Kim Dotcom's Millions From Megaupload, Million $ Panic Attack App, and Million $ Waterproof Shoes

Episode 422: Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) talk about their Canadian MFM event and the success stories they met there, the answer to what is a tax haven, the story of Kim Dotcom, and more. Want to see more MFM? Subscribe to the MFM YouTube channel here. ----- Links: * Rootd App * Vessi * Nike * Kim Dotcom * Megaupload * Prime * Congo Brands * 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: (00:35) - Recap of MFM Event (18:25) - Rootd (22:50) - Vessi (26:35) - Tax Havens (37:00) - Kim Dotcom (46:00) - Prime Energy Drink and Logan Paul Freakout ----- 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.

• 0:00Sam Parr?

  Here's the exact quote. He goes, "Do you want the numbers? All right. In year one, we cleared $110 million in retail sales. Sorry, 250 million in retail sales and 110 million gross internally."

• 0:20Sam Parr?

  All right, we're live. What's up?

• 0:23Shaan Puri?

  What's up, dude?

• 0:24Sam Parr?

  Uh, have you been following this Prime energy drink thing? Or Prime, I don't know what the fuck is it. It's just a Gatorade alternative, right? Have you followed it?

• 0:31Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I followed it because a while back, I don't know, like a month ago, uh, Ben, Business Partner Ben, he, uh, he told me, he met some guy who was like involved with it. He's like, dude, the numbers are insane for Prime. Like they're, they're selling, you know, bleep amount of just this one SKU and like, let alone the main, the main drink. And I was like, there's no way. Uh, that's a crazy number. And then I think recently they came out and said some more numbers. What did they say?

• 1:00Sam Parr?

  There's two takeaways here. The first takeaway is the numbers. So Logan Paul, so the beverage brand he launched with KSI, uh, so on January 4th, so about a month or something ago, he said it did 250 million in revenue in the first year and it did 44 million in revenue in just January of 2023. So recently. Um, and then he also said, but then check this out. Here's the exact quote. He goes, "Do you want the numbers? All right. In year one, we cleared $110 million in retail sales. Sorry, 250 million in retail sales and 110 million gross internally." So the takeaway here for me is, one, that's huge numbers. Two, what the fuck does, what the hell does that mean? This guy doesn't even know his numbers.

• 1:42Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:43Sam Parr?

  That's the second takeaway.

• 1:44Shaan Puri?

  Bro, you're off by half. Like, uh, that's crazy.

• 1:47Sam Parr?

  Also, what the hell does 110 million gross internally?

• 1:50Shaan Puri?

  What he's saying is they sell wholesale. So, uh, this, because they sell this thing, let's say at Walmart. So in Walmart, it did 250 million in sales, but to them, they're, they're getting bought at wholesale prices. So they, the markup is, you know, what? What's, you know, they basically sell at half price, right? So they sell it to Walmart. They sold 110 million worth to Walmart. So their company sold 110 million. The total product sold 250 million is what I think that has to mean.

• 2:16Sam Parr?

  Well, crazy, crazy that this is that big. I've actually seen a few interviews with Logan and he says what the numbers are and then someone from behind the scenes goes, no, no, no, it was this. And he goes, wait, what? Oh, my bad. It was this. And it's pretty wild that like, I think Logan's a smart guy. I would love to have him on the pod and everything, but it's pretty wild how he's really just focused on the content thing and probably doesn't know much about the business thing. It's pretty interesting. I've seen him like ask Mr. Wonderful or something about that, about like different stocks and things like that. And he's pretty, has a pretty rudimentary understanding of like certain finance topics. I thought for sure he would be somewhat on top of, but I guess not. You can crush it without knowing that.

• 2:56Shaan Puri?

  Well, I don't know about that. Like I think he, I think he's like anything else. Like the way we are probably good at business, but and we're just enough to be dangerous at, at the kind of like content, you know, like, you know, like when we see a YouTuber, both of us have had this reaction where we're like, oh, we're horse carriage operators and a Tesla just drove by like this is, when I see somebody on Tik Tok, you know, you might as well be, you know, it might as well be at Hogwarts with a magic wand. I'm like, we're doing something. I don't know how to do those things and I will never know. And like, it's awesome, but I just can't imagine myself really doing those things at the level you can do them. And so I think he's good enough to be

• 3:37Shaan Puri?

  dangerous on the business side and smart enough, obviously to know what categories to go into and what, who to partner with. So like, if you look at their moves, right? Like just zoom out so that you can't, you know, you know, hear what he's saying or whatever. If you look at their moves, the transition from Vine to YouTube, great jump. The transition from YouTube canceled to YouTube, like, you know, rejuvenated. That's a good, good move there. Then from YouTube to boxing, celebrity boxing, he ended up boxing Floyd Mayweather.

• 4:05Sam Parr?

  And he did all right.

• 4:06Shaan Puri?

  It's all right. Yeah. And his brother's, you know, doing, he's one of the most, you know, high earning, you know, boxers out there. Maybe he's like not a boxer. Yeah. So that's, that's incredible. Then the next jump, you know, for Logan was WWE. So now Logan is one of the big stars in WWE, but he does it on his terms. He then transitioned his YouTube content into podcast content. He's like, you know, I'm maturing.

• 4:29Sam Parr?

  By the way, have you seen him in WWE? He's really good. He's really good.

• 4:34Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. Like if I was 13, I'm pretty sure I would think Logan Paul is the fucking shit. Cause I'm 34 and I think Logan Paul is the fucking shit.

• 4:43Sam Parr?

  Like, he's good. Like he's got the acting down. He's got the, uh, he looks ripped. He's good.

• 4:49Shaan Puri?

  And people love to hate on these guys, um, for, you know, good, sometimes good reasons. They've done some things that are like, you know, whatever. He did the stupid video, um, in Japan. He's, uh, gets, he's gotten some trouble for his like NFT thing, but like, I don't know. I think there's a lot to be, to, to learn from and admire in these guys. I'm not saying they're great people, perfect people. I don't know them personally. I can't say either way on that, but I think from a marketing perspective.

• 5:15Sam Parr?

  Yeah, they crush it.

• 5:17Shaan Puri?

  15 out of 10, right? Like from a brand building, from a, a sort of learning how to keep riding new waves and stay relevant. Um, I mean, these are, they're phenomenal. The same way that the Kardashians are phenomenal in some way. And you could disparage them for a bunch of reasons, or you could look at the things they do great and say, cool. I'm just going to take inspiration from the things they do great rather than hate on them in a very common way about, you know, the same stuff everybody else does. Um, so yeah, I think, you know, what he's done here is, is pretty phenomenal. I, I think they're kind of, him and KSI are kind of like, um, minor partners.

• 5:49Sam Parr?

  I think it's, I think it's like a, like a, like a third, a third, a third type of thing.

• 5:53Shaan Puri?

  The operators get a third here?

• 5:55Sam Parr?

  Yeah. I mean, I, I saw an interview and it was either a third or like a 20%, but, uh, yeah, minority, but meaningful. I mean, it, this, this can be a billion dollar brand.

• 6:05Shaan Puri?

  Dude, I invited him to Camp MFM, by the way, and I was like, yeah, you should come. It's gonna be awesome. And he was like, uh, He's like, dude, I can't get hurt. He's like, I'm doing the WWE. If I go play basketball, I'm gonna get hurt.

• 6:16Sam Parr?

  Why did he reply to you?

• 6:17Shaan Puri?

  I can't like sprain an ankle or twist a knee and like not be able to go wrestle at WrestleMania in a month.

• 6:23Sam Parr?

  What platform did you speak to him on?

• 6:25Shaan Puri?

  You know, actually, what happened was,

• 6:27Sam Parr?

  What had happened was?

• 6:28Shaan Puri?

  What had happened was I jumped into Twitter Spaces where he was there and I just started talking there. And then he DM me afterwards. And then I was like, hey, you know, you actually, he had talked about my Clubhouse or Metaverse tweet on his podcast too. And I was like, yo, you actually talked about my other thing, you know, I'm that guy. And he was like, oh, cool. And so, you know, Twitter DM is kind of where we talked.

• 6:54Sam Parr?

  Dude, that's actually kind of a hack. There's like a handful of YouTubers that have five, 10, 20 million subscribers who I've chatted with on Twitter and they only have like 10 or 100,000 followers on Twitter and their fans, children, aren't using Twitter. And it's such a good way to like get in front of them. And I've actually pulled that move a few times on Twitter. It's pretty, pretty, I'm shocked it works.

• 7:15Shaan Puri?

  That's genius.

• 7:18Shaan Puri?

  It's just not the same without thousands of roaring fans chanting our name, signing, you know, people's backs and shit like that.

• 7:28Sam Parr?

  Hairy backs.

• 7:29Shaan Puri?

  Hairy backs.

• 7:29Sam Parr?

  Sweaty backs. You want to do a recap? So basically, the gist of this is, is Sean and I did a somewhat impromptu, it was supposed to be a meetup, turned into like a live performance, basically in Vancouver. I don't know how many people were there, between 1,000 or 1,300-ish, but we sold out this theater in Vancouver. It went pretty great. You want to talk about a few things that surprised you?

• 7:57Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, let's, let's do that. Okay, surprising. Surprisingly hard to be on stage, even though we kind of at this point talk for a living. There was a moment about an hour before where we're both like, Like, how do you use your tongue? Do you touch it against your teeth when you're making sounds? What do you do with that? And we just had no idea what to say. Why did it was like, you know, the moment of panic where it's like, are these people even coming for us? Who are they? Is this, did they sell the tickets? Or did people just click? Maybe like, you know, we just questioned everything for a moment. What are we going to say upfront? How do we make this amazing for people? And

• 8:35Sam Parr?

  There was really no thought that went into this. Like one hour we went and got sushi ahead of time and we were like, so what do you want to talk about? We talked about that for five minutes and then we started talking to each other about family and just fun stuff. But

• 8:47Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, we had like a 10 minute pow wow to try to figure it out. But I think it turned out okay either. I think the content turned out we, we basically were pretty tough critics of ourselves. I think we gave the overall event an eight out of 10. And I think the, I think it was not, it was not a 10 because I think it was a little poorly structured, like the opening part was a lot of intro, welcome to our spot, thank our sponsors, that sort of thing. And also we weren't as well prepared as we could have been in terms of like, we could have come up with things that that play better live than, than on stage. Like I had the moment of clarity afterwards. I was like, oh, it's a show that's live with the audience.

• 9:31Shaan Puri?

  We should be doing things like A, B, and C.

• 9:33Sam Parr?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 9:33Shaan Puri?

  And we didn't fully get that, but we did like a little Shark Tank pitch competition. We did Q and A. We did some stuff with the crowd. So I think that was good.

• 9:41Sam Parr?

  All things considered, I thought it was actually a nine. I think like, given the amount of preparation and the amount of fun people had. Uh, another shocking thing was people came, I think the value in order was to see us, to meet one another, then to actually hear what we had to say.

• 9:57Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, right. Right, exactly. And I think there was some benefit in doing it in Vancouver where there's probably just not a lot of. Events going on for entrepreneurs or tech people that are like exciting versus I think if we had done this in San Francisco, we probably would have got more numbers, but they wouldn't have cared as much. Like, there was a lot of people at this thing in Vancouver that traveled from Toronto or from Portland or from different places to come see it because, oh, might as well, it's a couple hours away. And, you know, you know, there's not going to be another thing like this anytime soon where I'm at. So anyways, those were some quick, quick recap. I guess if people weren't there, what should we explain? What did we actually do? So it was me, you and Andrew Wilkinson on stage. It was in this theater. So there's like a balcony seating. It was like a,

• 10:41Shaan Puri?

  you know, basically giant theater where like a comedian would normally play. In fact, backstage, as we're walking up, it was truly humbling. And I mean, humbling in the, in the most shit on myself way, which was we're walking up to the stage and it's like these framed pictures of guys who were in that same green room before us. It's like Jerry Seinfeld, Dave Chappelle, it's like all these legendary comedians. And it's like, some of the best podcasters that you've ever seen in the entrepreneurship category on Apple Podcasts.

• 11:15Sam Parr?

  Dude, it was, it was humbling. Another thing that was humbling was after it happened, we left the stage and we went and just hung out with people and there was this a huge line. And what it made me realize was that, so a lot of people don't realize this, but it's basically Sean and me and producer Ben, Jonathan sometimes, and we are sitting here just recording, talking to each other. You forget, we forget on a regular basis that it's being recorded. When the podcast gets published, we don't see comments. We don't know, like, we could see the numbers, but it's just like an analytics screen. I don't know who's listening, why they're listening. I don't know any of that. And so you forget that this stuff actually. Kind of matters to some people and it's really fun to go and meet people who consume

• 12:00Sam Parr?

  your thing and realize, wow, this actually matters to them. That was humbling as well.

• 12:03Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, there would be like a father and son be like, we always listen to the pod together and then we brainstorm. He's 14, but he wants to be an entrepreneur like you guys. So after we listen to the pod, we then brainstorm and do stuff. It's like, oh, that's really cool. This is like, uh, this is like embedded in your kind of like family a little bit. There were examples like that that were very surprising to me, but, but cool. Also, I should say, you were good at that. Like you were really good on stage. Sam was, I don't know what happened. I think the nicotine pouch kicked in and Sam went to another level. I'm gonna start doing nicotine, dude. That was a great ad for, for that. Uh, Sam had great jokes. And then afterwards, also, I feel like in the meet and greet, you were good at being kind of the celebrity. Like, I didn't know what to do with my hands. You know, people would come up, be like, can I take a picture? And my response was like,

• 12:47Shaan Puri?

  why? Oh, yeah, sure, I guess. And then they would stand next to me and I would do this like point thing to each one of them. Like, this guy. Like, if you look, go look on the Instagram, every picture with me, I'm just doing, nah, it's about this guy right here, whoever the fan was. And you were giving them the billionaire hug, which, um, I don't know if people picked up on, but you, you, you taught me this afterwards. I didn't know this trick. Explain the billionaire hug.

• 13:13Sam Parr?

  So I have a theory that once you hit a billion dollars, you get like invited to this like seminar and they teach you how to do a billy hug, which is basically when you hug someone, your hips and ass are in one direction, but then your shoulders and arm lean hard to the right. And so you could be touching them shoulder to shoulder, but ass to ass, you're never touching them. And this is like a way to like, look, we're touching and I'm being affectionate, but like my crotch isn't in the vicinity, therefore it's safe, it's all good. This is PC. And so I do the billionaire hug. I also bring my wife along to all these things as well, because it always freaks me out. I'm like, I don't know, man. I don't want ever, I don't want anyone to get the wrong idea. Sometimes, you know, it's

• 13:58Sam Parr?

  just, it's just, it can be uncomfortable every once in a while. So I do the billy hug. I do that. I'm not a billy, but I did the billy hug because I've learned from billys.

• 14:05Shaan Puri?

  Is it a, is it a sexual thing? Is it like, you know, you're, you're keeping your wallet away from them? What, what are you doing? What, why does it, why do the hips need to be away? Is there even an explanation? Or it's just something that only billionaires would understand?

• 14:15Sam Parr?

  It's just a, a time honored tradition. I don't know. I'm not there yet, so I don't know, but I just, I, you know, it's like singing in the shower. I copy my heroes. So that, that's why I do it. And this is a man and a woman thing, by the way. It's from the men as well. I've noticed that sometimes we have this relationship with people where they hear us talk and they think, oh, you're so approachable. And sometimes they'll come up to me and they'll go, dude, let's fuck. Let's do this. And I'm like, whoa, you're coming on too hard to me. I know I say this stuff, but you're coming on too hard. So sometimes you need to set some boundaries and that's my mini boundary. It's the crotch boundary.

• 14:49Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 14:51Shaan Puri?

  We, we, so we had our buddy Andrew on there. Andrew was really funny too. I, I gotta say, Andrew, who's been on the pod a bunch of times, I'd never met in person. So I've talked to him on the phone. We've done zoom calls. He's come on the pod, but in person, I gotta say, he's got a lot more juice than I expected.

• 15:09Sam Parr?

  And Dude, tell the story about dinner or lunch.

• 15:13Shaan Puri?

  So we go to lunch. So before the show, we're like, oh dude, we gotta hang out, Ben. You're, he's kind of from this area. I thought Vancouver, B C is all the same thing. Actually, you gotta take a seaplane.

• 15:25Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 15:25Shaan Puri?

  Of, or a helicopter. So he took a fucking chopper to come meet us, which is honestly, one of the more big dog moves anyone's ever done to me.

• 15:35Sam Parr?

  Well, the reason we knew it was a big dog move because he was a, he was like five or 10 minutes late. And instead of saying, uh, you know, my flight was delayed. He said, I was late for my flight. And I was like, wait, what?

• 15:48Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. That's subtle. I didn't pick that up. I just heard over what he called on the phone. It was just, I just heard the chopper going and I was like, hey, wait a minute. Is there a fan on near you? What's going, what is that?

• 16:03Shaan Puri?

  So he lands and before he lands, he goes, I'm going to be five to 10 minutes late. Again, I was late for my flight. And then he goes, um, just order me.

• 16:13Sam Parr?

  And he had a list.

• 16:14Shaan Puri?

  Order to me and Sammy goes. Eight oysters, two, two salmon, the Gary, this like, you know, whatever wagyu steak,

• 16:25Shaan Puri?

  you know, a miso soup. I have a nut and shellfish allergy. I'll die if somebody does that. And then he just signs it off. Thanks, but just THX. And I see this. I'm, I was, I was running late too, as, as per usual. I was in the shower at this point. I just started laughing. Sam replies, what did you say?

• 16:45Sam Parr?

  I was like, did you just say thanks to me? Like, yes, sir. I mean, it was like ridiculous. And he was like, sorry.

• 16:52Shaan Puri?

  He tried to blame an autocorrect. We're like, no, bro. You're just used to talking to people too much like that. You, you have people who let you get away with that. That shit might fly in Canada, but you don't bring that weak THX shit to, to the United States of America. We, we reject that. We send that back. We go to lunch and we're having a good time. We're just catching up. Again, Andrew's got the juice. He's got the juice in the way that my best friends, who I look up to the most, have that juice. You have that too. When you hang out in person with Sam, he's got a little bounce in his step. And it just seems like he's eager. He's excited. He's got a plan. Wherever you go, there's not going to be, it's not going to just be a default, normal experience.

• 17:34Shaan Puri?

  Something a little more fun is going to happen. Something a little extra is going to happen. A little more laughter, a little more, um, you know, learning, something extra is going to happen. So Andrew had that, which I was, which was awesome to see because he's quite, I don't know, would you say like reserved or calm? He's got almost like a calm brand, but in person, his energy was a lot more.

• 17:52Sam Parr?

  Kinetic.

• 17:53Shaan Puri?

  Freewheeling and I liked it.

• 17:55Sam Parr?

  He had a very kinetic energy where he was physical, you know, he was moving.

• 17:59Shaan Puri?

  And that's a great way of putting it.

• 18:01Sam Parr?

  Yeah. He was kinetic. He had that. I have that too. People always yell at me because I've got big thighs and I shake. And whenever I shake my thighs, the table moves and they're like, dude, you're too kinetic. So yeah, he's got that kinetic energy and we're having this wonderful lunch. It's probably an hour and a half in, and then we're not quite done eating yet, or at least it doesn't feel there. And then all of a sudden he goes, oh, shoot. And we're like, what? Like he like, it's like a panic. He goes, dude, my Uber's been outside waiting for me for 10 minutes. I gotta go. Bye. And he just stands up and walks away. And we're like.

• 18:33Shaan Puri?

  It was even better than that. He just stood up like he was stretching for a second. And then he picked up his jacket and he's like, I'll see you guys at the place. We're like, what? And he goes, yeah, sorry, I gotta go. My Uber's been outside for 10 minutes. What? When did you call an Uber? And he floated away like a balloon. Like he was the grandfather and up and he just went away. The house flew away. And then me and Sam were like, okay.

• 18:58Shaan Puri?

  Yo, was that weird that he just kind of floated away like a balloon?

• 19:01Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's like, well, we'll work on conversation skills later, Adrian. Have a nice day. Yeah, he just kind of bounced.

• 19:07Shaan Puri?

  I had to blow him a kiss. He was running away so far is the only appropriate goodbye.

• 19:12Sam Parr?

  But in general, the thing was awesome. Now, I don't, I'm not going to put you on the spot, but I would like us to do a five or three like thing where like a day thing where we could do like, you know, three dates in five days. I want to go to like C and B cities, so not the New Yorks, not the SFs, something like Denver or Toronto or Kansas City, something where they're, you know, what, what did you call it? Small fish, small pond syndrome? That's what I want to be. I want to be a big fish in a small pond because these people were so.

• 19:42Shaan Puri?

  Big piss and a small pond.

• 19:46Sam Parr?

  It's a hard word to say, but you want to do it?

• 19:48Shaan Puri?

  You, um, uh, you have a little something on your shirt here. I think you got a little taste of fame, a little dribble of that fame that just stained the shirt there. You like that taste of fame, didn't you?

• 20:00Sam Parr?

  Well, here's why I like it. We've talked about.

• 20:02Shaan Puri?

  We know why you like it.

• 20:03Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 20:04Shaan Puri?

  Cause being famous is awesome.

• 20:05Sam Parr?

  It is awesome, but it is exhausting. Now I understand why I like the touring bands who last a long time. They show up, they do the concert and they go home and go to bed. I was like, I couldn't sleep because we were like, did, we hung out with everyone. Then we had like a breakfast the next day. But anyway, I liked it because it was a challenge. I also think that in our little tech world, we assume that we're this little niche internet nerds, which we are, but it's actually cool to like flex and see the people and, and honestly felt like a movement. And there was times where I, I felt it was you and I were great at what we do, but in reality, we were just an excuse and like a steward of like a particular type of movement of these people who are like, you know, we're all on a journey. Some people are further ahead. Some people are not there yet.

• 20:49Sam Parr?

  Some people don't want to go far, some do, but they're all going someplace. And it felt like we were just an excuse to gather those people and it really felt beyond and bigger than us. I know that sounds woo woo and shit like that, but that's truly how it felt. And so that's why I thought it was cool.

• 21:04Shaan Puri?

  I agree 100%. At first, I felt so excited. I was like, man, I can't believe we sold out this theater. There's 2,000 people on the waitlist. They came to see us. And I think there was a small part that was like, that's like the stated excuse. But the reality is that the value was just, if you like this podcast, that's put you through a bunch of filters. And the filters are like, a lot of our, of our sayings, right? So it's like, you know, no small boy stuff, right? So it's like, people who want to think big for themselves, but they define what big means for them. But it's also people who don't take themselves too seriously. If you want the smartest podcasts, you should go listen to Invest Like the Best and go listen to All In and go listen to a bunch of podcasts with people who are,

• 21:49Shaan Puri?

  their intellectual horsepower outruns ours, right? The oven burns a little hotter for those guys than it does for us. If you want somebody who, like, we will celebrate a dude who's like a plumber that's hacking the Yellow Pages to get more leads, as much as we will a guy who's building a new, a new city or a new country, you know, from scratch. And so there's like this set of people who appreciate the same things we appreciate. And when you put them together, we're prob, like, it's not easy for them, I think, in their day to day life, to be around a bunch of other people who are like them, the sort of schemer and dreamer,

• 22:27Shaan Puri?

  you know, a profiler archetype. And so that's what I saw was the best because I was like, oh, man, sorry you guys had to wait. They're like, no, it was awesome. I was in line with a bunch of other people who were, I met this guy who's doing this and this guy is doing this. And I said, oh, wow. Okay, that makes sense to me. Like, the real value here wasn't coming and getting a selfie with me as I do my awkward point. It was actually just getting like, to be in a community of other people who have that, who have the same sort of freak energy that you have. And then once that, once I saw that, I was like, okay, this makes sense. We should do, you know, more of this.

• 22:58Sam Parr?

  Dude, I met a guy, like, there is a couple billionaires in the crowd. I don't know if you know that, and I'm not going to call them out, but I, I met one of them. Um, or at least their, their stake and they, they own multiple, they, they have large stakes in multi-billion dollar companies. And I remember I met one of them and he was like a typical, like, dorky. Guy. And then I met this other guy who had a sheet rock business that like, you know, it's like a blue collar thing and his hands were just so meaty and fat. And I remember shaking his hand and I told him, I was like, dude, I can't even wrap my hand around your hand and I'm not small. And that's, and I was like, dude, that's sick. We got, we got the neckbeards. They had the calloused hands, guys. And, uh, and this guy, one of the guys, I go, yeah, just, you know, DM me on Twitter. He goes, okay, cool. You'll see me. My Twitter handle is called fucking manly. And, uh, that's what he said to me. And I was like, all right, that's badass.

• 23:43Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, give us a hat. Yeah. He, he, he's a, he said to me, he was like, my wife has a big Instagram following for women's stuff. So I decided to create fucking manly. To like counteract that. That was awesome. Um, I want to tell you about one woman who I thought, uh, was really, had a really interesting story.

• 24:00Sam Parr?

  I know her well. I know her well.

• 24:03Shaan Puri?

  So I was at the, there was a dinner the night before that the tiny guys hosted and at the dinner, met some people, whatever was good. Uh, one woman came up and she goes, um, she's like, hey, my name's, uh, Anya, you know, uh, big fan, blah, blah. And then she gave me a little like quick high five. She goes, I just made my first million. And I was like, nice. Uh, what do you do? And, um, and she was like, well, you know, we, I created this app for people with panic attacks. It's called rooted. And I was like, panic attacks? Is that like the, an app for panic attack? I never would have even thought about that niche. And, uh, she's like, yeah, you know, I struggled with it like crazy.

• 24:41Shaan Puri?

  Um, and so then I created this app. So she pulls out this app called rooted and rooted as in like, you know, feeling grounded instead of having, you know, this sort of panic attack. And there's like a red panic button you can hit if you're feeling something in the moment, but there's also just like sleep. There's like lessons where you can learn about like, what is this thing? And why does this happen to me?

• 24:59Sam Parr?

  Like drills and breathing exercises.

• 25:01Shaan Puri?

  Exercise, breathing exercises and so on and so forth. And she said she has had. Two point something million downloads of this app. And I thought, okay, that's pretty great.

• 25:11Sam Parr?

  That's not even the crazy part.

• 25:13Shaan Puri?

  Then I was like, wow, are you, are you just really good at Facebook ads or what? She goes, no, I don't do any paid marketing.

• 25:18Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 25:19Shaan Puri?

  And I was like, so how do you get two point something million downloads of this? She goes, well, I think, you know, it solved a real problem. And also I dominate like the app store search for this because everybody else went really broad. They tried to go for like sleep or anxiety or breathing. And I went for panic attack because everybody else thought that was too narrow. And I just really like, did a good job owning that in the app store, ASO, right? Instead of SEO, the, the app store optimization. And then I started getting good reviews and it just snowballed. And now I'm like the top one in that. And I thought,

• 25:53Sam Parr?

  Did she tell you how big the team was?

• 25:55Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. So I was like, I was like, she's already halfway to being my hero at this point. And I go,

• 26:01Sam Parr?

  And this is our first business. This is our first.

• 26:03Shaan Puri?

  I go seal the deal for me. How big's your team? She goes, it's just me.

• 26:06Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Crazy, right?

• 26:08Shaan Puri?

  I go, what? And she goes, yeah, it's just me. I have a couple contractors that, you know, help me with things, but there's no employees. I don't want any employees. And I was like, I want to be you. You're, you know, you're, she's building something that has an impact. You know, she dominated it her way when anybody else would have, like, if she went to go ask, you know, smart guys like us, or, you know, go ask a mentor, what should I do? They'd either say, you know, go ask an investor, they'll say it's too small of a market. Go ask a mentor, they'll say, well, you need to, you know, what's your growth strategy? And she's like, I don't know. I just want to build a useful product. And like, I'll figure it out as I go. Third is like, you need to scale up. You're no way because she's closing these deals now with like, healthcare companies where they'll just provide it for like, you know, all of the members of their gold plan. So like,

• 26:52Shaan Puri?

  they'll pay for it for 50,000 members or something like that now. And, you know, do you need a BD rep and a sales team and all this stuff? She's like, no, I just go take the meeting myself. And it took some time, but we got the deal.

• 27:04Sam Parr?

  She said she meets them on LinkedIn. She goes, I just messaged them on LinkedIn.

• 27:08Shaan Puri?

  Fantastic. So I thought, Anya, shout out to her. She's the, she's got the, I don't know, not Billy of the week, not blue collar side hustle. She's something else. But like, you know, the riches and niches award of the week, you know, goes to her because I thought that was a pretty amazing story.

• 27:22Sam Parr?

  No, it was amazing. And this is her first business. And so like, you know, everything that she said, or everything that she has done, if you told me, like, if she told me the idea, which is, I'm gonna, I've never done anything tech related before, and I can't code, I'm gonna hire contractors overseas to do this. I don't know anything about marketing. I'm like, oh, you're, everything you're saying, you're gonna lose. This won't work. And she completely has pulled it off. And if you, and if you go to the reviews, did you look up her app? I mean, it's legit. Like, there's like, I think it's like a 4.9 rating. It's like a really high rating, thousands of reviews, and she completely has pulled it off. I'm almost positive it's only two-ish years old. Like, it's not, it's not, it's not, uh,

• 28:03Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 28:03Sam Parr?

  And then she also just went full time as of recently. So this was like,

• 28:07Shaan Puri?

  And she just started monetizing. It's like, most of the app is free. She's like, yeah, I want most of the app to be free. Um, you know, because obviously I'm trying to help as many people as I can. I'm trying to find that balance where it's a sustainable business, but also most of the app's free. And I just thought that was a badass story. There was a bunch of people there that had like really big stories, but to me, that was a really, I'd just say incredible, incredible win. And she had a kind of a, an intensity about her.

• 28:33Sam Parr?

  Oh, yeah.

• 28:34Shaan Puri?

  You could almost tell when you were talking to her, like, okay, even though on paper, you got no attributes, right? And we all know the rule. You gotta have some attributes if you wanna win. She didn't have the experience. She didn't have the skill of certain things, but she did have a certain level of intensity. And you could see that, just in talking to her, like, just the way she came across, she came across like a person to be taken seriously. And like, she was like, like a very small person. It wasn't like her stature, well, she didn't have a natural knack at that. It was just the way she was talking that, that stood out to me.

• 29:04Sam Parr?

  Did you, uh, did you meet the Vessi guys? So V E S S I?

• 29:08Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, we went out for lunch.

• 29:09Sam Parr?

  So, um, I, I don't know if I can say what, what they do. I don't, maybe you could say, but basically, if they told you the numbers.

• 29:17Shaan Puri?

  I'm not gonna say any numbers, but, uh, Tony was the guy who was there as the founder and they make awesome shoes apparently. I haven't tried them, so I can't say.

• 29:25Sam Parr?

  Dude, they're hardcore in Vancouver and so I, my, the lady at my hotel saw me wearing them and she goes, "Oh, you're wearing Vessi's. Those are, those are happening." So basically this, she didn't say they're happening because she's not 60 years old, but you know, she said they're cool.

• 29:41Shaan Puri?

  Those are jazzy fresh.

• 29:42Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 29:44Sam Parr?

  But anyway, so it's this shoe called Vessi. They look just like tennis shoes, but apparently they're like waterproof, which is a big deal in Vancouver because it rains a lot and it's wet. And the guy bootstrap, the bootstrap the company and he told me the top line revenue, which I don't know if we can say or not.

• 29:59Shaan Puri?

  Just say it and we'll bleep it.

• 30:00Sam Parr?

  Uh, okay, fine. We'll say, say it and bleep it, but over.

• 30:05Sam Parr?

  And so basically you, you guys didn't hear what I just said, but we're talking like not, we're talking in the same ballpark of like an Allbirds or something like that, like a publicly traded company, quite huge, completely bootstrapped. And I started talking to him and he's like, "Hey, um, I, I want to like, I'm thinking about like getting popular on Twitter." And then he started talking to me and I started giving feedback and then he told me about the company and I, and he told me the size and I'm like, "Wait, wait, wait. Why do you want to be on Twitter? You realize this is totally not worth your time and you are like way better than any of the thread boys, including me. Don't go on Twitter, dude. Just keep crushing it." And the company that he had was entirely bootstrapped and it started as a Kickstarter. So he was like, I was like, "Why are you guys so good?" He said, "Negative cash flow, like, uh, negative cash cycle," which means, um,

• 30:51Sam Parr?

  you know, people.

• 30:51Shaan Puri?

  Sell the stuff before they have to pay for the goods.

• 30:53Sam Parr?

  Yeah. He's like, "We just have good terms with a, with a manufacturer and we started as a Kickstarter, so it's been profitable since day one." And, and this is another thing where it breaks all types of, uh, patterns that I thought possible. So starting in Vancouver, Vancouver's not a big city. I think the metropolitan area is like 800,000. Or sorry, the metropolitan area is 2 million. The city's only 800,000. So it's not like an epicenter.

• 31:14Shaan Puri?

  Dude, I went for a run and I like ran across the city and I don't run. So it's not.

• 31:20Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and it's like not that big of a city. It's in Canada, which I didn't realize how like Canada is kind of podunk. Like it's, it's, it's like, it's like, it's like, there's only like 30 million people in that whole place. It's like.

• 31:31Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, Canada has the same population as California.

• 31:34Sam Parr?

  It's crazy. Oh, in the same population as like the metropolitan New York area. I mean, it's.

• 31:38Shaan Puri?

  But the size of that it's bigger than the United States in terms of like the actual landmass. So it's like, just, it's a lot of empty space or a lot of space per person.

• 31:46Sam Parr?

  Yeah, like it's not that big and it's a little behind in terms of like, it's not like a sophisticated place. So this isn't bad, but like, I remember I went to the airport and they checked my passport in such an odd location. And like, I remember they checked it like as I was going through the security thing to like scan my, my body. Not ahead of time. I'm like, oh, you guys know it would be way faster if you do this, this, uh, whatever. Uh, and so anyway, I met this guy and his company kills it. And so he, uh, huge company in Vancouver dominated Vancouver. They love the shoes there. Everyone was talking about it incredibly quiet and nice. No like.

• 32:20Shaan Puri?

  They opened up, they opened up a physical store in Vancouver.

• 32:24Sam Parr?

  You see, you saw the video of that?

• 32:25Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, the video of the line, there's like a line like half a mile long. And I was like, yeah, so you like, this is like a marketing stunt. You like paid people to stand in this line? He's like, no, these are like actual customers.

• 32:35Sam Parr?

  No, he's like, it's Monday.

• 32:35Shaan Puri?

  Bleep this too, but he said they're gonna do out of their retail location this year. I was like, what the hell? That's an absurd number.

• 32:42Sam Parr?

  It's crazy. This guy was really, really cool. Uh, so I'm happy I got to meet him. But anyway, good weekend. We had a good time. We'll do it again.

• 32:53Speaker 02

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• 33:08Sam Parr?

  Do you want to talk about, uh, you have another topic or you want me to go?

• 33:11Shaan Puri?

  Uh, I got one and then, uh, but let's do, let's do, okay, let's do this one first. So we went international, we went, um,

• 33:19Sam Parr?

  Abroad.

• 33:20Shaan Puri?

  Some might say, some might say offshore, you know, they'd be wrong, but you could say offshore. They got me thinking about

• 33:27Sam Parr?

  Off a shore.

• 33:28Shaan Puri?

  Companies offshoring money and like, I don't know about you, but I've always heard about this. But if you had ever asked me to explain, yeah, how do companies like offshore, what is, what's a tax haven? Like, how do these things work? Do you actually know how this shit works? Cause I went down a random rabbit hole last night and pretty interesting stuff.

• 33:46Sam Parr?

  Dude, I have no idea what the word tax haven means.

• 33:48Shaan Puri?

  Really how this actually worked.

• 33:49Sam Parr?

  I don't know what it means, but I like using it. You know what I'm saying? Like, I don't know, I don't

• 33:53Shaan Puri?

  Really want one.

• 33:54Sam Parr?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like it's, it's right under, uh, Shell, Shell Corporation. When people talk about

• 34:00Shaan Puri?

  Actually they're related. All right. So, so here's the kind of the headline or the takeaway, which is that companies like Nike, Apple, huge companies, right? The companies that we've all heard of use this. This is not just like, oh, I don't know, shady crypto guys that are opening up a company in the Bahamas or whatever. It's like, you know, the, the most blue chip of blue chip companies. Apple at one point had like $300 billion offshore overseas that they weren't bringing back into America. Why? Because the, here's the general, like first principles explanation. So you, uh, every country has a tax rate. So let's say in, in the United States, the corporate tax rate, let's say is 21%. Well, if you make money here, you're going to pay 21% on all your profits.

• 34:42Shaan Puri?

  But if you're able to shift those profits so that they're taken in another country, you can use that country's tax rate. Well, guess what? There are several countries that have a tax rate of pretty much zero. And so what these companies do is like, I'll give you an example of Nike. So Nike did this brilliant thing that resulted in Nike paying like, I don't know, something like 3% a year tax rate on billions and billions of dollars of, uh, of revenue and profits. And so how did they do this? Well, what they did initially was they created a, a shell company. There we go. Bingo. Shell company in Bermuda and the shell company in Bermuda owned the swoosh, like the trademark to the Nike check.

• 35:24Shaan Puri?

  And then what happened is company in the United States is selling shoes, but they, and it might rack up, let's say $10 billion of revenue, uh, or even like gross, gross profit. So like, you know, after taking out and took out the shoes and the shipping and all that. Well, normally they just have to pay the tax on the 10 billion. Well, what they would do is the swoosh company in Bermuda would then charge them nine billion, let's say, in royalty payments, saying, hey, you're using the swoosh, you got to pay us for that. So all of a sudden, the taxable income in the US goes from 10 down to one. And now they just pay the 20% on the one billion. And the nine billion that the Bermuda company got pays a tax rate of zero. Right? So their effective tax rate goes way, way down. And so this is what they did initially.

• 36:08Shaan Puri?

  And then, and this lasted for like, you know, some period of time. But then, and then they kind of closed these loopholes over time. So Nike had this, had this setup in, in the Netherlands. And they had this setup in the Netherlands where they had, you know, some Nike international company over there. They were doing this where in the Netherlands, they didn't have to pay taxes on, on the money for some period of time, because there was like a rule where on royalty income, you don't have to pay taxes. So they're like, great. All the revenue this company is making is the royalty income from the IP, the, the swoosh trademark that we're, that we're trademark, we're renting out basically to our other companies. And so they were not paying any taxes on Europe, Middle East, whatever.

• 36:51Shaan Puri?

  And then what happens is, you know, after 10 years, people start complaining, they close that loophole, the politicians high five, they're like, we did it. These big corporations are going to pay their fair share. And Nike goes, oh, hold on, let me, they get the BlackBerry out. They call, they call up the lawyer, they say, hey, one hole closed, open up another, please. Hang up the phone and that the lawyers get to work and they realize we could do something different. Here's what we'll do. We'll create two Dutch companies and one of them will have a director in the United States, because here's what happens. In the United States, the law says if your company, if the company is incorporated somewhere else, it should be taxed in that country.

• 37:34Shaan Puri?

  And then the Netherlands says, well, if it has US directors, it's going to be taxed in the US. So it's kind of like those like goofy, those movies where like the two guys are pointing. He's got it. No, he's got it. Wait, what? Nobody's been taxing this thing? And so they, they had what was called a stateless company, a company that was taxed nowhere, which is called Nike Innovate CV. And it paid zero taxes, basically. And so companies like Nike have been able to do this. Apple does the same thing. Facebook does the same thing. I don't know if you've ever seen like why all these tech companies have offices in Ireland.

• 38:02Sam Parr?

  Yeah, in Dublin. Everyone has a Dublin, a Dublin.

• 38:05Shaan Puri?

  And I was like, wow, you know, okay, must, is it the great? Is it the, the fantastic world renowned engineering talent of Dublin? What, what is the reason for this? And the reason is because there was something called the double Irish strategy, which said, if you have one, one Irish company that owned the IP and then another one that was, uh, you know, just like a subsidiary of it. And then that one had US directors, same thing, zero taxation. And so for, for five years, I think Apple made $30 billion through their Irish companies and paid zero taxes on it. And I just think this is incredible how they do this stuff. And by the way, Tim Cook goes and he sits, he stands in front of Congress. There's this amazing clip where he goes, Apple pays every dollar that they owe in taxes.

• 38:50Shaan Puri?

  We don't depend on tax gimmicks. We don't stash money in some Caribbean island. It's like, yeah, you stash it in Ireland instead. Like, what are you, what are you talking about here? And then like, you know, they've, they've kind of shut that double Irish strategy down. And then the, uh, and then Apple goes, and this is all, this all got leaked from this thing that you probably remember called, do you remember like the Panama Papers?

• 39:11Sam Parr?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 39:11Shaan Puri?

  That got leaked?

• 39:12Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 39:12Shaan Puri?

  Do you know what actually happened there?

• 39:14Sam Parr?

  Uh, a bunch of, they, uh, Panama was a city or a country, sorry, a country where this happened. And I don't know how it got leaked. I think the accounting firm that did a lot of the work for people got hacked.

• 39:26Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. The fourth biggest law firm was something called Mozak Fonseca. And basically this is the fourth biggest law firm. They're known for like creating shell companies and all this stuff. They got hacked, or not hacked, actually, somebody just leaked 11 million documents.

• 39:40Sam Parr?

  Oh, my God.

• 39:41Shaan Puri?

  They don't know who leaked it, but somebody was like a whistleblower, leaked this thing. And there was like this team of journalists that looked at it for a year before finally going forward and publishing the Panama Papers. Well, after that, there was something called, and that's where like the sort of Epstein and Putin stuff came out of the Panama Papers. Then there was the Paradise Papers, which came after that. And that was leaked from this accounting firm called Appleby. And, you know.

• 40:05Sam Parr?

  Huh, interesting name.

• 40:07Shaan Puri?

  You're familiar, you're a client of theirs.

• 40:09Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 40:11Sam Parr?

  Is there, is there like a Hooters LLC that can handle my income tax? Like, what?

• 40:16Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, these guys do shell companies.

• 40:19Sam Parr?

  And soft shells, tacos.

• 40:21Shaan Puri?

  Skillet, queso.

• 40:23Sam Parr?

  We like all types of shells. Shell macaroni and shell companies.

• 40:29Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. So, so, you know, they, they basically, they got leaked too. And then that's when the company stuff that came out, came out as far as, and then you could see Apple going to their law firm, then they leaked the email saying, we, we've, you know, the Irish thing is coming to an end. We'd like to find another country that has this favorable advantage. Can you find us something in the, you know, maybe in the Caribbean? Like, pretty much the exact opposite thing, as he said in front of Congress.

• 40:53Sam Parr?

  You did something that I think is funny. And so basically, when people discuss these topics, they use all type of, all types of words that in itself are not, like, by definition, are not bad words, and they actually don't mean bad things, but they use it in this context and people automatically think villain. And sometimes I find myself using those words on purpose, but like bragging about them. So, for example, loophole. You use the word loophole, why don't we just call it a rule? You know, like, we're just following the rule. This is the rule, we're gonna, we're gonna use the rule. They use loophole. Loopholes aren't bad, just a rule. Another one, manipulate. Why don't we just use like persuade or influence?

• 41:36Sam Parr?

  And so like people use that word manipulate all the time. Another one is exploit. I love that word exploit. I'm like, oh, so to efficiently use something? People talk about Amazon is exploiting their workers. I'm like, what does that mean? Isn't that the point is we give you money and then we exploit you like we. I myself.

• 41:53Shaan Puri?

  Don't get cancelled. Don't get cancelled, Sam. Well. We just got famous, bro. Don't, don't, don't ruin this.

• 41:57Sam Parr?

  Well, they use these words and I'm like, that word, like, that's, that's the point is to exploit. We're going to use this in a very particular way and we're going to use it efficiently. And you, you just did that where you use these words, but it's like, you're saying the word loophole as if it's a scam where it's like, no loophole is the opposite of a scam. It's.

• 42:14Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 42:15Sam Parr?

  This is, we are playing in the rules.

• 42:17Shaan Puri?

  Well, I think that they do mean something, which is that they're within the rules, but not the, they're within the letter of the law, but not the spirit of the law. And I think that's the, that's the difference.

• 42:25Sam Parr?

  Don't get all pro bono lawyer-y on me, bro. There's bro science now. You're doing bro legal jargon.

• 42:34Shaan Puri?

  By the way, Tim Cook actually even said that too, in that same clip. He goes, we not only comply with the letter of the law, but a spirit of the law too, which was, you know, that's a lie. But yeah, I think you're right, which is there are rules of the game and you can, if you play by those rules, you should not blame the player. You should hate the rulemaker, right? You should hate the game.

• 42:57Shaan Puri?

  And so I think that that's, that's where a lot of people go wrong, right? They hear this stuff. When I'm explaining these, I'm not saying Apple and Nike are evil. But when I explain this, I'm, I'm, really what I'm saying is I never really knew what this meant. I never knew actually how it worked.

• 43:12Sam Parr?

  Dude, you're a capital, you're a capital J journalist. You're just saying the facts.

• 43:16Shaan Puri?

  I'm a capital man. I think we established that myself. So, so yeah, I think this is kind of interesting. And then it's like, what's the game theory? So one thing that Trump did, which is actually pretty smart, which is another loaded thing you can't say. Was he was like, dude, these companies have like hundreds of billions of dollars overseas. Cause what happens is once they get taxed in the low, low, low tax place, they can't just move the money back into their, you know, Chase bank here in America and like, you know, go, go down to the ATM and pull it out. Like it would get taxed when it comes back. So they leave it overseas. So this is money that never reaches. And so what Trump did was he goes, all right, look, I'm going to make a one time exception for you to what's called repatriate the cash, bring the cash back to America. I'll lower the tax rate. It's like, kind of like, all

• 44:01Shaan Puri?

  right, guys, get in here. Kind of like, you know, the store owner like opens the back doors, like, get in.

• 44:05Sam Parr?

  It's like a, it's like a gun give back. You ever seen those where you can like, no questions asked, just give us your guns.

• 44:11Shaan Puri?

  Right, right. Exactly. And I think there's some, some value to those, the scenarios. And so he made it like, you know, it's 15% tax on that cash. This is like one time, one time only. If you want the cash back in America, so you can invest it here and use it in your corporate activities here, you know, here's your, your sort of like discount, half price. Come on in. And then that brought like, I don't know, 60 or 90 billion back in, but, but not like the full amount. He thought four trillion would come back in and it, they just didn't.

• 44:39Sam Parr?

  Speaking of crazy people and huge men in terms of size and loopholes and tax evasion, I've got a cruel story for you. And I have a feeling you know about this person. This is, this is the, I don't know if he's a Billy, but he's, he's, he's close enough. Have you heard of kim.com? Do you know who this guy is?

• 44:58Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah. He's, he's prolific, as you like to say.

• 45:01Sam Parr?

  Dude, this guy, that's the phrase here. I was gonna say, this guy's a prolific freak. He's a total freak. So this guy named kim.com has all these interesting facts. And I read about him because he, he's like 6'7", 350 pounds. This guy's massive. He's huge. And he lives in New Zealand. And he, him and his wife, he married like a Philippine, like beauty queen or something like that. And she divorced him. And, and these people thought that they were gonna like, she was gonna talk shit about him. She's like, no, no, no. Like, I have nothing bad to say about him. It just, the marriage didn't work out, but he was a nice guy. And so I started reading about him.

• 45:36Shaan Puri?

  By the way, what's his real name?

• 45:38Sam Parr?

  Uh, it's so Kim Schmitz, but then he was known as Kim Tim Jim Vester, or Kimball. And then eventually he legally changed his name to dot com. So the wife, the ex-wife kept her married last name and her name is like, you know, like Sarah dot com. And so like the article refers to her as like miss.com. Uh, it's like, so that's her legal name. So this guy's like.

• 46:05Shaan Puri?

  I'm gonna become Sean Worldwide, Mr. Worldwide.

• 46:10Shaan Puri?

  This is my wife. This is worldwide. Nice to meet you.

• 46:13Sam Parr?

  Dude, the article referred to her as Ms.com. And so, check this out. So this guy, in the 90s, he starts in Germany as a hacker. And he hacked something like 40 million, or he claims this, but this is not verified. He said he hacked into some like famous bank and he took 40 million dollars and he donated it to Greenpeace. At least that's what he said. But TBD if that's actually true, because Greenpeace is like, no, that's not true. And then eventually, he starts building all these other programs and all this like software that is like mildly successful. And he tries to send, and he's a hacker while he's doing this, doing a bunch of illegal shit. But while doing this, he's trying to send a file to his friend and the email that he's trying to send it through says, alright, you've exceeded the limit. We can't do this. So he creates this thing called Megaupload,

• 46:54Sam Parr?

  which eventually like gets huge. Have you heard of Megaupload? If you ever download an illegal movie or anything like that, you've probably come across Megaupload. Have you?

• 47:03Shaan Puri?

  Of course. Yeah. Never, never used it for textbooks, but definitely have used Megaupload.

• 47:09Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So Megaupload, it's kind of like Napster, but you don't need a, I don't think you, it's just a website. So you don't need to download a client. So it's like Pirate Bay, I guess is a similar one. But again, you still don't need a client. It's just a website where you can like trade files. And it goes viral because all these people would share files and he would put like Megaupload like in the like image. So like, that's how it like grew and got viral. And so anyway, he creates this thing and it swells. He launches it in 2005 and in 2010, he's basically, he's able to pay himself 42 million dollars. That was his personal income from that. And eventually after like eight years, he gets sued and Hollywood sues him. I guess, I don't know what Hollywood is, but big Hollywood sues him.

• 47:54Sam Parr?

  The government sues him.

• 47:55Shaan Puri?

  The sign.

• 47:55Sam Parr?

  Yeah, the sign. And they say that he made close to 200 million dollars in personal profit from this whole thing. And all during this, he's doing like this other crazy shit. So out of like 50 million modern warfare players, this guy was ranked number one. He was the number one player for Call of Duty. Yes. In 2012, he was The number one person in the world at Call of Duty. He also finished first in the Gumball 3000. You know what that is? It's like a Car race? It's a car race across Europe. He finishes first. Then he releases an album of original music with any like collab with other articles, other artists.

• 48:38Sam Parr?

  It's called Good Times and it's not that bad of an album, to be honest. Then he creates the Internet Party, which is a new political party in New Zealand. And it kind of gained some traction and he's doing all of this while running Mega Upload. Well, Mega Upload gets sued and he actually goes to jail for the second time. He's already been in jail for a few, I think a few weeks, a few months before for his hacking stuff. This time he gets locked up for a longer period of time. And when they arrest him, they go to his house and his compound and they just swarm it SWAT style. And in the house, they find all like 40 cars, like the nicest cars, you know, like these fancy Mercedes, AMGs, Bugattis, all this shit. They find all this art, but they also find $175 million in cash.

• 49:23Sam Parr?

  This guy had that much money in cash in like a, in a room in his house. He's kind of like a proper gangster. I mean, he's like a gangster of the gangster. And to give context, Mega Upload had 50 million visits a day. It was like the seventh most popular website in the world at one time. It accounted for 4% of the total traffic in America and it had 180 million users. And people were transferring 800 files a second on Mega Upload. This thing was huge. He had, and it was ran almost like a proper company. He had 155 employees, you know, engineers, customer service, admin, all this stuff. And it was wild. And this is a wild story that like I just came across because I was reading about miss.com, his wife or his ex-wife. Very fascinating guy. This guy's super prolific.

• 50:06Sam Parr?

  He even created this thing called a mega car. So he was trying to launch a car company that was like internet connected. And it didn't like work out wonderfully, but he built like a handful of the cars, but super prolific, very interesting. And I thought that you might have a little bit of stories about this guy. This guy seems like he runs in your world a little bit.

• 50:25Shaan Puri?

  I'm gonna send you this, I can't say this on the pod, but we've DM'd before and I just have to show you what's in this DM. We can't, this, this is not gonna be good content, but you, you have to see this.

• 50:37Sam Parr?

  What, what, what, was it just like crazy inappropriate stuff?

• 50:39Shaan Puri?

  I'll send it to you after this, but um, yeah, this guy is prolific. I feel like he's kind of like the rogue Marc Andreessen.

• 50:48Sam Parr?

  Totally.

• 50:49Shaan Puri?

  Like Marc Andreessen is also surprisingly massive, a prolific internet guy who was like, you know, had like a bunch of ideals and like took, took at it. Marc Andreessen just like sort of took more of the straight path and this guy went rogue. That's kind of how I think about him. I can't, I'm blown away by this Call of Duty thing.

• 51:09Sam Parr?

  Yeah, like he like, like this isn't like a he said, she said thing. I mean, that, this is like rankings, like you can actually see like leaderboards and he was number one.

• 51:17Shaan Puri?

  But does he just have like a basement of like, you know, 15 year old Korean boys that are playing for him or something like? Do I really believe that this guy was the number one worldwide Call of Duty player? That is insane. That is so crazy. That, that's like, what's the story about the Uber guy Travis, where he was the number one Wii tennis player in the world or something like that?

• 51:36Sam Parr?

  I think he was like two. So basically the story is like Chris Sacca, this famous investor and Travis were like at Chris Sacca's like vacation home. Chris Sacca, Mr. Sacca was there, Travis.

• 51:48Sam Parr?

  Well, you know, that's how we gotta, you know, that's how we gotta explain the story.

• 51:52Sam Parr?

  So you know the difference between the two Sacca's.

• 51:54Shaan Puri?

  So, so kind and polite.

• 51:56Sam Parr?

  So Mr. Sacca and Travis are playing Wii tennis and Travis crushes the dad, Mr. Sacca. And Travis, at the end of the game goes, Mr. Sacca, I've got a confession. And he kind of like, uh, you know, what's that princess movie with like, uh, I don't think the word means what you think it's, uh, Princess Diary, he kind of like throws the Wii controller into the right hand. He goes, I've been playing left-handed the whole time, but I'm really right-handed. And he just like obliterates them even more. And he goes, I have another confession. And he goes to the, the, the game, uh, the rankings and he's like two or three in Wii tennis.

• 52:30Shaan Puri?

  He's like the lift of Wii tennis.

• 52:34Sam Parr?

  Seven out of 10. We'll give him. And so, yeah, this Kim.com guy, he's crazy, man. We got, I would love to have him on the pod. He's super interesting.

• 52:44Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's a crazy story. Also, I feel like he didn't, he didn't launch his own crypto token. Like, the odds of him not doing his own token in the last five years? Like, that had to be like a one in one million chance of him not doing it.

• 52:58Sam Parr?

  He probably, I mean, he was like, he died about the US government. But yeah, he probably had like, I bet you he was like banned for like, you know, selling securities. I bet you he had some, I didn't look into like, what his, what his ban was and what the, what the verdict was. But, I mean, he was in like legit trouble. I mean, he was in prison. And so he probably can't. But what's crazy is, number one, in Call of Duty. Number two, that he had $175 million in cash in a room in his house. That's, that's wild. I don't even know, I would like to know how much like physical space that takes up. But that'd be a lot.

• 53:30Shaan Puri?

  Isn't it like always disappointing? It's like, that's just two brief cases.

• 53:33Sam Parr?

  Yeah, dude, on The Sopranos, I was watching last night, they gave a guy $75,000 and it was in an envelope. Like, not a, like, not a, like a manila, like, not even the type that you've got to go to FedEx for. The type that you have in your home.

• 53:47Shaan Puri?

  I can't tell you how disappointed I would be. Like, if I ever am involved with any kind of ransom, or if I win some sort of prize, like, I'd need the giant check if I win a prize. And if you're gonna give me some cash, like, just get it in the smallest bills possible. I want duffel bags. I want, I want like, you know, a Costco trolley bringing me the cash. Like, if I get something and it's in an envelope, I don't care what's inside, I'm throwing it away.

• 54:12Sam Parr?

  Yeah, if it fits in my jacket pocket, I'm out. And if, and it was like the side pocket of like a suit where you reach in, so you know those pockets are small. And if, and that $75,000 ever fit in that jacket, very.

• 54:22Shaan Puri?

  Keep it.

• 54:23Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 54:23Shaan Puri?

  Just keep it. I bought a lottery ticket in Canada. I didn't win, by the way.

• 54:28Sam Parr?

  You buy lottery tickets?

• 54:30Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I have this moment whenever I get up to the counter where my brain just goes into an instant fantasy of like, and then this was the day. And then I'm telling people that I almost didn't buy it, but I just said, hey, screw it. And I bought it and I won.

• 54:42Sam Parr?

  Dude, that's the stupidest shit ever.

• 54:43Shaan Puri?

  I do that at least one out of three times I'm at a counter. In the US, they require cash. So that's what saves me from not buying it. But in Canada, you could buy it on your card. It's great.

• 54:54Sam Parr?

  We're gonna wrap there?

• 54:55Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, we could wrap there.

• 54:57Sam Parr?

  All right. That's the pod. We gotta start saying the gentleman's agreement every time, by the way. I keep forgetting to.

• 55:02Shaan Puri?

  Go subscribe to us on YouTube.

• 55:06Sam Parr?

  That's it.