have bullets and go outside, do all that stuff. And I feel like somebody could build a pretty unique business doing that, providing that either to bars or even for at home stuff or corporate events.

• 8:19Sam Parr?

  That's a fantastic idea. Have you ever been to an indoor shooting range?

• 8:23Shaan Puri?

  Indoor shooting, oh, like where the target's there and you have the earmuffs on or whatever?

• 8:26Sam Parr?

  Yeah, just like, okay, it's miserable. So

• 8:29Shaan Puri?

  I've only done outdoors.

• 8:30Sam Parr?

  So I, the outdoor shooting ranges are fun. Indoor shooting range miserable. It has lights like a hospital and it is so loud. If you've ever been next to like an AR-15 or some like, you know, like huge gun, when it shoots, it rattles your neighbor. So you're standing right next to someone and it's not just loud, but it shakes me. And it's a miserable, unsafe, horrible experience. I would way rather do something fun like this over that.

• 8:57Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So, and I feel like because it's digital, you can do fun stuff, right? So when I went to go shoot a gun for the first time, I'm not into that, but my brother, my brother-in-law is, he, um, you know, we went and it's like you're outside. It was kind of cold. You're shooting these like paper targets. They don't move. Uh, you have to stand still every five minutes. You have to stop, reload the fucking gun. Takes time, like, there's like a lot of breaks in between the action. The action is fun, but like, there's a lot of other stuff going on. It was, it was uncomfortable and, uh, and I get that, like, you know, real man shit not supposed to be comfortable, but guess what? People like comfort. So, um, so I think what you could do instead is you basically make a souped up version of the Deer Hunter game,

• 9:39Shaan Puri?

  where you get the digital gun, but it feels like the weight of a real rifle or a real shotgun. And then you have like a digital scenario, right? You wanted to do a sniper class or I don't even know what you said, like a psychopath, but like, you probably want to like simulate actually like sniping someone at a like situation in some situation, like you can only see part of their head. They're really far away or whatever. So you could do that instead of just a paper target. So I think this could be a good idea. I'm sure something like this exists, but it's all about turning it into a business in a box or a traveling circus, like you said, and like coming up with a model that, that productizes this better.

• 10:14Sam Parr?

  I think it's a great idea and I would love to, I would love to attend.

• 10:18Shaan Puri?

  All right, let's do another one. You, uh, you pick either one for yours or one for mine.

• 10:21Sam Parr?

  This is a little bit less of an idea, but more of an experience that I had. So last week I went down to Nashville. I had an issue a few weeks ago where I had a car problem. I had to leave my car at the dealer in Nashville. I went to go pick it up and I started shooting the shit with the salesperson. They sold, he told me, this is a Mercedes Benz Music City dealership. That's what it's called. They told me that they sold 200 cars in June. Is that, does that boggle your mind? I never really thought about how many cars that is. That's $20 million in car sales in one month. That's crazy to me. And so I went and looked at what the figures were for what, how many cars are sold June to January? Cause I would think January, February would be a slow month. It's mostly pretty steady.

• 11:07Sam Parr?

  It's like 1.6 million on a high month and 1.2 million on a low, low month. It's not crazy different. So if you assume that the average sale price was a hundred thousand dollars and then you assume that they did $20 million for six of the months and $15 million for the other six, uh, six months. That's 210 million dollars in one location. And then I was talking with the guys who ran the, the company, who ran the dealership. They told me that they can expect to make 10 to 15% profit on that. Does that kind of boggle your mind that one location could do that much in sales?

• 11:40Shaan Puri?

  And was this like, did you feel like it was like an outlier location, like killer, killer real estate or something like that?

• 11:46Sam Parr?

  It's a Mercedes dealer in Nashville and there's three in the city. So did I think that that's an outlier? In one sense, yes, because they're selling, you know, expensive cars. So like, it's not like a Hyundai where you're selling $20,000 cars, but it's in, and it's also in Nashville. There's probably 10 to 20 cities in America that are of equal booming as Nashville. So outlier in one sense, yes, but not crazy outlier. And so I got interested in this and so there's this amazing website called Open Secrets. Have you heard of that?

• 12:16Shaan Puri?

  I've, I've heard of it, but I've never gone to it. What do you, you actually go to it? It's like reading WikiLeaks or something.

• 12:21Sam Parr?

  I go to it all the time and here's why. So if you go to it, you can go, it's called Open Secrets, maybe open secrets.org. And so I don't know if it's legal or if it's customary, but if you are a senator, if you're in the House of Representatives, if you're in a certain type of office in America, they typically disclose their income taxes and also what their net worth is. And you could browse through and you could see how much money they have in different bank accounts. You can see how much money they have in different stocks. You can see how much money they value their privately held business. It's incredibly fascinating. So for example, if you Google Open Secrets net worth senators, you'll see a list of the richest senators and it will tell you where their money is. And you could click it in some cases, if it's from the nineties.

• 13:04Sam Parr?

  For example, if you go and look at George Bush's net worth, you could actually see it's it's still a handwritten W two. So it's incredibly fascinating. And I browsed through there a fair bit because I think it's really fun. Who cares what if they're politicians or not? But what's interesting is that they're incredibly wealthy and you could see, how do people allocate money? Where does their income come from? How does that work? And I noticed that there was a fair bit of people who made money through car dealerships in Congress. And I actually made a list of them. So the first one, Vernon Buchanan, he's a congressman out of Florida. A hundred and fifty seven million dollar net worth. Where does his money come from? Buchanan Automotive Group, where they sell new and used cars in Florida. And he assigned fifty million.

• 13:45Shaan Puri?

  Hold on, I'm just going to this list. I did not realize these senators, there's this many senators that are this wealthy. So first, the funny thing is there's the richest and poorest. So, okay, on the top side, you have Mark Warner, richest senator. He's in Virginia, I think, and at two hundred and fourteen million. Poorest senator, poor Alcee Hastings in Florida, negative seven point five million dollar net worth. This guy is in a hole of debt. This guy is just, and you know, the the lowest one that is non negative, let's see.

• 14:20Sam Parr?

  Probably like a hundred grand or something like a.

• 14:24Shaan Puri?

  I'm exporting all these CSVs. This is gonna be great. Go on, go on, sorry.

• 14:27Sam Parr?

  And so I went and looked at some of the Congress folks that were that were rich. And it was Vernon Buchanan. He owns an automotive group. He assigned around thirty five million dollars of his net worth. Sorry, almost a hundred million dollars of his net worth to car dealerships. Ron Williams from Texas, net worth sixty seven million dollars. He had close to ten million dollars because he is part owner of a Chrysler Dodge and Jeep business. John Campbell, net worth of twenty three million dollars. He owns franchises for Nissan, Mazda, Ford, Saturn and Saab. And Mike Kelly, net worth twenty million dollars. He assigned at least five million dollars for his car dealers. It was incredibly fascinating. So I dug even deeper. This Nashville dealer, you want to know who's the co-owner?

• 15:07Shaan Puri?

  Who?

• 15:07Sam Parr?

  Nick Saban, the coach from University of Alabama. And he owns a bunch of them. He owns three, four, or five. Crazy fascinating to me about car dealers. And I was just so curious as to how the rest of them do. And so I did a little bit more research and I read different interviews with car dealers. And typically they make about five, 10% in profit. But the secret is that A, they have to make most of their money from service and parts because that's where the big margin is. And B, there's actually, there's actually a lot of ways that you can test this. So you can do loads of test advertising and they kind of do this like MVP style advertising where they'll advertise in different places, see which cars sell and then become an importer or a, sorry, a dealer of that particular car.

• 15:49Sam Parr?

  I just thought it was so fascinating about how these car dealerships work. Have you ever, like, do you know anything about this business?

• 15:56Shaan Puri?

  First of all, you're on fire right now. So I just got to give you a little bit of credit. You're on fire right now. I don't know if this is Jake, the researcher. I don't know if this is Sam, the deal hunter. I don't know what's going on, but good job. I love this. I love open secrets. I love the Senator thing and I love the car dealership thing. All right, so let me just put that on the table. Have I thought about this? No, but it's been hidden in plain sight. I grew up in Colorado and John Elway always had dealerships. It was like everywhere and I just, I never really thought about it, but like clearly the guy was making bank on these dealerships. Otherwise he wouldn't be spending so much time and energy doing all these little kind of like marketing meet and greets at his dealerships. And that combo of like local hero car dealership, I think has just worked for a long time.

• 16:40Shaan Puri?

  Like in the movie Little Giants, I think the guy, that's how the guy had his money too is like local football star, you know, car dealer. It's like, just like a formula that works. And I know that there's like the guy who's, who gets a lot of press during, whenever the Toronto Raptors do well, they have this super fan, this Sikh Indian guy who shows up at courtside of every game, Nav Bhatia.

• 17:04Sam Parr?

  I actually have him listed here. So he started as a Hyundai salesperson and he eventually started owning a car dealership and he claims his net worth is $50 million.

• 17:13Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. And he spends all of his money traveling with the team and buying courtside tickets to every single game. The guy's like a maniac. He goes to every single game and he has for like 20 years courtside and he's like cheering like crazy. And yeah, he started as a salesman. You're right. Okay, so this is kind of interesting. I want to share with you a couple of things that I can add to this. Have you ever heard of-

• 17:33Sam Parr?

  And by the way, if you scroll down, you can see all the examples I have of people who have made at least a billion dollars through car dealers. You see that?

• 17:40Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, this was pretty impressive. So the Benson family, they own the Saints, Penske, Wayne Hazinga, you love that guy. He started what, AutoNation?

• 17:48Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 17:48Shaan Puri?

  And he owns, he owns the Miami Dolphins. Yeah, that guy's a baller. We should, we should feature him. You know a lot about him. Mark Wahlberg has one, Michael Jordan has one. All right, that's pretty interesting. So that's cool. I didn't really realize that this is like one of those franchises that you kind of want to own. I wonder if that's changing. So in my head, I'm like, car dealer, isn't this dead? Like, aren't car sales just moving online? And then you have platforms like Carvana, that's like become like a $7 billion company of like buying cars online. So definitely some, some of buying cars moving online.

• 18:21Shaan Puri?

  But I, but not all. And so I actually ran into this company called Modal. Have you ever heard of Modal?

• 18:27Sam Parr?

  Tell me about it.

• 18:28Shaan Puri?

  The URL is just modalup.com. And a buddy of mine, Samir, this great guy, Samir Bala, he basically, he was gonna do a startup, and then I checked his LinkedIn, and he's like, oh, I'm COO of Modal now. I was like, what the heck? He took a job? I was like, if this guy took a job, this must be an interesting business because he would not go join a company unless he thought this company had like really good prospects. And I trust his judgment. And so I, I should have invested. I asked him to invest. He even made room and I got cold feet at the last minute for some stupid reason. But basically, I think this is a great business. What they do is they basically made it so that any dealer,

• 19:08Shaan Puri?

  it's like Shopify for car dealers in a way. So it basically lets you sell cars digitally and online. So it creates like a website, a checkout button, a buy button that you can just send customers to that, that, that want to buy from you. It also just like automates all the workflows. So like with buying a car, when you go buy a car, you're gonna end up sitting in the dealership for like an hour because there's like the paperwork. If you're, if you're doing a loan or a lease, you have to do even more paperwork. And then- You know, you just have to like, collect all these signatures and get all this stuff to get the title and your name. And these guys basically turned all that into software. And they were growing really, really well, basically going to car dealerships and getting them to adopt this software so that they could keep up and compete with the kind of like,

• 19:50Shaan Puri?

  online-only platforms. It's like, hey, don't, don't stay stuck in the brick and mortar-only ways. Yes, you're a car dealership, but you should allow some digitalization, digitalize your workflow and let your customers go check out online and just buy products. And what they do is they actually claim that they can, you know, boost sales by like, I don't know, 30, 35% or something like that. And it shortens the cycle time because usually people take quite a while to look through stuff and they, they speed up the, the purchase price, the purchase time as well. So I think this is a pretty cool business that's going to be quite big.

• 20:22Sam Parr?

  I, I'm on board with all the digital stuff. I was just fascinated at, at just the brick and mortar. And it's, it's still growing like crazy. In fact, there's loads of data on this because I didn't realize how impactful cars are. I mean, of course, I, you know, we all have them, but I didn't realize how they kind of, in a sense, are minor, maybe major players in the, in our country and how we even develop laws, things like that. And, and so there's all this data that you can go and learn about this. So the average car dealership, like the, a physical dealer, the average one in last year, 2021, did 36 million, or sorry, year to date, for the first six months, $36 million in sales in just the average car dealer. And we sell something like,

• 21:08Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, but that's like GMV, that's like car sales. So, you know, they don't, you said 10, 10 to 15% maybe is their margin on that. So that's 3 million, you know, take for the, for the whole dealership.

• 21:18Sam Parr?

  It's still astounding. And then if you can also go and look at another website you can go to is Pro Republica, and you could see which lobbies give money to the government for different laws, car dealer or the car lobby, which are, there's like eight of them. They give substantial amounts of money. And anyway, that's my, that's my segment on car dealers and cars. Pretty astounding. I was shocked by it. We can move on.

• 21:41Shaan Puri?

  You know what's cool, by the way? Tesla, no, no dealership model. So bold move by them to not have any dealers and in doing so, basically kept a lot of the profit for themselves and went direct to consumer. They're the sort of first direct-to-consumer car company that exists. So, so good job by, by Elon.

• 21:58Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and I could see that taking off, but the market is massive. Not everyone's going to do the same thing. And so there's room for everyone.

• 22:08Shaan Puri?

  Same, always holding it down for, for blue collar America. I love it. You know, in my mind, it's just two coasts squished together with some stuff in the middle. And you're like, no, no, the middle is, there's a lot of beautiful stuff in the middle. And it's not all just going away and becoming like fancy tech right away.

• 22:24Sam Parr?

  Not yet, at least.

• 22:26Shaan Puri?

  All right, uh, let's do some more. So look at my topics here and tell me which one's interesting.

• 22:30Sam Parr?

  Spoonflower is one of the most interesting things I've seen lately.

• 22:33Shaan Puri?

  Had you heard of this before, Spoonflower?

• 22:35Sam Parr?

  No, no.

• 22:36Shaan Puri?

  So check it out, I don't even know the URL, I think it's just spoonflower.com. Uh, they, they sold for $225 million. So I, I got familiar with this because, uh, for a clothing company that we were working on, we need to look at patterns. And I was like, where do you find patterns online? And you can find patterns in many places, but one place was Spoonflower. So this is basically a marketplace where you have on one side designers who come up with like, let's say a nice floral pattern or sunflower pattern. And then you can take those, so like, I think your mother-in-law is doing like a pillow business. And so she could go on Spoonflower and say, ooh, I really like this fabric swatch pattern.

• 23:17Shaan Puri?

  Um, I want to basically buy this pattern and turn it into pillows. I want to buy this pattern and turn it into wallpaper. And so you can use it for all the things that patterns go on. Wallpaper, you know, like mats, uh, pillowcases, whatever, different stuff like that. Blankets, curtains, shit like that. So it's this like niche marketplace you, most people haven't even heard of. And then you go there and you see it and you're like, oh, this makes total sense. And so they sold for 225 million to Shutterfly. I thought it was really cool and just like kind of this niche product that has been around for a while that sold. And then I wanted to share also a growth hack, but what's your kind of like first reaction to this?

• 23:57Sam Parr?

  I think this is brilliant. I'm looking at it right now. There's a few reasons why I like this company. The first is that I believe it's based in, in North Carolina. I like things that are not in Silicon Valley, not in the heart. I think, or not in the heart of, uh, tech, technology hubs. I think that's amazing. There's so many wonderful things about this business. It's just, I mean, it's a win, win, win type of company where, where you help people make money. You help people get what they want. The company Spoonflower makes a little bit of cash. I'm into it.

• 24:24Shaan Puri?

  Right, and it was started in 2008, so it's been around for a while. It's one of these that like, like most marketplaces, marketplaces are extremely valuable when you get them to work, but they can take time to work because you have to get that, you have to keep cranking the wheel of supply and demand to get it to work. You need enough designs and enough designers, you need enough buyers, and then you have to keep like, do a lot of manual stuff to make that work. So one thing I liked, this guy who listens to the pod, Adam, Adam Kiesling, I think is how you say his name. He was talking about this deal, and he was pointing out this like, this method that they used to grow. And he's like, I'll just share with you a couple of things that he pointed out.

• 25:03Shaan Puri?

  So Spoonflower, 3.3 million unique artists, 4,000 new designs uploaded on average every day. So that's like pretty crazy scale. And what they did was, they would do design challenges. And so Spoonflower would host a design challenge, and then the top 50 voted, popular voted designs would get featured as the winner circle. And it would get to the top of the website, and then if you go to the website, you click like, you know, oh, let me see the best Halloween designs. That would drive like 95% of the sales to a lot of the creators. So it was kind of feast or famine. You would, you'd take your shot to get noticed, but if you got noticed, you would get a ton of inbound sales

• 25:44Shaan Puri?

  for, for those, for those contests, right? And it might just be like 1,000 or 2,000 people participating in each one. And so I thought this is a pretty smart model of how they bootstrap the marketplace. So they're like, alright, we need, buyers want content for Halloween. How do I get a bunch of designers to make the right Halloween content and make it all, make a bunch of new ideas that are unique? You can only find them on Spoonflower. I'll host this contest, and the contest winners get like, I don't know, hundreds of dollars, thousands of dollars. It doesn't have to be too much money. And they get exposure through that, through that process. And then he was, Adam was sharing that like, you know, Food 52, that they used to do the same thing. When they were seeding their marketplace of recipes, right, they had chefs uploading recipes and then people coming to download them.

• 26:27Shaan Puri?

  They would, they created a contest called your best recipe using fresh mozzarella. Right. So give me your best mozzarella recipe. And then, you know, they would get Whole Foods to sponsor it and get a gift card. And then they're like, the grand prize is $1,000, right? And so they would keep doing these contests around things that people were searching for in order to seed the marketplace with the right content. So I thought that was a cool learning as well from this.

• 26:50Sam Parr?

  This is amazing. And what's even more interesting or as interesting is that Shutterfly bought them. I forgot about Shutterfly. I just looked it up. Shutterfly, I think they got, did they, did they get delisted? They were public. They had a $2 billion market cap and like close to $2 billion in revenue.

• 27:06Shaan Puri?

  Right. And so that's a complicated, that's a, that's a crazy space, the show that where Shutterfly is. So, you know, good luck. Good luck to them on that one.

• 27:15Sam Parr?

  Spoonflower is badass. Can we, um, can I tell you something that surprised me? So, so the other day Rihanna was named a billionaire. That's pretty amazing, right?

• 27:26Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 27:26Sam Parr?

  I think that's amazing. And so I got curious. I started working with Jake. I was like, what other celebrities have gotten rich in ways that I wouldn't really have known right away? And it kind of got, I kind of got

• 27:39Shaan Puri?

  YouTube, this is going to be a YouTube segment right here. 10 celebrities that got rich, not from their fame.

• 27:45Sam Parr?

  Well, it's, it is a little bit extended from the fame, but I'm going to give you six of them. So the first, you know who Jimmy Buffett is? You're not, you're not, you're not white, so you may not be into Jimmy Buffett.

• 27:54Shaan Puri?

  I've heard the name, but if you said point, here's five old white guys, point out Jimmy Buffett. I would just point to the far right. I have no idea.

• 28:00Sam Parr?

  So Jimmy Buffett, I don't even know how to just explain them. White 60 year olds who wear Tommy Bahama. Do you even know what that is?

• 28:06Shaan Puri?

  Yes, I know that one.

• 28:07Sam Parr?

  Okay. White 60 year olds who wear Tommy Bahama love him. He's the guy who created Cheeseburger in Paradise, that song. So he also had this album called Margaritaville. It's all about the Caribbean and being on a boat and like living this like parrot style life. I think that's Parrot Heads is what he's called. So he's got Margaritaville. It's a subsidiary of Cheeseburger Holding Company, which is pretty funny. He's got 30 restaurants and he has vacation clubs, hotels, a retirement village and tequila. Collectively, the holdings do something like $2 billion a year in sales. Is that crazy? Then you also probably don't know about this one. This isn't in your wheelhouse, but Dolly Parton. Do you know Dolly Parton?

• 28:47Shaan Puri?

  Is that his girlfriend? Who is this?

• 28:49Sam Parr?

  You don't know who Dolly Parton is?

• 28:50Shaan Puri?

  Again, I've heard the name. If you showed me five old white ladies, I couldn't point out Dolly Parton.

• 28:55Sam Parr?

  So Dolly Parton was a famous country singer, but she did more than just country. Have you heard the song, I Will Always Love You by Whitney Houston?

• 29:02Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 29:03Sam Parr?

  She wrote that. She wrote, working nine to five, which has been covered many times. She's just a hitmaker, but she was famous. You probably remember photos of her. She's in her probably close to eighties now, seventies, but she's famous for having blonde hair and huge boobs. You definitely like remember her. She's had famous phrases like, you wouldn't, you wouldn't be, you'd be amazed at how much money it costs to look this cheap. She's got phrases like that, but she's actually a great person and she has an empire.

• 29:28Shaan Puri?

  Great person.

• 29:30Sam Parr?

  Well, she's like, well, she's like, she's known for her philanthropy and for doing good. She, she gives back to the community. She seems like a wonderful person and it's kind of a joke that she looks cheap. That's like her joke. But it's estimated that she has a net worth of like $600 million and I was driving through the Smokies recently, just two weeks ago, and I drove through Gatlinburg, Tennessee, which is a small town in the mountains of Tennessee. And right outside of that, she has a fucking theme park. It's called Dollywood. Her name's Dolly Parton. She has Dollywood. There's rides. It's a huge deal. It's amazing. They've got, just imagine Six Flags, but it's all about Dolly Parton and it's called Dollywood. It's amazing.

• 30:09Shaan Puri?

  You know, we're like 15 years away from like Paul World in, in LA and it's the Paul Brothers, you know, version of Disney World. That's what's going to happen here. They are Dolly Partons of our generation.

• 30:21Sam Parr?

  It could be. So I'm shocked. You've never heard of Dollywood, Dollywood, Dolly World. You've never heard of that, Dollywood?

• 30:26Shaan Puri?

  No, no.

• 30:27Sam Parr?

  It's a huge thing. It's very big. Like it's like a mini Six Flags. It's not even a mini Six Flags. It's almost as big as Six Flags and people in the South, I'm from Missouri. I live in Tennessee, so I'm kind of Southern. People in the South are obsessed with it. That's where you go on vacation. You go to Dollywood and then you actually go to a lot of different casinos in the South. You'll see Dolly Parton themed.

• 30:47Shaan Puri?

  Casinos.

• 30:48Sam Parr?

  Casinos. It's crazy. All right. Another one. Sammy Hagar. That doesn't ring a bell either to you, does it?

• 30:54Shaan Puri?

  No, this is just a humiliate John session.

• 30:56Sam Parr?

  God, that's so funny. Van Halen. Do you know what Van Halen is?

• 31:00Shaan Puri?

  I heard the name.

• 31:01Sam Parr?

  Dude, dude, you are so.

• 31:03Shaan Puri?

  Couldn't hum a song if I wanted to.

• 31:06Sam Parr?

  That's so funny. Okay, so Sammy Hagar from Van Halen, he sold a tequila company for around $80 million. And it was a tequila brand. And I'll just tell you two quick ones. You don't know any of these people. It's all just like white, basic people. Kate Hudson, you know?

• 31:21Shaan Puri?

  I know Kate Hudson, but I see the word fabletics written here. She, what did she have to do with fabletics?

• 31:27Sam Parr?

  She helped start it. She was one of the co-founders.

• 31:29Shaan Puri?

  No way. Okay, I didn't know that.

• 31:31Sam Parr?

  Crazy, right? Your wife probably wears it. I mean, it's like a, they sell fancy tights, right? 2020 revenue, $500 million. Wild.

• 31:42Sam Parr?

  And then finally, Jessica Alba.

• 31:44Shaan Puri?

  She owns 20% of it. Yeah, I know Jessica Alba.

• 31:47Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so 20%, meaningful. And finally, Jessica Alba started or helped start the Honest Company. It just IPOed. It's got a market cap north of $1 billion, I believe. And her stake around $130 million. It's pretty amazing, right?

• 32:04Shaan Puri?

  I like it. Yeah. So what do you, what do you think is like the best model? So what do we see here? We saw like entertainment, so hotels, casinos, you know, like kind of like amusement parks. Then we saw basically like makeup company, skincare company, you know, fragrance company and alcohol brand. Which one do you like? Or do you think there's another one that there are celebrities are sort of leaving on the table?

• 32:29Sam Parr?

  Alcohol seems like the best. Conor McGregor recently did it. He sold Proper 12. I believe his stake was worth around $100 million. I think alcohol is the best one because you can charge $50 for a bottle of a certain type of alcohol. And there's a chance that someone will want to buy that many times a month. So I think alcohol is interesting. Makeup's okay. I obviously don't know anything about that. Rihanna crushed it. Her brand is killing it. It's called, what's it called? Fenty? And she's got, she's got, she's got a couple of brands. They kill it. But I think alcohol is number one, though I do think that there's a world, if I was a Lance Armstrong, and I've told him he should. Done this when he was on the podcast. If I was a Lance Armstrong, a Michael Phelps, something like that, I would 100% partner with a hotel brand and do fitness focused hotels.

• 33:14Sam Parr?

  And try to have branded, a branded pool or a branded pool instruction that you could do in that pool, like a workout or do a cycling branded hotel. I think that would crush. And I think you could make money for every year for 50 years to end that.

• 33:27Shaan Puri?

  Right. Yeah, I think doing something that's on brand is kind of the key. Like Sam Harris doing this with a, Sam Harris did this with a meditation app, right? Because that's what's on brand for him. If Sam Harris came out with alcohol or like, you know, like a skincare line, no, thank you. But Sam Harris with a meditation app, that can work. And I think that thing prints money.

• 33:52Sam Parr?

  It does. And so I've heard. All right. You want to do a few more?

• 33:56Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, Dan has one on here, by the way. George Clooney, make it a billion dollars with Casa Amigos, tequila. Somebody told me this story. I didn't plan to say this. I don't know if it's true or not. I might be making it up. George, have you heard this George Clooney giving his friends a million dollars each?

• 34:12Sam Parr?

  No.

• 34:13Shaan Puri?

  So George Clooney, this is the story. So, so George Clooney, at one point in time, he was like, you know, when I, I think he was thinking like, when, when I retire, when I die, like, I want to basically give some of my wealth to my friends because these friends are like, some of the best people in my life. I used to sleep on their couch when I was like trying to make it. And they really like helped me in one way or another. All these friends have helped me. And then he decided like, okay, why am I going to wait till I die? Like, that doesn't make any sense. And so he invited them all to like, a dinner or like a dinner at his like, whatever cabin or something like that. I'm making up a lot of these details, but what I was told was he invites them

• 34:53Shaan Puri?

  all to a dinner and he brings 14 briefcases or like suitcases, a Tumi suitcase, actually. Each one was filled with a million dollars in cash and he invited them over for dinner and he gave each of them the suitcase and they each just got a million dollars from him. And he was like,

• 35:12Shaan Puri?

  you know, I've been through some hard times and, you know, I want you to not have to worry about your kids, your mortgage, your school, whatever it is. You know, here you go. Enjoy. And I was like, that is a baller move. I love that. Why haven't I heard this story before? I think that's kind of amazing.

• 35:28Sam Parr?

  And that actually is comes to a point. I've actually been reading about this lately. So there's this great book and this concept called Die With Zero. Have you heard of this?

• 35:37Shaan Puri?

  No, but I get the idea just off the title. So it's a good title.

• 35:40Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So it's called Die With Zero. And the idea that we all have is I want to try to earn money. And when I die, I've got something to give away to my family. And if you don't have family, I can give away to causes that I care about. And this whole concept behind Die With Zero is why would you do that? And regardless if you believe in heaven or not, I don't. What I think, when I was like, well, when I die, it's going to feel like just how it felt like before I was born.

• 36:05Shaan Puri?

  Right, nothing.

• 36:06Sam Parr?

  And how did it feel like before I was born? Nothing. So do I really care about a legacy? Like, do I care about what people are saying about like about me when I'm, you know, pre-born feeling?

• 36:17Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 36:18Sam Parr?

  Of course, I don't care. So if I'm gonna, and that's not, he actually doesn't say that in the book. That's my, that's me. But the point of the book is, all right, why would you care so much about what you're going to do when you're dead? Just give it to people or your friends, like do that plan before you die and enjoy it with your friends and family.

• 36:34Shaan Puri?

  Create a giving plan now. If giving matters to you, create a giving plan now and do X to you on it now and not when you're dead, right? Two scenarios. Scenario one, you wait till you're 88 years old, 92 years old, you pass away. Then there's a will reading and, you know, a couple of your friends are there. They're also in their 88, the 88 to 92 year old range. And your kids are there and their kids are there, whatever. And you pass, you know, you pass along some money to them. And your 88 year old friend is like, oh, thanks for the, thanks for the million dollars, George. Appreciate it. Like it'll go straight to my like, you know, dialysis machine.

• 37:09Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 37:09Shaan Puri?

  You know, like, what do I need this for? And your kids are also like, cool, could I use that when I was paying off student debt for years or like wanted to start a business? But now that I'm 42, I'm glad that, I'm 45, I'm glad I got this, this inheritance from you. Thank you. And so, so that's scenario one. Scenario two, you invite your friends over for dinner. You bring a Tumi suitcase with a million dollars in it and you say, When I eat, we all eat. Let's go. And basically, you hook up the people who have helped you and it mattered to you, and you helped their lives today, because why wait 40 years and let them have more discomfort or suffering along the way? When you could, if you're trying to give to make an impact, impact today is worth a lot more than impact 45 years from now.

• 37:54Shaan Puri?

  And so I'm a big believer in this. I hadn't really thought about it till I heard this George Clooney story. But when I heard it, I was like, oh. And you know, my friends, if I invite you to a dinner in a cabin, and I show up with 14 suitcases, like you know what's happening. I'm about to George Clooney your ass, because that's what's going on. And I really have taken this mindset of when I eat, we all eat. And I really think it's a lot more fun to live that way. The other little story I'll share. I was talking to my trainer, and I was like, I was like, so I call him Jay. I was like, yo Jay, so you know about my goals, my dreams, you're helping me get there because you're my coach. Like, and you talk about like, you want to spin up your business, you're starting this fashion line, great, like,

• 38:39Shaan Puri?

  what's your like, what is your dream, though? Like, we do this imagination exercise. You know what I'm imagining for myself. And we love that feeling and we use that. What's yours? And he has this thing, which is you don't imagine the outcome. So like, let's say you wanted to be rich. You don't imagine selling your company to HubSpot and looking in your bank account and seeing X dollars. You imagine like, the congratulatory conversation. Like, once it happens, you won't be so fixated on it happening. Your life will just be different because it happened, right? So you might imagine, you know, you're, you know, you might imagine your friend calling you congratulating you on the deal. Or you might imagine booking a trip because you have all this free time now.

• 39:19Shaan Puri?

  And so you don't imagine the money, you imagine what happens after you had it. And you know, this is the sort of implied state. So anyways, his was, I imagine getting a text from my mom saying, you know, son, thank you for the $6,000 this month. Like, that's huge for me. Like, you know, I'm so grateful to have a son like you. Thank you so much. And then, so he was talking about that. I was like, oh, that's cool. So instead of saying, I want to be a millionaire so that I can forgive my mom something, he imagines the text from his mom. And then that got him thinking. So the next day he goes and he sends her $600. He's like, like, I can't send her 6,000 every month right now, but I can send her 600 today. And then he showed me the text he got the next morning and it was literally like almost word for word what he had told me in the garage. He was like, she had, she texted him. She's

• 40:04Shaan Puri?

  like, son, I don't know what I did to deserve such a blessing of a son like you. The money you sent me, you don't even know. I needed that. Like, it's going to go to exactly what I need. Thank you so much. Like, you know, I love you so much, son. I hope you're, you know, I hope you're doing well. And I was like, damn, that was kind of cool to see it come together. And I love that he didn't wait till it was all done to start the giving plan.

• 40:26Sam Parr?

  All right. So since you were talking about giving money away, I saw that you wrote something pretty funny in our document called "The Jewish Hack to Wealth." I totally agree with you. I have so many-

• 40:40Shaan Puri?

  By the way, I don't even have more to say. That's just kind of it.

• 40:44Sam Parr?

  I have, I, my, my wife is from a Jewish family. I've got a lot of my Jewish friends. I am so envious of how the, and at my wedding, when we, all of our Jewish guests, they gave us-

• 40:56Shaan Puri?

  Double.

• 40:57Sam Parr?

  Significant checks. I also think it's a New York thing, or I don't know if it's a New York thing or a Jewish thing, but my Missouri friends would give $100. Our Jewish New Yorker friends would give $1,000.

• 41:09Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 41:09Sam Parr?

  And it was amazing. And I think that there's something in the, in that particular community where you give a significant amount of money for gifts so you can help one another out and, and money kind of flows a little bit more freely. And getting eight or $5,000 or something, when you're 16 years old or 15 years old, I've talked to some kids, that's like how a lot of like interesting businesses have been started. They said they use their bar mitzvah money. I completely agree.

• 41:36Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. I, I don't know how many Jews there are in the world. I think there's like 10 million Jews, something like that.

• 41:41Sam Parr?

  It's like 20, I think.

• 41:43Shaan Puri?

  14, yeah, something like that. 14, 20 million. Not a lot. But Jewish people have, they punch above their weight. They have a lot of impact. They have a lot of power. They have a lot of success. And I don't think it's genetic. I think it's cultural. I think basically there's a strong foundation of basically like helping each other out. So everything from birthright, right? Like a free, basically all expense paid trip to your home country. At one point in your life, that's kind of an amazing program. And that keeps the, instead of the brain drain and people just sort of like leaving and not having this like emotional tie to the culture. No, that one transformative experience keeps people tied in. There's, you know, bar mitzvah, right?

• 42:25Shaan Puri?

  So like, I have, I don't know how many times I've heard, yeah, I just took all my bar mitzvah money and I use that to like, start the business or I use that to like, start investing in the stock market and like, like my buddy, he had, I think, I don't know if he had like 12 grand or something like 10 grand from his bar mitzvah, like money, something like that, like when he was whatever, I don't know how old you are, 13 or something when it happens. And by the time we were in college, he was like, he's like, got a fucking portfolio of a quarter million dollars. And I'm like, what, how do you have all this money? And he's like, oh yeah, it's just been compounding for, you know, for 10 years, basically. And he's like, yeah, one of the guys, you know, our family friend who gave us the thing, he didn't even give me cash. He gave me straight stock of this one biotech company that he really believed in.

• 43:10Shaan Puri?

  And the biotech company has like 10x in the seven year period. And yeah, so like I have, you know, what do we want to do? I got $200,000 if we wanted to start a business. And I was like, man, what a hack. And so, two things, I think it's amazing. I think more culture should do this. I also had heard a pretty interesting idea of like, you know, universal basic income? So it's like the idea of like, every year you give people some amount of money, $10,000 a year or whatever, I don't know what the proposed numbers are, but some amount of money is your universal basic income, like social security for all people. And it's like pretty expensive. And so, some people think it's great, some people think it's bad. I don't really know, I don't really care. But I do think this other idea I heard was better, which was, what if you got a birth

• 43:55Shaan Puri?

  dividend? So let's say every US citizen, when you're born, the government or whoever puts $2,500 in your account, could be $2,500, $5,000, something like that. So from age zero to, and you can't touch it till you're 21.

• 44:13Shaan Puri?

  So age zero to 21, you have this thing compounding. And if something's compounding over 21 years, it's going to double probably at least, I think, three times, so three to four times. And so everybody walking out at 21 years old would have $15,000 to $20,000 ready for them to do whatever they want as a cushion for life, as a way to start something, as a way to fund a creative pursuit if they want to be an artist or whatever. And I thought that was a pretty powerful idea and like a great sort of one-time bonus for every citizen.

• 44:49Sam Parr?

  Who does that?

• 44:50Shaan Puri?

  And then it's invested, so it's actually fueling the economy. So it's not like universal basic income where you get it, you might save it, you might spend it, you don't know what you'll do, but it's going to be invested in like an index for 21 years.

• 45:03Sam Parr?

  And then in doing that, everyone is bought into a particular type of thing. And so that way, even if you have different opinions, so I think that we should do this, I think we should do that, that's cool. But at least we all have a little bit, even if just a tiny bit of skin of the game. And so we're incentivized in a similar way.

• 45:21Shaan Puri?

  And everybody would learn about investing and compounding and the benefit of time in market, right? Time in market is the most important thing, right? There's a Buffett phrase, time in market is over, but I take that over timing the market. And so if you, once you've been in the market for 21 years and you look at that account and you get to see it going up, you're going to like realize the value of investing and that that's like the true path to wealth if you just do more of that. Whereas if you never get started, then you never really feel it real. So I think that's a big benefit. I think we should have the American butt mitts for fun.

• 45:56Sam Parr?

  That's actually a great idea. That's incredibly interesting. All right, maybe we want to do one last one. Tell me about Aubrey de Grey, because I've known a little bit. I've known a little bit about him. I've listened to podcasts with this guy. I believe he's an anti-aging doctor and professor.

• 46:15Shaan Puri?

  Yes. This is a funny story. I find it funny. Other people are gonna be like, how could you say that's funny? The funny, it's ironic. I went on Twitter last night, as I do, and I see this tweet that says Aubrey de Grey is a sexual predator. I don't know who Aubrey de Grey is. So I'm like, but that's a bold tweet. Okay, what are you talking about? So, you know, my gossip, the gossip part of me starts getting excited. So I click it. I start trying to see what's going on. And basically, two things happened. I found out that this person Aubrey de Grey has, you know, kind of like, I don't know exactly what they've done, but made people feel uncomfortable at the least, and maybe sexually harassed people at the most. I'm not

• 46:56Shaan Puri?

  100% sure. But basically, two women who are in that field, Laura Denning and I forgot the other person's name, they came out yesterday or recently this week, something like that, and they published stories saying Aubrey de Grey, you know, made me feel uncomfortable, said things to me that were totally inappropriate, abuse of power, and the organization that funds him knew about this, covered it up because he was so important for fundraising and for the science of this, because he's been basically like a lifelong leader of this movement of anti-aging. So I see that, and I'm like, all right, who's this Aubrey? I just want to see what he looks like. What is this Aubrey de Grey guy? He's got this huge beard. Have you seen him?

• 47:36Sam Parr?

  Yes, he looks like, a little bit like, there was a, what's the famous philosopher from the Soviet Union? Not Nostradamus, Rats Putin?

• 47:46Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, he looks like Gandalf or Dumbledore or something like that. You know, he looks like, you know, of that lineage. You wouldn't be surprised if he's Dumbledore's cousin. So I see him, and I'm like, oh, that's interesting. What's this guy like all about? What is he a big deal? And I click, and I see two things. One, I click and I listen to this TED Talk. And ironically, the funniest thing in the TED Talk was at the end, somebody asked a question, and they go, "If you're so into anti-aging, why do you try to look like an old man?"

• 48:15Sam Parr?

  That's pretty good.

• 48:16Shaan Puri?

  That was hilarious. The second thing is, this guy is pretty fascinating, very charismatic, very weird, and very interesting. And the whole topic of anti-aging is fascinating. And so I know yesterday was like, he's getting canceled, and like, you know, he probably did some fucked up things. I don't really know the guy's character. Maybe he's a bad guy. I have no idea. But this topic of anti-aging and that was ironic that that was my entry point into it, but I was blown away by what's going on in this field. So I wanted to kind of share this with you. I basically wanted to like summarize this guy's TED Talk for you in like two minutes. So he gives us TED Talk back in 2005 and he's talking a million miles a minute. I talk fast, he talks 10 times faster than me. And he's

• 48:59Shaan Puri?

  got these slides that are the white with black text and then like red font callouts of like his opinion. So he took like, you know, 12 minutes to make these slides, but they're actually very effective at communicating. And so he, he basically gives us talk, he goes,

• 49:15Shaan Puri?

  aging and illness and death are, you know, people think today that these are inevitable and that they're okay and that they're good. I don't think any of those things are true. I do not think it's inevitable. I think we will defeat aging. I think we will, we will be able to live thousands of years. I do not think they're good. And I do not think we should just sit by and just let, let, you know, 150,000 people die every day. That was like how he starts, right? So you're like, okay, tell me more. He's like, first, I'm going to tell you about the bad arguments against what I'm trying to say, right? By the end of this, I'm going to convince you that it's not only possible, it is probable that we're going to do this. And I'll tell you how. But before that, I will convince you, I'll let me get rid of some of these really bad arguments. He's

• 49:59Shaan Puri?

  like, bad argument number one, oh, we'd be so bored if we didn't die, right? Bad argument number two is, oh, the population will get too big and we'll, we're, humans are bad for the earth or whatever, right? And he goes through these arguments. He kind of like debunks each one of them very quickly. And he's basically like, look, what we want to do is we want to be healthy for a long time, right? We're not just trying to be old and like dependent and feeble for a long time. We want to be healthy for a long time. And he's like, here's what's going on in this field. And so this was kind of interesting to me. I didn't know any of this. So he's like, there's two schools. He's like, first, why do we die? And he's like, why do we die? We die for two reasons. He's like, to live, our body does all these metabolic processes.

• 50:41Shaan Puri?

  Basically, like, heating your body, cooling your body, immune system, digesting food, like, you know, learning, growing, building muscle. All these are metabolic processes. We do them to live. And just like any machinery, like a car or a factory, the more you use the machinery, the more like, as the physics of the thing moving happens, damage happens over time. It accumulates and eventually the thing breaks and stops working. So he goes, living creates damage. Damage is happening all the time and then eventually the damage kills your cells and then you die. And he's like, alright, so there's two schools of thought. School thought number one is that let's stop the damage.

• 51:24Shaan Puri?

  Prevent damage, right? Prevention is better than the cure. And he's like, bad idea. We barely even know how metabolism works. And it's highly unlikely that you're going to be able to keep the high function of the machine running. And like, stop damage from happening. Damage seems kind of like inevitable, if the machine's gonna run. And he's like, that's called whatever one school of thought. Doesn't matter what this called, what the name is. He's like, then there's another called geriatrics. Geriatrics basically is like, cool, damage happens, but how do we like, either repair damage? Or, or like, limit the damage so that it doesn't kill your cells? And he's like, that's where I think the, this is gonna work. So here's like, this guy's case on how this is gonna work.

• 52:04Shaan Puri?

  He goes, we are gonna reach a point where we have a therapy called human rejuvenation, rejuvenation therapy. H J R. I think it's H R, H R T or something like that. I don't know what he calls it. Human rejuvenation therapy. Let's just call it that for short. He's like, basically, you're gonna, he's like, what we know is that you're living. By the way, is this boring or should I keep going?

• 52:28Sam Parr?

  No, I'm looking at, I'm looking at what he's saying now. As you go, keep going.

• 52:31Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so, so basically, he's saying like, he's like, one thing we noticed is that the damage is happening from the day we're born, right? You, your cells function, you damage, but you don't really feel the effects until you're like, middle aged or getting older. So forty, fifty, sixty, that's when you start to, the damage starts to accumulate, the cells start to die. And that's when brain function slows down, muscle function slows down, reaction time slows down. He's like, so it, there's this like, point where there's too much damage. So we need to give you a therapy before then. He's like, We can't just like modify your DNA so there's no damage happening. What we need to do is by the time you're 30 or 40, we need to be able to give you something that's gonna like repair the damage that's happening faster than the damage is happening. And he's like, that's how we're gonna solve this.

• 53:16Shaan Puri?

  Number two, we're gonna solve it first in mice before we solve it in humans. He goes, mouse lives two years. The test is gonna be, can you get the mouse to live five years? But here's the trick. You can't breed the mouse differently. You have to let the mouse live normally for 18 months. And then you have to give him something at 18 months that extends life by two years. That's gonna be the test. And he's actually put up like a million and a half dollar prize or whatever. Like there's a multimillion dollar prize for anybody that can do that. You have to do a test where it's like an X prize. It's like, let a mouse live for 18 months, give him a therapy, and now his life needs to be extended. And in the control where you don't give the mouse the thing, he needs to die six months later as planned. And so that's like the, that's the breaking point.

• 54:01Shaan Puri?

  He's like, once we figure out how to do that, then like 10, 15, 20 years later, or something like that, we'll be able to translate that into humans. But we don't know how to do it in mice yet. He's like, right now, we can extend their life a few months, but not years. He goes, the second thing, people think that this is really far away. Like, oh yeah, maybe people will live forever, but not in my lifetime. He goes, the way that science works is it has this curve. He shows like, if you were 80 years old and we discover this shit, it's too late for you, you're dying. If you're 60 years old and we discover this shit, it's kinda too late for you, you're dying. If you're 50 and we discover it, we might extend you by a good 30 years, but you're probably gonna die at that point.

• 54:44Shaan Puri?

  He's like, but if you're 40 or 30 and we discover this, and that like when, at the time when we discover this? You like have escape velocity, as I call it, meaning I'm gonna give you the therapy before enough damages happen and you're gonna live like the guy who's 10 years older than you is gonna live till he's 150 and you're gonna live till you're 1,000. He's like, that blows people's minds, but it's true. It's just the way that this works, which is, once we have the therapy, the difference between somebody living an extra 40 or 50 years and an extra 1,000 years will just be like a 10-year age gap because you'll be just below that threshold of damage.

• 55:19Sam Parr?

  How far away are we?

• 55:20Shaan Puri?

  And so he's like, the part, he said, then he just discusses the science of breakthroughs. He goes, in every field, there are breakthroughs. Breakthroughs are extremely hard to predict when they happen. He's like flight, even, you know, from prehistoric ages, we've had this idea of being able to fly. And then nobody knew how to fly until like 1903. 1903, the Wright brothers figure out how to fly. And then from there, it's like every 25 years, there's like a pretty big jump from two dudes in a plane that's basically gonna kill you to like a plane that's reliable, to a plane that can go really far, to supersonic planes, to like, now we get on a plane, it's super safe, you go to sleep, you watch a movie and you fly, right? Like every 25 years, incremental progress happens after the breakthrough.

• 56:02Shaan Puri?

  But you, so you can predict incremental progress. So he knows after we get the breakthrough of figuring out mice, we're gonna have like 15, 20 years before we get it to, to, to be a therapy in humans that extends life 20 or 30 years, a healthy life. But, you know, we don't know when that breakthrough is gonna happen. He's like, the bad part is, it's been like 100 years and basically, nothing's happened for, for this breakthrough. And so, so yeah, so that's where, that's kind of like where it's at right now. But I was pretty fascinated. I was like, I wanna go, this is just like a, like, I'm at the TED Talk level. So like, you know, that's the surface of the surface, but I'm very interested in going deeper and learning more.

• 56:38Sam Parr?

  So there's this book on longevity, I believe it's called Lifespan. I'm, I'm gonna, I'm thinking about reading it. I'm very fascinated by this, too. It, it, something that I've been thinking about, and we're gonna have to wrap up here. It's all like, when I was thinking about dying, it seems like we mostly like all just die from like some type of cancer or Alzheimer's or something like that. Like we, like if the timeline's long enough, like we're all gonna get cancer or like some type of Alzheimer's or something like that and die. And I've always been wondering to myself, Isn't it weird to you that with everything that we have, that someone could still die from one of these illnesses that you could have, you could have had for six, 12, 24 months? Like, I've always thought, like, you should know right away. You should know, like, once that cell forms. Or, you know, I don't know anything about medicine, but

• 57:23Sam Parr?

  you understand. And so, anyway, this is, I've also been obsessing with that. Maybe it's because, like, I'm getting in my, my 30s now, and I'm like, well, I kinda, I'm very slowly, but I kinda just felt like a little bit of, like, soreness. I don't wanna, like, get older, and I'm flipping out a little bit. So, I'm on board with this. I'm gonna start reading this.

• 57:43Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, there's, um, there's, uh, what's it called? There's a chart that's great. And the chart basically shows why do people die? And it's like, it's like a visual chart. So, it's like, uh, blue, if it's, um, you know, it's, it just happens in yourself. It's non-transmissible. Red is if one person passes it to another, like the flu, or COVID, or whatever. And then there's like, uh, the size of the bubble is basically how many people die of that every year. It's like, number one is cardiovascular disease, and then number two is cancer. And that's like, you know, that's bulk of the deaths, right? And then, like, number five is influenza. And then you kind of, you know, whatever, you go on from there. So, you're right. It is these sort of same causes, stuff that people are trying to fix, but, uh, no,

• 58:25Shaan Puri?

  no breakthrough yet that, like, just radically eliminates that. Like, remember when people used to die of cancer? That will happen. It's just a matter of when, uh, which is pretty sweet, honestly.

• 58:36Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's interesting to me. Um, all right. I think that, uh, that episode was a nine out of 10. What do you think?

• 58:43Shaan Puri?

  I liked it. What do you think, Dan? I'll give you a nine as well.

• 58:47Sam Parr?

  All right. I think that was good.

• 58:50Shaan Puri?

  Dan's got a little bit of, uh, of a Ned Flanders in him. I can see Dan being the Ned Flanders of a neighborhood. I don't think that's a compliment.

• 58:58Sam Parr?

  It's definitely a compliment.

• 59:01Shaan Puri?

  Cheerful, great neighbor. What's wrong with Ned Flanders? All right. I'll take it. Like, a very positive guy.

• 59:06Sam Parr?

  Yes. That, I thought that was a compliment. All right. Thank you. That's the episode.