MFM Goes Viral on TikTok, Solana Billionaires, Right to Be Forgotten, and More

Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (@theSamParr) discuss how they were able to get more than 10M views on TikTok, why Solana billionaires are giving them FOMO, the right to be forgotten and companies that are helping people achieve it, and much more. _____ * 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: (00:30) - How MFM went viral on TikTok (07:55) - Right to be forgotten and Reputation.com (21:20) - Making billions from Solana (39:50) - Moving to Silicon Valley with nothing (45:50) - Reflections on eComm (01:00:00) - SOS and OpenSea ----- 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?

  It's almost a self fulfilling prophecy. There's so much talent being sucked into this thing. These guys are going to build things that actually have use cases. Actually, it's actually going to make it all work. You can't have this much talent, spend all day thinking about this and building in this and have nothing come from it.

• 0:27Sam Parr?

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

• 0:29Shaan Puri?

  I'm self conscious now because we're blown up on Tik Tok. I just look at myself, I'm like, I should have shaved. And now that I have to see myself and I see people and also the Tik Tok comments are brutal. They're, they're good, but they, you know, they're like, just want to argue with every point that gets made.

• 0:47Sam Parr?

  So let's, let's talk about.

• 0:48Shaan Puri?

  Now, when I see myself, I'm like, shit, this is going on Tik Tok. I better, I need to shave for the next one.

• 0:52Sam Parr?

  So basically 10 days ago or 15 days ago, something like that, like not long ago, we told everyone that we're going to do this contest. We're going to give $5,000 to like three people who take our clips and turn them into videos. The best people are on Tik Tok. So I actually posted the tags down there for you. So I must have made a mistake. I told people to say, to, to, to use the hashtag MFM clips. But then I also, I must've said clip as well, without the S. And so people are using two hashtag clips and clip, MFN clip and MFN clips. And some aren't using both. But if you use those links, I, I showed you, we have in the ballpark of around 15 ish million impressions from these videos.

• 1:37Sam Parr?

  And it's mostly young folks who created these Tik Tok handles from scratch, took our, our content and some videos have over a million. Some of them have hundreds of thousands of likes.

• 1:50Shaan Puri?

  They're great. And do you read the comments?

• 1:53Sam Parr?

  No. What do they say? Do they make fun of us?

• 1:55Shaan Puri?

  Any content creator, you go through the cycle of like, you get excited and you read the comment. And the early comments are good. And then the more popular you get, the comments start to turn mean. And then you just, everybody reaches a point where they, oh no, then the third phase is you say you don't read the comments, but you secretly do. And then finally, you know, whatever, these are the seven stages of grief or something. Social media grief, you finally stop reading the comments because you're like, this is just too toxic. So yeah, they, they're basically just shit on us for whatever we say. Like if we say, you put down 20% to buy a house, then all the comments are about ways that you can, oh, you can also not put down 20%. If you do this, this, this, it's like, all right, okay, tick dot commenter, you got me.

• 2:37Shaan Puri?

  You are smarter than us. You are going to constantly find some like edge case loophole or, you know, mistake in what was said.

• 2:46Sam Parr?

  Do they make fun of how we look or talk or anything? Like they insult us?

• 2:50Shaan Puri?

  No, they don't really, they're either like, uh, these guys are annoying. Like they'll be like, let's say somebody cuts a clip of one of us breaking down, you know, our monthly expenses or something like that. And then the comment will just, but they don't know like the vibe of the pod. They don't know why someone would just say that out of the blue, right? It's not something that people normally talk about. So they're just like, why did he feel the need to tell us how much he's spending on eggs? Or like, why is he telling us his body fat percentage, whatever? They're just like, there's that kind, which is, dude, what a douche. Nobody asked, you know, why are you doing that? Then there's the comments that are like, you know, actually, actually it's this other thing. And then there's some comments which are like, bro, I don't, I don't want that future. No, I don't, no thanks.

• 3:34Shaan Puri?

  You know, cause we'll be like, uh, here's how things are changing. It'll be like, dude, companies just only think about money and like, you know, comments like that. So those are the three flavors of hater we get so far. Luckily so far, nobody's just shitting on our like face and body.

• 3:47Sam Parr?

  Oh, that's good. That's a, that's a surprise.

• 3:49Shaan Puri?

  That's a win as far as I'm concerned.

• 3:50Sam Parr?

  Yeah. I, and in general.

• 3:53Shaan Puri?

  Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words about my appearance do hurt me.

• 3:57Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Just like, don't make fun of my teeth or like hair. Uh, you can make fun of my brain. They, um, This promotion has been a home run. Like I, I thought it was going to be pretty good. I didn't think it was going to be this good. And so what we'll have to do is there's like a couple people who I'm recognizing because I, I watch them that are killing it. We're going to have to have them on the pod and explain how they got so many views. It's pretty amazing.

• 4:19Shaan Puri?

  Right. And let's talk about this for a second because I think there's something interesting to learn here. So you have said many times, I've grown a lot of things. I've grown an email newsletter to multimillions. I've grown a subscription business to multimillions. I've, uh, you know, grown, uh, whatever. You're like, a podcast is the hardest thing I've ever had to grow. And you say that, I think it's just kind of a cool thing to say in general.

• 4:42Sam Parr?

  Do you agree with that?

• 4:43Shaan Puri?

  I, I agree with it in the sense of it, there's no like easy growth hacks to growing a podcast. There's no, just like button you can push. Paid ads don't really work. Nothing really works like that. The good news is once somebody actually subscribed to your podcast, they become like a really loyal fan and they like, feel like they know you. So it's got a lot of value, but it's hard to get that easy growth. This is the first, and we've tried a bunch of shit. We've tried, we did nothing initially. Then we tried placing it in our email newsletters. We tried, uh, bringing on big name guests. We tried, um, paid ads. We tried, uh, a bunch of different things, none of which really like, kind of felt like it was really working, but the pod kept growing organically.

• 5:24Shaan Puri?

  This is the first thing. Oh, by the way, we also tried making our own clips, paying an agency, tens of thousands of dollars a month to be making really awesome animated clips of our content.

• 5:34Sam Parr?

  And they were great.

• 5:35Shaan Puri?

  And they were high quality clips, but it didn't lead to this. This was different. This was, hey, anybody, open playing field. Just go for it and we'll give out prizes to the people who are actually good at it, merit based, right? And what they're good at is they understood Tik Tok, whereas like we suck at Tik Tok. We don't know how to create content there. They pull clip, they pull the right clips because they're actually listeners and fans of the show. So they know which clip is actually going to be interesting versus like, you know, some random employee at our company being like, ah, you know, at the 42 minute mark, let's use that one for the clip. These guys will pull like 10 that they think are interesting and put them out there. And, um, and they're motivated because they're like, shit, if I do this good, I can get a million views on this and I could go, you know,

• 6:17Shaan Puri?

  I can get five grand from these guys. Like, that's a pretty sweet deal for, for doing something, you know, pretty fun. So this has actually worked.

• 6:25Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's pretty wild and.

• 6:28Sam Parr?

  Like some, there's one guy who basically took our Rob Dyrdek episode and I looked at his feed and he, I'm not, I don't think I'm exaggerating. It's 50 clips in a row of like, he basically just took it and just divided it up. And like three of the 50.

• 6:43Shaan Puri?

  All he did was he just took our talking out and just, if Rob talks, he grabs a clip, which is smart.

• 6:49Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And in his whole feed, I looked at his feed, it was all that one episode. And like three of them had like 500,000 views.

• 6:58Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So go, go follow them. I think MFM cuts is one on, on Tik Tok and Twitter. There's MFM clips, then there's a bunch of other variations of that name.

• 7:06Sam Parr?

  All right. I want to tell you about something interesting. I got a few interesting things to talk to you about. Okay. So let me tell you about something that I was thinking about this weekend. So I've got a buddy, you kind of know them and we, I'm not going to name them. But a few years ago, he did something, he was accused of doing a crime. That was a horrible crime, one of the worst crimes you could commit. And he was the, he was an executive at a company and it made the news. So six months later, after he went to court, he went to trial, the government dropped the case because it was a horrible misunderstanding. He didn't do what he was accused of doing and they exonerated him and they go, we're sorry, we were wrong. We, we, we called this one wrong.

• 7:50Sam Parr?

  And the first time the story went out, it made all the headlines. And if you Google this person's name, it came up on top. But what didn't come up on top was like six months later, it said, charges dropped. The, the misunderstanding came about for this reason. This person lost their job because of that and lost obviously a lot of money. And I was, I've always thought about this and I listened to a podcast this weekend and it was called, um, the right to be forgotten. And it was by Radiolab. And so this, it's this idea of the right to be forgotten and it's in Europe. It's actually a law. Um, I don't know exactly what the law says, but it says like, if something isn't particularly newsworthy,

• 8:30Sam Parr?

  but you're writing about it anyway, and it really hurts that person more than that provides value to the common or to like a reader, you have to take it down. And there's a couple of newspapers like the Boston Globe, as well as in this particular podcast, they looked at this company, this newspaper in Cleveland, Ohio. And there's stories of like a cop emailing them. And he's like, look, you wrote about this time that I lied about some paperwork and ended up getting fired. I didn't hurt anyone and now I can't get a job at another, as a police officer anywhere else.

• 8:59Shaan Puri?

  Can I fill in the gap on the right to be forgotten for you here?

• 9:01Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 9:02Shaan Puri?

  So, so basically it's a law that says, search engines should have to remove links about your past, if, under certain circumstances. And it came about because there was a woman, an actress, who had, who was in a movie and then it got dubbed. So there was, the film was called The Innocence of Muslims. And then her, her original line, her original line got dubbed over. And then they made, it made it so that it looked like she was saying, is your, is your Mohammed a child molester? Right? So that was the clip. And she starts getting death threats and like people go crazy about this. And she's like, what is this? Like, why, like, okay, this thing got dubbed. Now this clip got on to, into the search engine and it comes up if you search my name or certain things.

• 9:48Shaan Puri?

  And it's causing, you know, like harm to me and my personal life. And so she sued Google in 2014 and ultimately they, they upheld it, which was,

• 9:58Shaan Puri?

  you know, like she would like to have it, have the film forgotten and stripped from YouTube. Unfortunately, the right to be forgotten, which is recognized in the EU is not recognized in the US. And so it's a, the EU does respect this as they're, they're tightening on privacy with GDPR and things like that. And the US does not.

• 10:15Sam Parr?

  So, yeah, and so in the US, we don't have that. But it's kind of interesting because I personally have seen this hurt people. But you think like, right now, like, let's say that you're at a bar and you're drunk and you call someone like a really bad word. And it's on Reddit and they find your name. You're screwed. Like to the point of like, your life is going to be hurt meaningfully for like the next decade. And like, you should suffer some consequences for someone's calling something, something rude, but not like that serious, you know? And so I've been thinking a lot about this business, about this reputation management business. Have you ever researched it?

• 10:51Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, my former co-founder used to work there. So he used to tell me stories all the time.

• 10:54Sam Parr?

  Great. I want to hear all about it. And I know a little bit about this because listen to this. So one of the companies is called reputation.com. So there's this porn star named Sasha Grey. So do me a favor, type in Sasha Grey on your Google and click images. This Sasha Grey doesn't, she's not an actress anymore, not a porn actress anymore, but she was like a very prolific porn actress. When you click images, what do you see?

• 11:17Shaan Puri?

  Here we go. I'm here. Okay. So I see a bunch of headshots of her. I see no real porn. Well, I guess, I guess some scandalous stuff, but mostly.

• 11:25Sam Parr?

  No porn.

• 11:27Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, mostly just pictures of her fully clothed or like in a bikini.

• 11:31Sam Parr?

  So one time at the hustle, right when we first launched, I helped write this article about Sasha Grey and she hired this firm called reputation.com. And she basically wanted to retire from pornography and become like an actor and whatever else, something different. And she hired reputation.com to hide or like basically blog a bunch and write a bunch in order to get the porn images to go down. And I remember when we wrote this article, reputation.com did something kind of funny. And if I would go on my Google Analytics at night, I would look at real time and there would be thousands of people reading this article and I saw that they searched Sasha Grey. And so reputation.com manipulated it.

• 12:13Sam Parr?

  So the article that we wrote about reputation.com and Sasha Grey came up number one, if you Googled Sasha Grey. And at night, when people are going to look at porn, they Googled Sasha Grey and they landed on our article. It was pretty wild. I would see it at night, every week or every night, it would go up. And so I got crazy fascinated about reputation.com. And so for this segment, I wanted to talk about reputation.com. I think there's Yext and there's sprinkler. And these are businesses that do like four or $500 million a year. And all they do is reputation management. What do you know about reputation.com?

• 12:44Shaan Puri?

  So he used to tell me stories like, you know, I asked him, I was like, oh, what'd you do? You know, before this, what was your job before that? And eventually he said reputation.com and I got fascinated like you. I was like, what is that? So he told me, he's like, you know, here's a scenario. You're a senator and your son who has the same, you know, John Chambers Jr. I'm sorry, sorry to any John Chambers out there. It's a hypothetical. So your son who has the same name as you basically gets a DUI or gets arrested for battery or something like that. So now anytime somebody searches John Chambers, this mug shot's going to come up or this bad news story is going to come up. And they basically, they go to reputation.com and they say, I would like this to disappear off the front page. I would like this to disappear.

• 13:26Shaan Puri?

  A reputation.com says, I can't make it disappear. The internet sort of is uncontrollable, but I can get you off the front page of Google. And they're like, that would be amazing. And they say, for the low, low price of $120,000, $75,000, whatever it is. It's expensive. Expensive significant because they know people are, by the time you're at reputation.com, you're bent over the barrel. They can charge pretty much whatever they can get away with. So like, you know, a NASCAR driver, a politician, whoever, people of interest, people who wanted their, their names or their kids' names to get out of the bad news. And so they had a team of engineers that were just, it's a constant cat and mouse game to figure out how to beat Google. So like he might, my co-founder told me, he's like, one of the big, the biggest days at the company was when we figured out,

• 14:11Shaan Puri?

  you know, Google has the autocomplete, right? So you go, you type Sampar, it's going to be Sampar, the hustle, Sampar net worth, Sampar wife, Sampar is gay. It'll be like all these, like the same 10 queries for everybody, right? And what he figured out was that when you type, you know, Sampar, if it used to say felony, like F would now say friend instead of felony. Like it would, they would figure out how to even finish the autocomplete because. Even when they were good at getting you off the front page by blogging, by promoting other articles, whatever, getting them higher ranked, if the autocomplete was still always suggesting felony, then people would click it and they would search for felony, it would be reinforced. And then Google would search for it more. So they needed to clear that. So there was

• 14:55Shaan Puri?

  just constant cat and mouse game to understand how is Google doing, how is Google deciding what goes where? And then how do we content farm or manipulate this in some way that will change what the first page results are because 98% of people don't go past the first page or something like that?

• 15:11Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And so it's amazing to hear about that. And then there's a company called Yext, Y E X T. They're publicly traded and they do, I think that they are just a direct competitor to reputation.com. They're publicly traded. They did $390 million, I think, last year in revenue. Their market cap is not very good. It's like four or five times revenue.

• 15:32Sam Parr?

  Are you looking at it?

• 15:33Shaan Puri?

  I'm on, I went to reputation.com. I just wanted to see the latest. Like you wouldn't even know when you go to this, what they do, because it says, this is their headline. First, it looks like a hospital website, like a nice health tech website or something like that. Then it says, "A world of interactions demands a platform of action."

• 15:54Shaan Puri?

  We're a fixer, is what it should say.

• 15:56Sam Parr?

  So, but here's the problem.

• 15:57Shaan Puri?

  By the way, maybe they change what they do. I don't know.

• 15:59Sam Parr?

  I think they still do it. I think they offer like a smaller package.

• 16:06Sam Parr?

  Like, like when we wrote the Sasha Gray articles, that was in 2016, they have like a $13,000 package. But the problem is, there's, there's kind of two problems with this. The first is that the results aren't guaranteed. Like you can't guarantee that it's going to work, which is, I guess that's not a problem, but that's just how it works. You know, when someone calls you, I get these calls all the time because I own domain names and I forgot to hide my name. It's like, hey, we'll put you on the first page of Google. That's a scam. You can't just promise that. But the second thing is that if you're an individual, if you're just someone who like said some stupid drunken thing to someone one day and now your name's all over the place, you, it's really, really hard to, like unless you're one to pay a hundred thousand dollars, which is what a lot of the stuff costs, it's incredibly challenged to manage your reputation if you're just like a person. And so I was

• 16:51Sam Parr?

  thinking about like, is there anything interesting in that space? I actually think that there could be something. I like this company called Do Not Pay. You know what Do Not Pay is?

• 17:00Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I love Do Not Pay. The guy, the guy behind it's awesome and it's a great idea.

• 17:04Sam Parr?

  So do not pay. It started by this guy and I actually didn't research this. This is all the top of my head. It started by this guy named Josh Browder, I think Browder. And he's young. Like when he started it, I think it was like 21.

• 17:15Shaan Puri?

  Maybe.

• 17:15Sam Parr?

  Oh, 25. Okay.

• 17:16Shaan Puri?

  Well, no, now I think he's like 25.

• 17:18Sam Parr?

  When he started, he was even younger. Yeah, he was obviously. And he was like, like it was like a prodigy type of thing. And originally, the business existed to help you fight parking tickets automatically. But now they have a bunch of features like it's basically all sticking it to the man. So another feature is like, we will sue, we will sue cold callers on your behalf, or something like that.

• 17:42Shaan Puri?

  They'll also do like, you know, we will unsubscribe you from stuff that you're not using that you pay for. You know, there's ways to save you ways that you do not pay, which is why it's a great name and a great idea.

• 17:53Sam Parr?

  And I think there's a world where like a do not, you could use a do not pay service like this to help manage your reputation online. And this is a need that I think we're actually gonna see more and more and more of it. It's like a very like exponential thing where it's like more and more people are going to be written about and more and more people are going to need this. And I don't know, it's just something I've been thinking about. Do you have any, do you have an opinion on that?

• 18:12Shaan Puri?

  I don't know where the new opportunity is in this one, because I think it really depends on, it's kind of like, you need Google to exist for reputation.com to exist. And so really, it's about thinking, okay, there was a version of this on social networks that people were doing. Like, I remember this one guy came to me and he was a great entrepreneur. He ended up not doing this idea, but like, I always thought it was a great idea. Others have done it, which is, when you, everybody has social media where they post stupid stuff when you're younger, or when you're just drunk, or whatever. And so what they do is they go to companies and they say, hey, we ran a check on all your employees, and we found these red flags. And, you know, you should be aware of how you're, of what, you know, who you're hiring, as well as what they're saying and representing your company,

• 18:54Shaan Puri?

  how they represent your company elsewhere. So they end up getting contracts with companies to monitor and clean up. And then they're not like tattletaling. They're sort of like, hey, like, an insider helping you out saying, hey, you have this employee who's saying this. You may want to take action. But the action might just be to letting the employee know that we flagged this as potentially controversial. And maybe they want to delete it. And so it's a monitoring service for social media reputations and social media controversy, which I think is a great, great idea.

• 19:23Sam Parr?

  It just sucks that you gotta do that.

• 19:25Shaan Puri?

  Well, it sucks that the world is the way it is. It sucks. Well, some people think, oh, it's good. You hold you accountable. But in reality, it's just a bunch of like, you know, don't say, don't say what you really feel is really the result of most of this because people just get afraid to say anything because they're worried about getting canceled.

• 19:40Sam Parr?

  So and your buddy liked working at reputation.com? Were they like, they were by the book?

• 19:44Shaan Puri?

  He was like, technically, it was super interesting to figure out how we do all this stuff. You know, he's like, he always says this thing like, at one point, we had indexed every person on the web. And we had like them and their cluster and their reputation. And so, you know, I think it was technically very interesting, but obviously like sort of soul sucking and boring as well. So he bounced.

• 20:03Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I think I can see that. But it is an interesting problem I've been thinking about. All right, let me tell you about one more thing. All right, so I was reading the information, the information.com, and they had an article about Solano. So I told you about this on Slack. So there's this Solana. Sorry, I don't know anything about it, really, other than

• 20:23Shaan Puri?

  Don't out yourself here as a crypto nobody.

• 20:27Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I don't want to act like I'm an expert here. I'm not. I just, I read a lot about it, though, news articles. So Chris McCann, I knew this guy named Chris McCann, because he had this thing called Startup Digest. And that's one of the reasons why HustleCon became popular is because I would email Chris and I would say, Hey, can you please put this in the email? And he had this email called Startup Digest started in San Francisco, and he would email email each week, different events happening in San Francisco, different startup events. This was when the startup community was much smaller and everyone wanted to go to events. And it was just, here's a roundup of cool events happening. He eventually expanded it to different cities. He sold it, not for a lot of money, probably 100, probably six figures, I bet. But he kind of worked his way into Benchmark,

• 21:10Sam Parr?

  where he like, was just an employee there. And somehow or another, invested $250,000 into, what's it called? Is it Solana or Solana? Solana, I'm a fucking new. He invested $250,000 into Solana. And the information wrote an article about how that 250 turned into a billion dollars. Is that crazy?

• 21:31Shaan Puri?

  In probably, I think, three, three years, maybe four years, max. Yeah, it's insane. I sent you, I sent you somebody else who also has made multiple billions of dollars from their Solana investment. I sent that last week to you. But but basically, Solana has gone

• 21:48Sam Parr?

  Oh, like the fund?

• 21:49Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, so Solana has gone from, let's see, I mean, it was like sub a dollar not long ago. And now it's $200 per coin. It's basically, it's, what is Solana? Solana is a competitor to Ethereum. If you know what Ethereum is, if you don't know what Ethereum is, just fast forward the segment. You probably don't care. So Solana is like a competitor to Ethereum and as recently as, okay, so this time last year, Solana was a dollar 54. And when it launched, when it did its ICO, it was just under a dollar, I think it was. And so, and that was only, that was, you know, a couple of years ago, two years ago, or something like that. So basically, if even just take last year, a dollar 54, you put $100,000 into that,

• 22:33Shaan Puri?

  and now you have, I think, $20 million, something like that. I'm actually going to do some public math here for everybody. Yeah, $20 million. So Solana has had this insane run up. And it sounds like he, I think through, he's in this fund called Red something, Red Circle or shit like that. A race, yeah, race, something. They were like the seed investors in Solana. And, you know, that's the right project to be a seed investor in is a crypto project that becomes a, you know, multi-billion dollar crypto asset. And sure enough, you could, turning 250k into a billion dollars, that's kind of insane. I don't think it was his personal 250k necessarily, but even if it was the fund.

• 23:16Sam Parr?

  The, the article made it sound like it was, but even if it's not, that doesn't change much.

• 23:21Shaan Puri?

  The insanity.

• 23:22Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it doesn't change much because he still is going to walk away with nine, over 100 million, some figure like there. But this article, I was reading about it, and they're basically like saying, there's like a lot of really high profile tech folks at traditional tech companies giving up amazing things in order to like flee to this crypto thing. And I'll get, and I want to ask you a question about that. But example, like this woman, Sandy Carter, VP of Amazon's Cloud Computing, she left to join Unstoppable Domains. Brian Roberts, who was the CFO of Lyft, he left to join OpenSea and he said, I've seen enough cycles and paradigm shifts. To be cognizant when something this big is just emerging and that we're only at the beginning

• 24:04Sam Parr?

  and it's just going to get bigger. We had David Marcus. He basically led Facebook's cryptocurrency thing. He bounced to start his own thing. The, this one dude left Google in order to become Coinbase's chief product officer. And when it went public, his stake was worth $600 million. And then of course, Jack Dorsey bounced from Twitter in order to work at Square. And it's like, definitely involves crypto.

• 24:26Shaan Puri?

  They renamed, they renamed to Block because they're focusing on blockchain.

• 24:30Sam Parr?

  But it's crazy. And my question to you is this. Have you ever seen someone create that much wealth that fast? And do you have any stories of people who you know or know of that are doing this and like what their stories are? Because this is crazy.

• 24:47Shaan Puri?

  Well, I'll say the first thing is that you're right, that there's basically a giant black hole that's sucking up all the talent in the world and it's called crypto. And it's almost a self, there's a lot of people who don't believe that crypto is a thing, or they think it's massively overhyped. And they say, you know, give me one example of a real use case of this thing. Nobody's actually using it for payments or web three. There's no real web three products. And it's sort of there, there's some truth to what they're saying. I wouldn't say that they're completely off base. It's like a valid critique. I don't think it's true, but it's a valid criticism. But the, it's almost a self fulfilling prophecy. There's so much talent being sucked into this thing. These guys are going to build things that actually have use cases and actually, it's actually

• 25:28Shaan Puri?

  going to make it all work. You can't have this much talent, spend all day thinking about this and building in this and have nothing come from it. That's like the biggest like takeaway for me of like, even if you're the biggest crypto skeptic, there's a self fulfilling prophecy here, which is that it's sucked up all the dev talent, sucked up all the smartest people sucked, it sucked up like $20 billion of venture capital every year now. And all that funding, all that talent is going to is going to create things that actually do work and do hit beyond what's already there today. So. There's that. Now to your question of have I seen somebody get rich this quick? I want to have my buddy on. I have a friend who used to work, work with me and I caught up with them.

• 26:10Shaan Puri?

  And his story, he basically went from like, uh, average, like an average job. Like you wouldn't look at this person and say, oh, that's a star career. And they're good. They were doing well, obviously, but they were doing like normal person well. And they went from normal person well to making like, to personally making like $15 million in the last year. Just by, they, they basically quit their job and they went down a crypto rabbit hole and started betting on things in DeFi. And they started playing with all the DeFi projects, investing their money in DeFi. And they didn't have a huge base of capital. They had, you know, call it half a million dollars that they put in. And to turn a half a million dollars, if, and if you have no path in your career to being like,

• 26:57Shaan Puri?

  um, you know, a deck of millionaire, right? Like if you don't have a path where you're like, yeah, I'm going to have fuck you money. To go from no path, no, no, like reasonable storyline that makes sense there. You have a job at a company that pays you good salary and that's that. To that is amazing to me and awesome. And like, you know, just like blew my mind more so than these guys who become multi billionaires. We're like prodigies and like invented the protocol or invested 250K in a random token. It's like, this is somebody who just took their own money out of the stock market. And I was like, ah, instead of investing in Apple, Google and Facebook, I'm going to invest in like crypto. And turned a normal amount, a normal like life savings amount of money into a life changing amount of money. And I want to have him on to tell his full story because it actually has like a bunch of twists and turns.

• 27:43Shaan Puri?

  That are like kind of amazing. So I'm going to ask him if he'll come on and share it.

• 27:46Sam Parr?

  Do I know them?

• 27:47Shaan Puri?

  Willing to. Yeah, you know them. Um, I don't know if they're willing to share, but if they are, it's going to make for an amazing episode. I'll ask him if he'll do it next week.

• 27:55Sam Parr?

  Did they, um, did they earn the, did they, uh, sell, do they have USD or like some type of stable currency?

• 28:04Shaan Puri?

  Um, no, they're, they're still in crypto, like a hundred or a hundred plus percent because they, you know.

• 28:10Sam Parr?

  But, but is it stable, like a bit, like a, a popular thing?

• 28:14Shaan Puri?

  It's a mix of popular things and like

• 28:17Sam Parr?

  Something they could sell.

• 28:17Shaan Puri?

  Stuff. Yeah, they could. Everything's liquid. If they wanted to cash out and say, I'm done. I'm going to Malibu and I'm going to chill. I'm going to pretend that this year never existed. And I basically won a lottery. They could do that.

• 28:29Sam Parr?

  Cause we have a buddy in our chat group who said he made all this money in some crazy coin. But he's like, I can't sell it. So it's like

• 28:34Shaan Puri?

  That's different. That's like, uh, those are like either illiquid, like, oh, there's this coin, but it's not listed yet, or it's liquid, but there's like no trading volume whatsoever on this coin. And so like, yeah, if you have $10 million and you go to sell even 100,000, it'll crash the price of the coin. That's not what this is. That's, that's a different thing. Um, that's a, what that is, is I, I make a million coins. I keep 999,000 for myself and then I sell one of them for a dollar. And oh, now the total value of my thing is a million dollars. And it's like, no, it's not really. You, there's such a lit, such a small amount of the supply out there being sold. It's not indicative of the true price. This is what I'm talking about is not that situation.

• 29:15Sam Parr?

  Is there any other person? All right. So you have a story of someone who did 500,000 to 15 million. I just told you about this guy who in like two or three years.

• 29:23Shaan Puri?

  This person, non-technical, never was a trader or a financial person, like they would own like a index fund or mutual fund before that, didn't know how to spell blockchain. Um, you know, like this person is, that's why this blows my mind. It's not just this, like, I know that amount is not the craziest amount of money. It's an awesome amount of money for anybody. But what's crazy is the point A to point B, it makes no sense. It's like, how could those two points connect in that amount of time? It's mind blowing to me.

• 29:53Sam Parr?

  So I told you a story about this dude, Chris, who did 250,000 up to a billion. You just said 500,000 to 15 million. Do we know anyone else that has this like crazy, crazy journey?

• 30:06Shaan Puri?

  Personally, you've talked about this guy, you talked about somebody, right? That you're

• 30:09Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I had a friend that that they did 1 million to 100 million.

• 30:14Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 30:15Sam Parr?

  At its peak, when Bitcoin was 60,000. So I don't, whatever is that discounted?

• 30:20Shaan Puri?

  Okay, I have another one. There is a kid who I call him a kid because he was actually a kid. He, I built this product called Blab back in the day is like, kind of like clubhousey. You could basically go hang out and chat with people. And this kid used to come home every day from school. He used to get on and chat and he didn't chat in the other rooms that had 13 year olds. He came to our rooms because he loved technology startups. He wanted to be in the startup scene. And I think he was maybe 13 at the time. Okay. So fast forward, it's been like six years since then. So now he's like, let's say 21 or something like that. He, it's been, it's been a while and he created some, but he was, he's a technical guy. He created a protocol. Like I was like, oh, what you been up to? Like, how's your startup going? And he's like, ah, it's, yeah, startups. Okay. We haven't been focusing on it for the last few months.

• 31:05Shaan Puri?

  I was like, ah, I know, man, it's tough. You just hang in there, buddy. You know, just pivot. He's like, actually, like, we ended up creating this thing anonymously on one of these random like side chains. And it was like, whatever, blah, blah, blah, some bunch of terms. I don't even understand. You know, it's a, it's a derivatives perpetual contract for, you know, adding liquidity to this blah, blah, blah. I'm like, okay, I don't even understand what you're saying. And he's like, yeah, the market cap of it, like, you know, basically like the market cap of it is like 900 million right now. And, you know, I think he cashed out $10 million in this. He's like, he's like, dude, it's been insane. The market cap went up like crazy. Now it's at 200 million. And he's like, I was able to like, take out like a life changing amount of money. He, I took out 10 million. He was, he was like, he was asking me because he goes,

• 31:50Shaan Puri?

  I heard you guys talking about charities and charity water. You told the charity water stories really moved. Like I've set aside seven figures to donate.

• 31:57Sam Parr?

  You're like, what?

• 31:58Shaan Puri?

  I was like, you've set aside seven figures? Like, like, are you seven years old? What, how did this happen? Where, what if, what has happened to this amount of time? Like, I used to talk to you when you would come home from eighth grade and get online. Like you're donating millions of dollars to charity now? Like what is, again, A and B, it broke my brain. And I don't mean this as an insult to them.

• 32:17Sam Parr?

  Like if they're, if they were only 15 then, so they're still only like 19.

• 32:22Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think they're 20 now, 21, something like that. It's been like seven years since we've made that thing. So, you know, it's not, it's not mind blowing to me that this person is successful. In both cases, I, I really like this person. That's why I used to hang out with them. That's why I used to work with one of them. I think they're really smart and we're gonna be normal person successful. It's like when, you know, I went like, my sister went to high school with this girl Lily Galici, who's like this super famous Instagram star now. And she's like, has her own TV show on Bravo. And it's like, wait, that's the Lily girl who used to come to our house after school. Like, she was just like a normal girl. Like, wait, that's her? Like, that doesn't even look like her anymore. Yeah, she's had some work done, right? It's like, just mind blowing to know a normal person who's like, yeah, that's a cool, normal,

• 33:04Shaan Puri?

  they'll do well in life. To be like, no, actually, they're like, one of those crazy outlier stories. And in a way that you wouldn't have otherwise predicted, you know, it didn't make any sense. Like, you know, it's not, it's not that that was their skill set and they tried, tried, tried that thing for 10 years and finally hit. It's like, just out of nowhere, they just did this thing and it hit. And crypto is this amazing thing like that. So by the way, I want to say something. When I first talked to my friend, I caught up with my friend, I felt insanely jealous. I was like, so, I was happy for him and I like him and all that. But I was also like, I was like, in my head, I was just like, what the fuck have I been doing with my life?

• 33:39Sam Parr?

  With the friend that used to work for you?

• 33:41Shaan Puri?

  Both of them, both the same reaction.

• 33:42Sam Parr?

  Yeah, because it feels weird because you're like, oh, wait, you kind of looked up to me.

• 33:46Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I'm your mentor, but now, now I'm like, you know, way less successful than you. So like, what just happened? You just like catapulted really crazy, like, between the last time we caught up and now.

• 33:56Sam Parr?

  There is jealousy there. It's easy.

• 33:59Shaan Puri?

  And I just want to say, like, you know, an interesting thing to observe is, what is your reaction to hearing stories like this? There's a part of me that I'm not proud of, which gets jealous of it. But that used to be like, it used to be, I would feel that. I wouldn't really acknowledge that that's what I was feeling. And I would kind of find reasons why it was like, ah, that's just luck. Or, like, you know, well, they probably were taking a bunch of risk and they might lose it all. And I'm kind of secretly rooting for it to not, not all work out just so perfectly as it has. That's gone. But I still got a little bit of that, like jealousy pang left. And I'd say the interesting thing is, my, my coach said this to me, he goes, You'll encounter people in your life where your success just reminds them of their failure.

• 34:42Shaan Puri?

  And they're not focused on your success. They're focused on their failure. Your success has reminded them of their failure, or your abundance has reminded them of their lack. And if you notice that in yourself, you want to be aware of that and change that. And if you find other people and they're like, oh, these people are haters, like, you know, just understand what's coming on. They don't actually hate you. It's your success has reminded them of some failing that they have in themselves. And that's where their attention has gone. And so, yeah, I wanted to share that because I definitely felt this like crazy feeling that I hadn't felt in a long time. But these stories were so mind blowing that I could, I was like, wow, this, I don't even know what to say.

• 35:17Sam Parr?

  I feel lucky to know who I know, which we have the same group, basically, that I've like, these stories that sound unbelievably true, I'm like, yeah, I know that person. I saw it. It was wild. So like, an example is Moy's Ali selling native deodorant for $100 million, two years after starting it. I was in, we shared an office when he was starting it and I saw him try to learn Facebook ads. Like I saw the thing come to fruition. I saw it right in front of my eyes every single day for like six or 10 months. And that was almost half the journey. It's actually pretty amazing, you know? And I think about like, this isn't like a one to one correlation because there's other components here. But like, I was thinking about this. I'm like, Jamaica is a very small country.

• 36:02Sam Parr?

  There's not a lot of people there, but they just dominate the 100 meter dash. And obviously there's some genetic, there's a lot of genetic factors going there, but it can't be significantly different than America. And, and I was thinking like, man, one of the reasons being is they just are just surrounded by like, it's just normal to be great at something and that makes it normal to work hard. And you're like, well, I should be running these times in practice and you don't like freak out. You just get it done because that's what's expected. And I kind of feel that way in terms of making money because of our friends are who they are. It's like, well, you just want to spin something up. And if, yeah, if you're willing to dedicate three years, like you definitely can add eight figures of net worth to your, like for sure, like it's easy. It's not easy, but it's simple.

• 36:44Sam Parr?

  And it's kind of cool to like be around people where you start seeing like, yeah, look, it's really simple. You just do this, this and this. Of course, you got to dedicate every, you have to dedicate tens of hour, you know, 50, 60 hours a week for like many years. But yeah, it's very simple, straightforward.

• 36:59Shaan Puri?

  The first example you gave with Moyes was starting it literally at the table. I think he sat at the table next to you, right?

• 37:03Sam Parr?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 37:04Shaan Puri?

  In Founder's Dojo or whatever those Hacker Dojo, Founder Dojo?

• 37:07Sam Parr?

  Founder's Dojo. Like, I think he was interested at first, if I remember correctly, he was like, what should I sell? Should I do mattresses? And he was like ordering mattresses and like measuring them and like seeing like, oh, that's too much work. Mattresses are too big. What else is there?

• 37:19Shaan Puri?

  By the way, the public story is like, my sister was pregnant and she couldn't find a deodorant that didn't have chemicals which might harm her baby. So I wanted to create that product. It's like, dude, I know you. You were like, all right, how do I build? I want to make a business. I want to sell some shit. What do people want? Oh, people like Kleenexes, mattresses, too big to ship. Okay.

• 37:37Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 37:38Shaan Puri?

  Scratch that off the list. Deodorant, small, under one pound, ships easily. People will use it every month. It's a renewable and there's a niche and there is a genuine problem for it. But like, I know you, dude. There's a, there's a real story and then there's the narrative. And like, I like stories, not narratives.

• 37:54Sam Parr?

  It's not bad. He was just like seeking problems to solve. He's like, boom, found it.

• 37:59Shaan Puri?

  And I respect that. I like that and that's how I think so, you know? It's normal to me. The, there's something to, when you see it being built day by day, brick by brick, you're like, there's a, just a respect and for me, like total joy. I never feel the jealousy in that case. Like, for example, I remember when you started the hustle. I remember when you were doing just the event and then you were like, I'm going to do this thing. And then I came to your office with you and John and it was like, like, it was like, we went into a room that was like a conference room that was like the size of a bathroom. And like you had a presentation and like, I listened to it and I was like, okay, this is cool. But like, what about this, this and this? And you guys were like, I don't know, we'll figure it out. And then you like, you started with these like long form, your original thing was long form stories. And then you like, kind of was working, but not really.

• 38:42Shaan Puri?

  You're like, I'm thinking about switching to this like newsletter thing, just daily news. Skim is doing it. It's working. These guys are doing it. I think we could do it in our niche and I think it'll be even better. And so seeing that, then it's like, cool. Seven years later, Sam, whatever, I don't know how long it's been, seven years? Was it seven?

• 38:58Sam Parr?

  We sold it about five.

• 39:00Shaan Puri?

  Okay, five years in, Sam sells the thing and is successful. Nothing but props, respect and, and joy of like, wow, this was so cool. I got to sit there on the journey with you. There's a difference of that, watching somebody build it brick by brick. And a difference of, actually, this happened in 12 months. You didn't get to see the hard work that was obviously going in and the risks that were being taken. So you'd, all you hear is like, I tried this thing and it just hit 100x, 200x, like what? You know, it's, it feels more like a lottery and it feels less like the hard work thing. I think that happens a lot in crypto, that's a little difference there. The second part is, I remember when I moved, so I moved from Australia to Silicon Valley without having a game plan.

• 39:44Shaan Puri?

  I think you were kind of the same way, didn't you just like come to Silicon Valley like? Showed up. Just showed up. I did the same thing. I was sitting in Australia, I went, I remember specifically, I went to a meetup and they asked me to speak about the, about lean startups, about startups. And I went and I spoke and everybody at the end was like, yay, you know, great talk. People afterwards were like, wow, that was really great talk. And in my head, my buddy was like, what's wrong? Cause he could see I was just like, kind of upset. He's like, what's wrong? He didn't like it? And I was like, I was like, I don't know anything about startups and I'm like the thought leader here. This is like, I'm doing something wrong. Like this is, like, I feel like not imposter syndrome, I feel like idiot syndrome. It's a blind leading the blind. It's like, these guys know zero about startups.

• 40:25Shaan Puri?

  I know point one about startups, but if I'm the smart guy here, then that, where are the actual smart guys? They're not here. And I asked, I was like, yo, what are the success stories in Brisbane about like startups? Is you guys are, have the startup scene? They're like, yeah, these guys did it great. Oh, where are they? They don't come to these events? No, they moved to San Francisco. These guys moved, these guys moved. And I was like, oh, all the smart people move. Okay, maybe I should move. So I changed my phone number first, just to mentally be like, all right. I have a Silicon Valley area code. I don't know why, for me, that was just like, I think I could just do it like over, like I did it in one night before I could move. It was like faster than moving was just to change my phone numbers, make a statement. And then I remember being like, all right, I'm going to move there, I'll figure it out. And I quit my job, you know, on the spot. And I was like, I'm just going to move there.

• 41:10Shaan Puri?

  I played poker for three months to hold myself over while I applied for a job, literally one job. And they didn't hire me, they were like, kept stringing me along. And I was like, all right, fuck it up. This was the one I ended up working at Monkey Inferno. There was like a slow process, two month process. So finally I was just like, all right, fuck it, I'm just going to move there. And if this doesn't work, I think I'll get this job, but if it doesn't work, I'll get some, I'll do something else. What was the title? Just product manager, like I was the first PM there. So I, I finally came and when I came, they were like, all right, why'd you move? Like, why'd you, why'd you come here? And I was like, well, you know, I wanted to see what's in the water here, right? Like if this is where all the smart people are, this is where the startups are like, what do you guys know that I don't, I don't know. And I was thinking it's about tactics. It's about operations. Maybe people

• 41:54Shaan Puri?

  are just like, literally, this is the cream of the crop. These are just the smartest people. And there's certainly some of that, but I'll tell you what to me was the actual, this was the actual difference. The thing that made coming to Silicon Valley work. I went to this coffee shop. You remember the creamery or this like, it's like this, like,

• 42:11Sam Parr?

  Yeah, that's where everyone would hang out.

• 42:13Shaan Puri?

  It was at South Park.

• 42:15Sam Parr?

  Second in Brandon, I think.

• 42:16Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. So this place called the creamery. It's kind of famous for where people take meetings. And I went there and I just sat there for like half a day. I was just eating. I didn't, I didn't have anywhere to go. I didn't have an office. I didn't have an apartment. So I was like, well, we'll sit here and then I'll go search for apartments later. And I remember just seeing table after table next to me. Somebody would come in and they'd be like, just pitching their idea to either an investor or a buddy, like trying to make a co-founder, trying to like a co-founder or two friends catching up or an investment pitch. And it was always like these like harebrained ideas. It's like, oh, you know, LinkedIn, but for, you know, cat doctors or whatever. This is a stupid ideas. And I remember just sitting there thinking, oh, that's a stupid idea. That's a stupid idea. And then I was sort of realizing like, oh, that's actually kind of cool. Like the normal conversation here, the coffee shop

• 42:58Shaan Puri?

  conversation here is I get the, I got this idea. I'm going to change the world. I got this idea. It's going to be huge. I was like, everybody kind of has bought into this. And that like, if you go to Hollywood, that's what happens. Like the waiters and waitresses, I'm going to be a star. And in New York, it's a different thing. And it's, it's Silicon Valley. It's basically, I get those, I got this idea. It's going to be big. And that's normal. Whereas before everywhere I lived, if you were the guy who's got an idea and you're going to quit your job to go do it.

• 43:25Sam Parr?

  You're crazy.

• 43:26Shaan Puri?

  You're the crazy guy. Here, you're the normal guy. Here, if in Silicon Valley, if you're like, I work at JP Morgan, you basically have to like bow your head in shame. You have to like come up with some excuse. It's like, you know, because my wife is pregnant with twins and I've really got to pay the mortgage. But as soon as that's over, you know, like, I'm back in the game. I'm going to go back into the startup game. Like if you're a, if you work for McKinsey anywhere else, that's great. If you work for, you know, McKinsey or Deloitte in San Francisco, you're like the low class person. You're not the high class person, because the high class person is. The founder with the idea or the angel investors betting on ideas. So the, just that culture where that's normal and possible to just constantly quit your job, have an idea, throw everything into it, maybe get rich. That's what makes Silicon Valley so awesome, or that's what it did.

• 44:12Shaan Puri?

  And what you're talking about where like, if your friends group has these types of success stories and is doing this type of shit, your brain will just automatically change into thinking, that's possible, that's normal, that's super doable for me too. And that, you can't underestimate that. I think for some people, that's what this show is, is like, if you hear us three times a week, at least that's like part of your friend group that talks that way, thinks that way, and will make it feel normal to have ideas, to bet on ideas, to make a bunch of money, to make huge investments. Whereas in your, your geography may not be, people around you and your neighbors and stuff like that may not think that way.

• 44:50Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and it basically changed my perspective from, like, this only happens to other people to, obviously, this is, obviously, I'm going to-

• 44:59Shaan Puri?

  It's a matter of time.

• 45:00Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I'm going to achieve the desired outcome. It's just, A, like, for, on which swing am I going to get my hit? And B, which thing do I want to dedicate five or 10 years on?

• 45:11Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 45:12Sam Parr?

  Cause if you like, work eight years on something and you're around the right people and you've been like going, like, I felt like, living there, it was like I was in school. So it's like, well, I'm in school, I know, like, I know it when I see it. And I can just keep working on something and then I'll see right away that it's working. And then I just spend time on it and just give it time and it works. It will always work. That's kind of like the attitude.

• 45:32Shaan Puri?

  There's, I think I've told the story, have I told like, why I did the e-commerce thing? And why I think it worked?

• 45:39Sam Parr?

  No.

• 45:39Shaan Puri?

  So, I was sitting with our mutual friend, I think I can say his name, maybe we'll bleed this out later, but I was sitting with him and his backyard, he had this, you know, he has that awesome, and when he lived in California, he had this awesome backyard with the basketball court and like a putting green and pool and chickens, stuff like that. And we were just chilling for the day and his dogs are running around. And we were talking, and while we were talking, the Shopify cha-ching kept going off on his phone.

• 46:06Sam Parr?

  That thing all the time. I used to yell at him. I go turn that shit off.

• 46:09Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So it was like ching and then like two minutes later it'd be like ching. And then I was like, I was like, what is that? He's like, oh, my bad. My like, I'm sorry. I totally spaced. I didn't even realize I like, I'm so like, I'm so numb. Like, I didn't even realize that was happening. Like, that's obnoxious. My bad. I go, no, no, no, leave that on. What is that? He goes, that's a Shopify. Like, every time we get a sale, it does that. I said, I'll leave that on. He goes, you sure? I was like, yeah, leave it on. So we

• 46:30Sam Parr?

  It went on the whole time.

• 46:32Shaan Puri?

  It goes off the whole time. By the end of the, I, we were talking about some other shit completely. We're talking about dogs and family and kids and like, whatever. By the end of the hour, I was like, all right, man, I gotta, you know, whatever. I gotta go. But I'm definitely starting at a Shopify thing. I want my phone to do that. And he's like, he's like, he's like, yeah, you totally should. I was like, just literally that experience. If I did not have that, and the jealousy worked to my favor, right? The jealousy was a signal of if I want that more than what I have, maybe I need to make a change, right? Cause I was like, I'm gonna go back to the office where I earn a fixed salary. It's a great, I was making great money, but like, it is capped. I will make the same amount, whether I do a good job or a bad job. Whereas for him, it was like, he got to chill. It was making money passively. And, um, and if he did a better job, he was gonna make more money.

• 47:17Shaan Puri?

  So that was the first thing. It made me maybe decide I'm gonna do this. And then I started like Mois, I was like, what can I sell? What can I sell? All right. All right. What can I sell? Okay.

• 47:25Sam Parr?

  What were the other options?

• 47:27Shaan Puri?

  Of other ideas I had to sell?

• 47:28Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 47:30Shaan Puri?

  I remember going through candles. Uh, candles are kind of an amazing business, but very competitive. Candles are same thing as deodorant. You, you use them and they burn out. They, they literally melt away and you have to buy another one.

• 47:42Sam Parr?

  So expensive. I just bought a hundred dollar can candle.

• 47:44Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, they're, they're high A of either super high margin. So they're not expensive to make. They're just really, you could charge a lot for them. You can have a whole bunch of SKUs very easily that are all the same. They're all just different scents. There are the high end, middle end, low end. There's candles that are like, you know, um, oh, this smells like your hometown of Missouri. There's like a bunch of gimmicks you can do. There's whatever. So candles was definitely one that was on my mind. I told you about the crystals story. I was basically like, cause I asked my buddy. So I asked that friend and I asked others, I said, how do you think about this? Hey, they gave me some frameworks of how to think about it, right? Like, look, you're gonna, the reason this whole thing works is Facebook ads. So that means you're going to acquire customers. So something like this dollar amount. All right. So you need to

• 48:27Sam Parr?

  How much was that dollar amount?

• 48:28Shaan Puri?

  So like

• 48:29Sam Parr?

  Twenty bucks?

• 48:29Shaan Puri?

  At the time it was like 20, 25 bucks, something like that.

• 48:32Sam Parr?

  But now it'd be higher.

• 48:33Shaan Puri?

  Now it's higher. Now it's like 40, 45 bucks, something like that. But it's like, all right. Let's just say in a best case scenario, you're going to break even on the first purchase. So you want a product that's going to have 65 to 70% gross margins. So that means the actual, let's say, I don't forget public math, but like, let's just round numbers here. A candle, let's say the cost of goods is $5. You want to make sure that you could sell that thing for $30 or whatever to have that type of gross margin. So, uh, and then you're going to have, you know, let's call it 15%, 20% is your cost of fulfillment. So that's like packaging it. You know, picking it in your warehouse and then shipping it to the customer and customer. And, um, okay, cool. So then you take all that out. So basically you end up with a break, a break even.

• 49:16Shaan Puri?

  And the question is, if you can break even on the first purchase, meaning it costs you $25, let's say in Facebook to get a customer. Then you want that to be your net profit on a single order. Uh, then you're basically, that's like the, that's like a great position to be in because you're breaking even on day one and then every repeat purchase. You build up your customer base by recycling that cash flow on this, you know, every month, you're not going, you're not going deeper and deeper in debt. And then as you build your customer base, when they come back and repeat purchase and you want that repeat purchase rate to be high. So like, you know, one of our friends has a thing that doesn't have high repeat purchase rate. The other one has like deodorant has amazing repeat purchase rate. So if they repeat purchase, that means your lifetime value will be higher for your customer and all that extra, every next purchase will be much more profitable.

• 50:00Sam Parr?

  And the business would be more valuable.

• 50:02Shaan Puri?

  And then little things like, hey, uh, the way that the shipping works in the country is like, you know, things that are under one pound. They ship at this low rate. Once it's over a pound, shipping is like much more expensive. Uh, like there's like a normal USPS, USPS, like whatever. Priority mail that if it's under a pound, it's like, whatever, five bucks or four bucks or whatever. So there's like certain little things that help. And so like, if you've talked to Moyes, Moyes used to like change his packaging so that he would be at point nine nine pounds, right? Like he was like, I want to be just under one pound. And that was like his, his, like Keith, one of the key things that helped control cost. So anyways, there's a whole bunch of frameworks. I went through a bunch of product ideas to figure it out.

• 50:41Sam Parr?

  And what were the other ones?

• 50:43Shaan Puri?

  You're gonna like, you know, the easiest thing to sell on Facebook is stuff that appeals to like white women in middle America. So like, how do you sell to a 35 to 65 year old woman that lives in Texas? And like, that's the, that's the persona that's like the most easy to fish for on Facebook. You can obviously sell anything to anybody. Facebook's huge. But like, if you can get one for white women in middle America, like you're gold, like, cause

• 51:08Sam Parr?

  The majority of your customers are?

• 51:10Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, ours are a little younger than that, but like, uh, yeah, that's like the

• 51:14Sam Parr?

  For white ladies.

• 51:16Shaan Puri?

  White women in middle America is like a great market to sell to. And most of Silicon Valley makes a mistake. They go for, what is LA, New York and San Francisco millennial, single millennials like me?

• 51:25Sam Parr?

  And that's such a expensive customer.

• 51:27Shaan Puri?

  It's an expensive customer. Their, then their lifestyle changes very quickly and they don't need your shit anymore.

• 51:33Sam Parr?

  And it's just Competing with like Uber and Lyft and shit, like the ad spend is just too hard.

• 51:38Shaan Puri?

  Everything is very competitive. It's just like, I guess the way to think about it is not necessarily that one is that much better than the other. I wouldn't actually say that. It's just more like, don't narrow your scope to your single lifestyle as like a 25 year old dude in San Francisco, who like orders, you know, every meal on Postmates. It's like, you're not representative of the world. So, you know, like, don't limit yourself to just that.

• 52:02Shaan Puri?

  Cause like, you know, it might be truckers in middle America that love, you know, that buy XYZ or whatever. There might be just like a different market that that's really lucrative that you're not really paying attention to right now. So pay attention to other groups. So anyways, the second thing that happened was I asked them, I asked, so we had two buddies that were doing the same thing. Two was enough where I was like, oh, if he can do it, and he could do it, I could do it. No problem. And, um, and so I was like, I asked them, I was like, what are your sales? And then, you know, it shocked me, right? It was like, oh, you know, the business, we did seven million our first year, 21 million our second year, and 41 million our third year. I was like, what the fuck is going on? I was like, and they're like, oh yeah, we didn't raise any money. It's just profitable. You know, I just take a dividend out. I'm like, what, like, what are these words? Profit?

• 52:45Shaan Puri?

  You know, like where I come from Silicon Valley, we don't, we don't say that word.

• 52:48Sam Parr?

  Yeah. What's that? What's that P word?

• 52:51Shaan Puri?

  Like, you know, the prophet like Jesus, like Muhammad, who are you talking about? So, so when I heard that, I was like, all right. And then that became my normal. Like, I was like, okay, I'm gonna do seven million my first year. I'm gonna do 20 million my second year. I'm gonna do like, that became my, what I thought was achievable and normal. If I hadn't heard that from them, I would have never scaled as fast. And sure enough, we did, you know, seven million the first year. Now, in our second year, hopefully we'll get to 20. Like, I hit this, I hit the exact thing to the point where I'm like, maybe I should have shot higher. Maybe, maybe just hearing their number created like an artificial ceiling. But I definitely created an artificial floor.

• 53:31Sam Parr?

  Are you, how many people work there full time at yours?

• 53:36Shaan Puri?

  Let's call it, yeah, like four or five.

• 53:40Sam Parr?

  Are you happy with e-commerce? I've asked you this, like, every quarter. Are you happy with it now?

• 53:45Shaan Puri?

  It's, it's a great business in one way, and it's a terrible pain in the ass in the other way. You know, like, you know, whatever, like, right now, everything is, it's, a lot of headwinds are going against e-commerce. So, Facebook's getting more expensive. Shipping anything around the world is getting super expensive and slower.

• 54:04Shaan Puri?

  So, those are the two core costs, right? Getting a customer and then fulfilling your product. All the, you're, you're doing physical products. And guess what? With inflation, everything gets more expensive. So, like, there's a lot of headwinds against e-commerce right now. And it's very competitive. So, you know, there's a bunch of reasons why it's bad. Then again, it's working and like, you know, I'm happy with our business. So, you know, it's good. But what I recommend is to the next person, not necessarily. I think if, if you can do software, do software. If you, if you don't really wanna like, do real work, don't do, don't do e-commerce. Cause e-commerce has real work. Like, we have a warehouse, you know, it's annoying.

• 54:40Sam Parr?

  Let me tell you something really quick before we wrap up. I just invested in, I don't ever do D to C companies, like these consumer shipping companies. But this guy listening to our podcast, I bet you he reached out to you too. It's called The Good Crisp Company?

• 54:52Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 54:53Sam Parr?

  So he sent me like, I guess on the podcast, I mentioned that I love snacks or something. I don't know.

• 54:59Shaan Puri?

  Well, we were talking about better for you snacks, right? So, so junk food, that's like keto, keto cookies, whatever. So he's got Pringles that are like better for you than Pringles, but they taste like.

• 55:09Sam Parr?

  Send them to you?

• 55:10Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 55:11Sam Parr?

  They're awesome. I ate this entire box of like, and it was like a lot of chips. Like it was, it was kind of messed up.

• 55:17Shaan Puri?

  It's a Pringles. Yeah.

• 55:19Sam Parr?

  And I was like, dude, this is awesome. The valuation was like two times sales. I ended up investing in it.

• 55:26Shaan Puri?

  I really wanted to invest. I'm just too, I told the guy, I was like, you have an amazing, you have a great business. I would totally invest in this. I'm just completely obsessed with crypto and like every dollar, every extra dollar that I could put into something speculative, I just want to put into crypto. I don't want to put into anything else.

• 55:39Sam Parr?

  What's your crypto stuff that you're, that you're doing now then?

• 55:43Shaan Puri?

  Dude, I bought Luna. Luna's just been like on fire. I don't know if you follow Luna.

• 55:47Sam Parr?

  How much did it go up by?

• 55:49Shaan Puri?

  Well, it depends what's time horizon, but mine is basically, I don't know, up 40% in like two months or something, right? It's like amazing, but and I think it has like a long way to go still. Not again, not financial advice. I'm just like gambling. So you're, imagine me saying, here's what number I'm betting on in roulette. Just take it as that. Don't take it as like, you know, my word, but um, I think there's a lot of interesting things about it. I'd heard, I'd heard about it from a few interesting people. And then I was like, all right.

• 56:19Shaan Puri?

  What is this thing actually? And um, I can explain it if you want, but basically I'll refrain for now. That's the, that's the thing I've been interested in.

• 56:28Sam Parr?

  And you did do good, Chris. It's a cool company, man.

• 56:32Shaan Puri?

  The problem with all e-commerce, so our, our mutual friend has this great phrase, which is e-commerce businesses are great to own, horrible to invest in. Now, I wouldn't say not horrible, but it's like, it's great for the owner of the business. It's not great for the investors. And that's only because the upside is somewhat limited. So even native, which sold for a hundred million dollars, it's like, these almost never go for multiple billions. But they're often valued at the same valuations as like a software company, which can become a multi-billion dollar company. And so like, you know, you invested, I think, uh, you know, I don't know about that one, but I was looking at other, another good deal that was in e-commerce that I liked. It's like, oh, we have, you know, we're doing 10 or $20 million in revenue.

• 57:16Shaan Puri?

  You know, 20% of that is profits or EBITDA. You know, we're valued at 50 billion or 60 million. It's like, it was a good company. It was definitely going to work. Like, the business was working and was going to probably keep working. And, um, you know, the reality is that that it's unlikely that that will ever even sell for 600 million, let alone 6 billion, right? So it's like, you get these like 2X, 3X, 4X of revenue, like, sales, or, sorry, of valuation sales. And that's just not super compelling when you have better options. Like, if you can invest in software, do it, you know?

• 57:47Sam Parr?

  And in a couple of weeks, we're gonna have this guy on. I lined it up, A.J. Patel from High Key Cookie and Zesty Paws. That guy's amazing. He's one of the most impressive people I've ever read about.

• 58:00Shaan Puri?

  And he was an owner of one of those businesses. And by the way, I should say two other things. There's all, there's obviously exceptions to every rule. So, you know, I'm like, there are, there are definitely some e-commerce investments that are gonna do awesome. Like, Native did awesome because it sold for 100 million, but he had only raised, I think, 2 million bucks or something like that, a million dollars. So, you know, he was super capital efficient, whereas most of these are not. They burn a fuck ton of money on marketing and inventory. Second thing, the only other bad thing about e-commerce is like, even when I say, oh, we did 7 million, 10 million, whatever, this year, that doesn't mean, A, that's revenue, not profits, and B, almost, and whatever you do have for profits gets reinvested back into the business because you're buying inventory for the next four months, or you're buying ads for the next month. And like, so you're always cash poor until you finally turn the corner.

• 58:45Shaan Puri?

  And there is a corner that you turn when you're a good business, but early on, you don't get that.

• 58:49Sam Parr?

  Have you turned it?

• 58:51Shaan Puri?

  We have not turned that, no. Because we're like, we are like, oh, great, we need to buy double or triple the inventory for the next season, and for the next season, and after that. And so, you know, it's gonna...

• 59:02Sam Parr?

  Stressful as fuck.

• 59:04Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, like, you know, but it's cool. It's like, it works, but it works if you don't need a bunch of cash to pull out, and you're okay being cash poor for a while. Real estate's like this often, too. You could be cash poor in real estate, but be like, you know, have a lot of value.

• 59:16Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but it's not gonna go to zero. Yes, real estate is slow, way slow, but it's more liquid. And, um, it's not gonna grow fast, but it won't go away. So it's a little different, whereas your thing, e-comm can double it.

• 59:33Shaan Puri?

  In the sense that if the valuation drops, then, you know, you're more, you know, you don't make a profit. It's not that it goes to zero, but you're... What you owe the bank is now the value of the company. And so your equity can go down, right?

• 59:47Sam Parr?

  Yes, but a econ business can double or triple in a year. Real estate likely will never do that. But that econ business, let's say that like something's made illegal or there's an embargo. Who knows? Like, there's a world where it can go out of business.

• 1:00:01Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, for sure. I have a couple more. I don't know if you want to just stay on. We could just split these into, you know, we talked about just like releasing these as like segments instead of

• 1:00:11Sam Parr?

  All right.

• 1:00:11Shaan Puri?

  Hour long episodes. Do you have time or no?

• 1:00:13Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:15Shaan Puri?

  All right. Have you seen this thing that happened called SOS SOS token?

• 1:00:19Sam Parr?

  No, what is it?

• 1:00:20Shaan Puri?

  All right, I gotta tell you about this. This is genius. Okay, so there's a, there's a, there's an app called OpenSea or a website called OpenSea. You've heard of OpenSea? It's basically like eBay. It's eBay for NFTs. So it's a place where you go and buy, buy and sell NFTs. And OpenSea is, it's in crypto, but it doesn't do some of the things that crypto people like. So it's like, it's not fully open source. You know, all the code is not open source. Like they, like the website, the way the website works, I think it's proprietary. It's a, you can't just fork that code and just put your own name on it. The second thing is that they don't have a token involved with it. And the third is that, you know, they raised a bunch of money from private, from, from traditional venture capitalists.

• 1:01:03Shaan Puri?

  And in the crypto world, that's like a sellout type of move.

• 1:01:06Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:07Shaan Puri?

  So Andreessen Horowitz, I think, put money in. It's a multi-billion dollar marketplace. And I think it's gonna be like, it's gonna be huge. I think they did like, Ben, you can look this up, but they did like, I don't know, $8 billion of transaction volume in like one month this year. So it's been, it's been growing like, and it's like crazy. It is one of the best startups you can invest in right now would be OpenSea. Now, what happened? So they, their CFO, they hired this hotshot CFO. CFO goes on some show, some, some either podcast or some talk show. And he says, you know, we're looking at potentially going public. And he's saying it because that's a good thing for the company. And immediately the users are like, oh, you're using the old route of like getting liquidity.

• 1:01:49Shaan Puri?

  That's going to make you guys rich, but all of us users who have built this into the most popular NFT marketplace. We're going to get nothing from that. Like, we don't own stock in your company. So you go public, we don't get anything. We built this thing. And again, that's against the that's against the core, the ethos of of your everything. Yeah, Ben just found it 10 billion and 10 billion in trading volume in August alone. So that's insane, same same numbers.

• 1:02:16Shaan Puri?

  So, or sorry, I think it's, yeah, I don't know, whatever. So basically. So what happened? So this group of people got together. I think the guy, the guy who was behind it, his handle is like 9x, 9x, 9x, or something like that. Right? So this guy come, they create something called the Open Dow. If you go to the opendow.com. And they say they created a token called SOS. So OpenSea is the name of the platform. So this is like SOS, like save our ship. He creates this token called SOS. He creates 100 trillion tokens and he gives them out. And what they did was kind of genius. So on like two days ago, anybody who was in crypto Twitter, anybody who buys NFTs started saying, oh, there was an airdrop.

• 1:02:59Shaan Puri?

  Which means if I look at my wallet, I'm going to have tokens. It's like finding 20 bucks in your wallet. And so they did an airdrop to all the users of OpenSea. Based on how much you use OpenSea. So

• 1:03:11Sam Parr?

  How did they get that information?

• 1:03:13Shaan Puri?

  It's it's the block. It's that's the beauty. It's this can only happen in crypto. So because

• 1:03:17Sam Parr?

  I know, but I would have thought that, like, I guess you could just scrape the website and just get a list of everyone's wallet on.

• 1:03:22Shaan Puri?

  No, no, no, it's not the website. All OpenSea is just like a website that accesses the Ethereum blockchain. So all the transactions happen on the Ethereum blockchain. The buying and selling of the NFT, the minting of the NFT is on the blockchain. The buying and selling is all there. And the blockchain, again, is this open source, public, public record, basically, that you can go access. You can go, I can go type in your wallet address, like your public wallet address. And I can just go see how much money is in your account right now. If I just go into EtherScan. And so you might have multiple wallets, but like, that's one thing you can do. So what they did was they went, they looked at every, every transaction on OpenSea, all the wallets. And they said, okay, Sean's wallet has spent 10 ETH. He's done five transactions, so he should get X percentage of it. So they took of the 100 trillion,

• 1:04:05Shaan Puri?

  they said, half of it, we're just going to drop to all the users of OpenSea. So I woke up and I had 58 billion of these tokens in there at a point, oh, whatever price. My total was whatever, like $300, whatever, it's like $500 because I don't use OpenSea a ton. I didn't do too many transactions. But if you're one of these people who's like an NFT collector or flipper, who is very active on the platform, who buys and sells, you know, you know, bored apes and things like that. People made like $3,000, $5,000, $15,000. So it's like finding $5,000 in your wallet. And you're like, what is this? Ah, I got this free money. And it's money that they minted and they basically, it was almost like, it's a marketing step, but it's almost like a hostile takeover. So they basically went out there. What they were saying was,

• 1:04:50Shaan Puri?

  here's what OpenSea should have done. They should have given all the users some tokens, proportionate to their usage, basically. So based on how much you've been using the platform, you get some of the OpenSea token and that, and then the OpenSea token will be publicly tradable. So you get to benefit and the core team will keep some of the OpenSea token, like the company will keep 20% of this. That's how, that's like the normal way in crypto. So the genius part of this is that some third party just did this on their behalf. And it's like, and now what, and they, so now there's a liquid market of like hundreds of millions of dollars. I think it was like $300 million. The, the group, okay, so here's how they did it. They said 50% goes to the users. 10% goes to the stakers and the liquidity pool, 30% goes to the stakers and liquidity pool,

• 1:05:33Shaan Puri?

  and 20% will stay with the treasury of our, of our foundation. And we are going to build an open source version of OpenSea. We're going to build a competitor to OpenSea. And all you users who are power users of OpenSea, you now have a stake in our new OpenSea that's to come, that's going to do things the right way.

• 1:05:51Sam Parr?

  But they've got to build, I mean, building an OpenSea is fucking hard. So, I mean, how many people work there? 500 people?

• 1:05:58Shaan Puri?

  No, no, no, dude, these things can be built by like, you know, four motivated developers if you needed to.

• 1:06:04Sam Parr?

  Then why the hell does Airbnb need 5,000 people?

• 1:06:07Shaan Puri?

  It'll take a lot to maintain it and do customer support and all those things. Yes, that will take time, but just building the actual product that will start to get people to shift off of OpenSea to do this. A team of five to 10 contributors can actually do this if they're great developers that are focused. Now, that's TBD. It's like a Kickstarter. It's like, hey, we give your money in a Kickstarter. Are they ever going to build a thing? Well, it kind of depends. Are they honest and are they going to work hard? I don't know. We'll see. But these guys, basically, they essentially raised, it's like they hijacked OpenSea and they raised, their share was 20 trillion out of the 120%. They have $130 million now in their treasury that they can pay their development team to build the open source competitor to this.

• 1:06:47Sam Parr?

  Who's the guy behind it? The people behind it?

• 1:06:50Shaan Puri?

  This 9x9x9x and then someone else who's x.xyz. That's his handle. I think that's who's behind it. And so they, I think it's, look, I don't know if this is going to work, but I think it's something that's only possible in the crypto world because again, this is one of, this is one of the reasons why people are like, you know, decentralization is cool. It's cool because the users can always pick up their ball and leave. They can go to another court. And so OpenSea does not own their wallets. It does not own their NFTs. They have no lock-in to keep the users there, except for behaving well and treating them well. And if somebody else says, I'm going to treat you better over here, it is very easy for me to take my wallet, take my NFTs and go over here.

• 1:07:33Shaan Puri?

  And even better, that other group can incentivize me to come over here and try it out by saying, hey, here's some free tokens that we minted out of thin air. So I think this is a genius marketing move. It's like a hostile takeover. It reminds me of, I had a buddy who was going to do this to a company called Ripple. Have you ever heard of Ripple?

• 1:07:49Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but they, they're shady, right?

• 1:07:52Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so Ripple was this thing, kind of like, started pretty early on. And they had this, like, you know, honestly, not a bad idea. They were like, look, you know, the way the international banking system works today is off this thing called the SWIFT standard. Ripple was like, we are going to be a bank-to-bank communication layer that uses blockchain, right? So they were like, we're going to use blockchain technology with a real use case, which is banks sending money back and forth to each other. So that was their idea. They got a bunch of funding from Founders Fund and others, and they released this thing called XRP. That's the name of their token. All right, so whatever. Nobody cares about that, how it works, nobody cares. But the interesting part is XRP has like, was worth a lot. The founders of Ripple became billionaires overnight before. Like best thing with crypto, you can get rich before like this open Dow has $130 million

• 1:08:36Shaan Puri?

  before they have a product. In Ripple, those guys became billionaires before banks ever used their product, which is like a really fucked up incentive and which is why sometimes shit doesn't actually get built in crypto. Cause hey, I already got the millions. I could just run away. I could just do a half ass job. It doesn't really matter at this point. I went public on day one. So Ripple has a market cap right now of

• 1:08:59Shaan Puri?

  94, is this right? $94 billion? I think I'm reading this right. $94 billion, something like that. No, no, sorry. $44 billion. $44 billion, right? That's like, that's like the market cap of like, you know, Bank of America, some shit like that. So obviously Ripple's not actually valued at that, but Ripple had believers and they had early momentum. They were very early in the crypto games. They had a lot of PR and the CEO would go on CNBC and talk about how this is going to change the game. So what happened? In the crypto community, people were kind of like poo pooing Ripple. They're like, this is like centralized. They, they took way too much share for themselves. They didn't give enough to users. That's why these guys are billionaires. Their product kind of sucks and they're kind of shady, whatever, whatever. That's the reputation was Ripple. Anybody

• 1:09:42Shaan Puri?

  who was in the known crypto, crypto, pretty much the general consensus was Ripple's full of shit. And so my buddy had this idea. He was like, he was like, I'm going to do the first hostile takeover of a crypto network. And I was like, what do you mean? He goes, look, I can see every single person's wallet who owns Ripple. I was like, okay, that's kind of interesting. He goes, but you don't know their name and all that. He goes, I don't need their name. I was like, you don't have their email address. He goes, I don't need their email address. I could just put something in their wallet and they'll wake up and they'll open their wallet and they'll see that they have something in it. I was like, okay. He goes, so I'm going to go out there. I'm going to say XRP is stupid for these five reasons. Number one, the founders took

• 1:10:18Sam Parr?

  Can you message these people anything?

• 1:10:20Shaan Puri?

  You can include a message in the transaction of giving them the thing, in the memo of the, of the thing. But like the way you do it is you first drop the token. You tell people, hey, if you held Ripple, you got this token today. And then you write your manifesto on your Twitter or your website about what this is all about. So you, it's kind of like somebody put a $50 check in your wallet. You're like, what's this all about? It says, go to this website to explain why you just got this $50. So that's how this, that's how this marketing mechanism works. So he was like, I'm gonna put some money in there. I'm gonna put my currency in all the Ripple holders wallet. And then I'm gonna tell them Ripple is stupid for these five reasons. The founders took too much. This other problem, this other problem, you know, they're the, the token is inflationary, blah, blah, blah. So I'm gonna change all that. We only take 10%.

• 1:11:04Shaan Puri?

  We are not inflationary. We do not do this sketchy shit, blah, blah, blah. My five point plan of how to make Ripple better. And we're, we're calling it our own thing. And here's the deal. If you own Ripple, if you send your Ripple to my wallet, I will send you back five times your value of this. If you're in the first, for the first thousand people that do this. Then for the next 10,000 people that do this, you're gonna get four times your, your Ripple back. And for the next 10,000 people, you're gonna get three times your Ripple back. So basically there's this urgency of like, okay, if these, if this is gonna become the next Ripple, if I send my money in now, I'm gonna get five, I'm gonna get a 5X multiplier of my money. And what he was gonna do was just, he goes, when you send it to this wallet, we're gonna just dump it. We're just gonna sell it and we're gonna put so much sell pressure, we're gonna crash the price of Ripple.

• 1:11:50Shaan Puri?

  So if you do it early-

• 1:11:51Sam Parr?

  Do they do this?

• 1:11:52Shaan Puri?

  So let me finish the story. So he goes, if you do this early, you're gonna get five times your amount. And you're not gonna sit there holding the bag while we dump this thing. It's like a prisoner's dilemma game theory. It was so genius. He's like, he's like, here's the math. If you're, if you're holding this thing, you have to assess. Are other people gonna take them up on this offer? If they do, then the Ripple I'm holding is gonna go down like crazy. I'm gonna go down like five to 10X. If I jump, if I jump ship, I get a 5X multiplier on my money and I don't sit there holding the sinking ship. And the game theory of this, I think was gonna work. So he has this plan. And he starts, and he starts, and so he's like, okay, well, he needs to be credible. So he went to some very, very wealthy people.

• 1:12:35Shaan Puri?

  And he got about $50 million lined up to do this hostile takeover. And he was like, he needed it to be like 200 million. And so he's like, I need to create this huge war chest. So I can tell people, look, we have this much money. So you, this, it's backed by something. Come on board. And he's like, dude, I, he's like, basically I'm going to these investors. I'm saying, if you give me $200 million, I'm gonna take down this project. I'm gonna absorb all the value of this project that's currently worth 40 billion. Right? So he's like, it's a huge return for those investors and they, and they also don't even believe in Ripple. So it was this high stakes, fucking James Bond shit. What the problem was, one of the investors that he had went to for this leaked the plan to a journalist. This guy, Dan Primack or whatever, he's like a pretty famous journalist.

• 1:13:17Sam Parr?

  Yeah, from Axios.

• 1:13:18Shaan Puri?

  Axios. Axios writes the story ahead of time. He says, hey, there's somebody planning a hostile takeover XRP, and here's how it's gonna work. And XRP, the Ripple team obviously sees this and they're like, okay, just in case, they, so they sold some amount of their Ripple to create a like few hundred million dollar buffer, so that if somebody tried to do this and tried to tank the price, they had enough liquidity to buy back the, buy back the tokens and keep the price high. So it kind of foiled his plan where the only, the only way it would have worked is if he had caught them by surprise. And he could have done it in like a two day period. He could have tanked the price of Ripple and created this competitor and had all the momentum on his side. But because they had heads up, they, they could create enough liquidity

• 1:14:03Shaan Puri?

  and they could be able to like support their price before somebody could do this to them. But how crazy is that, dude?

• 1:14:09Sam Parr?

  This is like some barbarians at the gate shit. Like, this is like 1980s, like Drexel, like hostile takeover where they like, were like, what's it called? The green mailing? Have you ever read like these like 1980s finance?

• 1:14:22Shaan Puri?

  I have, I have the book, I haven't read it yet.

• 1:14:25Sam Parr?

  Yeah, that's basically what they did. Like, it was like, it was like warfare.

• 1:14:29Shaan Puri?

  I was like, this is some George Soros shit. You know, George Soros broke the Bank of England? I was like, this is some George Soros shit. And that's what he was, that's actually what he was telling me. He goes, this is some George Soros shit. And I was like, what do you mean? He goes, George Soros broke the Bank of England by doing something very similar to this. And as he was explaining, I was like, there's no way this works. He's like, well, you know, it's risky, but like, if it works.

• 1:14:49Sam Parr?

  Who, who did it?

• 1:14:50Shaan Puri?

  And, so he didn't, he didn't end up doing it.

• 1:14:54Sam Parr?

  But I mean, who, who's the, it's an article, it's, is it public?

• 1:14:57Shaan Puri?

  Uh, I don't know if it's public, but I'll tell you, it's our friend who, you remember we went to dinner after our live show in Miami? It's our friend we went to dinner with.

• 1:15:05Sam Parr?

  Okay, okay.

• 1:15:06Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:07Sam Parr?

  That's crazy. I thought if, if Dan would have wrote about it, he would have named him.

• 1:15:12Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think he didn't know the name or he, I don't think he included the name of the thing, but how fucking nuts is that?

• 1:15:18Sam Parr?

  That's crazy. If you, if that person could have pulled it off, that's wild. This is barbarians at the gate shit, hostile takeover stuff.

• 1:15:24Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I love it. Um, all right, I have a couple more topics if we want to do them or if we want to go, we can go.

• 1:15:30Sam Parr?

  All right, I got, I can do 15 more minutes.

• 1:15:33Shaan Puri?

  All right, let's do one more.

• 1:15:36Shaan Puri?

  Okay, I got two random ideas for you. Okay, here's the here's the first idea. All right, this idea is my gift to the Chief Marketing Officer of Gucci. You know, you're welcome. Courtesy of Shanti.

• 1:15:47Sam Parr?

  Okay, I see this headline.

• 1:15:51Shaan Puri?

  All right. So I was thinking the other day, I was I was sitting there and sitting at the at a restaurant. And as I do, I'm just watch, I'm just people watch, I'm just watching these crazy creatures called humans. What the fuck are they doing? And I saw all these people that had fancy bags, Gucci bags, Louis Vuitton bags. It's very different from my world. I don't I don't give a shit about that, but they obviously do. And I was watching this and then I came home, I'm watching the show Selling Sunset. Funny show on Netflix about real estate team.

• 1:16:18Sam Parr?

  Dude, I watched it too, man. You know, I watch all that shit.

• 1:16:22Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So so you know, I dabble. And if you notice, every day they come to work, they're wearing like the craziest. Like what nobody wears to work, they're wearing like

• 1:16:29Sam Parr?

  Like $5,000.

• 1:16:30Shaan Puri?

  $5,000 dress with like a $5,000 bag and they put the bag right on the middle of the desk. It's like, there's no laptop, there's no computer. It's like a desk with a chair and their purse on top and then they just gloss up with each other. Right. That's where the show is at this point. So I was thinking about this like luxury thing and luxury has just caught my eye. And I said, what else? What else could you do? And I don't know how this came to mind, but here's a crazy idea. It's really a marketing stunt. It's not a business idea. It's a marketing stunt for Gucci. So here's what you're gonna do. Every year, there are over a million joint replacements in America. So people getting hip replacements, knee replacements, people getting, you know, they fracture their foot. They get a steel rod put in. There are over a million people a year that get this done.

• 1:17:16Sam Parr?

  I got it done.

• 1:17:17Shaan Puri?

  You got it done. What'd you get done?

• 1:17:19Sam Parr?

  I've got screws. I broke my leg. I've got screws and a little, I got metal on my feet.

• 1:17:24Shaan Puri?

  Now, you're not the right person to ask, but is there a version of Sam? That might have paid an extra 500 bucks to have that be a Gucci nail.

• 1:17:31Sam Parr?

  The answer is yeah, of course. The answer is yeah. The answer is yeah. So we're talking about, I thought you were gonna go with like Gucci prosthetic legs. But you're talking about like.

• 1:17:42Shaan Puri?

  Just branded on the inside.

• 1:17:44Sam Parr?

  That's actually a cool idea.

• 1:17:45Shaan Puri?

  Inside.

• 1:17:46Sam Parr?

  And you only see it on the x-ray?

• 1:17:48Shaan Puri?

  Like only see it, you, you have the picture before it goes into your body, right? So you get the Instagram porn of, oh, hey, guys, I'm doing well post-surgery. Here's my pics. And as you're swiping.

• 1:17:58Sam Parr?

  It's an awesome flex.

• 1:17:59Shaan Puri?

  It's a fucking Louis V hip that's coming into your body.

• 1:18:02Sam Parr?

  It's an awesome flex.

• 1:18:03Shaan Puri?

  It's an LV knee, dude.

• 1:18:05Sam Parr?

  You can always see it in airport scanners.

• 1:18:08Shaan Puri?

  They do something so that exactly in x-ray, you'll always see an emblem on the thing. Now, I don't know how doctors will figure out the science of how this works without fucking up your system.

• 1:18:17Sam Parr?

  That's good.

• 1:18:17Shaan Puri?

  How good is that, dude? That, that is, that is amazing. This is just an extra little revenue line, tons of news, because everyone's gonna say this is what's wrong with the world. You're gonna take over and guess what? There's gonna be a bunch of people out there who are going and getting surgeries done that are gonna say, yeah, okay. It's the average knee replacement is like 25, $30,000, like all in. I think that, you know, maybe it can be as low as 12,000 to 15,000. You tell him in the actual part itself that goes in, I think is a $5,000 part that the hospital orders. You're telling me I wouldn't get the $7,500 supreme fucking, you know, knee, knee?

• 1:18:51Sam Parr?

  With the Nike logo?

• 1:18:53Shaan Puri?

  The just do it hip? Come on.

• 1:18:55Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:55Shaan Puri?

  Come on.

• 1:18:56Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:56Shaan Puri?

  That's just licensing revenue for them. It's marketing, it's, it's influencer candy, dude. It, if people get grills, if rappers go get diamond grills, if they were, if, you know, somebody out there like me, some, some guy like me out there was like, yo, diamond braces. What? Yeah, diamond braces. Actually, fuck it, not even for braces, just diamond teeth. Diamond teeth worked. If diamond teeth worked, the Louis V hip can work.

• 1:19:21Sam Parr?

  Dude, this is a good idea. This is pretty funny. This is brilliant. This is actually a good one.

• 1:19:25Shaan Puri?

  That one was for you for TikTok. That's for you TikTokers out there. That was my TikTok segment.

• 1:19:28Sam Parr?

  That's actually, this is actually a fun idea.

• 1:19:31Shaan Puri?

  All right.

• 1:19:32Sam Parr?

  What uh, wait, who, who, hey, did you research this? Is that even possible?

• 1:19:37Shaan Puri?

  I have no idea if it's possible.

• 1:19:39Sam Parr?

  I've got like, I don't think you could, I don't think you could see stuff like that. I've got x-rays of my screws and like, you can like, look at them, but I don't think, I don't know how that would work.

• 1:19:48Shaan Puri?

  It might have to be a striping. It might have to be a dots, polka dots. It might have to be something that will show up there. It might be an emblem that's just on it, a tiny emblem. But you know, like the red bottom shoes for what's it called? You know, like.

• 1:20:02Sam Parr?

  Yeah. I don't know. Yeah, we're fucking nerds, but the, the black or the red bottom shoes, they wrap about them.

• 1:20:11Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. Whatever. People will find a way to see the shit and you just, if that's the only problem with this idea, we got a good problem to have. So, um, and also by the way, tattoos, I think you could also do this with tattoo parlors. I think you could drop branded official licensed designs of tattoos for brands and be like, yeah, if you get this one, it's actually, that's like actually the brand. Cause like, you know, people get tattoos of brands like.

• 1:20:37Sam Parr?

  Yeah, like a Louis Vuitton tattoo.

• 1:20:38Shaan Puri?

  I think Jake Paul has a Nike swoosh where his like sock would be on his, on his calf.

• 1:20:42Sam Parr?

  I've seen that. That's hilarious, actually.

• 1:20:44Shaan Puri?

  And I was like, that's funny. He got a brand tattooed on him. And I think I was also like, you know, why wouldn't brands actually drop tattoo designs, just like they drop bag and shoe designs? Like, I feel like that should happen.

• 1:20:56Sam Parr?

  That's interesting. That's another interesting idea. All right. Two for two.

• 1:21:00Shaan Puri?

  All right. I have one more for you. Okay. This one's less fun, but I think it's still good.

• 1:21:05Shaan Puri?

  Do you remember glamour shots?

• 1:21:06Sam Parr?

  Love them.

• 1:21:08Shaan Puri?

  Did you, your mom have glamour shots? Do you know anybody who had glamour shots?

• 1:21:11Sam Parr?

  I didn't do it, but like my sister did. It's hilarious. It's like Napoleon Dynamite shit where you go to the mall and you wear stupid makeup and a bad haircut and you take these awesome pictures, of course.

• 1:21:22Shaan Puri?

  Do you know the business behind glamour shots?

• 1:21:24Sam Parr?

  No.

• 1:21:26Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so.

• 1:21:27Sam Parr?

  Is that the, is that the name of a brand glamour?

• 1:21:30Shaan Puri?

  Glamour shots was the name of the company, I think. Okay, so here's the, here's the quick backstory. I did like, you know, two seconds of research on this, so could be wrong. Started by a frat party photographer who was like, you know, taking pics at frats and I was like, all right, what else I got? So initially starts, it calls it party pics. Then when they were like, kind of looking at trends, they were like, oh, people are liking this like high glamour style, like big hair, loud, loud clothes, certain backdrops. And so they were like, all right.

• 1:22:00Shaan Puri?

  He's like, so he renames it to glamour shots and it's physical locations. And within first year, it already starts working. By year three, seven million in revenue and copycats popping up everywhere. Hollywood headshots, freeze frame, you name it. There's different portrait shops popping up. At one point, it just, he expands through the franchising model, expands to 380 stores, Taiwan, Japan, everybody wants a piece of glamour shots. And the trick, the thing that like really made it work was most.

• 1:22:27Sam Parr?

  Great name.

• 1:22:28Shaan Puri?

  Most professional photographers, you would go, well, there's a couple of things that made it work. One was the style was iconic. The second was, so it wasn't just come, I'll take a picture of you. It was come, I'll make you look like a Hollywood star with the hair, the makeup, the clothes. And it was only like, you know, top half up. So you would be wearing your jeans underneath and then at your top would be like this denim studded jacket or whatever with the collar popped or whatever. So backdrops with the colors, everybody knows the look. Fan blowing your hair, that whole thing. So that was one, one innovation. The other was instant gratification. So you would take the photo and for most photographers, they're like, great, I'll, I'll, I'll go, you know, get these exposed, then I'll, I'll, whatever, touch them, I'll pick the best ones and I'll get, I'll get you,

• 1:23:11Shaan Puri?

  you know, some, some options in a few, few days, few weeks. Glamour shots, they used a special like kind of camera technique or whatever. So it was actually taking a video, I think, and it would grab an image and you could see it right there on the screen in real time and you could pick and be like, oh, I want that one, that one's so good. They got you in the heat of the moment when you were in peak state, when you were already caught up in the frenzy and people were dropping 300, 400, 500 inflation adjusted on their glamour shots.

• 1:23:38Shaan Puri?

  Average customer spend. So it was like highly lucrative. Cause that's basically like, you know, for like a 30 minute shoot, you're making, you know, huge profits and they had these like six categories of styles that you got to pick from. The names are hilarious. One is can't wait to be touched. Another spontaneous, tailored, elegant, bold. And that's where these like classic looks come from. So there was some genius behind the person who really understood what the customer wants behind it.

• 1:24:04Sam Parr?

  Whatever happened to the company?

• 1:24:05Shaan Puri?

  So it gets to a hundred million in sales by 1994. By 2001, it's now dropped back down to 93 stores. Now there's like 40 stores left. It's basically withered away and dying. Didn't, didn't last, didn't keep up with the times. Here's the idea. We're rebooting glamour shots.

• 1:24:23Sam Parr?

  And.

• 1:24:24Shaan Puri?

  We're rebooting glamour shots.

• 1:24:26Sam Parr?

  Everything nostalgic from the nineties is crushing.

• 1:24:29Shaan Puri?

  Oh, you're rebooting Spider-Man, Batman, X-Men. You're rebooting Home Alone. Home Alone's getting rebooted. We're rebooting glamour shots. That's what I'm telling you.

• 1:24:40Sam Parr?

  I'm on board. So there's, I'm looking at it now. There's only five. So there's only five of these locations left.

• 1:24:46Shaan Puri?

  We're down to the last, you know, remember the Alamo, where we're down to the last stand. So the question is, how would you actually reboot glamour shots? So I wanted to brainstorm with you for two minutes. How would you reboot glamour shots? I got a couple of ideas. I don't know if you have one off the top of your head, otherwise I'll go.

• 1:25:01Sam Parr?

  You gotta do it in person, I think. I think that's a part of it. That's part of it. Um, do, what do you need to do that's different? I mean, you just do an ad campaign with really cool celebrities or some celebrities and you'd be like, here's what they would have looked like, like, you know, a modern, a modern person, what they would have looked like with a glamour shot. What would you do?

• 1:25:18Shaan Puri?

  So I'm gonna reboot it. I'm not, okay. So nostalgia is one, one, one angle you could, you could just say this look would come back. Uh, but I think that's, that's short sighted. I think what you gotta do is you gotta work backwards. So my mom had glamour shots on the wall. The end product was a framed picture on the wall of her looking like an eighties soap opera, nineties soap opera person, basically with the hair blown out and crazy lighting and crazy dress. Well, what is the, what's the end product people want today? Instagram, baby. They want epic Instagram content. So we've talked about Museum of Ice Cream. We've talked about some of these. I think those are secretly glamour shots reboots. I think you gotta go all in on the glamour shots reboot. So you're gonna, you're gonna make somebody look fucking amazing.

• 1:26:01Shaan Puri?

  For social media. I know what people out there throwing up in their mouth. They're like, oh, this is everything that's wrong with, well, guess what? People, people care what they look like, how they come across on social media. If you, if you hate that fact, cool, delete Instagram. But if you still got Instagram, you're still in on this idea. Okay. So how are we going to do it? One idea was, could you get Airbnbs, convert them to like, basically like dope lifestyle looking Airbnb's and just rent them out for shoots? Instead of renting it out for $700 a night, you're renting it out for a hundred dollars an hour and you're doing, or $200 an hour and you're doing shoots for people. Where they get to look like they live in a dope lifestyle. They look, it look like they're living.

• 1:26:38Sam Parr?

  But that's, that's different than a glamour shot. Glamour shot is like, supposed to be funny.

• 1:26:44Shaan Puri?

  It's not supposed to be funny, dude. That, it looks funny now when we look back, like, look back at your dad with an Afro or whatever, like, actually you had an Afro in high school. So look back at your own high school. That's supposed to be funny. At the time, I don't know if you were trying to be funny, but for glamour shots.

• 1:26:55Sam Parr?

  But they are, they're trying to be glamour. But that's different with these Instagram things. You're talking about being like lying.

• 1:27:01Shaan Puri?

  You're trying to look cool. Yeah. So, so that's one, one angle to it.

• 1:27:05Sam Parr?

  I think you're lying. You don't live in that fancy ass house.

• 1:27:08Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, but you're not saying, I live here. You're just posting a picture. Like people do.

• 1:27:12Sam Parr?

  Somebody will have like a, like a.

• 1:27:13Shaan Puri?

  People rent fancy cars and they take pictures with it and then they've returned the car.

• 1:27:17Sam Parr?

  Do you know anyone who does that?

• 1:27:19Shaan Puri?

  Personally, thank God, no. That, have I seen people who do that on Instagram? Yes. I've seen people who do that on Instagram. Tons of people do that on Instagram.

• 1:27:27Sam Parr?

  It's like, uh, what you would need is just like.

• 1:27:28Shaan Puri?

  People rent dresses for the day, you know?

• 1:27:30Sam Parr?

  Dude, you would just need like a, like one airline seat and like what looks like an airline.

• 1:27:34Shaan Puri?

  You've seen that, right? The private, the half private jet. It's like a movie set. It's like a.

• 1:27:39Sam Parr?

  It's like where they film pornos.

• 1:27:41Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. So, so there's that. I think, okay, but that's a little capital intensive to get Airbnbs. Maybe you do it with a green screen. So I think one, one way you could do this is you could just have someone come take pictures with a green screen and you just do it where once they take the pictures once at one of your locations with the green screen, very cheap to do. Then you CGI them into like a whole bunch of different looks that becomes their collection of, of like, they could be power suits. They could be, it could be boss mode. They could be party mode. They could be whatever, but you just have green screen props and scenarios and you show them exactly how to pose to look good. Most people don't even know how to pose, myself included. When you meet somebody who knows how to pose, you're like, oh, like that's fucking half of it.

• 1:28:20Shaan Puri?

  That other half is like lighting and fucking props, but like, and editing, right? Like, but do you remember when the guy came to take photos of us at the Miami thing? He was like, all right, stand here. Half squint your eye. You're like, why?

• 1:28:31Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I was like this.

• 1:28:32Shaan Puri?

  I look like I have Down syndrome. What do you mean? He's like, no, trust me. Kind of squint your eye. He's like, then, you know, like protrude your neck forward. I was like, no, this looks like a turtle. He's like, no, look, watch, I got rid of your double chin. You know, you look like sharper and like more powerful. Okay, look at this angle. This, this gives you confidence. Look from this angle specifically, whereas for me, I'm like the fucking nutcracker. If I take a photo, it's like, stand straight, look straight, hands to my side, smile, cheese. Like, that's how I take all my photos, right? But there is an art to posing and most people don't know how to do it. So I think there's a, there's a version of glamour shots that somebody could reboot. That just gives you an end product that you want for social media. I don't know exactly what it is.

• 1:29:10Sam Parr?

  I would just say, bring back the classics. I think that you could just, you could just do it as is. What, what happened to the company? So did it?

• 1:29:17Shaan Puri?

  Dude, you could just do this with like dating profiles and stuff, whatever. I don't know, the company still exists, but I think it's kind of like just gone down the drain. I don't know. I don't know the ending of that story.

• 1:29:27Sam Parr?

  I wonder what happened to the founders? Does he have like some, his name's Bob? Does he have like some huge like mansion now in LA? Like that glamour shot money?

• 1:29:34Shaan Puri?

  1,000% he's gonna have a huge mansion in LA. Yeah, take two seconds to just Google that. I bet you, I bet you this guy's gotta have a thing in LA. If he doesn't, we're just gonna edit this part out.

• 1:29:46Sam Parr?

  Uh, I can't see, but is it actually Bob? Ooh, he lives in Texas, in dripping Springs, Texas, which is near Austin. And it's where like, it's like where moms who get glamour shots live. It's like a, the suburbs of Texas.

• 1:30:02Shaan Puri?

  By the way, that's the glamour shots is still thriving in Texas. I think that's the only place where it's still like a thriving business. I think I read that.

• 1:30:09Sam Parr?

  Dude, this guy's awesome.

• 1:30:10Shaan Puri?

  All right, that's all I got. Those are my topics.

• 1:30:13Sam Parr?

  This is awesome. We gotta get Bob on here. Um, all right, that's the pod.