#86 - Why Every Business Should Have an Enemy

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. Episode summary: (0:03) Discounted Uber credits hack (4:06) Scam talk: Chamath bitcoin giveaway, Nigerian PPP, Super Pac (12:05) Baseball card storage idea (15:20) Self-storage company, Public Storage, is wildly profitable (16:12) Real estate talk (20:01) Why it’s important to have enemies when marketing (27:42) Private Twitter idea (30:08) Chris D’Elia and Wikipedia for creeps idea (37:42) Should Wikipedia be government owned? (39:50) Cheaper backend brokerage 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.

• 0:07Sam Parr?

  So before we get into this, I gotta ask the listeners and you something. So Jack, our friend Jack Smith, introduced me to this guy a few years ago. And I don't even want to say what the services yet, but okay, I think I could say a little bit. There's a ride sharing service, one of the ride sharing services. And what this guy does is he, I think this is how he does it. I don't exactly know, but you can buy discounted credits. So you know how?

• 0:41Shaan Puri?

  I pay 20 bucks and I get $40 worth of rides.

• 0:44Sam Parr?

  Have you done it?

• 0:45Shaan Puri?

  So he showed it to me years ago, right? This was like, I don't know how long, two years ago, maybe he showed it to us. And I was like, oh, great. I take rides all the time. Would love to. Then as I went through the website, I was like, is this like a, A, is this a scam? I don't think so, because Jack said he's doing it and he recommended it.

• 1:01Sam Parr?

  I've done it.

• 1:02Shaan Puri?

  But then I was like, is this gonna get my account banned? Like, this is too good to be true. So my skepticism went off. I didn't do it. I forgot about it. And then he posted about it in the, in our private My First Million Facebook group. He said, hey, did you guys know about this? This is a really cool, clever hack and system that this guy's created. Jack loves those things. So tell me more about what's got your eye here.

• 1:22Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so he has this service. Now he's doing it for similar things. And okay, so Jack was like, hey, you should have this guy on the podcast. And I'm like, okay, so pros, this guy is a hustler. He's doing amazing stuff.

• 1:39Sam Parr?

  And I'm pretty sure, I think he's either said it or I figured it out. I'm pretty sure the way he does it, this guy's in India. I think what he does is he has a network of like thousands of teenagers and kids. And he just gives them a first ride on a ride service. And he gets the $10 back like in referral and then sells it.

• 1:59Shaan Puri?

  Right, so he's gaming the, it's not, as far as I understand, it's not like illegal, there's no like sort of illicit hacking or anything. He just says, hey, they have a referral, they have a referral system, which is cool, you get a, you know, um, every time you refer somebody, you get a certain amount of credits. And what he realizes, he can do cheaper, maybe shorter rides in India. And that will count as a new customer that's been referred. And so he can give you in the US, uh, you know, your full credit for a lightweight ride there. And the arbitrage, there's some money. He keeps some money and we get a saving and then the ride, the person who takes the ride gets a free ride. So it's like a win, win, win for everybody but the service.

• 2:37Sam Parr?

  And to add to complexity, if you pay with Bitcoin, you get a bigger discount, which is what I've done. And if you like do XYZ, like it's, it's, it looks incredibly shady. Long story short, it's interesting, it's a cool story, it's definitely, it's not a scam, but it's questionable about the ethics. And so do we want to promote this or not?

• 3:00Shaan Puri?

  Um, yeah, of course. I, it's not promoting it. I am interested in this guy's story. And I think a lot of people will be interested in it. You can make your own judgment after you hear him out as to.

• 3:10Sam Parr?

  Well, we've been called out for promoting unethical behavior.

• 3:14Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, but people will call you off or whatever. I, I don't think we're promoting anything. It's one thing, okay, it's promoting if we say, this is awesome, go do this. Okay, that's fair, but that's an opinion, right? Uh, but I think the right thing to do is to say, hey, here's somebody who's doing something interesting. They're, they found a way to hustle and create, uh, you know, create a business for themselves as well as value for others.

• 3:36Shaan Puri?

  We should hear them out and then let people judge for themselves. Is this like past the gray area and, and not, not cool for them? Or is this actually like, you know, fine? And so I think, I think that's, we should leave that up to the listener. But our job is to tell the story and also I'm curious. So why not have him on? Who cares?

• 3:53Sam Parr?

  Capital J journalist. All right. Well, uh, he's, he messaged you and I, we'll, we'll set it up. Um, I don't even know if he speaks English well enough. I guess we'll find out.

• 4:03Shaan Puri?

  Right, yeah, we'll find out. We'll bring him on. So I had some other of these, um, um, these are more like actual scams, but I wanted to talk about them. I don't know why. I wanted to just tell you some things that I've seen. Okay, so, um. Recently, I don't know if you've seen on YouTube or if it's just in my recommendations, but all day, every day, there's a live stream of Chamath Palihapitiya, who's kind of like a known investor, early Facebook guy, billionaire. It's like Chamath talking about Bitcoin and it has always like 40, 50,000 live viewers watching it at any given time and it says Bitcoin giveaway, Chamath Bitcoin giveaway. And what they did, so what someone's doing, which is just totally a scam,

• 4:45Shaan Puri?

  they have a stream going, they have a video embedded of Chamath talking about Bitcoin from like five years ago. It's not Chamath doing this, by the way. He's trying to get it taken down. And then on the screen, it says Bitcoin giveaway, send me your address and I'll send Bitcoin to somebody. And I think they're just making money off the ad revenue of this live stream. And it has like 40, 50,000 people. I'm sure some of that's bot traffic and some of it is real traffic. But it's hilarious that somebody's doing this like A, what a waste of time and B, it's hilarious that YouTube allows this. Chamath's trying to take it down. But A, okay, so that's one little thing I noticed. Here's another one. You know, when the US government came out with the kind of PPP, like, hey, if you're unemployed

• 5:28Shaan Puri?

  or you're an employer and you have people, you can get access to money. So of course, the Nigerian sort of scammers came out and they actually took out $100 million from the system. I don't know if you heard about this.

• 5:42Sam Parr?

  No.

• 5:42Shaan Puri?

  They just filed as either unemployed people or employers of unemployed people, or sorry, employers who qualify for PPP, the sort of Nigerian scam ring.

• 5:52Sam Parr?

  It's called the, what's it, it's called the 409 scam, I think it's called.

• 5:56Shaan Puri?

  Is that the name of the program?

• 5:58Sam Parr?

  Is that like the country code of, so a lot of these guys are based out of Lagos, Nigeria, I think. And I think, and I believe that they're there because for some reason it's part of, I don't know how it got embedded into that particular culture where they're, where they, it became a thing, but I think, I also think that there's a Not really strict laws around, like, there's a lot of loopholes in law that you can not get punished.

• 6:22Shaan Puri?

  So this guy totally scammed, or this group of people scammed out a hundred million dollars out of the government, out of the US government, while the US government was giving away money for like, in a really intense two-week, three-week frenzy. Abreu just linked some guy in, from Wikipedia, Emmanuel Nwude, I don't know how you say his name. But he sold an airport for 240 million dollars. He didn't own this airport, he just sold it. Which is crazy. So there's that, and then here's some other ones that I thought were interesting. So, you know, super PACs? Like, the political fundraising thing, which sort of like gets around the normal donation limits for individuals?

• 7:02Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's like, uh, it's like, uh, it's like they like form a company or a fund, and you give money to the fund, and that fund's allowed to...

• 7:09Shaan Puri?

  To donate a larger, larger quantity of money, right? So there's super PACs for every cause. So my, uh, my friend who's, uh, my friend Jason had this hilarious idea. He didn't do this, but he was just like, he's very politically minded, and he hated super PACs, because he's like, oh, God, like, it's the super PACs who get behind, let's say, the gun lobby, or whoever, that like fund these things that I don't agree with necessarily. And I just think super PACs are kind of shady, there's a lack of transparency, blah, blah, blah. And then he sort of had this idea of like, if you can't beat them, join them. So he was like, I know what I'll do. And I thought this was a hilarious idea. He's like, for every issue, I'm just gonna spin up two super PACs, one taking each side. And I'm just gonna raise all the money I can for both sides, and I'm gonna take a cut of both sides of it, for every issue.

• 7:54Shaan Puri?

  He's like, until they shut down super PACs. And I thought that was a hilarious way to fight super PACs.

• 7:59Sam Parr?

  Didn't, uh, do you remember at Founder's Dojo, where I used to work out of, it was like this office that was kind of like Ehrlich Bachmann on the TV show Silicon Valley? I think Dave did something like this, where he created a, a donation thing. Who was running? Trump versus Obama, uh, Trump versus Hillary? And he created like, he like created something where he was like, pledged support to Hillary, and then he also had a pledge of support for Obama, uh, Trump. He did both of those things.

• 8:29Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. There's all kinds of crazy stuff. I don't know, I don't know why I needed to bring up a bunch of fake scams.

• 8:34Sam Parr?

  What, what's, who's the wealthiest person who you know who got money off of, like, a shady way?

• 8:41Shaan Puri?

  Hmm. I gotta think about that. Do you have one?

• 8:46Sam Parr?

  I don't know if this is shady, but I have a bunch of friends that have made a lot of money, like thirty, forty, fifty million dollars off of what I consider to be borderline unethical internet marketing practices. Like, for example, who have run call centers. Like, you know how you get a phone call from like Marriott hotels? It's not really from Marriott. It's like, or you know, if you, I knew a guy who had a company.

• 9:10Shaan Puri?

  Hold on, so it's not really from Marriott, and then what?

• 9:13Sam Parr?

  I don't know how the scam works, because I get the calls all the time, but they'll say, like, you know, you won this, you won, like, it's basically they're selling you travel packages. Like, you were picked from a random drawing to get a discount on a all-exclusive trip to sandals. So that's not unethical, it's just obnoxious. And then I know a guy who made a bunch of money off a co-registration company. So like, when you sign up on Expedia, they sell your email address to eighteen other travel stuff, and he was the middle man, and he made like fifty million dollars, embedded all on, in the stock market in one big.

• 9:53Shaan Puri?

  Okay. The closest I, the first thing that came to mind, or the closest thing that came to mind, I don't actually know this person, but I, you know, know, know the guy's kid, and, and this is the dad. So this guy, Naveen Jain, who

• 10:07Sam Parr?

  Oh, I know him.

• 10:08Shaan Puri?

  CEO of this thing called InfoSpace back in the day. And like, during the dot com boom, InfoSpace was like, you know, riding high. And then, you know, sort of overnight, InfoSpace crashes, but he had sort of sold out, or, you know, protected his own interests right before the crash, and was like, you know, everybody lost their jobs in their 401Ks and the company, and this guy was like a billionaire. And so that was sort of shady. And then he started this thing called Intellius after the fact. I think that's the name of it.

• 10:37Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and it had a similar outcome.

• 10:39Shaan Puri?

  Uh, yeah, Intellis is this like shady thing where you would sign up for a free credit check, I think, or it's like back, you could find information from public records about people or about yourself. Uh, I don't remember exactly what the, what the product was because I don't spend too much time, you know, like thinking about the stuff. But basically there was this tiny checkbox at the bottom, which was like, cool, you got this free credit check, but then we're going to charge you 20 bucks a month, just kind of on subscription after that for blah, blah, some bullshit. And so they were making millions and millions of dollars and people were all like, wait, what am I get? I just paid like $200 this year for Intellis? What does that mean? What, what is this? And people kind of screenshotted the flow and showed how like, you know, size four font, the, the fine print was that you're going to get charged

• 11:24Shaan Puri?

  for this thing. Um, and so that was pretty bad.

• 11:27Sam Parr?

  Yeah, that guy claims to be a billionaire.

• 11:29Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. And he's a pretty like, kind of crazy charismatic guy. And he's now got this like company that's about going to the moon, like a rockets company and all kinds of stuff. But he's definitely, you know, behind that smile, there's definitely like some skeletons or some baggage. Um, like, you know, neither of those two, two stories in FOS space, or, or I think it's called Intellis. Um, neither of those seemed like the most up and up, um, companies.

• 11:56Sam Parr?

  Well, let's talk about some legit companies.

• 11:58Shaan Puri?

  All right. So I'll do one. Uh, so this one actually comes also from Jack. Uh, so this is sort of the Jack episode. He's the guest, but we don't have him here. Um, so he was talking a little bit about baseball cards. And I know baseball cards are hot right now because Gary Vee's been really pumping baseball cards and talking about baseball cards all the time. And, um, so baseball cards are like a collector's item. They have, they have value. They've, they appreciate over time. Um, it's, you know, like many, many goods of that kind. Um, now one thing that's a common problem for people who are buying, selling and trading baseball cards is the actual. Receiving of the, you know, you receive a shipment, you have to open it up, you hope it's not damaged, you have to verify that it's real. And then if you sell it, you gotta sort of go through that whole shipping process right back to the other person, hope that nothing goes wrong in the process.

• 12:43Shaan Puri?

  And so for people who are collecting these as a sort of financial asset in some ways, um, and they don't, they're not like sitting there trying to carry them with them to school or something like that. You don't need the physical card. He was saying, why is there not sort of a central repository where you can?

• 13:00Sam Parr?

  Like a, like a, like a, like a safety deposit.

• 13:03Shaan Puri?

  A Fort Knox for, for the baseball cards where basically you buy and sell it online, but it never moves. It just sort of exchanges ownership, but it's all stored in the central vault where it's cooled properly. So they don't degrade. They're all verified by a professional there who's centrally located. You don't have to deal with any of the shipping costs or, or potential issues there. Yeah. So I think it's a pretty clever idea and obviously could extend to sneakers, could extend to art, could extend to other things. Maybe there's something like this that exists. I don't do baseball cards or art. Do you dabble with any of this stuff?

• 13:34Sam Parr?

  Um, I got into shoes after I learned about them. We wrote about it on trends about a year ago, and I've since gotten into them. Yeah, but not to the point of wanting to make money off of it, but to the point of like spending $300 on a pair. But I did do research on this and it seems as though there's not a great solution. So Jack's on to something. We wrote about this actually, um, Heritage Auction House. What I would do if I wanted to create this, which I actually think this is a wonderful idea. I don't, I don't, I certainly don't have time, so I'm not going to, but this is a great idea. And what I would maybe do is contact a lot of the auction houses and be like, what are you guys doing now?

• 14:12Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 14:12Sam Parr?

  What, why can't this work? And.

• 14:16Shaan Puri?

  Or collectors, you know, high end collectors, people who have a portfolio of these things. Um, because I think it is a very small, it's a small, it's a niche community, obviously. It's a small number of people.

• 14:24Sam Parr?

  I don't think it's as niche as you think.

• 14:27Shaan Puri?

  My point is that the kind of circle of influence is pretty tight here where the number of people you would need to convince and that you could go learn from to see if this is a real problem is kind of small and that's great. It's like, kind of like online poker where you just go get these 15 pros to do something and now they sway the rest of the casual community with them as like, oh yeah, that's the best practice. That's how we do things now.

• 14:48Sam Parr?

  It's pretty interesting and I love it and I like it's I wonder, I would have to imagine this has significantly better economics or maybe not than storage. So do you know how the companies like clutter are doing?

• 15:04Shaan Puri?

  I always assumed that those companies are on the verge of failure. Now, I don't know if they, because and I think Omni actually, it's like, everything's going great. We keep raising money. We keep adding high profile people and we shut down. Like, that's how these companies tend to go. Or they break out, you know, but

• 15:18Sam Parr?

  But you know that Public Storage, you know, the company Public Storage?

• 15:21Shaan Puri?

  Public Storage is huge. Yeah.

• 15:22Sam Parr?

  It's the most profitable company on the stock market.

• 15:26Shaan Puri?

  Is that right?

• 15:27Sam Parr?

  By

• 15:28Shaan Puri?

  Cool claim. Is that

• 15:29Sam Parr?

  By margin. So it like does four billion in revenue and like two billion in net income.

• 15:36Shaan Puri?

  Interesting.

• 15:36Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's like the most profitable thing. Now, they don't do what, they don't do all this high cost shit that all the new startups do where they like, want to bring you your stuff. They just say like, here's a room. Bring your stuff. It's yours. Give us a hundred dollars a month. But it could be, it's a really cool idea. That's my point. And so also another thing, I'm sure a lot of people know this, but I was ignorant and I didn't know this, but these storage companies, they're real estate businesses.

• 16:05Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 16:06Sam Parr?

  It's just a, it's just a way to get profit to buy real estate.

• 16:09Shaan Puri?

  A great book I read when I was in college that inspired me. I was like, on the verge of going down the real estate track rather than entrepreneurial track or the sort of startupy track.

• 16:20Shaan Puri?

  And it's called Confessions of a Real Estate Entrepreneur. It's an awesome book if you're a total noob and you're just curious about how the hell do people make money? It's not about the terms and the tactics and all that stuff. It's this one guy being like, I wanted to make it real estate. So then, so he's like, my first deal, I had no money and I found this warehouse and then I negotiated this. And he just walks through deal by deal for like 10 deals of Confessions of a Real Estate Entrepreneur. And one of them was about storage and you know, the whole game with real estate is you sort of need to see value where others don't. So other people look at this 25,000 square foot store warehouse. And they say, okay, warehouses are valued at X dollars per square foot. So this building is worth Y. And what you need to say is, hey, if I subdivided this warehouse into tiny storage units and I add it all up.

• 17:04Shaan Puri?

  Now it's worth, you know, X plus Y dollars per square foot is more, it's worth more. So I can go buy it. I can actually pay more than the guy next to me because I'm gonna, I know I can get more value out of it than that person can. Cause I know how to change use or add value in some way. That's what we worked did. They took office floors and say, hey, what if we subdivided it and rented this out by the desk? And so that's like a common real estate strategy. And that's what storage units are.

• 17:27Sam Parr?

  And if anyone listening to this, I think some people will get mad at me. Real estate has the highest ratio of rich and dumb people like.

• 17:37Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 17:38Sam Parr?

  Well, how do you, you know what I'm saying?

• 17:40Shaan Puri?

  I know exactly what you're saying.

• 17:41Sam Parr?

  It's got the highest ratio of low IQ rich people.

• 17:45Shaan Puri?

  Yes, that's very true. Doesn't mean if you do real estate, you're low IQ. It means there are more wealthy people in real estate who are not superstar geniuses who, you know, work themselves.

• 17:59Sam Parr?

  Normal, just normal, smart, hardworking people.

• 18:01Shaan Puri?

  Right. A normal, smart, rational person who obviously had some skills, took some risks. But there are more wealthy people in real estate that way. If you just said, hey, Sean, you know, in the next 10 years, you die if you don't get wealthy. I'd be like, cool, going to real estate. Like that's, that's my best path, my highest likelihood chance of becoming wealthy is through real estate versus any other sort of venture.

• 18:23Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's the, it's the highest, it's the highest dumb people to rich people job I've ever seen in my life.

• 18:31Shaan Puri?

  I love it. Okay, so that's my, that's, that's Jack's, uh, Jack's idea, which is sort of Fort Knox for baseball cards. I like it. Uh, what else we got?

• 18:38Sam Parr?

  Are we gonna talk about hay? Did we talk about hay? I don't think we did.

• 18:41Shaan Puri?

  We didn't. Go for it.

• 18:42Sam Parr?

  Um, okay. By the way, this, uh, look at what I'm drinking here. I drink these all day. You see that? It's called Heineken Zero. It's not, not, it's not the same as non-alcoholic beer. It's zero alcohol beer. They're awesome.

• 18:55Shaan Puri?

  Wait, what do you mean it's not the same as non-alcoholic beer? What's the difference?

• 18:58Sam Parr?

  I don't know the legality, but the, I drink a lot of non-alcoholic beer because I like beer. The normal non-alcoholic beer says it has less than 0.5% alcohol. This has 0.0 and Heineken said that this is their fastest growing category.

• 19:13Shaan Puri?

  And you like it?

• 19:14Sam Parr?

  I love it. I've, I drink, I'll drink four a day.

• 19:17Shaan Puri?

  So what's in it that makes it taste, does it taste like beer or it tastes like something else?

• 19:22Sam Parr?

  Uh, it's a, it's a, they call it a malt and yeast beverage. It's a unique recipe. It has 0% alcohol. It's brewed with pure malt and special A yeast, just like the original Heineken Lager beer. Um, it has the same taste, but without the alcohol.

• 19:39Shaan Puri?

  See, that's hilarious. They sell the same product with, without the expensive ingredient and can charge the same for it. So here, well, let's give you less.

• 19:47Sam Parr?

  Ingredients, water, malted barley, hop extract and natural flavor. That's all it is. So, oh man, I love these. Uh, I drink them like crazy.

• 19:58Sam Parr?

  They're awesome. Okay. Um, we apparently, we did talk about hay a little bit, but what did you want to talk about?

• 20:04Shaan Puri?

  Uh, I just wanted to sort of call out the, the sort of marketing side of things, uh, of what they do. So have you read the book Rework, which is their, the 37 Signals book?

• 20:13Sam Parr?

  Years ago, but they basically say that like one of the marketing principles that they talk about is like to have an enemy, right?

• 20:19Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think there's a chapter called Pick a Fight. Um, and I want to read it. So let me see if I can pull it up real quick. Okay. So here's a section of it. If you think a competitor sucks, say so. When you do that, you'll find others who agree with you and rally to your side. Being the anti-blank is a great way to differentiate yourself and attract followers. For example, Dunkin' Donuts positions itself as the anti-Starbucks. It, it's ads mock Starbucks, uh, for using, you know, these fake Italian words, you know, instead of just saying small, medium, large. Uh, or they'll do a campaign like, uh, they made a site called dunkinbeatstarbucks.com where visitors can send e-cards with statements like friends don't let friends drink Starbucks. Audi is another example. It takes on the old guard of car manufacturers. It puts old and

• 21:04Shaan Puri?

  old luxury brands like Rolls Royce and Mercedes on notice by touting how it's a fresh alternative. Apple jabs at Microsoft with ads that compare Mac and PC owners, et cetera, et cetera. All these examples show the power and direction you can gain by having a target in your sights. Who do you want to take a shot at? You can even pit yourself as the opponent of an entire industry. Dyson's Airblade starts with the premise that the hand dryer industry itself is a failure and then tells and then positions itself as faster, more hygienic option. I can't believe it's not butter puts the puts the enemy right in its own name. Having an enemy gives you a great story to tell your customers. Taking a stand always stands out. People get stoked by conflict. They take sides. Passions are ignited. It's a good way to get people to take notice. What do you think?

• 21:47Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I'm down. I right now. My enemy is the New York Times a little bit. And basically journalists who say they don't have a bias, but like they can't admit that they do. So yeah, I'm down with that. And with hey.com, I call it hey.com. I think it's working well. I think that um.

• 22:07Shaan Puri?

  So they picked who I think initially they picked just traditional email like Gmail as the enemy. For being like cluttered. You just keep getting spammed by random things. It's email you don't want. It's a headache. And now they picked Apple and it was a way better fight to pick because it's a more novel story and it doesn't seem as self-serving as when they picked Gmail as the competitor.

• 22:31Sam Parr?

  And I like that. I actually like these guys a lot. And so I'm going to talk shit about them a little bit. But in general, I really like them and I respect them. But I do think that it's a little lame what they like. Some of these moves are a little bit lame because they also pick a fight with like main mainstream startups about giving equity. When they're like make millions of these guys probably make 10 million, 15 million a year in profit. And they're very, very wealthy. And I feel like it's a little hypocritical.

• 22:58Shaan Puri?

  So they they. On Twitter, people are calling this beef marketing. So just have a beef with everybody just to keep, keep your, keep your name relevant. And there's always going to be some people that agree with your side of the story. So for example, against the startup industry, they are anti VC, don't take funding, be profitable.

• 23:14Sam Parr?

  Which is weird because they've taken funding from Jeff Bezos.

• 23:17Shaan Puri?

  Right, but on the whole, they, they don't play this, they are profitable and they don't play the sort of raise A, B, C, D, E, like sort of get, get big, big, big, big IPO. So they picked that fight. They picked the fight of you don't need to work 80 hours a week. 30 is enough. Be productive. Just be smart. Don't kill yourself. You don't have to be a workaholic.

• 23:37Sam Parr?

  Tweeted the other day that they are working through the weekend to resolve all the issues.

• 23:40Shaan Puri?

  Right, but I'm saying in general, they, I'm not saying these are correct. I'm saying these are the fights that they, they easily trigger people, just like they triggered you just now. Then there's, then they also do like, they take summers off, which is part of their kind of like, don't be a workaholic thing. And they have one more, which is sort of like, don't depend on any platform. So like, don't be, don't be dependent on anybody. And these platforms.

• 24:00Sam Parr?

  I get it. And I like a lot of their philosophy. I just think it's stupid when you make rules. You know what I mean? Like when you make rules around something, it's like, dude, not everything has a rule. Like a lot of, like, you can't say that you are anti VC. I'm not anti VC at all. I'm just like pro, like, let's be logical and let's look at a variety of options.

• 24:21Shaan Puri?

  Right. But that doesn't sell, right? So, so if you just looked at it in terms of like, if they, if you just said they're doing all of this for marketing purposes.

• 24:30Shaan Puri?

  If you, if you believe that to be true, then what they've done is incredibly effective. It's sort of like buffer, right? Maybe you don't agree that you should transparently put all your company salaries and revenue and, and losses out there publicly. But if you looked at it like marketing, it's been undeniably effective at marketing the company.

• 24:46Sam Parr?

  No, I'm on board. I think, look, it's working for them. I just think that some of their opinions are bullshit, but I like them a lot. And I think that it's incredibly effective for them.

• 24:55Shaan Puri?

  So why don't you pick more fights? That was kind of my takeaway when I saw this. I feel like you guys could do way more of this.

• 25:02Sam Parr?

  I think we should.

• 25:04Shaan Puri?

  And so like, let's come up with a game plan right now. So.

• 25:07Sam Parr?

  I just picked a fight with a guy today. Did you see my Twitter?

• 25:10Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Okay. I'm looking at your Twitter right now. So you picked a fight with this two V D V L D Y? Is that the person?

• 25:17Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 25:18Shaan Puri?

  So what is this? Tell me what happened.

• 25:19Sam Parr?

  They copied my landing page. They copied trends completely. And I just, they're full of shit. Um, and I emailed them and told them to fuck off and, and they like, try to justify it. I'm like, no, you're, you're lying. Like, I just looked you up on web archive. You just copied our page. Like, I see when we launched and then when you launched, you.

• 25:35Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 25:35Sam Parr?

  Word for word ripped us off.

• 25:38Shaan Puri?

  That's, uh, okay. So you picked a fight with them.

• 25:40Sam Parr?

  But that's actually, uh, if you look at like what the rules are of this game, that's actually a bad fight. You don't pick a fight with people littler than you. You gotta pick a fight. So who should I, what should I do, you think?

• 25:49Shaan Puri?

  Well, you said New York Times. So first I was thinking, uh, cause you guys have, uh, as a competitor, like, uh, Morning Brew, right? So like they pretty similar, pretty, they're kind of similar in size. And that's one that could be more like PewDiePie versus T-Series where the feud actually would help both sides grow. So that's more like wrestling where you could be like, cool, I'm going to attack you, you attack me. This is just going to generate a bunch of buzz. It's sort of like the Barstool Call Her Daddy thing where it's like, both sides end up more popular and, uh, through the, through the drama. So like, that's one that I think you guys could do. The other one would be more like against the mainstream, uh, mainstream media, which could be New York Times. Now, there has to be some level of authenticity to it. Um, so it's gotta be something you genuinely do believe.

• 26:33Shaan Puri?

  Like, it could be the thing that like, why are you guys pretending like you're not biased? But that doesn't tell a great story about you guys and what you do. It's not that you guys are like, it's not that the value prop of the hustle is to be opinionated clearly and be subjective, not even try to be objective. I don't think that's like what y'all do. So I think you gotta pick a fight that, A, makes sense, B is polarizing, uh, and C somehow tells the story of what the hustle's all about by being the opposite of the thing you're hating on.

• 27:01Sam Parr?

  I thought about making fun of the skim because I think they're like a joke, but then I was like, I, I, I don't know if I would win that fight.

• 27:11Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I don't know. I think there's something here because I think in general you do have strong opinions about things. But I don't see that come through via the hustle, maybe intentionally. Maybe you've censored it, maybe you haven't, but I think you guys can do well with this.

• 27:24Sam Parr?

  No, I'm not in favor of censorship. How about this? Let me, let me, let me, a small tangent, something that I'm, we're testing and I'm thinking about launching is I'm pretty obsessed with the idea of expert opinion as opposed to journalist's opinion. And one thing I'm testing is I've built this network of like a thousand experts and every day we're emailing them stories and getting their opinion and we're going to just publish their opinion. We're not going to touch it. We're not going to edit it. We're just going to say, here's exactly what they said.

• 27:52Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 27:53Sam Parr?

  And that's interesting to me and I'm going to get people to pay money for it.

• 27:56Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think that's actually pretty dope.

• 27:58Sam Parr?

  It's like a private Twitter.

• 28:00Shaan Puri?

  I saw the like mockup you guys did. I didn't love that, but I love the idea of this because when I think about it, this actually what I care about. I care about what do the people who actually know their shit think about this and not the journalists with their opinion, the editor with their agenda, the journalist talking to an expert and then like siphoning off one quote and having that be, you know, that fitting into some narrative. I just like, let's say it's the like right now, the NBA is about to resume and there's a big debate, should they come back or should they not come back? Some of the players don't want to come back because of coronavirus. Some of the players don't want to come back because it takes away from the Black Lives Matter movement. And there's all these ESPN talking heads that talk about this, like there's literally this guy Brian

• 28:43Shaan Puri?

  Windhorse who's like, you know, the opposite of a basketball player. He's like a short, fat, white guy who's never played basketball and he's always talking about what should happen, what shouldn't happen. And I'd rather just be like, cool, the, the ping goes out to all the NBA players and here's the 80 responses we got back. LeBron said this, I don't know if it's anonymized or if it's with their name, but that would be way more interesting to me. It's like, here's what they actually think.

• 29:07Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So that's what I'm thinking about building or that's what we're, we're attempting to build. And, and in that case, the enemy to me is clear.

• 29:15Shaan Puri?

  It's like journalism as a whole.

• 29:17Sam Parr?

  Journalism, because if you think about it, like

• 29:19Shaan Puri?

  We don't need you.

• 29:20Sam Parr?

  Everyone with a phone is a journalist and I hate when I hear I hate the fact that journalists, journalism is a circle jerk on Twitter, like they only want to impress each other. They don't want to impress their audiences. Like you have to like what I tell our team. I'm like, guys, we don't serve each other. We serve our readers like we are their waiters. We are their servants. We exist to give them information. Um, and my team who has worked at a variety of places are like, well, that's so different than other places because it's all about how do we win awards? Or how do we uh do this or that? And I'm like, yeah, that baffles me that that is the thing. So that's our enemy for that.

• 29:58Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Okay. I like that. I think that could be good. Um, cool. Pick a fight. I like it. Okay. I have I have another random idea or or thing to talk about. So we both like this comedian, Chris D'Elia, and uh he was funny guy. We thought he was great.

• 30:16Sam Parr?

  The best.

• 30:16Shaan Puri?

  I'll speak for myself. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know how you felt, but we thought he was hilarious. Whatever. He's a comedian.

• 30:21Sam Parr?

  I thought he was the best. I've I've seen him live a couple of times.

• 30:24Shaan Puri?

  And um I listened to his podcast a bunch. That's one of the few podcasts I listened to. Anyways, last week gets exposed as sort of like a creep. And so um bunch of people come out and say, hey, Chris D'Elia was messaging me when I was, you know, 17, 16 years old. Um, and asking me for nude pictures and all this bad stuff, right? So a whole bunch of people come out at once. Turns out Chris D'Elia is creeping around or allegedly creeping around. And so this comes out. He's sort of getting canceled right now. So two questions for you. Um, art question for you. What was your reaction when that happened? Um, and then I have an idea based on that.

• 31:01Sam Parr?

  My reaction was if I was even bummed that he was accused uh and the evidence.

• 31:09Shaan Puri?

  Was pretty damning.

• 31:10Sam Parr?

  Strong.

• 31:11Shaan Puri?

  Pretty damning.

• 31:12Sam Parr?

  So I believe it to be true. And in my head, I think, well, fuck you. Like, you're, you're the worst. So I feel pissed off because I, I was a huge, huge, huge fan. And I, I don't know, I'll still listen to his jokes, but I will not like support him financially.

• 31:29Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So that was my other question. Well, if you're listening to him, you're still supporting him in some way.

• 31:33Sam Parr?

  I guess so. But I don't know if I would pay money to go see him.

• 31:36Shaan Puri?

  Right. So that's kind of my other question is, and nobody really talks about this. It's sort of like, cool, I'm a fan or you're canceled. But I think in reality, you know, as so many people, this is, you know, two of my favorite comedians, Louis CK and Chris D'elia, both came out to be doing really creepy messed up behavior. But there's also people who are clearly still fans of Louis CK. They're probably not fans of what he did, but they're still fans of him. They'll still listen to his stuff. They'll go to his shows. And I was wondering, how do you deal with that? Kind of like being torn between like, well, you don't like what they did, and maybe you don't even like the person, but you kind of like their art. You know, like, I don't know, do people still watch the Cosby Show?

• 32:16Sam Parr?

  So like, yeah, I still watch the Cosby Show. I listen to R. Kelly. I love Michael Jackson music. Here's my logic.

• 32:23Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 32:24Sam Parr?

  Here's here with great people, people who achieve greatness, who are like world class at their craft, are nine out of 10 times fucking weird and hopefully only weird. Sometimes they're also bad people.

• 32:40Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 32:40Sam Parr?

  And I just accept that, like, the people who I like are also good. There's a great quote where it says, like, every great man is a bad man.

• 32:48Sam Parr?

  And in this case, it is incredibly true. We're like, he's, with all this great stuff, he just has also done a ton of bad shit. So I still like, will absolutely listen to his stuff. But I won't, I think he's a piece of shit.

• 33:04Shaan Puri?

  Right. Isn't that weird? That's, I'm sort of in the same boat. I don't know how to feel. That's why I brought it up. Because I'm like,

• 33:09Sam Parr?

  That's not weird. I mean, if you like, surely like, I don't know, I don't, I don't even like it in political, but maybe like Chick, like Chick-fil-A. It's like, dude, my taste buds don't know that you hate gays.

• 33:19Shaan Puri?

  Right, right, right.

• 33:20Sam Parr?

  So it's like I can, it's hard, you know, I could, I could disagree with you, but still enjoy your stuff. Right?

• 33:26Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. And I think, I mean, with, with all, with all that's coming out, um, everybody's going to have to figure out how they're going to deal with this. Cause your favorite something musician, athlete, comedian, politician, one of your favorites is going to go down for being a total either asshole, creep, criminal, bad guy, you know, something, something's going to come out and, um, I think everybody's going to have to ask themselves, cool, how am I going to deal with that? Am I going to still consume their stuff that I like? Or am I going to protest it? Am I going to think they're a piece of shit? Am I going to be conflicted? What's going to happen?

• 33:55Sam Parr?

  It's like, it's like, you know, Martin Luther King's one of my heroes, but he also cheated on his wife a lot.

• 34:02Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 34:02Sam Parr?

  Or that's like the rumor. Um, so it's like,

• 34:05Shaan Puri?

  I had heard about that. That's really crazy. Apparently I just learned about this, but like the FBI was tracking him for a while because he was seen as sort of like a potential enemy of the state. And they like bugged his hotel rooms or whatever. There's reportedly, uh, no one's seen this, I guess, but it's, there's reportedly tapes of him sleeping with like 40 different women, you know, outside of his marriage, um, and participating in, you know, some sort of sexually deviant activities. But he's Martin Luther freaking King, right? And he's got like, you know, a day, a day named after him and everything else.

• 34:35Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So that's what my opinion is just like everyone who's great is also bad in another person's perspective. And you just, you just gotta take the whole person.

• 34:43Shaan Puri?

  Right. Okay. So the idea I had off this was actually, um, a WikiLeaks for creeps. Cause one of the things that was really disturbing that came out of this was not just, oh, this guy I thought was cool. I liked, turns out to be not so cool. And I don't like what he did. Um, but it was like, a lot of these text messages were from like 10 plus years ago. And so, and same thing with like a lot of the people that get canceled, like the Bill Cosby stuff, a lot of that stuff I think was happening like in the nineties or something like that. And it takes sometimes decades for the stuff to come out. And I think that's a shame because, you know, A, the person sort of gets away with it and continues to harm other people or sort of, you know, be a, you know, a menace in society is out on the loose as long as these things stay secret. But I understand why people don't.

• 35:25Shaan Puri?

  Expose things and they get tied up and wrapped up in it and you know, you could see the girls who came out and said something about Chris D'elia. Their Twitter, they're getting attacked by his fans who are like, you know, well, why'd you, why'd you send them the picture and like stupid stuff like that? And so I think there needs to be sort of a WikiLeaks for creeps. Where there is a, there is a way to dump anonymously. Evidence and claims against people. And then there needs to be some sort of like verifying function, like a set of journalists, kind of like the people who went and studied the Panama Papers and like dug into it, tried to figure out which what's real, what's not. But like a guaranteed sort of anonymity layer so that, you know, information can get out faster. What do you think of that?

• 36:07Sam Parr?

  As long as there's a trustworthy third party to verify, I've been to it. It's just so easy to accuse people of doing bad stuff.

• 36:17Shaan Puri?

  Totally. And that's the reason this can't be a company because you'll just die of sort of libel and slander, you know, like, because anything that turns out not to be true. You get just get sued out of existence. I think there was like a, there was an app that used to rate guys. I think it's called Lola or Lala.

• 36:33Sam Parr?

  I remember that. I remember that. I, uh, my roommate was rated on it and it said like.

• 36:39Shaan Puri?

  Not so nice things.

• 36:40Sam Parr?

  Cheated on me and like small dick. And I was like, oh dude, that sucks. I was like, I'm sorry, right? I mean.

• 36:50Sam Parr?

  That sucks.

• 36:52Shaan Puri?

  So yeah, like I think you can't really do this as a company, but I think for society, it would be good if there's a way. For people to be able to come forward about bad behavior better for a whistleblower network to come forward. And not just about like how WikiLeaks is about sort of documents around certain things, but actually around, you know, racism, sexual harassment, things like that. I think there needs to be. Something like this. And obviously I haven't put a lot of thought into this. I'm not an expert about this stuff, but when I saw that it takes 10 years to come out. I'm like, something's broken.

• 37:21Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it is crazy that like Hannibal Buress. joked about that Bill Cosby thing and his joke was something like, what? Everyone knows this. Everyone knows this guy.

• 37:30Shaan Puri?

  Harvey Weinstein. Everybody knew that.

• 37:31Sam Parr?

  Like everyone, we all talked about this. We all know this. And it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what? I didn't know this. This crazy. Like, I wish I would have. I agree with that. I also think that there's a lot of room to deconstruct Wikipedia. I think Wikipedia is, I, I'm like, I wouldn't say I'm a hardcore libertarian, but I'm libertarian, or I tend to be on a lot of topics. And I think that Wikipedia should actually be a nonprofit or some type of like owned by the government and should be like a national treasure that.

• 38:00Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, the Department of Education should just own Wikipedia and fund it through, you know, what is the, look up the Department of Education funding. And I bet that would cover, you know, easily, easily what Wikipedia needs to stay around. And it's doing a hell of a lot more than the Department of Education probably is. Isn't Wikipedia already a nonprofit?

• 38:17Sam Parr?

  It might be a nonprofit, but I want to make sure it never goes out of business. I think that Wikipedia is a treasure. And same with Reddit. I'm like Reddit, don't make money. You don't need to make money. Well, you just ask, put a little donation thing and just let us see your expenses and I'll just give you a little bit and everyone will. It's like one of the few things where I'm like donation or government funded is the way to go.

• 38:39Shaan Puri?

  Right on. Okay, I want to give people in the last four minutes. Oh, my God, Department of Education, 68 billion in funding. Yeah, they could afford to.

• 38:46Sam Parr?

  How much you think Wikipedia? I don't even know. I mean, if you're, if you have five billion page views a month, how much?

• 38:51Shaan Puri?

  Well, they say on their thing, we need this much to survive. I don't know what it is, but it's like, I just, I don't think it's above 2 billion. I don't think.

• 38:58Sam Parr?

  I don't even know. Like, what, what do you think Twitch costs to run?

• 39:02Shaan Puri?

  Like, I don't know, so I can't say.

• 39:04Sam Parr?

  Okay, if I, or just for the hosting, like, I'm ignorant. I know nothing. Does it cost more than 10 million? Do you think it would cost more than 10 million a month?

• 39:12Shaan Puri?

  Yes. But I can't, I can't say about Twitch, but I would just say.

• 39:16Sam Parr?

  Wikipedia, sorry, Wikipedia. You think Wikipedia costs more than $10 million a month just in hosting?

• 39:21Shaan Puri?

  I think it's probably about that. That'd be my guess.

• 39:23Sam Parr?

  So they need $200 million a year?

• 39:25Shaan Puri?

  AWS could just fund it and be like, hey, this is powered by AWS. It could be on every page powered by AWS, get free hosting that way.

• 39:32Sam Parr?

  Wikipedia's funding is around 100 million a year. There it is.

• 39:36Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so I let's give them one more idea before we go because we talked about a bunch of random topics today. Okay, business idea. So I just got my new house and I'm renting this place. And as part of it, you need renters insurance. And so I'm like, oh, fuck, here's a task I don't want to go do.

• 39:52Sam Parr?

  You gotta go get lemonade.

• 39:53Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I gotta go do whatever. But then I was thinking about it. I was like, and the guy who's telling me I need renters insurance is the broker, the agent who like rented me the house. And I was like, why isn't this just part of the lease? Where like, you're like, hey, by the way, check this box because you need renters insurance, so just do it through me. And you have your renters insurance done. And so obviously, this guy is not an insurance company. But what I think you could do is create a back office insurance company where the storefront is actually just all the rental agents and brokers that already are talking to the customer, just signed the deal. They're the ones trying to enforce these terms and force you to have insurance. Why aren't they empowered? So I'll give you

• 40:34Shaan Puri?

  an example of this. I have a buddy named Guy Gal. Great name. Fucking top five name.

• 40:40Sam Parr?

  Guy Gal?

• 40:40Shaan Puri?

  Guy Gal is his name.

• 40:42Sam Parr?

  Oh, that's great.

• 40:42Shaan Puri?

  And Guy has this company called Rise, I believe, is the name of the company. And what he does is he's like, hey, you know, all these, when you go to sell a house and the sign goes up and it's like Caldwell Banker, or like, whatever, KB Homes, or whatever it is. It's like, always the brokerage name. And then like, the agent is kind of like a very secondary footer thing. He's like, dude, the world is shifting where the agents really want their own brand upfront. The agents are the one who go do the marketing, the sales. So what he did was he's like, he go and the brokerage takes a huge fee. So when an agent gets their fee, I think the brokerage will take 50%. And so he's like, look, through technology, I can make a more streamlined brokerage. And what I could do is I can be a hidden back office for any agent. So you're the agent, your

• 41:27Shaan Puri?

  name is Alex, you know, Alex Rompero. Well, you could just be the Rompero Group. And you could build your brand as the as the storefront. Forget Caldwell Banker, you don't need those guys. I will be the the back office. I'll take care of the legal compliance and paperwork that the brokerage normally does. And I will only charge you X percent fee. And it's less than the 50% that that.

• 41:48Sam Parr?

  Isn't this exactly what Caldwell Banker does?

• 41:51Shaan Puri?

  Caldwell Banker does it, but they are the back office, but they put their brand first. And a broker can try to like, kind of put their own marketing front on top, but it's not their core model and they take a huge cut. So what this guy did, what he did with Rise is really smart. He, he targeted the top 1% of agents in every market. He goes to them, he said, dude, you're a top 1%, you don't need Caldwell Banker, you are the brand. And he said, bring your book of business to me, I'll do the same work that they do for you with the lower cut. And I'm gonna, and look, you push a button, your website gets spun up automatically. I'll take care of all your sort of technology needs. And I take 15% instead of 50% or whatever it is. And so I think it's a really smart model, he's doing really, really well.

• 42:31Sam Parr?

  How much money is he doing?

• 42:33Shaan Puri?

  I can't say, but the company's doing well. And I think it's a really smart model attacking a very big space, which is this backend brokerage thing for home sales. I think you could do the same thing for insurance. I think you could build an invisible insurance company and have the brokers or the agents be the storefront. And just say, hey, you should just offer this to all your clients when they rent from you or buy from you. I know that Compass kind of did this in the real estate space. But there's someone doing this for business insurance where they, where they're trying to be a back office as a service.

• 43:00Sam Parr?

  I've seen that.

• 43:01Shaan Puri?

  I think there's more, I think there's more companies that can do this that are not doing this today. Where you empower the agent who is already at the point of sale. And you give them a thing to upsell that gives them a little bit of money and it makes your customer acquisition free. And you just need to provide the backend service for it. So I think there's a whole class of businesses like this.

• 43:20Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I need to go and research all this. I'm, this, and this interests me a lot. I'm gonna go look up Caldwell Banker. I don't even, I see their signs, I don't even know what they do entirely.

• 43:27Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, deep dive it and deep dive Compass, because they kind of disrupted this model a little bit.

• 43:31Sam Parr?

  Yeah, they crush it.

• 43:32Shaan Puri?

  All right, I gotta run, my computer battery's at 1%.

• 43:35Sam Parr?

  I'm gonna shut my computer, I gotta go, see you.

• 43:37Shaan Puri?

  Me too, see ya.