#133 - Sam's Black Friday Email Results, Lean Media Businesses That Make Millions, and Celebrity Death Match for Tik-Tok

Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) discuss: - The Black Friday email Sam sent out - The controversies surrounding Drudge Report - Creating low-brow media companies like Media Takeout - The TV production business and Dave Chappelle's request to Netflix - Bringing back Celebrity Death Match for Tik-Tok? Thank you to our sponsor this episode, EPOS! EPOS are fantastic headsets that make it easy to work flexibly across situations and locations, with portable headsets including hassle-free device compatibility. If you are an IT manager running a big department or a head of a growing company looking to give your employees the best headset solution to work from home, check out eposaudio.com/millions for a free trial! Have you joined our private FB group yet? It's a page where people share each others million dollar ideas or what they're already working on: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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

• 0:19Shaan Puri?

  We're here. What up, Sam? How are you doing?

• 0:21Sam Parr?

  Hi. You want to talk about what transpired on Wednesday?

• 0:25Shaan Puri?

  On Wednesday? Oh, yeah. After the, after our podcast's recording with the, about the Black Friday tactic that I was telling you about, then you were like, I'm gonna do it. And then, what happened?

• 0:35Sam Parr?

  I did it, and I got all the credit. So I first want to say, I stole from Sean. Sean stole from Brooklyn.

• 0:44Shaan Puri?

  Actually, technically, I stole from my friend Ben, who works with me, my partner Ben. Ben was like, stole it from Brooklyn, and Brooklyn stole it from Chubbies. Chubbies stole it from, probably, it all goes back to like, Sugar Man, you know?

• 0:55Sam Parr?

  So I want to say, I want to give a 90% thank you to you for giving me the idea. I got all the credit, but you should get the credit. And then you could give like a 90% thank you to all your people. So it kind of like trickles down.

• 1:07Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:07Sam Parr?

  So I sent it out, and it worked so good. It, I got a text from Andrew Wilkinson, I got a text from coworkers, and they're like, dude, you just sent this out to the whole list.

• 1:19Shaan Puri?

  That's hilarious. The people actually believe it, because this year, I saw, so we did it, like I was saying last time, we did it with our e-comm business, but I saw three or four different companies try this, including you guys. So, you know, I think the jig is up. It's all, still will probably work again next year, one more year, and I think it's like, everybody's burnt on this tactic.

• 1:37Sam Parr?

  I think you could keep doing a different iteration of it. So-

• 1:40Shaan Puri?

  But the principle will still work.

• 1:41Sam Parr?

  So I sent mine to like 250,000 people, and we made, I'll just say, seven figures.

• 1:47Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:47Sam Parr?

  So here's a few things I learned. The first thing is that, like, we normally discount trends, and we actually discount it way too much. We need to raise the prices. This needs to be way more expensive. But we did it this one time, and shockingly, not really anyone was angry that they didn't get a discount prior, which I, that was my biggest reason for not ever wanting to do this kind of, I didn't want to be disrespectful to old people. They didn't care. But I got literally 1,000 emails of people saying, either, this email's awesome- You're a piece of shit. This is a scam. Why are you scamming people? And my reply was like, dude, jokes aren't scams. Like, this is clearly like a joke. And then the third one was like, oh, my gosh, Sam, this is not meant for me. Like, people who are concerned. What type of replies did you get? Actually, Sean, should we give the background of this?

• 2:26Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, let's do it. So people who, because we can't assume everyone follows the whole, every episode.

• 2:30Sam Parr?

  So on Wednesday, Sean has an e-comm business and he told me about this sales tactic that he was gonna do where he was going to email his list, this thing, and where the subject says, needs approval. And the body of the text said, hey, team, our Black Friday sales ready to roll? The email's below. Can you please click through and make sure all the links work fine? Let me know, Sean. And it was supposed to be an internal email. And it was like a mistake, as if it was sent to the entire list. Sean told me about that and immediately we were like, oh, we gotta do that. So that's what we did. So how did it go for you?

• 3:05Shaan Puri?

  For us, it was great. It was our biggest sales day and it was like two weeks before Black Friday. So you get to double dip Black Friday, basically. And I did it a little bit differently. So, so you did it like the exact Brooklyn tactic, like needs approval, blah, blah, blah. We changed it up, like the text at least, but the same result, same effect, because it's the same principle in play. And what we did was we followed up with, oh, my God, this discount isn't supposed to be live. We over-engineered it. We didn't need to do this. We sent it to a handful of people that we knew are chatterboxes. They're always super active everywhere in the community. And so we sent it to just a few of them. They immediately ran and said, oh, my God, guys, did you see this? And then we were like, oh, no, you found it. This is in the public, like, Facebook group or whatever, where there's a lot of people there.

• 3:47Shaan Puri?

  And we're like, well, you know, we told our developer to fix it, but, you know, hey, while it's live, fair game, go for it. This, we'll hopefully have it fixed in a couple hours. So that time urgency of like, get it before the bug gets fixed, was like insane. And so this worked really well. So that's what I was telling you. And you were like, I was just telling you to brag. And then you were like, oh, dude, we're gonna do that. That's great. That's a great idea. And then you posted some crazy stats on Twitter as it was going, which I think is great. It amplifies, that's an amplifier, right? You're talking about what's going on, which amplifies the interest in it. And you showed a screenshot of Like 300,000 people on a website in real time. That can't be right. That is fake.

• 4:23Sam Parr?

  That was fake.

• 4:24Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 4:25Sam Parr?

  I thought that that number, but we did have about 5,000. I thought that 300,000 was a high. So look, I was like playing this kind of douchey.

• 4:34Shaan Puri?

  You went all in, which is great.

• 4:35Sam Parr?

  Like banging my chest. I thought I was doing it so obnoxiously that most people could understand that it was a joke. So we had this whole thing planned out. This like, and we had already written out all the emails and then Sean told me his idea and I was like, oh, that's way better. So I called Steph. I go, Steph, we're going to do this right now. Fuck it. Like, we're doing this right now. And I just wrote up the email. I sent it and like, we went with the shtick of, I sent out the email saying, check this. And then

• 5:00Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 5:00Sam Parr?

  I put it on Twitter. Oh my God, I totally screwed up. My fat fingers have got me in trouble. I've sent this to everyone. Hurry up and buy it or something like that. And then the follow-up was, oh my God, I can't believe I just sent you that. My coworkers are going to kill me unless of course you buy now. You know what? 2020 was a hard year. We're doing it live. We're keeping it up.

• 5:21Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 5:22Sam Parr?

  For the next 500 people, you get this price. After that, it rises to this price and then it rises to this price.

• 5:27Shaan Puri?

  I think personally, it's 30% good marketing psychology and 70% was, it was actually a sick discount. So there's probably a lot of people who, if you had just said, hey, Black Friday sale, 99 bucks for trends. I think you would have got probably half the response that you got. So I think maybe this was 50% marketing and 50% amazing deal for good value. Like people who were on the fence and this was enough to push them over the edge to give it a shot. So I'll split the credit there.

• 5:53Sam Parr?

  It worked out well. I'm happy we did it at a.

• 5:56Shaan Puri?

  All right. I look forward to my Christmas gift.

• 5:58Sam Parr?

  Yeah, we do owe you. That's for sure.

• 5:59Shaan Puri?

  What else we got? Unless you had anything else on that one?

• 6:01Sam Parr?

  No.

• 6:02Shaan Puri?

  You wanted to do Drudge, right?

• 6:04Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So you want to take the lead?

• 6:05Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I'll tee it up. So I put this on there because you had told me about Drudge. I had heard the name. I didn't even know anything about Drudge Report, but it was very interesting. Thing that came out, an article that came out, I think this week, and somebody basically dug into like, what the hell happened to Drudge? And there's

• 6:21Sam Parr?

  What is Drudge, Sean?

• 6:22Shaan Puri?

  The Drudge is, Drudge Report is like, kind of like a news aggregator. It's a bunch of links on a page that was predominantly for like, kind of right wing, sometimes conspiracy, but definitely like right wing conservative news articles. And it became super, super popular. It was really early, kind of like, when was it 90s? Like, when it started? Started in the 90s and it became like the influential place. If you were in the middle of the page, if your link was like 40 links down, 30 links down, you could still get like a million page views just by being on Drudge. So it was like-

• 6:52Sam Parr?

  A link aggregator, but they did break some news stories. So they were the first to accuse Bill Clinton, I think, of sleeping with Monica Lewinsky. So they did get some-

• 7:00Shaan Puri?

  Even better, they broke the story that I think Newsweek had squashed a story about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. So not only was it like, the president had an affair with the staffer in the White House, but mainstream media squashed it. We are gonna like, release the truth, release the crack in here. So they had a few big breakthrough moments like that early on, which helped them get big. And then this thing was basically talking about these like three or four, like three or four points that were like, kind of like a Drudge takedown. It was basically like, if you look at Drudge, it's no longer right wing to the point where some people think it's been bought by a lefty billionaire, which goes into point two, which is that like, Matt Drudge doesn't work there anymore, or he's sold it. And he's a pretty like, kind of stealthy character. So, nobody knows, nothing's confirmed, but this is a rumor and suspicion.

• 7:44Shaan Puri?

  Then the third one was like, they're inflating their page views and they have some like nefarious ad practices where they're like, if you're on the page, they'll auto-refresh the page like ridiculously fast, which drives up their page view count or drives up their ad impressions count. And they say it's for like, showing you the new links, but like, it's like ridiculously fast auto reload. Nobody would do that. And so there were some other things in the ad, like about ad ideas, a bunch of really nerdy stuff that it got into.

• 8:07Sam Parr?

  So let's even, let's give a little bit more background. I took this from the article you posted. So basically, who, who wrote this? What was it on? It looked like a good site.

• 8:17Shaan Puri?

  Table, tablet mag.com.

• 8:20Sam Parr?

  I'd never heard of it.

• 8:21Shaan Puri?

  Never heard of this.

• 8:22Sam Parr?

  So Drudge Report, it's basically a one-page website that were just links. That's all it is. And in 2004, on Election Day, it got 36 million views, uniques, in one day. Previously, it was updated once to twice a day with as many as 40 to 50 links per day. And if you, like Sean said, if you were like in the middle, if you were just a link there, you could get millions of views. And they guessed that it was making some number between 10 and 30 million a year in ad revenue and had been doing so since the 90s. And it only had three or four employees, one of them being Matt Drudge, who would actually post the links in the day. He would like go surfing and post the links and then just chill all day.

• 9:07Sam Parr?

  And he had a pretty like chill lifestyle, but there's one man media operation that kind of controlled the, at least the conservative movement, or at least some portion of it.

• 9:16Shaan Puri?

  Yes, exactly. And there's a whole bunch of stuff in this article. This, this article was like, it was like five conspiracies baked into one article. Like they could have split it out as like a five-part series, as far as I'm concerned. Cause it was like, there's this couple, the Otto's, OTTO, like they live in Mountain View, California. Who are they? Why do they live in Mountain View? Why are they associated with Drudge? If you call the Drudge help hotline, it goes directly to this woman's phone number. Now it's got changed after I called it the first time. And on 2019, he randomly changed the ad agency that worked with this to this company owned by the Otto's. And the Otto's have no background in ads. So why would he do this, like a $20 million property or like, you know, ad revenue? Why would he switch it on a dime to somebody else? Didn't even tell the original agency why. There's all this like stuff, like, do they actually own Drudge? Is that why it's changed? Who are they linked to?

• 10:00Shaan Puri?

  You know, this guy, he's the ex-CTO to the CTO at Google. And it's like, what the hell? What's going on over here? So there was just a whole bunch of interesting things. I wanted to hear your reaction to this overall. And I, I would say there is an idea paired with this or an opportunity paired with this, which is they reference that there's been a whole bunch of other sites that are trying to replace Drudge as like the real right-wing news aggregator. We're what Drudge used to be before Drudge like went left. And I think that's kind of cool and interesting. I was watching, I was looking at a couple of those.

• 10:27Sam Parr?

  So yeah, let's talk about the opportunity and then my opinion after, or like what my takeaway is. But in terms of opportunity, so these link aggregation websites are awesome. I mean, at the end of the day, the hustle is that. And it's an eight-figure business doing that. We have this thing in our daily email called snippets, which we literally just take a headline and we put it in there and we say, you know, from Bloomberg, that's usually always the most engaged thing, to the point where I'm like, man, screw it. Like, should we only just do that?

• 10:52Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 10:53Sam Parr?

  Which is, maybe that could work. And certainly, that would be a lot easier to run that operation. So I think news aggregators work. I think that they can be a really good business if you keep them lean, like three, four, or five people. But particularly, I've always said this, Sean, that the conservatives engage with news way more, I don't know what the right word is.

• 11:13Shaan Puri?

  Pervently.

• 11:14Sam Parr?

  Pervently, yeah. It's, they have a more rabid fan base, because usually the right wings, the right-wing folks feel like they're the minority and that they're being pushed down. And so they like need a band, you know, any group that feels like they're the second, they feel like they gotta band together and rise up, whatever. And so the conservatives always engage with news more. So I do think that there is something here. I have a friend that actually launched something like this, who you know, Sean. It's our good friend who lives near you.

• 11:42Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 11:42Sam Parr?

  And it worked really well. He ended up shutting it down because he didn't agree with that ideology. And so he was like,

• 11:48Shaan Puri?

  Conscience got the best of it.

• 11:50Sam Parr?

  This will make money, but this is not, I just can't do this. By the way, I'm not placing judgment. If you believe this shit, cool, that's fine. Do it. I think there's a way to make money. But he personally was like, this goes, actually goes against what I believe. I'm actually shutting it down. And it worked out well, for the short amount of time. At least, like, the path was there. That's like, oh, man, this could totally work.

• 12:09Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. And so I was looking at a couple of these alternatives, because Trump tweeted out something a while back, like, our people have left drudge, it's become a lefty thing, and our people now go to revolver. And so I was like, what the hell is revolver? And so it's revolver.news is one of these. Citizen Free Press is another, where like, if you go to Citizen Free Press, it's just a white page with black links on it. CitizenFreePress.com. And it's like, you know, here's, here's some of the links. Something shady in Syracuse, dot, dot, dot. Forty-two shot, eleven dead in Chicago. Stephen Miller shoots and scores CNN cancels Christmas. There's just like a whole bunch of these like kind of sensationalist links, which is like no different than pretty much any news, honestly. Like they're all sensationalist clickbait. Some are just more blatant about it than others.

• 12:52Shaan Puri?

  Some don't put up the facade of being noble journalism. Like you have Daily Mail who's like, yo, we're going to post about Kim Kardashian's butt every time she wears a bikini. And then you have CNN or somebody else who's gonna like, still be trying to drive as many clicks as possible, but they're gonna not be as blatant about it.

• 13:07Sam Parr?

  Do you want to know one of these sites that I used to read all the time? And I love it. And like, I found out that some of Sarah's girlfriends read it and we always make fun of it because it's so funny.

• 13:18Shaan Puri?

  Which one?

• 13:18Sam Parr?

  It's called Media Takeout. Have you ever heard of Media? I love Media Takeout. It's MTOnews.com. I think it is so funny.

• 13:30Shaan Puri?

  So Media Takeout is kind of like a World Star Hip Hop TMZ-ish type site, but what's its like, what's its shtick?

• 13:36Sam Parr?

  So they talk about thick Anna, which means when Rihanna was thick, when she was, or I don't know if she is, but I don't know anything about it. I know enough to know that like in our family thread, they're like talking about thick Anna. And it just has the funniest headlines I've ever seen. Today is so freaking funny. And so we always talk about Media Takeout. It is so good.

• 13:58Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think some of these sites are great. There were some other ones that were like this that were, what was the site that does the like? This person's cheating on this person. Is this person having an affair with this person? That's like all it does. Or they were doing some really bad stuff that was like, on this college campus, you know, this guy or girl is sleeping around. Like they were just like, oh, that was like the article on the website. It was like really crazy.

• 14:18Sam Parr?

  And it's like supposed to be really trashy. And you know what I just realized while I'm on Media Takeout? This is hilarious. Media Takeout. So it's MTOnews.com, right?

• 14:28Shaan Puri?

  Yep.

• 14:28Sam Parr?

  Okay, it's supposed to be trashy. Like that's why it's funny. It's like, it's funny because it's trashy. So they were independent. I noticed a shift in their content. They've switched to where now it's owned by this company called Maven. Do you know what Maven does?

• 14:42Shaan Puri?

  No, I just clicked the link at the bottom because I was curious about the same. Who owns this?

• 14:45Sam Parr?

  They own Sports Illustrated and a bunch of other like incredibly legitimate thing. And their CEO is Ross Levinson, who I've met before, who's the former CEO of the LA Times and the former CEO of a bunch of like legitimate things. It's crazy. This is crazy that this company owns Media Takeout.

• 15:02Shaan Puri?

  Right. And by the way, isn't Sports Illustrated like bankrupt and for sale or something right now?

• 15:06Sam Parr?

  That's why Maven bought it.

• 15:07Shaan Puri?

  I see.

• 15:08Sam Parr?

  So by the way.

• 15:09Shaan Puri?

  The CEO of Media Takeout, in one sentence, what do you do? I provide gossip to the masses. Just straight up, just says it, I love it. The second one, why did you create this? There was an opportunity in the media market to address African American and urban audience. I decided to fill it. Media Takeout is among the top 500 most visited sites in the country. It was that, is that, is it still the case? Yes, but everything's, you know, changing pretty frequently. That's pretty crazy. So it had 16 million readers a month at one point, and then it's a lot more now. He says 30 million visitors a day.

• 15:38Sam Parr?

  It's crazy, it's really big.

• 15:40Shaan Puri?

  You're in the wrong niche, bro.

• 15:41Sam Parr?

  So here's my, here's my opinion. By the way, the person who I just looked, I'm like, I'm on the team page. Do you know a woman named Sarah Stringfellow? She's a VP publisher at the company. She was the first employee at Twitch.

• 15:52Shaan Puri?

  Oh, really?

• 15:52Sam Parr?

  Yeah. She was the first hire Justin TV, which went on to become Twitch. So these websites, these gossip websites, as long as they are so ridiculous that they're funny, what you have to do is you got to cross the barrier to where you are talking about it, like you and I are to our friends or with Sarah and our family. So for example, WorldStar Hip Hop or WorldStar, they crossed the chasm of the threshold by people screaming, "WorldStar!" And like, that became part of culture. Same with Fashion Nova. So like Fashion Nova is like the shitty, you know, I mean, there's like pretty fucking shitty clothes. And once it crossed the threshold of like, oh, it's just another Fashion Nova ad. Like, once you start saying with that your friends, it became a thing. Same with Media Takeout.

• 16:34Sam Parr?

  When me and my friends or my family would start talking about Media Takeout, it became a thing to me to that I consume it all the time. I love Media Takeout. So like with these sites, you got to figure out, you can't just be behind the scenes entirely. You have to do something, you could have this, but you have to do something interesting or impactful to cross the threshold. Same with Drudge. What Drudge did was they actually did the Clinton thing. So they had one or two legitimate stories that they broke that made them,

• 16:58Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 16:59Sam Parr?

  not legitimate, but part of culture. And that you have to do with these.

• 17:03Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I would agree TMZ has done an amazing job of that. I would say.

• 17:06Sam Parr?

  Agreed.

• 17:06Shaan Puri?

  The big risk with these things is that you can get gawkard basically where gawkard was this. And then Peter Thiel and Hulk Hogan basically sued sued them to the point where, you know, they they basically sued them out of business. And so in one day, basically, the business shuttered overnight.

• 17:20Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but the problem was that gawkard wouldn't acknowledge what they were, which is just trash. Right. And this media takeout, they say, they say, we are trash and it is awesome trash.

• 17:30Shaan Puri?

  I think that wasn't the problem. I think gawkard literally just picked on the wrong guy. They picked on Peter Thiel and Peter Thiel was just the wrong person to mess with. A deep pocketed billionaire with a vengeance streak is not, not the one to mess with, right? They messed with a thousand famous people and got no repercussions.

• 17:46Sam Parr?

  It started that way because someone said, take down the video and they go, no, we're journalists. Fucked up. We're going to have this sex tape on our video because on our website because we're journalists and there's no such thing as holding us back. Whereas like media takeout would be like, alright.

• 18:00Sam Parr?

  Like, because they don't have like, you know, it's a different shtick. They don't have like a principle, probably if they're trying to.

• 18:04Shaan Puri?

  So if you wanted to do a business like this, where would you, where would you look? Where would you start? First of all, you probably, I'm guessing you probably wouldn't want to do a business like this. Am I, am I right on that or no?

• 18:14Sam Parr?

  100%, but it would be fun. I would say that I would probably start with reddit.com PUBLICFREAKOUT. Do you know PUBLICFREAKOUT?

• 18:22Shaan Puri?

  I haven't. No, I haven't gone to it.

• 18:24Sam Parr?

  So it's a subreddit where I noticed a lot of people like Barstool and other folks get their posts from. And it's just a, it's got a million subscribers, maybe, and it just has lots of videos of people freaking out.

• 18:35Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 18:35Sam Parr?

  There's this other website called, there, there's two more that I would do. There's this other one called Karma or no, what's it called? Justice Served. And I noticed that the engagement on that subreddit is like stupidly high. There's two more that are combined. They're called popping and the other one's called Belt Good Coming Out. And it's all of like these like instant relief. For example, there's like a video of like a horse getting like a piece of hair pulled out of its stomach. And when you pull it out, then like this whole abscess like leaks out. People are obsessed with that. So I'd probably start in those three areas.

• 19:08Shaan Puri?

  Interesting. Okay. I, if I was going to do this, I don't think I'm the best person to do this and my idea is probably bad, but I would, I would definitely go for gossip. So I'd either go for like a Hollywood gossip or like kind of the Instagram or TikToker, like not Hollywood gossip, like kind of social media famous, but not Hollywood famous. And I would go for their gossip. I would do it all through SMS and I would just text out anytime anything happens. Anytime this person cheated on that person, this person said some, this person commented on this person's photo, this person liked this person's photo that they're not supposed to. I would just be texting that out for all these like famous people that you, that this young audience is into. So I would try to be kind of TMZ or two rungs down the ladder of social media stars. That'd be one. And then the other would

• 19:52Shaan Puri?

  just be kind of world star style, like ridiculous videos that aren't going to be posted on YouTube because they're too extreme or they're too crazy. And I would do that. Or the last one would be conspiracies. I think that you could, you could build a site like this just on conspiracy and rumor. And again, I would try to do the whole thing through SMS. I think that would be the way I would build it.

• 20:11Sam Parr?

  I think that your TikTok one is the best idea, but it could be tied with the conspiracy one. So I'm a follower of a whole lot of the conspiracy ones. So I love true crime. I love unsolved mysteries. These are all subreddits. Last night I just watched a 50 minute documentary to fall asleep about Robert Hanson, the serial killer in Alaska who would kidnap women and throw them in the wild and then hunt them. Like I like am obsessed with.

• 20:35Shaan Puri?

  Great thing to go to sleep to. Love it.

• 20:36Sam Parr?

  Serial killers, the conspiracy theories. I love conspiracy theories. I just bought a book on JFK's conspiracy or the conspiracy of him being murdered. So I agree with you. The engagement on some of these subreddits is crazy. Like people dedicate their lives to uncovering conspiracies as well as finding missing people. They invest so heavily into it because you like eventually they feel like they know the person. So anyway, I agree with you. I think those would be some really good niches.

• 21:00Shaan Puri?

  I like it.

• 21:01Sam Parr?

  Oh, so let's wrap this up by saying, we talked about opportunities. So opinion. So here's what I think about Drudge. Who cares about his politics? What I think happened is he just did the coolest thing ever, which is he got rich on the internet and he bounced.

• 21:14Shaan Puri?

  You think he stole it or he, or he just stopped working on it?

• 21:17Sam Parr?

  One of the two, but I think that he made probably 150 million and he goes. All right, I'm out. And he bailed. And I think that bailing like that is so cool. And you remember this other guy who did this? Do you remember Flappy Bird?

• 21:30Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's his name?

• 21:31Sam Parr?

  Dong Nguyen.

• 21:32Shaan Puri?

  What was the maker's name? Yeah, Dong Nguyen. Yeah, that's right.

• 21:34Sam Parr?

  So Dong Nguyen, he created this game called Flappy Bird, and it got downloaded 50 million times.

• 21:40Shaan Puri?

  In like a two-month period, by the way. It was like a very short amount of time. Every, everybody already know, we don't even need to explain Flappy Bird, because you downloaded Flappy Bird.

• 21:47Sam Parr?

  And it apparently was making around 50K a day in revenue. And he famously tweeted after two or three or something months, "This is too addicting. I'm turning it off." And I actually don't know if he turned it off or not. But I love the idea of someone creating something and saying, "All right, I'm out," and killing it. I love that tactic. I love that story.

• 22:08Shaan Puri?

  In the article, they said Drudge had talked about, "One day, I'm just gonna, the page is gonna load, it's gonna be all black, and it's gonna be over. That's how I'm gonna do it." And so he didn't do it that way. I don't think he bounced, because I think he would have done it in a flashier way, just by like, anything I've ever read about this guy. I think he would have either sold it publicly, or he would have done something like what you're talking about, which is like, go extreme and like, just shut the site off. I don't think he would let it slip into like, irrelevance and like, kinda lefty-style stuff. I just feel like that would be not the cool way to like, let it go.

• 22:38Sam Parr?

  When I, one time I, when I first moved to San Francisco, I volunteered to help Andrew Warner, and we went to the Launch Fest, and he was interviewing people, and I was like, filming or something. And he interviewed this guy, I was trying to find out who it is, who has a software company that now does about 100 million in sales. And the guy told a story, he goes, "I created this service in college, and it was a cloud hosting site, and the more popular it get, the more money it cost me. And I was giving it to people for like, free. And eventually, I was like, "Oh, I can't afford this anymore." So he emailed the customers, and he goes, "I'm shutting this off in the next 48 hours, unless I collect this much money. So if you want the service, you have to become a customer." And he like, made the money, and then he's like, "Oh, wow. All right, fine, I'll keep doing it, and we're gonna charge money for it."

• 23:20Sam Parr?

  Like, he was like a, more like a, like a nerd who just, anyway, have you heard any other stories of people saying, "I have this thing, I'm bailing, unless of course, like, I can make enough money to make this a thing, then fine. But until then, like, I'm out."

• 23:33Shaan Puri?

  All right, so this ties in. Did you see the Dave Chappelle thing that happened recently? Did we talk about this already?

• 23:38Sam Parr?

  He told Netflix to take his shit off.

• 23:41Shaan Puri?

  He'll definitely take his shit off. Did you see what he posted on Instagram?

• 23:44Sam Parr?

  No.

• 23:45Shaan Puri?

  All right. You gotta watch this video. Maybe I'm just like too into this, but like I sent this to five people with just like, wow, wow, this is amazing. And then none of them like replied like, yeah, that was amazing. So maybe I'm off, but I thought this was fucking awesome. So Chappelle's Show, which has a cult following, goes on Netflix. A bunch of people are like, yes, Chappelle's Show is on Netflix. I get to watch all of it. And then like, I don't know, a few weeks later, it goes down. Why did it go down? Dave Chappelle asked for it to go down. Why is that? So he posted on Instagram, a video, a 20 minute IGTV video that says, this is why. And then he explains, it's like him at a comedy club and he's explaining why he did what he did. And he, he weaves together a story like,

• 24:27Shaan Puri?

  you know, Dave Chappelle is kind of like, you know, a comedian, normal dude, like loves to smoke weed or whatever. But to me, this was like every PR person, every comms person at every big company needs to watch this and be like, oh, that's what perfection looks like for like communicating a message and getting people on your side looks like.

• 24:45Sam Parr?

  Which he's like the best at that. He tells stories. Yeah, he's the best at that.

• 24:48Shaan Puri?

  He tells the story. I'm going to butcher it, but I'm going to give you the short version of it. So he's like, I remember the first time I ever did comedy, I was 14, 15 years old. I was at this comedy club. And the guy who's introducing me goes, ladies and gentlemen, this is the first ever performance by this next comedian. Who knows? We may be seeing the birth of a star. I'd like to welcome on stage, David Chappelle. He's like, he goes on stage, he does a set and afterwards this other guy is like this older comedian who's like, you know, probably 40, goes up to him, he's a 15 year old kid and he's like, hey, that joke you told about Goodyear condoms. Oh, I really like that joke. I have an audition next week at this club across the street. Would you mind if I use that joke?

• 25:28Shaan Puri?

  And Dave is just like, oh, like, you know, kind of weird, but like, okay, it's fine. I guess if it helps you get the audition, that's cool. And so he says, yeah, and then he's just like, whatever. And then three months later, four months later, he's at a club and that guy's going before him. And that guy does his joke and he's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, dude, like this is two or four months. You said you needed it for the audition. Like, you can't just take my material. I was going on right after you. I was going to say that joke. And the guy's like, all right, let me buy this joke off you for 50 bucks. And Dave's like, again, 15 years old, he's like, I don't know, like, I don't have any money, but like, that seems like not the right move for me. I think I should keep my material and like, build my name off of my content. And the guy's like, well, you know, like, I was just being nice. Like, I could just take it. You know that, right? I could just take it. And he like, kind

• 26:12Shaan Puri?

  of like, towered over him as like, an adult man. And Dave's like, all right, I guess it's fine. And then he like, he's like, all right, let's jump forward three years now. And he tells a second story. And basically, he weaves together these three, like, life stories. These, each one of them is like, a funny, interesting story on its own. And he weaves it together to show, like, oh, he's basically, over his career, just kind of like, constantly been taken advantage of by sort of the bigger players. Like, at first, it was this 40 year old man at the club. And then, like, most recently, it was like, you know, the network execs who own Chappelle Show. And he's like, I walked away because I didn't want to do the show on the terms that they were telling me to do it. And then they say, I go, I've gone crazy. I'm smoking crack. I'm in Africa. He's like, I never smoked crack. He's like, I just didn't want to do the show.

• 26:54Shaan Puri?

  And he's like, and now, I can't even do a new show because they sign, you know, I had to sign a contract that said, you can use my name and likeness forever and in perpetuity in all parts of the universe. He's like, well, he's like, what kind of contract language is that? That's like, all parts of the universe? Was that even really necessary? So I literally can't come out with another show with my name in it, because these fuckers own it. He's like, so I called Netflix and I was like, hey, I don't have any legal power here, but like, this shit makes me feel bad. Because I'm not making a dollar off this, and they're making a lot of money off my name, off my content. And I can't even make a new show because of this. And Netflix took it down. He's like, that's why I fuck with Netflix.

• 27:31Sam Parr?

  I saw that. I saw that. He goes, this is why I fuck with Netflix.

• 27:34Shaan Puri?

  So I just thought it was great. So everyone should go watch that thing. I think it was like, a master, it was interesting. And it's like, a masterclass in like, telling your side of the story.

• 27:41Sam Parr?

  I wonder if that's good for Netflix. Makes, it certainly makes me appreciate them. You know what it does, though, more than anything, is every creator will be like, All right, fine, Netflix. We'll work with you. You sound cool.

• 27:51Shaan Puri?

  Because who is Netflix in competition with? They're not in competition with Hulu. They're in competition really with all of the production studios, right? Because they're doing original content. They're trying to sign talent, sign actors, producers, all that stuff. So what weak competition really is like the traditional Hollywood world because they got away with the monopoly for so long that things were so screwed up that all you have to do is just not be completely an asshole and you look like a knight in shining armor. And so I think this is going to be good for them with creators.

• 28:20Sam Parr?

  I agree.

• 28:21Shaan Puri?

  Especially comedians because they're going heavy into comedy and like every comedian looks up to Dave Chappelle.

• 28:25Sam Parr?

  I want to talk about this writing tool, but before I do, since we're talking about Hollywood, I just looked up, I like looking at houses for sale. There's a house for sale in LA for $85 million and it's Ryan Seacrest's house. How the fuck did Ryan Seacrest get so rich that he has a house worth almost $100 million?

• 28:44Shaan Puri?

  The hardest working man in Hollywood, dude.

• 28:46Sam Parr?

  Oh, my God. And then I looked up what he does. It's called like Ryan Seacrest Media and they raised like $300 million, which is outstanding, crazy. And then they explained what they did and like they write television shows and they produce television shows. And the way like I just know so little about that industry. I'm like, what the fuck do you do?

• 29:05Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I also don't really know. I know he has like his morning radio show type thing.

• 29:08Sam Parr?

  He does everything. Now he hosts like, it's like Ryan and Kelly instead of, you know, it was Michael. It was Regis and Kelly, then Michael, now.

• 29:17Shaan Puri?

  If you remember when American Idol started, there was two guys that were the hosts. It was Ryan Seacrest and fucking other guy. And the other guy wanted like a little more money and they were like, nah, fuck you. We don't need you. So Ryan Seacrest like stayed on and became like the household name. And this guy who was like holding the winning lottery ticket, unfortunately like got it pulled out of his hand after, after the first season.

• 29:40Sam Parr?

  I just looked up Brian Seacrest Productions. I'm like, it's really hard for me to understand what you do. But he raised $300 million from PE companies, so like legit companies. And I'm like, what the heck? So one of these days we're going to have to dive in because there's a whole bunch of these companies. So there's like Tyler Perry Productions as well, but they're like around one person. There was Dick Clark Productions. And I'm like, what does that mean? First of all, what does a production company do exactly? Because it sounds like a very manual thing to produce a show and I understand how that creates massive returns. Second, why is it after one person? So we got to dive deep on that, actually. I think that's a, that'd be interesting topic.

• 30:15Shaan Puri?

  Okay, I have a five minute. Tangent, a two-minute tangent, I should say. Do you remember Celebrity Death Match on MTV? Obviously. So I went down this rabbit hole last night about Celebrity Death Match because I was like, what happened to that? Was that as awesome as I remembered? I went back and watched one. I was like, yeah, this is awesome. And then I was like, how did they make this? Because it was like claymation or whatever. And I was like, how hard would this be to do? And so I watched the making of of a Celebrity Death Match. Amazing YouTube video to go watch. It's really hard, I think, right? Super hard, dude. So they make like, the doll is basically like this wire. So imagine like, kind of like a, like a hanger material, like it's just wires. And that's in the stick figure of like a body. They have an artist who draws like a 3D version, a caricature of like whichever celebrities are

• 31:00Shaan Puri?

  in the match, like Bill Clinton. They'll like, they'll find like, what's the one unique identifying, like, physical trait of this person? Is it their big chin? Is it their hair? And they like, accentuate that, like any caricature. They do a 3D drawing. And then the guy makes it out of clay. And they put it on rubber, so it's not so heavy. And so that's like the mold. The whole thing is animated, right? So how do they animate this? So there's like this tiny little like desk-sized green screen stage. And then literally, there's a camera that's just set. This is back like in the 90s. So like, I can't even imagine how much easier this would be now. And actually, I tweeted at the creator, he's on Twitter, he's at like 300 followers or something. I was like, dude, how much easier would this be now? A hundred times easier to do? Because like, good on you guys for doing this ridiculously over the top thing that like, was completely unnecessary and

• 31:45Shaan Puri?

  just pushing the boundaries. And what'd he say? So he didn't reply. But I probably doesn't even use Twitter anymore. He's like, kind of like, completely off the grid. But we'll see if he replies. I tweeted out like 3am last night when I was looking at this. But they make 15 different mouths for the characters. And so as they're animating them talking, it's like photo, then switch off mouth, put next mouth, photos, next mouth, photo. And they have 15 mouths that can make the like, kind of syllable expressions of all words. And they just animate like if it's, if he's like, you know, jumping off the top rope, that's like, you know, they move them one inch, take the photo, move them one inch, take, it's like a hand animated thing. It's ridiculous. Like, so crazy of a thing. Yeah, I remember that shit. That was a...

• 32:22Sam Parr?

  Very hard to do.

• 32:23Shaan Puri?

  It got me thinking. I was like, I feel like that was a great concept that was way before its time, both in terms of the technology to do it. Like, I think now you could probably do this whole thing essentially with AI. I think you can animate the whole thing using the kind of modern graphic stuff. And then the second thing is distribution. So that was a television show, but I bet you if you made a TikTok account that was like the poor man's version of Celebrity Deathmatch, you'd probably get 5 billion followers in like three weeks. And you could make, I don't know, probably a million dollars a year just sponsored off sponsored stuff of your TikTok channel. That's gonna be, because you're gonna be way better production than any TikTok account, and it's completely permissionless. So any kind of artsy-craftsy film kid somewhere who doesn't wanna like go through the gauntlet of Hollywood,

• 33:08Shaan Puri?

  the TikTok gates are open. Just go make Celebrity Deathmatch TikTok edition. Do it between TikTokers. They'll retweet it or react to it. And I bet you'll get to like millions of followers, you know, if you did it well.

• 33:19Sam Parr?

  That's a great idea. I was going to ask you to talk about writing tools that I have on here. Let's, we have to get to that next week because we're already on this topic. You might as well, this is like a Hollywood episode, get to the Jake Paul stuff.

• 33:30Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. And unfortunately, I don't know anything about Hollywood. So I'm just, you know, talking out my ass with a lot of this stuff. So you, did you watch this boxing match that happened with Jake Paul over the weekend?

• 33:38Sam Parr?

  Hell, yeah.

• 33:39Shaan Puri?

  So for those who don't know, Jake Paul, this kind of like big viner turned YouTuber turned like whatever, kind of like teen influencer guy, they made a career pivot where they stopped vlogging, Jake and his brother Logan, and they started hosting these celebrity boxing tournaments where boxing matches where it was like two YouTubers, KSI fought Logan Paul and Jake Paul fought KSI's little brother. And you either know all about this or you know nothing about this. So I'm trying to figure out how much to explain, how much not to explain.

• 34:06Sam Parr?

  I know all about it, by the way.

• 34:08Shaan Puri?

  So what's interesting is I think this is A, a brilliant move, and B, like an amazing business model to capitalize on the fame. So what they did was Jake Paul fought Nate Robinson, who's an ex-basketball player. He's the slam dunk champion. He's like this 5'9" super athlete dunker who's out of the league now. So they agreed to fight on the undercard of the Mike Tyson, who's like 53 years old, Mike Tyson versus Roy Jones Jr. So they were the co-main event against these 50-year-olds boxing. And I bet you Jake Paul drove, I don't know, 30 to 40% of the buys compared to Tyson, maybe 30%. And I just think this is amazing model. I would not be surprised if these guys are banking.

• 34:50Shaan Puri?

  $10 million, $5 million every time they do one of these events. So they've done like one or two a year now for the last couple of years. I think this is way better than doing, you know, Sugar Bear hair ads, uh, you know, on your Instagram or whatever. It's way better business model for these influencers. Now, it takes a lot of like risk and effort, but I think it elevates them to like a different stratosphere of fame and fortune.

• 35:12Sam Parr?

  So Abreu, while we're talking, can you find out how many viewers that fight had? See if there's anything like that. So basically the background here, I wasn't allowed to talk about this, but I think I, I don't know if I talked to you about it or not, Sean, but in March or May or something like that, I actually, the creators, the promoters of this event emailed me asking if we wanted to sponsor. I didn't want to sponsor, but I wanted to see the deck because I'm a huge boxing and fight fan and they sent me all the information. So I knew about Tyson fighting before he announced it and I was so amped. And I didn't tell, I don't think I talked to anyone about it actually. And the idea here is that Triller, what is Triller? Triller is an app. I think it has 100 million users. It's like a music video app.

• 35:56Shaan Puri?

  It's TikTok, but it's based in the US. So Triller's been around for a while. Triller and Musically were competing. Musically got bought by the Chinese company ByteDance and it became TikTok and TikTok took over the world. But Triller is still a fledgling, they're trying to make it. They announced some big numbers. I don't personally believe it, but they are basically trying to be TikTok and they're, in some ways, you know, the best outcome for them is TikTok gets banned because of sort of like, people have talked about the TikTok ban because of the Chinese backing and the data collection privacy issues. And if so, Triller would be the big beneficiary because it's TikTok in the wings.

• 36:28Sam Parr?

  And they paid, according to Abreu, 50 million for the right to stream the fight. And, uh, they were trying to get a bunch of app downloads. I bet you it worked pretty well.

• 36:37Shaan Puri?

  It wasn't, I don't think that's right because it wasn't even in, it wasn't even on Triller. The

• 36:40Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it was.

• 36:41Shaan Puri?

  Event was called Tyson on Triller.com, but you could watch the thing without Triller. There's no way they would pay 50 million for it to be non-exclusive. I don't believe that. You could just go buy the pay-per-view without go downloading Triller.

• 36:53Sam Parr?

  What did, what did he say?

• 36:55Shaan Puri?

  So he's saying the estimate, you know, the estimate for, by a veteran promoter, Ludibilla, was that it'd be a million plus pay-per-view buys, which is like almost Conor McGregor, Floyd Mayweather territory of like how much they can individually draw. Like the biggest pay-per-view of all time was the Manny Pacquiao Floyd Mayweather, which was like Close to, it was between four and six, four million domestic buys. So that's four million people buying something at essentially $70 apiece. So that's a lot of revenue. It's like, what is that? I don't know, 600 million revenue or something like that. And so this would be a million, a million would be more than pretty much every UFC pay-per-view card of the year, except for Conor McGregor one.

• 37:32Sam Parr?

  So two things happened. I agree with you. It's a better way to make money if you're a YouTuber, but then also there used to be this show in the 90s where retired athletes, like retired football players would do like a track and field, like a decathlon or something. And it's kind of cool. I watched old videos of it because like there's all amongst runners, which I'm, I'm in the running community. There's always bets like, do you think that Usain Bolt could have ran a half mile in under two minutes? Or do you think Mayweather says he's fast? There's no way he could break five minutes in the mile though. He would always act like, could he actually do it? And so Tyson was like, after the fight, Tyson was like, man, I think a lot of people like seeing us old guys fight. They know we're not the best, but I think more people watch, watch us will want to watch Randy Moss do something than the guy who currently plays the position.

• 38:16Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 38:16Sam Parr?

  And I was like, I agree with you actually. I think that-

• 38:19Shaan Puri?

  Well, the numbers will back it up. This event is going to draw more than, I could be wrong, but I believe more than any boxing event of the year.

• 38:25Sam Parr?

  Oh, yeah. Even more than Deontay Wilder and Fury, although I don't remember what year that was, if that was this year.

• 38:32Shaan Puri?

  Oh, bro, you looked that up. But maybe, maybe I'm wrong on that. Did Wilder Fury do, let's say two, two million pay-per-views?

• 38:37Sam Parr?

  It did half a million. I already looked it up.

• 38:38Shaan Puri?

  Half a million. Exactly. So this is going to beat that.

• 38:40Sam Parr?

  Well, the only other boxing match that would be bigger than this is the other Logan Paul one.

• 38:44Shaan Puri?

  Right. Well, that one, what was interesting is that one was a YouTube pay-per-view of like $5 or $10. This one was a full $60 pay-per-view because it had Tyson on it. And so it was this one, even if this had a fraction of the people watching it, this was much, much bigger.

• 39:01Sam Parr?

  I watched both of them. I paid for one of them. I bootlegged this one.

• 39:04Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I bootlegged. I would never pay for this, but it's so easy to bootleg nowadays.

• 39:08Sam Parr?

  Where do you, what do you go to?

• 39:10Shaan Puri?

  Two ways. There's a website called ripple.is, so ripple.is, they have bootleg all sports. And then the other one is there's a Discord channel. If you just Google MMA Cracked Streams Discord, MMA Cracked Streams Discord, that's a Discord, and they always post the link in the main channel there at Discord about where you can find this thing.

• 39:29Sam Parr?

  So I go to this website called crackedstreams.com and I looked up the traffic of it, Cracked Streams. It gets like 50 million monthly uniques.

• 39:40Shaan Puri?

  Super spiky, I'm sure.

• 39:42Sam Parr?

  It is crazy. It is crazy, crazy, crazy. They always do these things where you click this ad and you gotta register. I have no idea how that makes money.

• 39:51Shaan Puri?

  I would love to have one of these guys who owns one of these sites come on and just talk about it. Because, yeah, I mean, it's clearly just like shit ton of ads and they know like, hey, you're you're doing the pirating thing. So you're gonna put up with like the maximum possible number of ads. And, uh, you know, they really do screw your computer up, but it's all good. It's worth it.

• 40:12Sam Parr?

  So here I posted the one that I go to. I looked them up on SimilarWeb. According to SimilarWeb, they're at 30 million uniques, 26 million uniques last month with an average visit duration of two hours.

• 40:24Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 40:26Sam Parr?

  It's nuts. It's nuts. It's us. It's us. I want to, I definitely want to know who, and 62% of the traffic is direct and 33 from search. So it's just like the best audience ever. I want to know how, uh...

• 40:38Shaan Puri?

  Well, it's illegal, right? So that's the problem is you're running an illegal business. So it's like, if you want to do pirated content, you're gonna get a lot of traffic if you're gonna give away pirated stuff for free. If you, uh, like, it's really funny. I was on the Twitter channel of Chad Hurley, the creator of YouTube, and there was this chart that came out that showed the growth during COVID of all these different platforms like YouTube and Twitch and TikTok and then OnlyFans. OnlyFans is like spiked up way above everybody else and he just retweeted it and just wrote, "Titties." It's not like an amazing, amazing retweet by the founder of YouTube. Yeah, if you do porn, you do illegal content, you do gambling, you will get the traffic, no doubt. You know, your business might be in murky waters, but like, good luck.

• 41:22Sam Parr?

  I just looked up this guy Chad Hurley. His latest tweet was, "If I was employed, I could easily be fired for what's in my Twitter drafts."

• 41:29Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 41:31Sam Parr?

  I'm looking at this graph. How big do you think OnlyFans is now?

• 41:34Shaan Puri?

  Well, I kind of know, so I can't really say because I would be giving it away.

• 41:38Sam Parr?

  According to this, the revenue is significantly greater than Twitch. Do you believe that to be true?

• 41:43Shaan Puri?

  Uh, I can't say. I have info on both sides. So that would be, I'd get in trouble if I said anything.

• 41:48Sam Parr?

  Okay, so this is all from the tweet. OnlyFans lets creators charge for access to content. In four years, OnlyFans grew to a million creators, 2 billion paid to creators, and 100 creators making at least a million dollars.

• 42:02Shaan Puri?

  What?

• 42:04Sam Parr?

  That's crazy. So this is like a multi-billion dollar company already.

• 42:07Shaan Puri?

  It is definitely a multi-billion dollar company.

• 42:09Sam Parr?

  What? That is crazy. Crazy, crazy, crazy. All right. That's nuts. I can't believe that. But I mean, I can believe it, but good, good on them. Does the guy who started still work there? Or did he hand the reins away to someone else?

• 42:22Shaan Puri?

  I think they're still there.

• 42:23Sam Parr?

  Wow. Wow, wow, wow. That's amazing. What a crazy company.

• 42:28Shaan Puri?

  All right. The Hollywood episode is over. What did we talk about? Jake Paul, talked about Drudge. We talked about Celebrity Deathmatch and OnlyFans. All right.

• 42:39Sam Parr?

  All right. Talk to you later.

• 42:40Shaan Puri?

  All right, man.

• 42:40Sam Parr?

  Peace.

• 42:41Shaan Puri?

  See ya.