AI Santa and Four Other Simple Business Ideas (+ Vice Goes Bankrupt!)

Episode 451: Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) talk about business ideas that solve problems, deep fake Santa and the rise and fall of Vice media. Want to see more MFM? Subscribe to the MFM YouTube channel here. Check Out Sam's Stuff: * Hampton * Ideation Bootcamp * Copy That Check Out Shaan's Stuff: * Power Writing Course * Daily Newsletter ----- Links: * Vice * OMG Facts * Nonlinear * TrueMed * Play Street Museum * 260 Sample Sale * Kingsford Charcoal * Hostshare * Kindred * MoneySuperMarket * Replit * TrueMed * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. ------ Show Notes: (00:55) - Play Street Museum (06:32) - 260 Sample Sale (13:05) - Host Share (21:15) - AI Santa (25:18) - Vice media (43:45) - OMG Facts and Emerson Spartz ------ 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?

  This is such a good idea. By the way, this is a phenomenal idea. This is a 10 out of 10 opportunity and

• 0:07Sam Parr?

  Dude, he pitched me to invest.

• 0:09Shaan Puri?

  Why have I not invested in this?

• 0:20Shaan Puri?

  All right, what's up? We got a banger. We got a doozy. We got a, we got a two man trio here and it's just me and Sam, no guests today. Sam, what's up?

• 0:30Sam Parr?

  Nothing. I've liked having guests, actually. Normally I hate it. Lately I've enjoyed it.

• 0:34Shaan Puri?

  What's the difference?

• 0:34Sam Parr?

  So we should do more.

• 0:37Sam Parr?

  I like the people we've chatted with. It's been better.

• 0:39Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, not like those other crusty guests in the past.

• 0:44Sam Parr?

  I have got a meaty topic. It looks like, I don't know if you have meaty ones, but you have four good ones, but they're smaller. Is that right?

• 0:51Shaan Puri?

  All right, I'm gonna tell you about a business that I think is kind of interesting. Ben, Ben put this on my radar yesterday. He goes, he goes, dude, your sister should open a play street, a play street. I was like, what the hell's a play street? So I look it up. Have you ever heard of this thing? Play Street Museum? Probably not. You know, you don't have little kids, but basically imagine like a good for you version of Chuck E. Cheese. Let's start with that as the, as the analogy. So like Chuck E. Cheese is, you know, it's like, I heard this tweet that was like, come eat rat pizza at my child casino.

• 1:34Sam Parr?

  Dude, my parents used to say the, they were, I always thought the Chuck E. Cheese near my house had burnt down, but they just would say, no, it burnt down. We can't go anymore. If I drove by there when I got a license and it wasn't burnt down. I just thought it had burnt down.

• 1:49Sam Parr?

  That was their excuse. They said it burnt down.

• 1:52Shaan Puri?

  16 years old, you're just slamming the drive, the steering wheel, just like, god damn it. It's been here the whole time.

• 1:59Sam Parr?

  It's like, it's like one of those facts your parents tell you when you're five and you just believe it to be true. Like, you know, I think I, my, I told you, my, my father one time said, real men don't drink with straws, but he was referring to like a Jack and Coke. So like for years I was like, oh, we don't, we're not allowed to drink from straws. It's like the Chuck E. Cheese, it's the Chuck E. Cheese on Chippewa burnt down. You know, it's not there anymore.

• 2:20Shaan Puri?

  Chuck E. Cheese on what?

• 2:23Sam Parr?

  That was the street. Chippewa.

• 2:26Shaan Puri?

  Too good. All right. So this thing Play Street is basically you go there. It's a nice, clean place. It's like a, like a dream playroom for your kids. So it's like they got a giant train set. They have some learning games. They got like, you know, the floors all, it's like child safe. And you basically pay

• 2:42Sam Parr?

  Beautifully done.

• 2:43Shaan Puri?

  Fifteen bucks.

• 2:43Sam Parr?

  Beautifully done.

• 2:44Shaan Puri?

  And you get to play for an hour and a half or something like that. And so Ben goes, yeah, I've been going to this place. And I see that basically the one near me at least, he goes, I think they're doing 50 grand a month. I go 50 grand a month? That's kind of a lot. And he goes, yeah, he goes, they basically they have, and I forgot the exact numbers, but it's like seven sessions a day. It's $15 each.

• 3:05Shaan Puri?

  And you have 25 kids, I think, in the, in the thing at once. And he goes, they're basically 75% full in these sessions. You kind of do the math. You're like, all right, that gets you kind of like to 40K. Plus you can host your kids birthday parties there in the nights and weekends. And so some people do that. He's like, I think they're probably, you know, an extra eight to 10K of, of sort of event revenue per month. And then if you look at the cost, you know, you got your rent, it's probably like, you know, 5K. And you have, you know, you have your staff, your teacher, you're sort of like your, your supervisors or whatever that are like overseeing the, the play space and like resetting it, re-cleaning it in between sessions.

• 3:40Shaan Puri?

  I think, I'm pretty sure this thing is like netting, uh, something like 30K a month, um, in profit, maybe 25K a month in profit. And

• 3:48Sam Parr?

  And they have tons of these locations.

• 3:49Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So, so it turns out they're franchising or something like that. I don't know if these numbers are true, by the way. This is like complete guesswork on my side, but I wouldn't be surprised. My sister owns, uh, some preschools in San Francisco and the numbers are somewhat similar. Now that's different. That's, you know, they pay, you know, a lot more, but for, for, for, you know, regular schooling. But it's interesting to me that these play spaces can, uh, can do so well. And it's like, it's weatherproof. It's like, you know, you did like, I know with me, like we go to Target three times a week. You might ask yourself, Sean, what do you, what do you need from Target so much? Don't you know you can order online? And what I tell you is this is, uh, this is daycare for me. Like I

• 4:28Sam Parr?

  Sean goes to Target so much that in his home, you have this like Target. Like a Target checkout place and a Target like grocery cart that you said you had to like find because it was like a collector's edition or like it was all sold out everywhere, right?

• 4:44Shaan Puri?

  Moms go crazy for this.

• 4:45Sam Parr?

  You had to like buy it on eBay and do a big markup.

• 4:48Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. These Target mini grocery carts, uh, kids love them because they're they're used to see the kids like to do anything they've seen their parents doing. So the whole mini grocery checkout plus plus Target cart is uh, is like in high demand. So I go there often and I do it because you got to kill time. It's like, how do I kill 90 minutes? And ideally, and I would do something that's like enriching to them. You know, worst case scenario, we just go to Starbucks or Target or whatever. And this would be better. I would gladly pay 15 bucks for my kids to be able to go play in a place that's not a park, which is like weather, weather dependent. So I think these are really cool ideas. Um, I think this play street thing is a cool idea. And I could see this, uh, you know, this franchise doing like, you know, decently well, probably not the best franchise in the world, but I think it could do decently well.

• 5:33Sam Parr?

  Where are the locations?

• 5:35Shaan Puri?

  They're like Texas. Uh, there's like none in California, none in New York. It's like a bunch of like.

• 5:40Sam Parr?

  But what are they? It's like a, it's like a.

• 5:42Shaan Puri?

  It's just a blank commercial space. Um, so like you don't need any food stuff. Uh, so you just say, you know, it's like a, just a blank like retail space.

• 5:50Sam Parr?

  Huh. Yeah. I mean, their branding is pretty, pretty good. It's like.

• 5:53Shaan Puri?

  Kind of like how escape rooms work. Escape rooms work because they require no specific real estate. They can operate in a very small footprint and they take like two staff to run at any, all day. And so escape rooms actually are like, you know, fairly, fairly good, you know, franchise businesses, or they were for a period of time. Now, unlike an escape room, which is kind of like, you don't know if, if escape rooms are a fad, or if they're going to be like popular three years from now. Um, these you kind of know are going to be popular because it's like, you know, every parent's got this problem. All right. Let me tell you about another, another thing like this. Another problem you haven't really thought about. This business called 260 sample sale. You ever heard of this?

• 6:29Sam Parr?

  No. Uh, let me Google it.

• 6:31Shaan Puri?

  It's like kind of a cool New York thing. So what, what they do is any e-commerce or fashion brand has a ton of, you know, photo samples or product samples that they get from their manufacturer. They use them in their photo shoots to create the pictures on the website or for advertisements or marketing or whatever. And then those don't live in the warehouse like they live like where the photographer is or where their office is. And you just end up piling up boxes and boxes and boxes of photo samples, you know, over time. Because let's say you, you know, most fashion brands or apparel brands have, you know, thousands of SKUs. For each SKU, you had a sample made before you had the production one made. But you didn't just have one sample made, you have each of the

• 7:16Shaan Puri?

  sizes made and because you needed it for the photo shoot to be able to show the range or be able to cast different types of of models. And so what ends up happening is you get a ton of these samples over the years that you can't really, it's like not worth your time to get rid of. And so this business popped up again, like, you know, the markets are like, you know, water and water is going to just float everywhere. There's an empty crevice and there's an empty crevice in this market here for getting rid of these samples. So what they do is 260 samples always says, send us your shit, brand, and we will host a pop up where we're going to sell you along with a bunch of other brands, all at a great markdown. So we have high quality brands at a markdown because these are samples. So you're not like training your customer that like, you know, hey, this is

• 8:00Shaan Puri?

  like TJ Maxx discount or something like that. It's a good story. This is, these are samples that you're going to get for for less. And they'll like, they'll just give the brand a commission back. They'll say, oh, you know, every time we sell something of yours, you get a small commission. It's better than nothing. It takes it out of your space.

• 8:14Sam Parr?

  How'd you, how'd you find this? This is totally out of your, out of your, dude, they're only based in LA, Miami, New York, and the pictures are like smoking hot women. And then like, uh, it looks like a picture of like a huge line out of a warehouse in Soho. So

• 8:34Shaan Puri?

  Hot women in waiting.

• 8:35Sam Parr?

  None of those things.

• 8:35Shaan Puri?

  I don't do it. You know, your boy doesn't do it. So

• 8:39Sam Parr?

  None of this checks your box.

• 8:40Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, your boy's so married and so in the house that I did not go to this. You're right. But I'm in the e-commerce world. I got my own e-commerce brand plus. I know and talked to a lot of other ecommerce people and I know about this problem. And so I heard about this solution and I think it's very clever. I think it is a smart thing to do. I also think these guys are not that well known and they're only doing it in certain, certain areas, certain locations and whatever. I think this could be done many times over. I think, I think like a aspiring hustler could do this by vertical. So you could go get a bunch of health and wellness and fitness brands or beauty brands and be like, hey, beauty brands, send us your products and we're gonna, we'll have a, a, a stations where you can demo them and sample them and then buy them.

• 9:24Shaan Puri?

  So I think you could do this for other verticals. I think you just do this in other places like, hey, if these guys are doing New York and LA, I think that their locations are like Beverly Hills and Brooklyn or something. Do this in Texas, do this in, um, do this in different, different parts of the, the country. I think you could have a, you know, it's like your own little farmer's market. It's your own flea market that you, you get to, to stock and run. But you don't have to do it as a full-time job. So you could do it with every quarter or twice a year or something like that and still have it be successful. So I thought this is a cool.

• 9:54Sam Parr?

  Have you, do you know Kingsford charcoal? You, you've, you've seen it. It's like the most popular charcoal, like the blue. Do you know how that was created?

• 10:02Shaan Puri?

  I think it's a byproduct of something else, right? What, what was it a byproduct of? Wood?

• 10:07Sam Parr?

  Ford. So Ford, uh, when, when, when Ford was making cars, they had to like, you know, have all these furnaces making metal and they took like the leftover char and they're like, what should we do this? And so they pushed it together and compact it really tight. And that's how charcoal came to be. And that's like a byproduct business. And I love byproduct stuff. You know, it's kind of like, it's tangentially, it's kissing cousins with like the sharing economy. I love that stuff. I love byproduct stuff. And this is one of those that's awesome. This is actually quite cool. Their website is really challenging to use, which is, uh, I think actually a good sign. Uh, cause I can't tell like, apparently they do sell stuff online. Uh, but it's mostly, but one thing I do hate, whenever I go to New York, dude, seeing people

• 10:50Sam Parr?

  wait in line to buy like Supreme clothing, like just hurts your soul. Put the gun in my mouth, man. Like I'm never doing that. I'm not doing that. I'm not going to wait in line and spend my valuable time to purchase a thousand dollar like thing that should.

• 11:04Shaan Puri?

  The only thing worse than that is bottle service at a club. It's like. The guys who are paying, you know, $7,000 for a table to and paying a thousand dollars per bottle that they could literally walk across the street, buy for $40. It's a it's literally the chump tax. It's like, oh, you're a chump. Come to this line. Please, please, please. Yeah, come right ahead. Come right ahead. You walk through the chump line.

• 11:29Sam Parr?

  I'm not a man of God, but when Jesus made like the list of seven deadly sins, the example of debauchery and gluttony was people waiting in line for five hours to go to a Supreme store. I mean, like, whatever, like, I see that stuff. I've like, this is the worst form of consumerism. I cannot stand this. I so I they have these pictures here and it turns me off.

• 11:48Shaan Puri?

  Amen.

• 11:49Sam Parr?

  But I I would maybe buy this online, but I ain't standing in line. I'm not standing in line with a bunch of these people to buy this stuff. I can't stand that. Whenever I see that, it makes me want to like, throw away everything and go live.

• 12:04Shaan Puri?

  All right. Here's an idea you're gonna like more. Host share. So got a DM from a guy named Michael Fisk, and he shows me this thing called hostshare.co. And he goes, here's the here's here's here's the situation. You have a short term rental, right? Yeah, a property. Yeah. Shout it out. So people can go stay at marathonranch.com.

• 12:25Sam Parr?

  Marathon Ranch. Marathon Ranch. Is it dot com?

• 12:27Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 12:28Sam Parr?

  Or dot co. I don't know. Yeah, dot com. Marathon Ranch.

• 12:30Shaan Puri?

  Sam comes by, has dinner with you, gives you massage. It's fantastic. So you don't have 100% occupancy, right? You have some nights that are unused. Is that correct?

• 12:40Sam Parr?

  A 60% occupancy rate is is a profitable model.

• 12:44Shaan Puri?

  So you got, let's say, 40%. That's unused nights. What you doing with those nights? This is the sharing economy, bro. What you doing with those nights?

• 12:51Sam Parr?

  Sitting there.

• 12:51Shaan Puri?

  Well, Michael Fisk has an answer for you. His answer is trade your unused nights with other hosts who have unused nights. You stay for free there. They stay for free at your place. And I think this is a really smart idea. I don't know how many hosts. Let's Google this. How many hosts on Airbnb? I don't know how many properties they have or how many hosts. Four million. Okay, so you have a market of four million hosts that you could make a inter-host. Like network, basically where you say, hey, if you're a host, you get to travel for free. So you get to, I know, I don't know how they make things equal. So like if your property is way more dope than somebody else's, I don't know how you make that, that trade. They, okay, how do you normalize the values across properties?

• 13:37Shaan Puri?

  We calculate how many shared nights you would be staying in, in exchange for 21, in exchange for the 21 days of travel per year. The formula is established, so higher, higher value properties share less nights, lower value properties share more nights. So for instance, if your average night is $500, you'll share approximately 15 nights in a year. Whereas if you're a hundred dollars, you gotta share 45 nights in a year, take the same minimum. That's great. So like, what's your property per night, per night right now?

• 14:02Sam Parr?

  $700.

• 14:03Shaan Puri?

  $700. So you're gonna basically, what they'll say is, hey, make your thing open for 12 days out of the year. And then in exchange, you get 21 days free booking in this network. Would you take that deal?

• 14:15Sam Parr?

  That's, yeah, in fact, I do. So go to live, livekindred.com. So it's kindred, K I N D R E D, and then live.

• 14:25Shaan Puri?

  Ah, okay, this idea exists.

• 14:27Sam Parr?

  So I use this service. So my dream situation is I want to find like another couple that has like similar style or like once as I do, that lives in New York and they want to be in Austin and we could just swap. And I've not found a good solution for that. But there's this thing called live kindred, kindred that I do, that I have used where someone will stay at my home when I'm not there. And then I get credits for the marketplace and then like, I'm gonna go to Taos, New Mexico. Like I have like eight credits because someone stayed at my house for eight nights and I know that, so I'm gonna go and stay somewhere else for free. And it's actually pretty cool. I wish that it was just like a direct swap. So I could do six months here and we could just swap six months for six months.

• 15:10Sam Parr?

  But I've been using services like these. I actually think that, I don't think, I'm not old enough to say like, this is the future. But I think that like, you know, there are a lot of people like me who do split time. Dude, finding a place for those split, like when you split time, it's really challenging. I'm always looking for a good solution.

• 15:27Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's a, that's good. I didn't know that something like this exists. So with this, do you?

• 15:33Sam Parr?

  It's hard. And, and I think they raised money, by the way, from Andreessen.

• 15:36Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you give up your space, is that right? So you give up, you put your space in the network, but you still have to pay or you, it's free?

• 15:42Sam Parr?

  Uh, I, there's some type of service fee. Frankly, I don't think it's a good business. Uh, I don't understand how they make money. And cause what, what I said, what I signed up for, I was like, I'm getting a lot of value. I'm not spending a lot of value. I don't know how you guys are doing this. So like,

• 15:57Shaan Puri?

  You're getting that VC subsidy right now. You're getting that Andreessen Horowitz uh, value exchange.

• 16:03Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So like, we're trying to use our credits quickly. Cause I think, I don't know if they're gonna stay in business or not. Cause I don't, I don't understand how it works, but it is awesome. If it's awesome if it does work.

• 16:13Shaan Puri?

  Uh, that's hilarious. Um.

• 16:15Sam Parr?

  So yeah, I like these types of businesses where, where uh, or that solve this problem. Uh, is Host Share popular?

• 16:21Shaan Puri?

  I think it's brand new. I think the guy just created it.

• 16:24Sam Parr?

  Yeah. If you could pull it off, it's pretty amazing.

• 16:26Shaan Puri?

  It's a smart model.

• 16:28Sam Parr?

  I think it's hard to pull off. Cause like, I don't understand how Host Share makes money.

• 16:31Shaan Puri?

  I think they have to charge a flat membership. So I think they have to basically say it's $500 or a thousand dollars a year to be in the network. And um, you know, you only pay if you use more than five nights or something like that. Make it a, make it a fair trade. And um, you know, I think, I think basically then they, they're trying to get a subscription, right? So they're trying to say, can I get 50,000 people to pay us a thousand dollars a year um, on this subscription?

• 16:58Sam Parr?

  There's a few things like that. I forget what the big one is called, but there's they, there's things like for luxury rentals where I'm almost certain that they just partnered with hotels where you pay like five grand a year. Do you know what I'm talking about? It's called Levanta?

• 17:10Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. I don't know the name of it, but I know what you're talking about. It's like you get access to this, like you know, boutique hotels.

• 17:15Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And I've looked into them. When I originally saw it, I didn't have enough money. Like I, I wasn't in the spot that I could do it. And so I've been looking for things like this. I actually, I really like these businesses. There's one, there's this company called uh, the nerd wallet of England. I forget what it was called. It's called uh, Money Market Swap.

• 17:32Shaan Puri?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 17:32Sam Parr?

  Or there's a guy named Simon who started it. And so basically he started like the nerd wall. He started a blog that compared like mortgage rates and things like that. And then if you bought one or got a mortgage through him, you got affiliate fee. It's a, I think it's called super money market is what it's called. It's publicly traded in England. Anyway, the guy sold all of his shares after he took it public 20 years later and he now owns this. Thing called like Simon's Resorts. And so it's this rich guy who went and bought like 50 resort or 50 like really nice homes around the world. And I actually don't know, they they frame it up like this is his personal stuff and you can just use it when he's not there. Uh, but it's actually pretty cool. And so I love these types of things because I think they're just neat to like buy all this shit and share it with everyone. I think it's really cool.

• 18:13Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I like that. Can I tell you about a little random experiment I'm gonna do? So I want to make for this Christmas season, a deep fake Santa. So basically, you're gonna be able to come on the site and pay $35 and you um, and you type in your message, you could say, hey, wish my daughter Jessica a Merry Christmas, tell her great job with the soccer thing and be nice to her brother.

• 18:41Sam Parr?

  Big sports fan, huh?

• 18:43Shaan Puri?

  Great legs and soccer. And so you'll be able to type in that message and then it'll basically create a video that Santa saying this to you. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna try this thing that Replet has. So Replet has this new thing where you could basically buy developer cycles. Have you seen this?

• 19:04Sam Parr?

  No, but tell me about it.

• 19:06Shaan Puri?

  You can go. So let's say you need something built. You could basically just go and buy, you could put up a bounty. So you're like, all right, I want somebody to build me this deep fake Santa. It's gotta do A, B, and C. And you put up a bounty, you put up, put up the dollars and then people will just build it for you. And um, you can, you basically have an award. So it's kind of like a uh,

• 19:27Sam Parr?

  Like 99 designs.

• 19:28Shaan Puri?

  Designs for code. Yeah, exactly. And and you do it in their currency, which is called cycles. And so they kind of help you estimate like roughly how many, how many cycles should this be for this to to to work out? Um, but I haven't used it yet. I really want to try this bounty thing. I think it's great because

• 19:42Sam Parr?

  So you're gonna uh, you're gonna pull an Emerson. You're gonna uh, you're gonna be this smart guy who just does a money grab.

• 19:49Shaan Puri?

  Uh, no, I'm gonna bring, I'm gonna pull a Justin Mayer's. I'm gonna bring the joy of a Christmas of belief, really, of the belief in magic, uh, to millions of kids around the world this Christmas. What are, what are you doing for the children this year, Sam?

• 20:04Sam Parr?

  Is that your, you're gonna do the Justin Mayer's pitch? Like, so we had a problem. We wanted to bring joy to children. But like, and we thought, what better way to do that than a $50 cartoon?

• 20:14Shaan Puri?

  In a world full of war and divisiveness. Joy is all we have left. It is what they called the last refuge. And people say that magic is magic, but the magic is getting people to believe the magic. And how do you get people to believe using deep fake technology? And that's what we

• 20:32Sam Parr?

  How do you get people to believe in you lie? We're gonna, we're gonna create a fake cartoon about a fake person.

• 20:41Shaan Puri?

  We're gonna charge real money and it's gonna be a fantastic result.

• 20:47Sam Parr?

  Are you really gonna do this?

• 20:48Shaan Puri?

  Cause I really want to try this bounty thing. I want to play with this. I think this could be

• 20:53Sam Parr?

  What's the URL gonna be?

• 20:56Shaan Puri?

  I think it's gonna be called Santa's real, uh, you know, dot org. Give it a dot org.

• 21:03Sam Parr?

  Let's make all of our businesses dot org, just so we could like

• 21:07Shaan Puri?

  Just so we can be better than other people.

• 21:13Sam Parr?

  For a long time, I wanted to make my businesses dot net. So people would think that I've been around for a long time.

• 21:18Shaan Puri?

  Your personal website has to be a dot net and then your business should be a dot org.

• 21:24Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but dot org is way better. I'm gonna do a dot org. That's way better than that stupid ass XYZ crypto bullshit. I want a dot org. Is that what they are? Or like dot AI, dot IO? If you have a dot IO, like I'm not into it. I want a dot org.

• 21:40Shaan Puri?

  We are a for-profit dot org. It's fantastic.

• 21:44Sam Parr?

  Is that what dot org means? It's a nonprofit?

• 21:45Shaan Puri?

  I think you have to be a nonprofit to get a dot org.

• 21:48Sam Parr?

  But who makes that decision? Is there like a governing body?

• 21:51Shaan Puri?

  You have to like present your EIN for your 501(c)(3) or something like that. I have no idea. I've never done this to be clear. I've always been firmly in the dot com camp, but I'm ready to, uh, I made my nut and I'm ready to go and get, get my dot org on for the rest of my life.

• 22:10Sam Parr?

  That's like, uh, onstage, Andrew or backstage, we were like, so what are you doing? And he used the P word.

• 22:16Shaan Puri?

  I know. Slanted us with the philanthropy.

• 22:19Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's like, dude, if you don't say that word around me, don't say philanthropy. Don't flex with me, bro. And, uh, so now instead of philanthropy, it's dot orgs. You know?

• 22:34Sam Parr?

  A Wilkinson.org.

• 22:36Shaan Puri?

  Go ahead and email me there.

• 22:39Sam Parr?

  Today I want to talk about Vice, Vice.com. The reason I'm talking about them is because they are about to declare bankruptcy.

• 22:46Shaan Puri?

  Right. Cue the Michael Scott clip where he just walks out and declares bankruptcy. Let's think about that. I love that clip.

• 22:54Sam Parr?

  Now, yeah, I agree. Most, every joke I said on this podcast, I've stolen from that show. So the reason I want to talk about them is not because of Vice, but because of the story of the founder Shane Smith. And if you're under the age of 26, Vice probably means nothing to you. They've actually like very quickly lost relevancy. But to give you some background of what Vice is. So Vice originally was like a punk rock magazines based out of Montreal. So it was three Canadian guys, one of those guys being Gavin McInnes. You know who Gavin McInnes is?

• 23:31Shaan Puri?

  No, who's that?

• 23:32Sam Parr?

  Have you, have you heard of Proud Boys?

• 23:34Shaan Puri?

  Proud Boys, like the political thing?

• 23:36Sam Parr?

  Yeah, he started Proud Boys.

• 23:38Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 23:39Sam Parr?

  Which a lot of people don't realize. And so it was like these three, like, kind of like punk rocker guys and Gavin McInnes being one of them. Shane Smith, who I'm going to talk about today was the other one. And basically the way it started was they got like a grant from the government where they were able to launch this magazine. And that's how it started. It started as a skateboarding punk rock magazine. And they would write like these amazing articles where it was like Vice's guide to drugs. And they would like write all these stories about drugs. They would use the N word all the time. They would like, they were like.

• 24:08Shaan Puri?

  Wow.

• 24:09Sam Parr?

  It's kind of like, you know how like some, you probably don't know about this, but like in the punk rock community, they like, sometimes they'll like talk about Nazis and talk about like, use racist language, but they do it as like a shock factor. Cause it's like, I want to be in your face, that type of thing. That, that's what Vice was all about. I don't remember. I don't know if you remember like the old school covers of these magazines, but it would be like a tab of LSD on like a hot chick's tongue. Do you remember it? Like?

• 24:32Shaan Puri?

  I remember seeing the Vice magazine. I remember reading something, actually, they called it just zines. Is there a difference between a zine and a magazine? Cause that's what, that's what I had.

• 24:42Sam Parr?

  Just, just, just the culture. If it's someone's a zine, it's typically more, it's like a punk rock thing. Whereas if it's a magazine, it could be like GQ.

• 24:48Shaan Puri?

  Okay, gotcha.

• 24:51Sam Parr?

  So you've never seen these, but it started out as like hardcore punk rock where they would write articles about doing drugs, having sex, like just rock and roll shit. And that started getting picked up. And so they started this company in 94, but in 99, they moved to New York and that was like where things changed. And that's right where like the internet just got started. What it looks like you're looking at something funny.

• 25:12Shaan Puri?

  I'm looking at the magazine covers and I'm, and you're saying rock and roll. And I was just thinking about like, this is what cool, like basically like this is what influential people, uh, it's like, kind of like musicians are influential people and they did this stuff. It's like the, the tongue with the LSD on it. It's like someone just biting a tuft of hair. I don't know what, why there's a bunch of hair in someone's mouth. And I was just thinking about pot and roll and how it would be just like someone entering a cold plunge, someone meditating. It's like, yeah, we're part of that pot and roll movement. Uh, yeah, we're the famous podcasters. You know what I mean? They're all just sauna cold, hot, cold, man. It's crazy. The temperature variance is insane.

• 25:50Sam Parr?

  Things have changed. Things have changed.

• 25:52Shaan Puri?

  Cool has changed.

• 25:54Sam Parr?

  Yeah. The definition of cool has changed, which is actually part of the thing I'm going to discuss. But so the internet starts coming around in the late nineties. They raise a little bit of money, like $2 million. They moved down to, um, they moved down to New York and that's where they like really get going. And so they create the website vice.com. Originally was a magazine. It was a free magazine that they would just hand out and they would make money off ads and it would be the three of them writing articles and they would do something that I used to do all the time where they would have like fake authors. So it'd be like someone who wasn't real, just fucking making up stories is really what it was, which is, you know, it was an entertainment magazine. So that's fine. But they start growing and it takes off after a handful of years. And so they kind of created

• 26:34Sam Parr?

  this thing at the time. Now we just know as like branded content where it was now sometimes you call them advertorials, things like that. But basically their whole shtick was we're going to make awesome content and we're going to get the eyeballs of millennials, which back then millennials were like the Gen Z today. You know, it was like the elusive, hard to reach audience. And they said, we're going to reach these millennials. And we're gonna make the best content and we're just gonna plaster your logo on there and that's gonna be good enough for you. And this is like pre-Facebook, so like performance advertising wasn't really much of a thing. And so it was like the way to advertise. And eventually they blow up and the important part of the story isn't exactly that they blew up

• 27:14Sam Parr?

  because they did, but the story is like the antics that they went along and built this thing with. And so they raised money from Rupert Murdoch, who's, you know, the founder of Fox. They raised money from all these amazing people via com. Eventually they raised money at a $6 billion valuation. Today, they're nothing, but they still make $600 million a year in revenue. And so I want to talk about some of the crazy stuff that the founder did as well as how their business model works. And so have you ever heard of the guy Shane Smith, who was the CEO and kind of the main man?

• 27:46Shaan Puri?

  Never.

• 27:47Sam Parr?

  All right, so he had a whole bunch of interesting things that he did. So if you Google Shane Smith, you'll probably see like pictures of him like it's a, it's a guy who almost looks like a punk rock Santa Claus where he's kind of like a bigger guy. And he like, you'll see like he's got sleeve tattoos and you'll see him shirtless all the time and smoking a cigar. Do you like see any pictures like that?

• 28:06Shaan Puri?

  He looks like, um, he looks a little bit like the guy who's the number two guy in billions. I forgot what the guy's name is, uh, like not, not Axe, but his, his right-hand man.

• 28:15Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 28:15Shaan Puri?

  He looks a lot like that guy if that guy had just like chest tattoos. If he just had like a tattoo around his nipple, that's, that'd be this guy.

• 28:22Sam Parr?

  Dude, so he's just like crazy. And so Vice originally, the way that they became respected is they would do all this crazy stuff, but it was him doing it, Shane, the CEO. And so he would go to Liberia during, uh, when they're having a civil war and he would just bring a camera and just get dropped in Liberia and figure it out. In 2013, he traveled to North Korea because he organized a basketball game between the Harlem Globetrotters and the national team of North Korea. And that was like the big shtick. And then eventually, do you remember hearing about Dennis Rodman going to, uh, North Korea? That was for a Vice documentary and they would make these like free documentaries and they would post them on, uh, it was originally their site and then they moved to YouTube and they would get lots of views and they would like.

• 29:05Sam Parr?

  Put like an Intel logo on there and that's how they made money. And so they, and so he was known for walking around his office of like Vice and I've been to the office. It's like as magnificent as you'd think. It's like the coolest of the cool and he would walk around shirtless and he would just like, say crazy stuff. He was known for just being like this wild guy. And so one time when he hired a CEO, her name was Nancy. This was recently, he said, we're the modern, we're the modern day Bodhi and Clyde and we're here to take all your money. And he would just say stuff like that all the time. There was another time when they were just getting started and I believe it was Intuit. They came, um, was it Intuit or IBM, one of those, they came to the office in order to pitch, or Vice was going to pitch into it.

• 29:49Sam Parr?

  And so what they did was there was a really shitty office at the time. 24 hours before the meeting, he built like a glass conference room. So it looks legit and so you could see your employees. And then he went and hired a bunch of like actors and got tons of friends to come and work in the office to make it look like they're important because he always like said something like, um, we don't want them to think that we're, or what did he say? We want them to think that we're rich. Like they like, he was like, we're going to act as it. And he did, and they eventually got a $25 million deal from this company and it worked out. And there was another time where there was this, uh, 2003 Vice made their documentary on themselves. And he tells a story about when they started the company, how he got arrested in Bangkok, uh, Bangkok.

• 30:33Sam Parr?

  And he said something like, a few years later, they were like, yeah, I remember that story. You talked about being imprisoned in Bangkok. And he was like, yeah, yeah, I remember that. And he goes, tell me more about that. He goes, well, I made it all up. We needed a story on how the, we needed a story on how the company started. And I'd heard the story from someone else, so I just took it over and we needed, and I just had to take, make it mine. He's like, I watched the Hangover three and uh, decided that was my life. Dude, he would do crazy stuff like that all the time. There was another time where I was reading this interview with him. He, uh, there was this headline about how he spent $300,000 at dinner in Vegas. And a reporter goes, did you really spend $300,000 for dinner?

• 31:13Sam Parr?

  He goes, no, it was $380,000 plus tip and it was barely dinner. It was mostly wine. And so he's just, he, the guy's like wild. He even tells crazier stories where he goes, this was a quote from, uh, the, uh, Financial Times. He would go, I would be at the party and would just go get wasted, take coke, have sex with girls in the bathroom. And then get, uh, and then afterwards mail my advertisers drugs because I knew if I sent them a bunch of drugs in the mail, they would keep buying ads with us. And he admits all this stuff. It's crazy, man.

• 31:47Shaan Puri?

  How could this have gone bankrupt? I just don't get it.

• 31:51Sam Parr?

  Well, so check this out.

• 31:53Shaan Puri?

  Where did we go wrong? Was it when we mailed our customers drugs? Or when I did drugs during the day when I was working with my shirt off, having sex in the bathroom?

• 32:03Sam Parr?

  Dude, he tells a story about him and his co-founders having threesomes with like people who are going to buy ads with them. And he says that they were like mobsters who accidentally clanked shovels together while they are burying a body.

• 32:19Sam Parr?

  If that analogy makes sense, when someone was like, what's it feel like having a, having sex with your co-founder? And you know, do you guys ever like touch? He goes, yeah, but it's just like two mafia guys and our shovels accidentally clink while we're burying the body.

• 32:33Shaan Puri?

  Wow.

• 32:34Sam Parr?

  This guy is a showman. He's a total showman. Of course it didn't work out well.

• 32:42Shaan Puri?

  In all seriousness, didn't, uh, totally blew it.

• 32:45Sam Parr?

  It didn't, it didn't work out well for the company, but it worked out for him. So Google Shane Smith house.

• 32:50Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I see a $50 million house. I'm two steps ahead. He already Googled it.

• 32:54Sam Parr?

  So this, there's this amazing article that came out in 2008 where it's all about Shane Smith. And it says Shane Smith's living large and it documents his new house that he purchased for $30 million, I think. And it's this beautiful mansion up in, uh, LA somewhere. Well, he recently sold it for $50 million. So like this guy has totally come out on top of this, of this whole thing. And it's just really fascinating that he basically came in, he spent about 15, 20 years doing his thing, right before like tide, the tide change. And like, these guys were the opposite of woke. Now Vice is like the wokest of the woke. But right before that change happened,

• 33:34Sam Parr?

  he got his money, he got out and he bounced and he hired a CEO. And his story is super, super fascinating. And so you've never heard of him?

• 33:42Shaan Puri?

  I've never heard of him. I briefly knew that Vice started as a, as a zine or magazine. What's your main takeaways? Because this is entertaining, because this guy's like Felix Dennis, just like reincarnated. So what's your takeaway? You're a media guy. You're, you're a bit of a wild man. What's your take on this?

• 34:00Sam Parr?

  Not that wild.

• 34:01Shaan Puri?

  I mean, this guy makes you look like a, like a, you know, choir boy or something. But what's your takeaways from this story?

• 34:08Sam Parr?

  I have a bunch of takeaways. And so, but first, let me tell you how their business model works, because that's part of my takeaways. So a lot of people don't realize how they make money. They're going bankrupt now, but they still make 600 million a year in revenue, but it's just like wildly unprofitable. So they, their company, it's basically like, I consider it like a mortgage backed security for media. And so do you remember like the mortgage backed securities of 2008, where it was basically like, banks would buy like, tens of thousands of mortgages in one tranche? Turns out like, 4,000 of the 10,000 were shit. That's exactly what Vice does. And so they, they got famous because they only had like 20 or 30 million monthly visits to their website, vice.com, which isn't a ton. That's not a ton for hundreds of millions in revenue. What they did

• 34:53Sam Parr?

  was, they did, they partnered with OMG facts.com, distractify.com, and all these other clickbait websites. And they would roll that up. And so they would call them part of the Vice network. And so they would tell people, you know, like Intel or whoever the big advertisers are, look, we reach all of millennials and we have 100 million, 200 million monthly uniques to our network. In reality, it was on like shit sites, like, you know, all those other things. And that was like, once that came out, it was kind of frowned upon. And then the other way they made money was they had a agency called Virtue, like Vice and Virtue, which is pretty clever. But their whole company is basically a creative agency.

• 35:35Sam Parr?

  So they would make content for Snapchat, Facebook, and then eventually HBO. And they would get paid like a service fee basically for it. And it was basically one big agency and that's how they made money. Which brings me to the takeaways. Takeaway one. If you're going to be a company that makes money from multiple different streams of revenue, you got to nail one first. They didn't even nail one like stream of revenue. They had like five other things that added up to a lot, but not one of them worked wonderfully, at least not enough to be profitable. So that's one major takeaway. The second major takeaway is they'd always say they're going to be the next Disney. They go, we're going to be a mini Disney. Shane once said, we're worth 10 billion right now,

• 36:20Sam Parr?

  but conservatively, I think we're going to be worth 40 or 50 billion in a couple of years. That couple of years would have been like in 2020 or something. Never worked out. He goes, we're going to be just like Disney, except with like cocaine. Didn't work out. Why? Because no one likes them. If you're going to build the next Disney, you got to be like, people got to love you. You know, people love Mickey Mouse. They don't really love like Shane Smith, you know, and all that stuff. You know, they like them. They don't, they don't really love them. So if you're going to be a media company like that, you have to have something that people love. The next thing is news. If you're going to be in the news business, that's really, really hard because you have to stay relevant. And I actually think that you should be something that typically people don't grow out of, but they grow into.

• 37:05Sam Parr?

  Meaning a Wall Street Journal, a New York Times. If you're going to be like one of these publications, Economist, Financial Times, things like that. You want to grow into it, meaning like as you get older, you want to like aspire to be able to read it and like it and understand it and brag about it. Whereas with Vice, it was like, I'm no longer 28 years old. Reading about this stuff is not exactly cool. And plus the people working there, you kind of look silly. I've always said about this about Barstool Sports. I'm like, dude, Dave Portnoy is getting older. Like some of these antics are kind of not going to be cool anymore. They're more so like pathetic. Do you know what I mean? And that's kind of happened with Vice.

• 37:41Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you basically, you either stay with the shtick.

• 37:47Shaan Puri?

  And you just start to look like a clown as you get older and older. Or you gotta sell, get out and change your life, you know, change your lifestyle. And it's pretty interesting because it's very hard to let go because A, if you weren't such a nut, you wouldn't have got that, got this level of success in the first place. So it's kind of like a self fulfilling prophecy. And then on the second, second part of it, you know, it's very easy to get addicted to the character, the, the fame, the money that comes with, with acting a certain way. You're being rewarded, rewarded, rewarded. And then you now you're 57 and you're, or you know, you're Vince McMahon now, or you're Hugh Hefner now, or you're whoever, right? Like it's hard to leave the character, even though you might actually, maybe you actually should, uh, you know, grow out of it.

• 38:31Shaan Puri?

  Anyways, but I'm glad that these guys don't grow out of it. It's, it's for our entertainment. Thank you. Thank you for your service, Shane Smith.

• 38:37Sam Parr?

  It is. And the last two things, if you're going to build a media company, avoid New York City. Like when you're a creative services business, you need, it's a, it's a talent arbitrage. And it's really hard to do that when you're in a really high cost of living city like New York. And also you saw that they like became this woke company, which I don't entirely believe like, go woke, go broke, like that type of thing. I do think that, um, I think that like there's a niche, you can make money in any niche. It don't matter if you're woke or not, but they like changed that way when that wasn't originally what they did. And I think they changed that way because they moved to like Williamsburg and, and everything like that. And it totally changed their, uh, their, their shtick.

• 39:21Sam Parr?

  But the last thing is actually a compliment. So you texted me the other day, right before you're about to go on to, you were going to speak at this conference and you said, uh,

• 39:30Sam Parr?

  what did you say about to drop some showmanship on these bitches? Is that what you said?

• 39:33Shaan Puri?

  About to show these bitches some showmanship.

• 39:36Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And that is totally true. And that is what he did. And frankly, even though he, it seems as though he conned a lot of people, he kind of got the last laugh. And he had showmanship throughout the entire thing. And had it worked out, it would have been a lot cooler. But having showmanship, it totally works.

• 39:54Shaan Puri?

  By the way, there's like stories. People ask me like, oh, do you get nervous before public speaking? It's like, I don't know, man. If I was nervous, I probably wouldn't be thinking I'm about to drop some showmanship on these bitches. It's a different attitude.

• 40:05Sam Parr?

  Exactly.

• 40:06Shaan Puri?

  Versus I hope I don't mess up.

• 40:09Sam Parr?

  Dude, he like throughout his career, you can like, there's so many crazy stories about this guy. It's all about showmanship. He does the wildest stuff where he like tells stories, the way he tells stories. It captures your attention and some of his employees were like, when I'm with Shane, I feel like I'm going to war and I'll go to any war with him.

• 40:25Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 40:25Sam Parr?

  Or there's like Johnny Knoxville did a interview and he was talking about Shane and he goes, he's the greatest leader you could ever have. Also the greatest drinking buddy. And like he like does this.

• 40:37Shaan Puri?

  What a bio.

• 40:38Sam Parr?

  Yeah. He like has all of these like amazing one liners, even if they are full of shit. But whenever I hear him talk, I'm like, oh my God, I believe everything you said. So for example, have you ever heard me say the best way to circumvent someone's bullshit detector is to not bullshit? I've used that line a couple of times. I stole it from him. So he would like, he has all these like amazing one liners and that showmanship, it's absolutely captivating. There's like a story about him with Rupert Murdoch and Rupert Murdoch and Shane are walking and Rupert Murdoch is like a, you know, if you see the movie TV so succession, he's like that guy. He's like a mean old man. And Shane sits down with them and goes, you don't have millennials, but I do, I have everything you don't have. And like, he's talking to this billionaire.

• 41:22Shaan Puri?

  Testosterone?

• 41:26Shaan Puri?

  The value of my youth? One of the things I don't have. All right.

• 41:31Sam Parr?

  But he just like totally like swings above his weight and I think it's really fascinating to learn from this guy. So if you're listening to this, Google Shane Smith, it's, there's like crazy stories about this guy.

• 41:40Shaan Puri?

  Good segment by you. Good, good job by you. Good job. I like that one. I actually have a spin off of that. You mentioned a company in there that I was like, hmm, that sounds familiar. I kind of remember this name. So you said OMG facts. Do you know who started OMG facts?

• 41:56Sam Parr?

  I do. I forget his name, but he's an oddball, right?

• 41:58Shaan Puri?

  This guy Emerson Spartz and I met Emerson Spartz maybe 10 years ago. And so, and when he was building OMG facts and building a network called Dose Media.

• 42:08Sam Parr?

  He's like a genius, right?

• 42:09Shaan Puri?

  He's, I met him and I was like, wow, this guy is super smart. I actually think that he is kind of like, if he had just applied himself to some other areas, he would have like totally done, done some like absolutely amazing things. Everybody would know his name versus just kind of me and half of you knowing his name. So I'm going to tell you a couple of things about Emerson Spartz. So the guy, when he was 12 years old. Built a website called MuggleNet. And I don't know if you're a Harry Potter guy, but I'm a Harry Potter guy. And I was on MuggleNet all the time. And I used to love this because it was the number one Harry Potter fan site in the world. Tons and tons of traffic. I mean, at the time, Harry Potter was like, you know, Justin Bieber. Harry Potter was was

• 42:54Shaan Puri?

  super, super famous. And in between the books, people wanted a place to discuss, to post theories, to post fan fiction, to debate, you know, what should have happened, blah, blah, blah. And so MuggleNet, when he's 12, he builds the super popular site, getting millions and millions of visitors. When he's 18, he publishes a bestselling book. His bestselling book is called, it's called Harry Potter Should Have Died: Controversial Views From The Number One Fan Site. And basically, it's like, Harry survived, but should he have? You know, I run the world's biggest fan site for Harry Potter. And here's some of the controversial viewpoints that people

• 43:37Shaan Puri?

  have about Harry Potter. You could already see this guy's got the, he's got the certain that au jus that comes with the sandwich. He's got the sauce. And he's got the showmanship. And so he, I met him, maybe he was, I don't know how old he was, maybe 22 or something like this at this point. And Where'd you meet him? I don't even remember, man. I remember being on a call with him, a video call. And it was him, and I think his girlfriend at the time, and they were creating something called Dose Media. And I go, so what is it? He goes, well, we're going to make like, really viral content. So they had OMG Facts, that was one of their companies. They had like, four or five websites like that. One that was like, Science Facts, ones that was Funny Things, one that was whatever controversial

• 44:20Shaan Puri?

  or pop culture stuff, like references to TV shows and things that were hot right now. And they had these websites. And I go, okay, so how do you like, at the time, in my mind, I was like, going viral is getting, you know, lightning strikes you, you know, you, it's just not something you try to do. It's just something that happens, or it doesn't happen. And it usually doesn't happen. He's like, no, no, no. And he had built a four-part system. This is the first guy. He's like, yeah, we're a different type of technology company. We have eighteen engineers and we have four writers and we reach millions and millions of people a month. And I was like, no, no, it was actually good. I was like, so what do the engineers do? He's like, well, basically, all the viral content

• 45:01Shaan Puri?

  in the world starts either in one of three places, Reddit, Imager, or 4chan. And he's like, basically, I built a detector that would find stuff that's going, that's getting hot on those, on those three platforms. First, before it hits Instagram, before it hits Facebook, before it hits Twitter, it's gonna get popular there first. And he goes, so we built a detector, then we built a, like, then the writer basically would, would build, like, write a summary, and then we built a A/B tester that would basically create headlines, headlines and, and like different, like, frames of

• 45:43Shaan Puri?

  that same story. And it would test them really quickly. We had a tester that would spray that out. We would pay to get that in front of like, you know, 5,000, 10,000 people. We would find what's the winning angle. And then we would have the post and then distribution, right? And then we would actually distribute that to our audience. And so, we could engineer a higher degree of virality in every piece of content. Why? Because we're finding the best stuff, we're packaging it quickly with our writer, then we're remixing it with our automated A/B tester that's gonna juice up the headlines and then the images. Then we're spraying it out, getting data feedback telling us which of these fifteen variations is the winner, and then we post the winner. And I was like, dude, this is amazing. And over the few years, I saw him build this up. And he, his traffic kept going

• 46:25Shaan Puri?

  up and up. Now, the problem was, his traffic wasn't that valuable. It was kind of fly-by-traffic. It was kind of like the lowest common denominator of the internet.

• 46:35Sam Parr?

  And from Facebook, I think.

• 46:36Shaan Puri?

  It was very dependent on social networks. And then Facebook changed. And for a while, Facebook was like rewarding the hell out of anybody that could post viral content. And then it got too clickbaity on Facebook. And then Facebook just manually went and unplugged the, like, viral engines for, for, for these companies. And so, like, ten companies died, like, you know, in that transition. I don't think his totally died, but I think it definitely slowed down. And I think he also grew up and was sort of like, what else do I want to do with my life? So now, I just went to.

• 47:06Sam Parr?

  By the way, really quick before that, before you go on to him, did I, have I told you about my partner at Hampton Joe? He had a company called Little Things, which was the same thing as that. It was a content, like clickbait website. He started it in New York and then like he had all these, he had multiple floors in an office building and it was killing it. They're at a hundred million in revenue. He had a deal to sell. They went through due diligence. The deal was going to close in two weeks. That change that you just referred to, it happened to Little Things. At the time, Little Things was the most trafficked website from Facebook in the world. So it was like Little Things and then it was like HuffPo and then like BuzzFeed.

• 47:45Shaan Puri?

  BuzzFeed, yeah.

• 47:46Sam Parr?

  The deal was about to close, I think for a hundred and something million. He was going to walk away with 50 million after taxes. Two weeks before the money was supposed to go through, that change happened, the deal, he lost the deal and weeks or months, like only a couple of months later, they had to shut down the company and it was all because they built everything on top of Facebook.

• 48:06Shaan Puri?

  That's a Mike Tyson gut punch, right? Like, uh, birds fly, fish swim and deals fall through. That is the, the, the, the sad part about deals. That is too common.

• 48:17Sam Parr?

  Yes, and that's very common. That's what happened to this guy, Emmett Smart, Emmett Sparks. So what happened to him afterwards?

• 48:22Shaan Puri?

  Emerson Spartz.

• 48:23Sam Parr?

  Emerson Sparks.

• 48:24Shaan Puri?

  Smart, sorry.

• 48:26Sam Parr?

  Yes.

• 48:27Shaan Puri?

  But, uh, here's his bio now.

• 48:31Shaan Puri?

  His, his thing says like AI history, complex systems of Bitcoin. Then he goes, goal, I want to die number one on the leaderboard of people who changed the world. And so his, what he's doing now is something called nonlinear and nonlinear, it looks like is basically a, is basically a, uh, a company that is funding people working on AI to make it, make sure that it's safe. And so, um, so they, they fund basically nonlinear entrepreneurs, people who are trying to work on these like exponential technologies. And so, yeah, they, we incubate X, X risk, X risk nonprofits, I don't even know what X risk nonprofits means, uh, by connecting founders with ideas, funding and mentorship. And so that's what he's working on now.

• 49:13Shaan Puri?

  But this guy's always going to do interesting things. This guy can't, this guy can't be uninteresting.

• 49:17Sam Parr?

  Dude, when I read about him, I, I was like, Why are you doing this, dude? Like, you're doing this dose media thing? Like, you seem like a genius. You're just absolutely wasting it. This is a, what do you say? It's a high, uh, high effort, low? Or what do you say?

• 49:33Shaan Puri?

  Hormozzi had a good one for this. It's a 10 out of 10, um, 10 out of 10 entrepreneur. We're going at a four out of 10 opportunity. And that's how I felt when I met him. I remember literally like, this is now 10 plus years later. I have not spoke to this guy. You mentioned OMG Facts and in my mind, I'm like, that guy's smart. Follow up with that guy, right? Because he left such an impression on me where I was like, this guy is really, really clever. Really smart, really also like wholesome. Like even at the time, he was like, uh, even though he was working on something that's like, typically, I would say almost everybody I know that's in this kind of like viral media. Actually, just like lame. There's kind of shitheads and, um, and I mean that like in an endearing way, like, you know, some people are shitheads and it's all right.

• 50:18Shaan Puri?

  You're just like, yeah, I'm trying to, I'm, I found this arbitrage. I'm making it happen. Um, and so he was not that. He was really soft spoken, really, really nice guy. Ben says, extra risk is the risk that something could end the world. It's existential risk. Okay. Yeah. Good. So he's, he's going to save the planet, which is good.

• 50:33Sam Parr?

  Dude, and his website is a, is a dot org.

• 50:35Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 50:36Sam Parr?

  Noble mission. A dot org type of guy.

• 50:38Shaan Puri?

  I had a, when I was in Austin, um, a friend of mine was hanging out with Justin Maris, who's been on the pod before. I think I can quote this because I think it's a good quote, but he said, uh, he goes, Justin said the best thing. He goes, it doesn't matter how you make your first nut. Just gotta make your first nut. But after you do that, then you want to work on a noble mission. And he's like, dude, I, he's like, I like that. He's like, you know, do whatever you gotta do to make, to make your first nut, which is, you know, get your, the first few million dollars where you're financially free and you're, and you're, uh, you don't have to have a job. You can work on whatever the hell you want. But then after that, don't go chase the second nut. Go, go after something that's a noble mission. Go after something that's awesome. And, um, yeah, very few people actually do that.

• 51:19Shaan Puri?

  In fact, I don't even think Justin is doing that at the moment, but, but I, I love the quote. Isn't he doing like an FSA spending store? That's like the most like opportunistic thing I could hear, I think of.

• 51:30Sam Parr?

  The way that he pitched it, it was pretty awesome. He said something like, uh, obesity in America is like an epidemic and 60% of people are overweight. We want to make you eat healthier by making it easier to acquire like, you know, this types of food and this type of healthcare and we're doing it via, and then he like, that's where the pitch comes in. That's always a good pitch.

• 51:50Shaan Puri?

  Let's go look. So his site.

• 51:51Sam Parr?

  I think it's called True Medicine. True Med.

• 51:54Shaan Puri?

  So True Med, it says, food is medicine, exercise is medicine, sleep is medicine. We don't mean this in a theoretical sense. Food, exercise and sleep are all scientifically proven to prevent or alleviate, uh, physical and mental illness. In short, these are all medicine. It's a, True Med is a payment integration that enables qualified customers to use pre-tax HSA and FSA funds to purchase health promoting products and services from their favorite merchants. Soon it'll be available in the checkout flow for all merchants who are, for merchants who sell healthy food, supplements, exercise equipment and other health and wellness products. This is such a good idea. By the way, this is a phenomenal idea. This is a 10 out of 10 opportunity and, uh,

• 52:32Sam Parr?

  Dude, he pitched me to invest.

• 52:34Shaan Puri?

  Why have I not invested in this?

• 52:36Sam Parr?

  I didn't invest because I was just like saying no to everything and I deeply regret it. I deeply regret it because, by the way, this is the best way to pitch a business, which is like, you like paint this like dreary picture, like the world is obese. You know, did you know that like, if you add up all the terrorist attacks, all the guns, all the car accidents, it would only be one tenth of the people who die, uh, you know, from being obese. Like, you know, that type of fact. And you say like, if we continue this, this is what the outcome is going to be, this and that. And, and so we need to solve this. The way that we are happen to happen to be trying to solve this is by doing X, Y and Z. And I'm like, all right, that's a great pitch.

• 53:13Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, this is, uh, wow. I am so jealous that I'm not invested in this. I'm, I'm, I'm messaging him right now. All right. Uh, that's it. That's the pod. We're out of here.