3 Killer Businesses Hidden in Plain Sight

Episode 645: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talk about cash-printing businesses that are around us every day and how to spot them. — Show Notes: (0:00) $1M dollar product: Water quality testing (8:26) $10M dollar product: EZ Labor Law Posters (15:22) $100M dollar product: Barcodes (22:55) Idea: Casual Friday (28:44) Marketing campaigns that altered culture (36:00) Shaan reads his intro (40:06) "Torches of freedom" (44:42( Sam tours Yale campus (50:59) Idea: YC campus — Links: • Oasis - https://www.oasiswater.app/ • GS1 - https://www.gs1us.org/ • Propaganda - https://tinyurl.com/2fc959jr • Craig Clemens Episode - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5N9rNShYI_g — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: Need to hire? You should use the same service Shaan uses to hire developers, designers, & Virtual Assistants → it’s called Shepherd (tell ‘em Shaan sent you): https://bit.ly/SupportShepherd — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com • Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth • Sam’s List - http://samslist.co/ My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by The HubSpot Podcast Network // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano

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

• 0:00Shaan Puri?

  All right. So check this out. I'm going to tell you about three products that are hidden in plain sight. And the genius of these is that they take something that's free and they sell it. They take a free thing and they sell it. And I'm going to tell you about one example that makes hundreds of thousands of dollars, another one that makes millions of dollars, and then another one that's made hundreds of millions of dollars.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like my days off on the road. Let's travel.

• 0:28Shaan Puri?

  All right. I want to tell you about a couple of business ideas. I'm going to start with one that makes thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousands, let's say, one that makes millions of dollars, and one that makes hundreds of millions of dollars. And they're all products that are hidden in plain sight. So we've all seen them, but you probably never even realized their businesses. And secondly, the magic thing about all of them, they sell a product that's actually free. What inspired this? Did you just see something? Found one, found a second, found a third, drew a line, three dots make a line. So that's kind of what happened here. So first is I'm on Twitter and I see Joe Gebbia, who's the founder of Airbnb, friend of the podcast. I see Joe tweet out something about a screenshot

• 1:10Shaan Puri?

  of an app that was checking water, water quality. So the cleanliness of water. It was this app called Oasis. I thought that sounds familiar. Sam mentioned that like, I don't know, six months ago. Sam mentioned that in passing, but I never really paid much attention to it. What is the story of this thing, Oasis? So here's one that's making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, selling a product that is free and it's hidden in plain sight. And it's just water quality testing. So there's a kid who is behind this and we chatted with him. So Oasis is a app. It's an app that checks the water quality. It'll tell you if your city's water is clean, if your county's water is clean, it'll tell you, you can hold

• 1:53Shaan Puri?

  up a bottle of this Aquapana right here, and it will tell you, is this Aquapana actually clean, or does it contain PFAS, forever chemicals, that whole deal, right? It's an app and a website, right? An app and a website. And it started by this guy named Cormac and Cormac is from Minnesota, which is known for having really fresh water. He said, drink it growing up. He would just drink tap water. No problem. He'd drink hose water like you, Sam. And that was what he did. And then he moves to LA. And he just starts doing the same thing. He starts drinking tap water. He noticed tastes a little bit different and he gets an upset stomach. He gets a little bit sick. Nothing life threatening, but he's like, dude, that's weird. Um, like, I just, I just drank the water. Like, why is the water so much different here? So he tries to look it up. He says, how do I find out if my water is actually

• 2:38Shaan Puri?

  safe to drink out of the tap? And it turns out that you can go to any city and you can request a report. You can request a report about the water quality in your area. So he does that and he finds, oh, man, there's tons of contaminants in my water. And so he stops drinking tap water. He goes to Whole Foods. He buys water from Whole Foods. He says, well, let me see if this one's actually contaminated too. It turns out you can contact any bottled water company and they have to provide you a report about the testing of their water. And he finds that the water being sold in Whole Foods also has lots of contaminants in it. And then he's like, what the, what's going on here? And so he creates a app, really for himself, but for others too, to be able to check the, uh, quality of water, whether it's your city, your town, or bottled water that you're

• 3:23Shaan Puri?

  drinking. And he's basically just aggregating free data that already exists that anybody could go request. So when we first mentioned it, it was on the Jeremy Giffen episode a few months back. It was at $10,000 a month in revenue.

• 3:36Sam Parr?

  And the way that you make revenue is, I think he has an affiliate scheme where like, if you buy something that he recommends, you, he gets a cut and also you pay $50, right?

• 3:45Shaan Puri?

  There's a paywall. Yeah. So you basically, you request a report. You can get some information free if you want, like, you know, the full report or whatever. You pay 40, 45 bucks, 49 bucks, something like that for a free, for an annual membership to this app. So you can continue.

• 3:56Sam Parr?

  And by the way, when I shared this, I knew it was a paywall and people were like, who the hell would pay for this? And I was like in that camp at first. And then I started clicking around the website and I'm like, oh my God, my town's here. And it says it might be dirty, but I can't see the results unless I give them $50. And so like, I understand why it's actually incredibly valuable.

• 4:21Shaan Puri?

  I mean, look at the numbers. So it's doing, let's say, 40,000 a month now in revenue. So 40,000 a month, so basically a half a million bucks a year. And but if you do the math, 45 bucks, if it's a, you know, $45 subscription. You know, he's only got a few thousand subscribers to this thing. So it's not like it's, it's not like everybody's paying for this, but a small number of people really care about the quality of water and are willing to pay to get the information. And he's structured it. And so what he did was he started off with all the free reports. And then when he, you know, couldn't get the free reports or wanted to test more things, he's or wanted to verify their reports. He'll do his own independent testing, but it's very expensive. It's like, you know, a couple of grand to do independent testing of a product to find out, does it actually line up? So he's slowly doing them one by one as he gets more money.

• 5:06Shaan Puri?

  And he said, you know, we live in a world where we think we live in abundance. You could walk to Target, Trader Joe's, you'll find 20 different protein bars, 30 different waters. But the problem is most of it's filled with toxins. None of it is actually healthy. So my mission is to build a 100% independent platform to test products and provide healthy alternatives. And I think this is kind of awesome, right? Like, I think this is kind of amazing. And the way that he's growing this thing, because you might wonder, how does he get customers for this? Is he just does TikToks that go viral. So check out this video. So it's a video about like Liquid Death right here, right? And so he'll post this video TikTok, just very simple, green screen over a product. And he's talking about how, you know, I used to think this is really healthy, but actually it's full of chemicals and blah, blah, blah.

• 5:48Shaan Puri?

  If you want more, if you want to figure out which products are actually clean, use my app. And this video will get, you know, a million plus views and it'll drive a bunch of, bunch of attention. And it actually go and then drives people to download the app and go ahead and, and sign up. So very simple way to test this, to drive traffic to this product. And it's something you can do over and over and over again. Apps like TikTok and Instagram Reels to a slightly lesser extent, YouTube Shorts to a lesser extent. You can just, once you find a format that works, you can literally repost the same thing and the algorithm is just going to say, yep, humans like this. And it's just going to keep serving it up to a lot of people, even if they're, even if they don't follow you. And so when people have figured out these like simple formats that work, they just

• 6:30Shaan Puri?

  copy paste and post the same, 90% of the same video over and over and over again. And I know several people that are building multimillion dollar businesses doing this.

• 6:40Sam Parr?

  I'm so turned on right now. This is the greatest thing, dude. This, this guy. So he shows his revenue on Twitter, which is pretty cool. So Oasis metrics over the last 28 days. Monthly gross revenue, he shows us 25,000 and then he shows his churn, he shows everything. I actually predict this could be a significantly larger product than, I think it could be worth

• 7:03Shaan Puri?

  It can be.

• 7:04Sam Parr?

  many tens of millions of dollars or even more. The reason being is the way that these review websites work is you typically have to hire a lot of freelancers in order to go out and write all of the articles. But if you're just using data to like organize as a table, it's way more profitable. Also, he's getting early in, he's getting in early on a trend. I think this water thing is still tiny, tiny, tiny compared to what it's going to be like in the next 10 and 20 years. I think he's on to something life-changing for himself.

• 7:35Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so I promised you I would tell you about a company that's hidden in plain sight that is using free, selling free information and making hundreds of thousands. Check. Now I want to tell you about one that's making millions. And then we'll go to the hundreds of millions. Okay, so the millions one. And we've mentioned this once before, but it was years ago, so I want to bring it up again. If you've ever been to a company's office and you walk into their break room or their, maybe their kitchen where they have snacks, you'll always notice on the wall that there is this poster and our eyes just glaze over it. We don't ever look at it. Looks just like a, looks like, you know, when you're on an airplane and you see the safety thing and the seat back in front of you. It looks like that, but it's on the wall. And this is a labor law poster.

• 8:19Shaan Puri?

  And the reason that your office had it is the reason that all offices have it. It's required by law that you have to post this in your company, your employee, you know, break room or, or open area. And these labor law posters. They update every year, so you have to get a new one every year and they're required by law. Okay, so that's the, that's the good news. The bad news is you have to buy them. Or do you? And so here's the, the interesting thing about this business. There's a couple of companies that do this. I, I, I don't have all their, their names and information here, but I remember finding one that was like based in Minnesota. And what the guy was doing was he's just, all he does is print labor law posters. So what they'll, what they'll do is they'll mail you a letter to your business and the letter looks a little bit scary. And it says, hey, if you don't have this poster up, you are in violation of California labor laws right now.

• 9:05Shaan Puri?

  And you must have this up. It is a, is a requirement by law. It costs $45. Tick this box, send this back to us. We will send you your poster. And you do that and you said, they send you the poster, you put it up on your wall, you forget about it, you move on.

• 9:19Sam Parr?

  And this is a private company that sends that letter?

• 9:21Shaan Puri?

  Correct. Now, the thing is, these labor law posters are actually free. You could just go to your state labor law website. You can get the labor law posters. But companies have realized that using this sort of like awareness tactic, tactic, making it easy, sort of scaring the hell out of you is a way to make a couple million dollars a year on super high margins. Cause all you do is printing the same poster, single SKU, single product, one, one product a year. And you just send it out to businesses and they, and then they.

• 9:51Sam Parr?

  In all fairness, I'm on, I'm on the government's website and figuring out how to order the poster for free is actually hard.

• 9:57Shaan Puri?

  Of course, of course. Just like filing your taxes is a little bit confusing and TurboTax and others have made a, you know, they, they turned the button into bright shiny green buttons instead of small gray buttons that you don't know which one to click. Right? So there is a tremendous amount of value in simply either aggregating and structuring data and making it available for people. Or helping you just comply without, you know, having to figure out how to comply. And, uh, you know, maybe the $50 tax is worth it every year as your subscription, but that's what these companies do. So labor law posters, a way to make millions of dollars selling a product that's free. And a business, again, that's hidden in plain sight. And I bring this up because one of the great things about this podcast that I hope we do for people

• 10:39Shaan Puri?

  is that you will go from a mindset where success seems rare and hard to grasp. And you're sort of thinking. What is it? I need a great idea and great ideas are rare. They're hard to find to a mindset of everything I see in my life, every object in my view. It's not there by accident. That is, that sign is there for a reason. That cable is there for a reason. Somebody realized you needed that and they created that. Once you realize that, you realize, oh my God, business is everywhere. This is a business. This is a business. This is a business. And then you realize, wow, all I gotta do is figure out one of these. That seems easy, right? It's like in a jar full of Skittles picking one. It doesn't seem that hard. And that's what, you know, I think I hope to sort of achieve by bringing up these businesses because not only are they clever little business models,

• 11:24Shaan Puri?

  but it just points out that your eyes are just glazing over million dollar opportunities everywhere you walk because they are literally everywhere. You will go into a parking lot. Look at the ground. Somebody painted those stripes. And when you go look at it, you go, you can go ask the owner of the real estate. You say, who paints the stripes for your parking lot? They'll say, oh, we use these guys. You go talk to them. You say, wow, you just paint straight lines in parking lots? That's what you do?

• 11:48Sam Parr?

  Yep.

• 11:49Shaan Puri?

  How much money do you make? You know, is this a small business? Oh, you did seven million last year revenue? No profit? Oh my God. Right? And then you realize, oh my God, there's somebody who makes $7 million of your profit painting white lines on the, on the road.

• 12:02Sam Parr?

  Dude, I, when I first moved to San Francisco, I lived with this guy. He was one of my roommates and he was a piece of crap. But he was telling me how he was making hundreds of dollars a month because apparently the Church of Latter Day Saints Mormons, they, you can order a Bible for free on their website, I guess. But they like, it's like Legion and they'll like come and hand deliver it, but they'll like try to like, you know, convert you to their faith or whatever. And he created an online store selling bibles for 20 bucks and somehow raked on Google. And he just went and took the person's information and put it into the Mormons website and on his website, they're like, you know, we hand deliver bibles or something like that. And it was like,

• 12:40Shaan Puri?

  That's hilarious.

• 12:42Sam Parr?

  And I, I remember this guy and I was like, this is a horrible scam. That's amazing. But it was very funny. And he was taking like $500 a month, uh, doing this.

• 12:50Shaan Puri?

  That is so funny. Oh my God. What happened to that guy?

• 12:56Sam Parr?

  He's one of those guys, you know how like you have these friends and frankly, you and I are those people maybe where they're like, do hacky shit.

• 13:04Shaan Puri?

  You have those friends. It's like, dude, do you remember how we met?

• 13:06Sam Parr?

  Yeah, where it was like, you do this hacky shit and you're like, this is gonna go one of two ways. Like it's gonna go the right way or the wrong way. Miles was the wrong way. So like, he like, kind of disappeared. He probably got in trouble for a crypto scam. What's the, uh, yeah, it was like, it was crazy, but it like, it on his about page, he was like, why did my, why did the person who delivered my Bible want to talk to me? And his thing said, yeah, they tend to do that. Mormons love it. It's all like, it said like, uh, like it just explained how like, you're gonna get hand delivered by these Mormon guys. What's the third one?

• 13:36Shaan Puri?

  Okay, third one. Um, here's a product that is used, I believe, six billion times a day. It is a product that Time Magazine said is in the 50 things that made the world economy work. Do you want to take a guess what this is? It's a hard one. I know.

• 13:52Sam Parr?

  This is, this is pretty fun. Uh, do you have one or two more hints?

• 13:55Shaan Puri?

  Like many great inventions, it was invented maybe 20 years before it actually got used. So somebody invented this thing. They're like, this is cool, but how do we, what do we use it for? I couldn't find a use case. And finally they found a use case. Oh, I'll, I'll give you another example. Every time you buy a product, you use this product. I feel like I'm doing those annoying riddles where it's like, I'm, I'm awake at night, but not during the day. What am I?

• 14:20Sam Parr?

  Or like, you could sit on me, but not take me with you.

• 14:24Shaan Puri?

  All right. I'll end the suspense.

• 14:25Sam Parr?

  The answer, by the way, is a chair. What is that?

• 14:28Shaan Puri?

  It's a barcode. So.

• 14:29Sam Parr?

  Oh, that's cool. Do you know the story behind the barcode?

• 14:33Shaan Puri?

  No. All right. So let me give you a little history lesson. I know you like history. So, uh, barcode is invented by these two guys. Norman Woodland and Bernard Silver. And these guys are inspired by Morse code. They realized like, wow, Morse code is so simple. It's just. Basically, it's dots and dashes. The dash, I think, is like a rest, basically, and the dot is like, you know, the sound. And they're like, could we create another system that's like that? Maybe a visual system? So they created a system, actually looked like a circle at the time. So it was like a circle. And they're like, oh, look, with thin lines and thick lines, we can create like an, basically, an infinite number of unique tags for something. And they're like, oh, this is great. They patent it. But there's not really a good use case for it.

• 15:16Shaan Puri?

  And then people try to use it for a couple of things, you know, they realize, oh, you know what we could do? We could track train containers. Well, you know, we're always wondering where those containers are, where in the route that they are, and if they ever get unloaded. So they put a barcode on the side of a train container. And it works great. Everyone's really excited. That's working great for a second. And then the problem is, trains are outside, they get dirty. And as soon as any dirt gets on the thing, it ruins the barcode. So they're like, oh, this is a bad idea. Take it off, scrap it. And then they tried on some second thing. It doesn't really work either. And basically, for like, I don't know, a couple of decades or something, nobody's using barcodes. At the same time, in another part of the world, you get the invention of the laser. And the laser gets invented. The laser is a really great way to scan something.

• 16:01Shaan Puri?

  That that becomes interesting, but but they don't really know what they're scanning. Why? What are we scanning this for? Lasers have multiple uses, but that gets invented. And then in the third part of the world, three things come together. The third part of the world is grocery stores are having a really tough time because they are trying to stock inventory. And they're sort of by hand, keeping track of all the inventory they have. Think about this. In a store, there's so many units, it's taking so many hours of labor. And then if any customer checks out, it's so slow. Because, okay, every item you have, I got to punch it into the register, exactly what this is. I got to either remember the prices, or I got to write this in, and then I have to keep stock of the inventory levels. It's a pain in the ass. So they create-

• 16:36Sam Parr?

  Do you think that, like, when Wal- so Walmart was invented, created, founded almost around this time? Do you think that a barcode is one of the reasons, like, would that have prevented companies from scaling? Is just the operational manpower?

• 16:50Shaan Puri?

  So Walmart opened their first store in 1962. This was now 10 years later. So 74 is when this starts to happen. They're they're hearing this problem. It's too slow, too much labor, too expensive. So they create the ad hoc committee for the uniform grocery product identification code. And they go into the lab and they're like, all right, we need something. They find this technology there. Oh, remember what's that guy Norman always talking about that goddamn barcode? What if we use that? What if we use this laser? And they come together and they create the barcode and they change the shape of it. Instead of the circle shape, they change it to the rectangular shape that we all know and love today. And the first barcode ever gets scanned is a pack of Wrigley's gum in 1974. And so, and they're like, wow, that just it knew the price.

• 17:35Shaan Puri?

  It took me one second and it's deducted my stock level by one. Oh my God, that's this was magic. And so, you know, this is like the blockchain getting invented, right? It's like, oh my God.

• 17:46Sam Parr?

  How do they convince all of the manufacturers to put this on their thing? They just like rally around.

• 17:50Shaan Puri?

  Retailers demand it. So the retailers are saying this can they're the ones with the hair on fire problem, right? They are spending all this money and time on labor. So they say, hey, if you want to be in our store, you got to start adding these things to your product. And, and so for a manufacturer, you're like, oh, if I want shelf space, which is the most important thing for me. Oh, I'll happily stick this this on here. And so they're all working and where do you but the problem is where do they get the code? And how do I make sure that your code is not the same as my code? Right? Like what what's going to prevent that? Well, we all go to go through some central thing that's going to, you know, give us the barcodes that are I can use for my product to make sure nobody else can use it. It's like reserving namespace or a license plate. It's like, how do I get my my exact license plate that nobody else is going to have? And there became what's known today as GS1.

• 18:35Shaan Puri?

  GS1 is the nonprofit that issues these barcodes and keeps track of who owns the barcode space. And to get barcode space, you got to pay. But again, remember, every store has standardized on one thing. So if you want to be in a store or you want your goods in an Amazon warehouse, for example, you now need to use their system, which means they have infinite pricing leverage and they charge a shit ton for these barcodes. And so.

• 19:03Sam Parr?

  And is that GS1 who's charging?

• 19:04Shaan Puri?

  GS1. So GS1, let me tell a little bit about this this nonprofit. You can go look them up because they're a nonprofit. So last year, eighty eighty one million dollars in revenue. Uh, barcode sales makes up ninety, ninety-three percent of this. And again, a barcode is nothing. It's literally like, I just, a set of lines that they're selling for ninety million dollars a year. And um, they now have four hundred and sixteen million dollars of assets that they've just been stockpiling. The CEO makes three million dollars a year. The CFO makes a million dollars a year. The SVP of Community Engagement, which God knows what that guy's doing, making eight hundred thousand dollars a year. This might be the easiest job of all time.

• 19:41Sam Parr?

  Does he hose happy hours?

• 19:42Shaan Puri?

  Exactly.

• 19:43Sam Parr?

  Like, what do you do?

• 19:46Shaan Puri?

  And they, you know, they stash thirty million dollars in overseas places like the Caribbean and Central America. And all of their expenses, pretty much, and half of their expenses.

• 19:55Sam Parr?

  Are they like staff salaries? Lobbying against the QR code? Is there like a barcode QR code, like lobby where they're just fighting each other?

• 20:03Shaan Puri?

  I think QR codes are just a type of barcode. Uh, they're just a three dimensional.

• 20:07Sam Parr?

  Got it. Okay.

• 20:08Shaan Puri?

  Uh, two D, sorry. Um, so. Yeah, that, isn't that crazy though, that this, this nonprofit now has half a billion dollars in assets? Just selling barcodes. And any retailer, anybody who's ever had to like, get your products, you know, you let's say you want to sell on Amazon, Amazon says you gotta do this. It's a racket. You end up just having to pay whatever they demand in order to, to get your products on the shelves.

• 20:34Sam Parr?

  Do you know how like, there's been a lot of cool movies lately. There's been a cool movie on the guy who created BlackBerry. I think there was one on the person who helped create Tetris. And then there was another one for the person who helped create the Pop-Tart. He's like, kind of cool, like product creation stories. I wonder if, is there an interesting one here?

• 20:51Shaan Puri?

  Somebody's just saying there is like, what if podcasts were movies? Then they just turned like, every episode of like, acquired or how I built this into a documentary.

• 21:01Sam Parr?

  Dude, well, this guy Bernard Silver, like, that, that, this is actually a way more interesting story than uh, I would have thought. Because this is something that changed culture. It changed, it changed so many things, like it, you know, we talk about inflections and how like, you know, the iPhone was invented, which had all these ramifications, including a GPS being there, which now means that Uber has the ability to exist. And then there's like, million, a million examples of that. This is one of those inflections where like, this barcode helped create, let's say, or made a Walmart possible, or made this other thing possible, which like, literally shaped. History and this is actually really fascinating stuff.

• 21:37Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. So this is just a it's a space that you again, you don't think you don't even think this is like a you don't think where does this come from? Where does this little thing come from? And again, it doesn't come from nowhere. Somebody creates it and then that person who creates it now has, you know, something they can charge for and there's business everywhere.

• 21:56Sam Parr?

  So it's so funny that this episode is accidentally turning into a theme, a theme of things that you don't really think about, but how they became a thing.

• 22:06Sam Parr?

  I have actually an example of one of those. Can I tell you it?

• 22:08Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, go.

• 22:10Sam Parr?

  All right. So in the 1960s in Hawaii, it started to become common. I think it was because of like one hotel where your employees were allowed to wear in a Hawaiian shirt to work on Friday because for the most part, you had to wear a suit to work, you know, like dressing formal was how business people operated all of the time. And this whole casual Friday idea, it sort of started getting popular in mainland America where like in the 1980s, HP was like, hey, everyone, you can wear a Hawaiian shirt to work on a Friday, which was a big deal because they employed tens of thousands of people. So it was like, it was kind of like a statement.

• 22:48Sam Parr?

  But in reality, up until the late 80s and early 90s, virtually everyone wore suits to work all of the time. However, this executive at Levi's, so Levi's had just launched Dockers and Dockers were khaki pants. Up until then, khaki pants were almost considered, you know, if you look at like the history of fashion, like suits were considered like the that's the standard. That's what you do. Khakis were basically casual wear, even though now we don't look at them as casual. That's what they were. They were casual wear. And Levi's creates Dockers because they wanted to be the khaki business, but still people are like, this is too casual. We can't wear these any other time except for Saturday and Sunday. And so this marketing executive at Levi's has this brilliant idea.

• 23:33Sam Parr?

  They print up 40,000 pamphlets that explains to HR professionals, here's this new thing called Business Casual and Casual Friday. And here's the rules of this holiday or this like new tradition. It was just an eight page pamphlet and it said, it didn't promote Levi's or Dockers though. But in all of the photos, you'll see like a picture of someone wearing jeans and it is like a Levi's logo. Or you'll see a picture of someone wearing khakis and you just assume that it's Dockers. And so this thing takes off. It works.

• 24:08Shaan Puri?

  So they go, we gotta read this though. A guide to casual business wear. Ideas for dressing professionally at work. And then it basically shows like pants, jeans, like it's showing like options, ideas for it. And then is there a rules for it? So what are the rules that they said?

• 24:24Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And it says, don't wear like tattered jeans, but they should be nice new jeans.

• 24:28Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 24:28Sam Parr?

  Or like, like they can't be stained or what else does it say?

• 24:32Shaan Puri?

  No sleeveless, no tanks. Oh, man.

• 24:38Shaan Puri?

  Discrimination.

• 24:39Sam Parr?

  Baby steps. Baby steps. We're going, we're going from suits to khakis. Like, you know, like it takes time.

• 24:44Shaan Puri?

  I mean, should we guns out Wednesday? Do you think we can make this happen?

• 24:48Sam Parr?

  I, I, well, I'll actually have to talk about that in a second, but so it's a good.

• 24:52Shaan Puri?

  Avoid lingerie. Okay. Fair enough. Save athletic wear for after work and don't forget to check footwear. Ophto sandals are gross. No, no, it just says not appropriate.

• 25:02Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's a great little pamphlet. So they sent this out to literally 40,000 HR executives. And they even go as far to create an HR hotline. So if you work at IBM and you're like, you know, I actually don't know protocol for like our Ophto, are, are sandals allowed? Are like whatever, I could call this hotline and I could ask the inventors of Casual Friday. Hey, can Sydney wear like open, are, are shoes allowed or toes allowed to be seen? Even if like their toenails are polished, like whatever, like you could like ask these questions and it takes off. And Casual Friday officially becomes a thing. And so it literally shaped culture.

• 25:43Sam Parr?

  And it was all because Levi's was like, we gotta sign these guys up. We gotta start selling some of the stuff. And like, back then, it was kinda, the American apparel industry was a little bit in a rut. They weren't doing that great. And this changed everything. And so people started buying Dockers, buying Levi's because this movement of casual Friday totally picked up. And it got me thinking. This is like some pretty brilliant marketing. I call this marketing, you can call it cultural shift marketing, or tradition hijacking. And so people who have like found little traditions and they blow up the tradition, or they blow up this idea, and then they say, and by the way, if you want to buy inside the idea, we just so happen to have the thing that could make your life a little bit better. And so there's a few other examples of this that I can, I can present to you. So the first one is the beers.

• 26:27Sam Parr?

  So they're a diamond company. They've been around, I think, for hundreds of years, actually. In the 1940s, they ran this campaign called the diamond is forever. And it was this idea that like diamonds are special. Because up until the 1940s, diamonds were special, but they weren't nearly as special as we think they are now. And they also came up with this insane idea, which is they're like, this campaign they come up with, how much should you spend on a diamond? And they said roughly two to three months of your salary, which is like outrageous. But that alone is like what that campaign is credited as helping shape the diamond industry. They even ran further campaigns that said on certain anniversaries, you have to get your wife a diamond. Another one is breakfast being the most important meal of the day. Calog invented that idea. And so like, we grow up now, we tell our kids, you have to eat breakfast.

• 27:11Sam Parr?

  It's the most important thing. Calog invented that. Prior, prior to that, people didn't always think that.

• 27:15Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 27:16Sam Parr?

  Two other ones are baby showers and, and wedding registries. So baby showers weren't a thing until Johnson and Johnson started running ad campaigns, thinking you, you have to have a baby shower if you're pregnant. Or if you're, Macy's came up with the idea of wedding registries. They said, um, you're gonna get married? You gotta, people gotta buy you all this stuff. And, and in fact, you don't want people just to buy you random stuff, because women have to buy you the same stuff that you already have, or two guests buy you the same thing. Like, that's ridiculous. You have to create this registry at Macy's that you can register. And then finally, spring cleaning is another one. That really wasn't the thing until Lysol came up with this idea of spring cleaning.

• 27:49Shaan Puri?

  Dude, these are great. I love, I, I don't know if other people get us fired up about these. I get so fired up about these. I think because it's the same idea as, oh wow, these businesses are hidden plain sight, you know, this object just didn't just get here. Someone made it come here. All of these occasions, these, these sayings, these, these holidays, they didn't just pop up out of nowhere. Somebody made them happen. And when you find out that it's some marketing dork, it's some marketing dork somewhere that was like, you know what, like, how do we, spring sales are slow, spring sales are slow, spring, spring fling, no, spring clean, no, spring cleaning. It was like, yes, that's how we're going to get people to buy cleaning products in the, in the spring.

• 28:29Shaan Puri?

  I love that. I love that just a mad ad man somewhere in the world can just shift how people do things. There's a great, we did an episode with Craig Clements about exactly this.

• 28:40Sam Parr?

  Was it like leaky gut?

• 28:42Shaan Puri?

  He did, he did prebiotics, but he didn't talk too much about that. It was, was, he was talking about the ones that have, like, the ones you're talking about, like, why we eat bacon for breakfast? Why we need to drink orange juice, right? Like where orange juice came from. And like all these things that today just seem like, I don't know. This is what we do. It's just staples of the, of people's diet. It's just tradition. And it's like, no, no, that wasn't tradition. Or, you know, the classic one is toothpaste. He talks about how at a certain time, about only 6% of the population brushed their teeth. And so when they wanted to increase sales of toothpaste, he said, well, we can't just sell more toothpaste to the 6% of people who already brush their teeth. We need to get the other 94% of people to start brushing their teeth.

• 29:24Shaan Puri?

  How are we going to do that? And that's when he came up with that campaign, not Craig, but.

• 29:28Sam Parr?

  Like Claude Hopkins. It was, it was like rub the tongue on the, on your teeth and you feel that film?

• 29:35Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, one of, one of them. Exactly. It was like, you know, basically saying, take your tongue, rub it on your teeth. You feel that film? That's, and he, and people did that. As soon as they read it, they do it. They'd stick their tongue there and then it's gross. And you're like, there's a way to get that off. And then you'll have that Hollywood pearl smile. And then people wanted that, right? And so that created this movement. And then by the end of that campaign, something like 70 or 80% of people now brush their teeth in America. It was like a huge shift that happened just off of that one ad man, that single big idea. And I love, I've, I've really actually like toyed with the idea of writing a book about just these, these crazy ad men. And then the way that they've actually shifted culture.

• 30:13Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and that fascinates me as well. And like another one is like Wall Street Journal. And so they try to like, they sort of nailed it, but it hasn't, it hasn't stuck with us. But it was the idea of once you graduate college, the gift that you get is a Wall Street Journal subscription. Just like I think Rolex did it was like, once you, you know, President's Club is you get a Rolex if you sell, if you hit some sales quota, like, or you become president of whatever. And so I was thinking, what other things haven't been hijacked? That can be. And so I've got a few examples, but the first one being Friendsgiving. So Friendsgiving is what, like 20 somethings who are single is what they celebrate. Instead of a Thanksgiving with the family, they do Friendsgiving in their town or in the

• 30:57Sam Parr?

  city that they're living in. And so I think Friendsgiving is one that there's not a clear winner as to who owns Friendsgiving. But we can make it an entire week of being thankful for your friends. And you will do various gestures, including having them over for dinner to show your, how appreciative you are that they are now your friends. And so we could sell gift boxes, we could sell gratitude journals, we could do digital cards, we could do all types of stuff. And by the way, speaking of cards, Hallmark is like one of the inventors of like Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, things like that. The other one, graduation season. So turning into a life transition planning or celebrating new life phases, all because of graduating. So we're going to call it graduation season.

• 31:41Sam Parr?

  And so what do you get for graduation season? You get financial planning subscriptions, productivity tools, career coaching, travel discounts. That's for graduation season. You said you've thought about those. What are other ones that you've thought about?

• 31:53Shaan Puri?

  Oh, I mean, come on.

• 31:54Sam Parr?

  Like, no, like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Like examples of things where you're like, that's amazing that they pulled that off.

• 32:01Shaan Puri?

  Like Craig talked about the Otis elevator one, which I thought was amazing. Do you remember?

• 32:05Sam Parr?

  What was that?

• 32:05Shaan Puri?

  So he basically talks about how back in the, elevators got invented far before they were used. What does that mean? So the elevator gets invented, but people didn't want to use them. They didn't want to, they didn't.

• 32:15Sam Parr?

  They're scared.

• 32:16Shaan Puri?

  They're scared. Because there were situations where elevators would just plummet and you just plummet to your death. So it's like, okay, no thanks. And the consequence of that is, think about it, if you don't have elevators, you don't have tall buildings, right? Because people are only going to go up so many flights of stairs. So like New York was like, you know, four stories high. There was just no, there was no buildings taller than that. So cities were kind of limited in how big they could be. And this guy Otis ends up creating a, um, an elevator with automatic brakes. And so Otis creates the automatic braking elevator. He's like, this is it. This is going to be amazing. Everybody's going to buy my elevators. And if you look today, by the way, you go, go to any elevator, you'll see a little thing on the wall. Almost always says Otis. But it didn't happen right away. And he couldn't figure out why. He's like, this has automatic brakes.

• 33:01Shaan Puri?

  It solves the problem. But nobody believed it. And so Craig talks about how one of the techniques that the marketers use is a

• 33:08Sam Parr?

  But they have to like break the elevator and like film it like getting caught.

• 33:11Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. So the world fair was going on and Otis decides to go all in. And he creates this, uh, show basically. So he creates this exhibit where he's got an elevator suspended in the air, hanging by ropes, cables like they would. And he, cause he had watched Cirque du Soleil and he was kind of like inspired by, oh, wow. Cirque du Soleil, man, their, their stunts and their spectacles are so awe inspiring. You can't help but look at it. So he said, I gotta do that. So he gets somebody up there and he stands in the elevator and he says, ladies and gentlemen, I have created the, the world's first safe elevator, the elevator with automatic brakes. And he gets the guy at the top to swing an ax and he cuts one rope and the elevator starts swaying and swinging. And it's hanging by a thread now and everyone's gasping in the crowd.

• 33:55Shaan Puri?

  And he's like, cut the rope. And then the guy swings, he cuts the rope. Elevator starts to go down two feet and then it automatic brakes and it stops. And he says, all safe gentlemen. And he says something like, whatever. He says some famous phrase that's basically says like Otis Elevate, when you're in an Otis elevator, you know, it's all's well, all's well, you, you will be safe. And elevator sales take off from there. And then when elevator sales take off, now buildings can be taller. It literally reshaped the way that cities work. All because this guy realized that he needed to think out of the box in terms of his marketing. And he needed to do something that would break through the noise and it would actually shift culture, shift perception about a product in a dramatic way. And one tool, the tool belt is that Craig called these hijacks of the human mind. The seven human hijacks.

• 34:40Shaan Puri?

  And he's like, one way to hijack the mind is a spectacle like this.

• 34:44Sam Parr?

  Does Craig have a book? I gotta re-listen to that one. Does Craig have a book?

• 34:48Shaan Puri?

  This is after that episode, I hit Craig up and I was like, hey, I want to write this book with you. And we talked about it. We're both got really excited about it, but we're both busy. So this might be the motivation to rekindle that project.

• 35:00Sam Parr?

  Dude, the seven hit, uh, human hijacks?

• 35:02Shaan Puri?

  I wrote the

• 35:02Sam Parr?

  Sign me up.

• 35:03Shaan Puri?

  I wrote the intro for it. It's pretty dope. I'll read it to you sometime.

• 35:06Sam Parr?

  Oh, that is awesome. I'm gonna have to go listen to that because that was like two years ago and I remember listening to it and think he's amazing.

• 35:15Shaan Puri?

  Can I read you the intro to this book?

• 35:17Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 35:17Shaan Puri?

  We can cut this out. It's boring, but I just wanted to get your opinion on this. All right. So I wrote this a while back. All right. It's called Hijacks or Seven Human Hijacks: Confessions of a Billion Dollar Marketer. Okay, so that's Craig. Craig sold over a billion dollars of products online himself. Okay, so I said, here's how it goes. If you read this book, I need you to make me a promise. Repeat after me. I promise to use these tactics only for good and not evil, because the techniques in this book, not just tactics, they are hijacks. The same way a terrorist can hijack an airplane, marketers can hijack the minds of consumers to get them to buy products they didn't even know they wanted. You might be skeptical. In fact, I think you should be skeptical, skeptical of somebody making such a bold claim, but I could tell you that these products, these hijacks have been used to sell. I've, I've used these products, I've used these hijacks to sell over a billion dollars of products

• 36:00Shaan Puri?

  personally. That's one billion with a B in case you lost count. But rather than convince, rather than let me convince you, let me ask you. Did you brush your teeth this morning? More importantly, why? Who told you to do that? Who told you to brush your teeth in the morning? Your mom? Well, who told her? Her mom? Well, yeah, before that, who told all the moms to do this? It must be the dentist, right? But wait, who told the dentist? The answer, it turns out, is a man named Claude Hopkins. Before Claude Hopkins, only 7% of the population brushed their teeth. Sidebar, can you imagine dating back in 1913? Nobody brushed their teeth. I feel bad for grandpa. After Claude Hopkins, 65% of the population brushed their teeth. And Claude didn't just sell toothpaste, he literally changed the world. He got millions of people to change their daily habits with one brilliant marketing campaign I'll show you in chapter two. But before I show you how you did it, blah, blah,

• 36:45Shaan Puri?

  blah, blah. And then I go, and then the chapters are like, how diamonds became a girl's best friend, and blah, blah, blah, like each of the different products that that got, you know, embedded into culture.

• 36:55Sam Parr?

  What are the seven human hijack? Like, what are they?

• 36:58Shaan Puri?

  Sounds like I succeeded and got you curious. You're gonna have to pay $14.99 and get the book.

• 37:04Sam Parr?

  Like, is it literally like seven different like tactics? Or is it seven different examples of?

• 37:08Shaan Puri?

  Tactics, tactics. And then each one has example and you stack them. So what he showed was like, you know, for example, one of the tactics is spectacle. Like I told you about the Otis elevator.

• 37:19Sam Parr?

  So like a spectacle would be one of the seven.

• 37:22Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, like spectacle is one of the seven, but like even the thing about like take your tongue and put it on your teeth. So like a, um, like a magic trick. Basically, it's like the thing, you know, but remember the thing where people used to that power band or whatever those bracelets?

• 37:34Sam Parr?

  And they made you like hold your arm and they're like, look, you see how now?

• 37:37Shaan Puri?

  Put your arms out and watch. I can't push you over, right? And wow, that's sort of, um, that's, I forgot what he called it, but that sort of magic trick is, um, is one of the things where it's a, it's a demonstration, a powerful demonstration. Right? So you can demonstrate on the person themselves. You can get them to feel it and feel it themselves in order to, to, to want to buy a product.

• 37:57Sam Parr?

  Did Craig come up with this idea of seven human hijacks? Or did you come up with it on the pod?

• 38:02Shaan Puri?

  So he, he was going to come on and it was like, cool. We could talk about your business. We could talk about whatever. And I was like, you know, I said, I asked him one question. This is a very valuable question. I said, what's the best talk you've given recently? Like, have you given like a presentation or a talk at all that just like really killed? Like you could just tell the audience loved it. He said, oh dude, I did this one talk inside my company just to get them fired up. He's like, basically my company is like a giant marketing company. And I wanted them to come into work and not just feel like, oh, we need to raise sales by like seven percent this quarter. Like, no, like, he's like, I wanted him to realize, yo marketers, you don't just drive some revenue or lift sales by X percent. Like a marketer can literally change the way that society works. And he's like, so to get them fired up about that, I told them these examples of stories that they did.

• 38:46Shaan Puri?

  And then he's like, when I was putting them together, I realized it's the same set of techniques that they've been using across these eight, 10 examples. Just the same, same set of tactics, these hijacks that they've been using. And he's like, that could be cool. And I was like, yes, do that on the, on the pod.

• 39:01Sam Parr?

  Check this out. If you Google seven human hijacks Craig Clemens, the first post is on Reddit and it says Craig Clemens on MFM, talking about the seven human hijacks and how to use them in your marketing. And it links to this amazing post that this guy wrote where he lists the seven.

• 39:18Shaan Puri?

  On r slash marketing.

• 39:20Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's so good.

• 39:21Shaan Puri?

  So one of them, for example, is he talks about like the act of rebellion. So how do you make your consumer feel like they're giving the middle finger to the man by buying your product? So the example he gives is back in the day when cigarette sales were flat and cigarette sales was flat because basically cigarettes were only smoked by men. And so, and there was like, so it was already super saturated. It was like, dude, we can't really get more men to smoke. They kind of all smoke already. And so they realized like, the only way we're going to grow sales is by getting the other 50% of the population to start smoking. How do we get women to start smoking? At the time, it was seen as not cool. It was seen as sort of like, you know, it was like a kind of dirty masculine thing to do. And so the guy behind the campaign, basically what he did

• 40:04Shaan Puri?

  was he used influencers. So influence is one of the hijacks. So he got all of the like, whoever like the Kardashians of their time were. So he got like 30 of them all together, all at once. And that was at a time where the big problem in culture or society was like, I forgot if it was like women being able to vote, or was like some other thing where it was like, women were repressed in some way. And so he got them all to go to this, the parade or the fair, the, you know, the New Year's fair, the Macy's fair, whatever it was, like the parade that happens in New York. And they all stood on this float and he gave them all cigarettes. He said, all right, when you turn this corner, you're going to light that cigarette, right when the journalists are all there, they're all have their cameras pointed at you. You're going to light the cigarette and you're going to defiantly smoke the cigarette in front of them. And you're going to do this

• 40:48Shaan Puri?

  thing that women aren't supposed to do as an act of rebellion.

• 40:50Sam Parr?

  He called it, he called the sigs, torches of freedom.

• 40:55Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. Exactly. And that's what the newspapers, so he then put somebody in the crowd where the journalists were, and he said that out loud to the journalists who then went and wrote that in their story, like they lit up these torches of freedom.

• 41:10Sam Parr?

  You see those ladies up there, guy? Those are, those are, those are torches of freedom. That's what those are.

• 41:17Shaan Puri?

  That's what Jewel needs to do. He needs to be like. These are vapes of freedom that these kids are using.

• 41:23Sam Parr?

  Oh, look at that guy. That's a, that's a sex machine that he's using. He's gonna have sex with so many people because he's using that thing.

• 41:30Shaan Puri?

  Even, even that same, so then I think it was like Lucky Strike or whoever their brand color was green and green was like not in vogue at the time. And he's like, yeah, the women don't want to buy it because these sticker, the box is not fashionable. It's like, do we need to rebrand? He's like, hold my beer. Don't rebrand. And so instead he got those same women to go to the, whatever the big, um, like fashion, like, you know, like, like the Met Gala type of thing. And all of them wore green. They all wore that same green colored dress. And so then green became cool for women, like, you know, it's basically it became in trend right after that. And then, you know, the sales of that, that, um, that brand went up basically because he made the color cool. And it's kind of just cool to see somebody who can puppeteer society in this way. I'm, I'm summarizing it like a nine month old episode.

• 42:15Shaan Puri?

  So I, I might have some of the details wrong here.

• 42:18Sam Parr?

  This Reddit poster said, side note, a lot of these stories are documented in this amazing book called propaganda.

• 42:27Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. That's the Bernays book, right? It's a hard read, dude.

• 42:32Sam Parr?

  I wanted to read it, but it seems like intimidating. What's so hard about it?

• 42:35Shaan Puri?

  You know, these are old books that are just like so dense. There's, it's not an easy read. I don't know. I, my brain is very simple. Like a lot of people will recommend books to me that like, oh, this is a great book. Have you read, um, you know, Rene Girard, like memetic theory. It's like, oh, I'm interested to go buy the book. And I'm like, I'm just too dumb to read this. Like, I'm too dumb.

• 42:52Sam Parr?

  I even read the.

• 42:52Shaan Puri?

  Do not have the attention span to read something like this.

• 42:55Sam Parr?

  I read like the memetic theory, like summary book, like what was that one that came out recently? And, uh, it was still hard.

• 43:00Shaan Puri?

  I still read like a third of that one.

• 43:02Sam Parr?

  I read that. That was like, uh, the, the Malcolm Gladwell version of like Rene Girard. And I like read it and I'm like, so I want what other people want? Is that it?

• 43:11Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 43:12Sam Parr?

  Like, that's the, it was, I read the whole thing and I was like, I don't understand why this is so many words. What am I missing? Uh, and so I've heard about this book.

• 43:22Sam Parr?

  I've, I've heard all about this, uh, book propaganda. Uh, it would be fun to read or at least try to read.

• 43:28Shaan Puri?

  There's something about books that are like more than 50 years old where.

• 43:33Shaan Puri?

  Their brains were just able to like, you know, they spoke differently. They talked, they, they talk differently. They, they, they write differently. And for whatever reason, my brain can't really process it very well. So I kind of need somebody to like, translate into modern speak or into like simpleton speak for me.

• 43:49Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I think maybe I'll try and do that. This guy, uh, this seems like a cool book. Oh, the guy who wrote it was born in 1891 and died in 1995. Wow. He saw a lot.

• 44:01Sam Parr?

  All right. Let me tell you, let me tell you about something that I did. So on, did you see, you probably didn't see this, but on Friday I tweeted that I'm going to Yale's campus. I tweeted that I'm gonna go check out Yale because it's like an old historical place and I wanted to like do something interesting for the weekend, something easy on Saturday. Tweeted it out. I got like a lot of replies and it was like kind of overwhelming on what to do. So on Saturday morning, we just drive up there and I just go to the busiest, just like part of the town where I think like, I'll just figure it out when I get there. I show up, I see a student tour. Like if you're a prospective student, you know, like when you go to your mom and dad. And I just like,

• 44:39Shaan Puri?

  Slip it.

• 44:39Sam Parr?

  Tag to you. Yeah. I just like, get out of it. I just like, pop it. And like, it's pretty funny because it's Sarah and I who I don't think either of us look young enough to be students. And then I've got my baby like strapped to my chest.

• 44:49Shaan Puri?

  Well, I gave it away.

• 44:51Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So we're just like, we're like, we like, just like our, at the back of this like student led tour, listening in. And then out of nowhere, this kid, I guess he's not that much of a kid, but he's like 20 years old. He goes, hey, Sam. And I go, what's up, man? He goes, hey, I, I'm a big fan of the pod. I listen religiously. I saw that you were gonna be here. So, can I show you around? And I was like, yeah, I would love that. What are you, what are you doing here? What are you doing today? He's like, well, I saw that you were coming and I just went to the most busy place there was, and I just hoped that I was gonna see you.

• 45:22Sam Parr?

  And here you are. And so this kid gave me the,

• 45:25Shaan Puri?

  And now I didn't think through what happens after that.

• 45:29Sam Parr?

  But it was great. And like, by the way, that's like the third time that's happened. And I love when that happens because I, like, he's doing me a favor of like, I would love like a local to like, show me around. And so he shows me all this amazing stuff. So I've heard of Skull and Bones.

• 45:43Shaan Puri?

  The secret society of Yale where presidents are in or all that. Is it legit? What, what, what is it?

• 45:50Sam Parr?

  It's quote a secret society, but I don't know like how much of a secret it is when there's like a building and like it's like a like it's like a nonprofit with like an endowment. So like, I don't know like what, I don't know what the secret is. I don't know like what, what secret, but it was just cool to like, see this building that I've read about. And then we went and saw this old graveyard. It's the oldest graveyard in America. And I was looking through it and I'm going to explain to you why I'm obsessed with old stuff, particularly the Ivy, the Ivy League. So it's kind of like a nerdy thing of mine where I liked, I've been to Harvard, Princeton, Yale, a bunch of others. Cause I just love like touring these old schools. They're just cool. We go to this old graveyard and we saw Noah Webster's grave. You know who Noah Webster is? Have you heard that name?

• 46:32Shaan Puri?

  Dictionary Webster? Is that him?

• 46:33Sam Parr?

  The dictionary. Merriam-Webster's dictionary. The guy who invented the dictionary. And I just was like looking at this, this old graveyard and next to him was a Charles Goodyear, the guy who created vulcanized rubber, which created Goodyear tires. And it was awesome. It was so cool. And I'm actually really envious of you that you went to Duke, this like historical old institution, because it was so cool to like be around history where like someone came up with something and they literally invented or, or standardized the English language, like something that like shapes history and it's still, you know, they've still impacted the way that we've done things. And so it was an awesome, awesome weekend to like see all this old stuff because it inspired me. You know how like when you get behind the computer, like every single day and you're like, I'm

• 47:17Sam Parr?

  going to do something that just makes a little bit of money. Sometimes you kind of get these ruts of like thinking small. It was very inspirational to like see Yale and see this old institution that has lasted for centuries and how big and global it was. It was very, very cool. And I want to give a shout out to that kid. I don't want to say his name because he said he wanted to be low key, but I want to give him a shout out for showing me around.

• 47:33Shaan Puri?

  That's awesome. Most white person hobby ever to go to a graveyard. You'll never, you'll never see a non-white tourist hanging out in a graveyard. It's not, not a, not a thing we do.

• 47:45Sam Parr?

  Dude, it was awesome. It was great.

• 47:47Shaan Puri?

  So you, you saw the Webster's dictionary Goodyear and you're like, all right, I'm going to come back and podcast. What, what was your, what are you going to do? What's the move?

• 47:55Sam Parr?

  You know, it it kind of put me into a little bit of a crisis where like I was asking that. But like, you know, this podcast is definitely part of it. You know, I don't know about you, but I sometimes think like this is like a podcast is not like impactful compared to like, we're talking to guys who are inventing robots that are doing X, Y, and Z or like who are going to the moon. But a lot of these guys were authors that I who's like, uh, whose grave I saw and I was still inspired by them. And so I felt a little bit inspiration of that, but there was a little bit of a crisis of like, oh, man. Like, it's important to do something like that can impact people for for centuries.

• 48:24Shaan Puri?

  Parse the source. I don't know, just putting that out there, see what, see how that lands. I feel like you're good with coming up with alternative phrases for things. So instead of saying, uh, you know,

• 48:34Sam Parr?

  Not just because I don't know the real phrase and I can't pronounce the words. So when I mumble, it just sounds like, did you, did you get this feeling at Duke where it was cool to be around like old, like historical things that have lasted for a long time?

• 48:46Shaan Puri?

  I know exactly what you mean. There is definitely a vibe and a feeling when you're at something that is not just bigger than yourself, but sort of timeless. The problem with Duke and other southern schools that have this is like, you're like, oh, wow. Who made, you know, what, what is this? It's like, like this is the slave wall. It's like, oh, yeah, nevermind. It's like, what, what's the name of this road? It's like, this is tobacco road. We had tobacco plantations, like everything is, uh, there's like a sort of, um, dark side to a lot of the history there. So that wasn't cool. But the rest of it is, in fact, I used to love going to the, the chat, like the center of Duke's campus is the chapel. And I used to go there all the time, even though I'm not religious, but just the aura, the vibe, like the vibe of a church is kind of unmatched, to be honest.

• 49:28Sam Parr?

  It's great.

• 49:28Shaan Puri?

  And, um, so, yeah, I really love, really love that.

• 49:32Sam Parr?

  Here's why I like Silicon Valley and why I like old stuff. It's, it's kind of similar, which is I love thinking about things that we take for granted. So for example, like buildings that have been there for a long time or that are really large, or even just like your streets or institutions like Yale. And I'm like, How did someone create something that became such an institution that we take it for granted? And we don't even like reflect on like how this became a thing. And Silicon Valley is cool because it's ideally the outcome is that you are creating something in real time that will become an institution like an Airbnb, like a Google, where it becomes a verb.

• 50:05Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 50:06Sam Parr?

  Like I'm gonna, you know what I mean? And you get to see that happening. And I think it's really cool to be in Silicon Valley to see the beginning of whole full institutions in the, in the making. And then also go and see in the old stuff of like, this is how it's done.

• 50:18Shaan Puri?

  So we just had Gary Tan on. Don't you think that Y C should just have a campus? And it should have this sort of Gothic, uh, you know, old school institutional vibe. And even if they're, if they're not going to do it, why wouldn't I just go create a campus? A small micro campus for Y C people, free, free, free room and board. So free place to live, free food that's healthy. And all I do is just cherry pick investments from people on campus. I just get to invest in their companies. It would be, I don't even need Y C to do this. Why, why wouldn't I do this?

• 50:50Sam Parr?

  There's a, or even just a museum. Have you ever heard of the Museum of American Finance? It's this thing in New York City where it's like, it's like a museum for like the history of finance. And frankly, it's badass. It's awesome. And just like a place to like go and like physically explore all that Y C has done. It is kind of interesting.

• 51:08Shaan Puri?

  It's just like Bill Ackman's loafers. What's inside this thing? Well, what is the Museum of Modern, of what? Of Finance?

• 51:14Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's a, it's a museum of American finance. So if you look at a photo, it's just like, it shows like, here's what like the stock tickers used to look like. And people would stand here and like trade like in the 1800s. And then like, then it's switched to have like the phones were on the floor or you do this, whatever, like tells the history of it. And then like important things related to it, but it's a museum in downtown Manhattan.

• 51:36Shaan Puri?

  That's cool. I like that.

• 51:37Sam Parr?

  Dude, this is a fun episode.

• 51:39Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that was a banger.

• 51:40Sam Parr?

  All right, that's it. That's a pod.