#104 - Why You Should Be Studying MLMs

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. Sam Parr (@theSamParr) and Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) host the pod today without a guest. In today’s episode you’ll hear: Shaan and Sam recap their previous episode with Tai Lopez and reflect on some of the feedback received from the listeners (1:08), Sam asks Shaan what he knows about trade associations (12:05), Shaan finds new ways to add value with trade associations for groups that traditionally don’t have them (18:35), both guys explore boring household products that could be made cool, like the Nest thermostat (24:40), Shaan walks through his renewed interest in licensing brands (31:05), Shaan and Sam explore brands that have the surprise effect and the genius of that mechanism (38:45), Shaan shares one of his secret tricks in mimicking MLMs (45:18), Sam talks through his next travel designation (48:05), Shaan’s fitness trainer is a force for optimism in his personal life (51:18). This episode is presented by Tempo! Check them out at tempo.fit and use code "TempoHustle" for $100 off. Joined our private FB group yet? It's a page where people share each others million dollar ideas or what they're already working on: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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

• 0:00Shaan Puri?

  We're back. It's my first million. I'm Sean and I'm joined by Sam. On this episode, we talk about a bunch of different topics. We debrief our Ty Lopez experience. We have a bunch of ideas around trade associations, licensing popular brands and using them in funky ways. Sam got a speeding ticket and has an idea around police radar detectors. And then we just have a couple of stories and frameworks around coming up with new ideas, such as the little trick I use with MLMs. So it's a good episode, me and Sam, and I hope you guys enjoy.

• 0:43Sam Parr?

  We're live. We are live. Before we get into ideas, we got a recap, right?

• 0:49Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think we should debrief.

• 0:52Sam Parr?

  So on, we recorded it on Thursday, went live on Friday. I got a ton of messages. We had Ty Lopez on. So listen to that last episode. What did you think, Sean?

• 1:02Shaan Puri?

  I think I actually felt like my, my, my outlook was similar to, I think, how most, what most people messaged me afterwards, or at least it felt that way, which was, I thought it was a semi-interest. I thought it was an interesting episode. I thought it got interesting later. I thought the beginning, he was kind of monologuing and doing his thing. He wasn't really saying new stuff necessarily, but I thought it got interesting. I think he is a total character and I'm fascinated by him. Like, I sent you this tweet he put out yesterday, which is like, he took a selfie in the mirror and he's like, he looks like the, you know, he looks like someone from The Incredibles. He's like, super, super jacked, which I couldn't tell when we were doing our, our recording. I couldn't get that, I didn't get that feeling, feeling at all.

• 1:42Sam Parr?

  I did a little bit. You could see, he looked, uh, fit.

• 1:45Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, he looked fit, but like, dude, this picture is crazy, but it was just added to the like, just how hilarious of a character he is and how over, like, over the top and larger than life in many ways. So anyways, I thought it was interesting. I thought he, you know, was pretty open. I thought, yeah, he does this thing where he kind of like redirects conversations towards what he wants, which is fair, like, most. Kind of successful persuasive people I've seen have this talent. He uses that talent a lot. But I thought he was fairly open. I thought he was down to answer any questions. He didn't. We've had people come on and like, I can't talk about that. And, you know, blah, blah, blah. He didn't have any of that in his, in his, in his talk.

• 2:24Shaan Puri?

  And then the other thing was the people who hated him before still hated him. People who loved him before still loved him. And then the people on the fence, I think, leaned towards, he's a smart dude. He's interesting. I like him. I like him more now than I did before. That's how I read it.

• 2:36Sam Parr?

  I think that you in particular, I told you this when I was texting you, you did a really good job of pressing him. I didn't really press him so hard. I, I think that someone once wrote this review on the podcast that we congratulate ourselves a lot. So I'm always trying to be aware when I do it, but I would say you did a very good job of pressing him. I think that I would have, we probably both would have been even better if it were in person. It was a little bit hard to interrupt him when he was speaking with

• 3:04Shaan Puri?

  For sure.

• 3:05Sam Parr?

  Because there was one, a few times where we both wanted to say stuff and we accidentally had mute on or something like that. And so I wish we could have done it in person, but it was cool. I got, I got dozens and dozens and dozens of like messages from people who are,

• 3:21Sam Parr?

  I was shocked were listeners. And I thought, I was like, oh, wow, this is cool. This was good. Did you get a lot of messages?

• 3:26Shaan Puri?

  I did. Yeah. I got text messages that were like, oh my God, my, my bullshit radar is going, is beeping off like crazy. You know, for little things like he wouldn't share his age. And it's like, it's one thing to not share certain numbers, but like, when you don't share your age, it like just reinforces this belief that way. Are you kind of shady? Which I just found funny. I don't even understand why he wasn't sharing it, but whatever. And then other people were like, like some people did these really insightful recaps where they were like, they wrote blog posts or they tweeted, I retweeted a few of them. But one thing that I thought was cool was people were very like reflective of, okay, I felt this way about it, like, you know, Where do I stand? And what does this mean about me? And like, what parts can I give him credit for? What parts do I feel, you know, he was kind of overhyping?

• 4:09Shaan Puri?

  And I just thought people had like an introspective, some people had like a very introspective response to it, which I thought was kind of, I don't know, interesting. It's not what I expected. We never really had that. I never felt that with any other episode.

• 4:20Sam Parr?

  I felt pride because I think that like in the world that we live in right now with the election coming up and everything, we live in a very polarizing environment. And I'm really proud of the audience that and the brand that we're building and the community and the listeners and ourselves, because we are all pretty reasonable about listening to different perspectives and different ideas and not being too harsh and understanding that there's two sides to every story. And I felt really proud about that, where there were some people who I'm really good friends with. Like Andrew was like, yeah, I'm still, I, he, our friend Andrew was very vocal where he was like, yeah, I disagree with you guys entirely. That's cool. Wonderful. It's okay to have friends that disagree. But in general, even people who disagree were like, I disagree. I understand their opinion though.

• 5:05Sam Parr?

  And I think that made me very prideful. I felt wonderful.

• 5:09Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I felt good about that. And the other thing, I actually don't think we did a great job pressing him. The reason why is I didn't do a ton of research. Like a lot of people who really don't like this guy, it's because they've looked into a whole bunch of things. They've read all the Reddit forums. They've watched the YouTube teardowns and like they, they, they know more info. That's not, I really wasn't interested in tearing the guy down or like doing investigative journalism. That really wasn't what was interesting to me. I sort of just assumed going in, this guy's a pretty talented marketer. He took advantage early on the YouTube platform and he did what a lot of people do. He sold, you know, kind of a dream and he probably, you know, his content was probably good. Not completely original, but who cares? He curated good content, gave it to people.

• 5:51Shaan Puri?

  If you actually applied that in your life, it would have helped you. If you didn't, it wouldn't have helped you. Probably was kind of aggressive on certain pricing tactics or like, you know, certain things. May have crossed the line in certain areas. I'm, I don't really know. I don't, personally, that was less interesting to me. Just like during the convo, I was like, You know, people get all up in arms. Did you rent the Lambo? Did you?

• 6:11Sam Parr?

  Yeah, that was bullshit. Who cares?

• 6:14Shaan Puri?

  Who cares? I personally just don't care about that. And so I think some people who cared about that felt like, did you let him off the hook? You guys didn't look into enough. But it's just, I didn't care about that. That's not what was interesting to me. I would have somebody on here who's a total internet scammer, or somebody who's a hacker, or somebody who hacked a Bitcoin exchange. That doesn't mean I think they did a good thing, but I'd be fascinated to talk to that person and understand, who are you? Why do you do this? What's cool about this? Are there two sides to this story? What's your point of view? You know, like, I'm just more of an interested person and less, uh, I'm not trying to be the cops. And I think some people wanted us to be the, you know, the cops and sort of waterboard them. And I, that's just, I wouldn't have done that to anybody. It's not really what I'm interested in.

• 6:55Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I didn't really care about the whole leasing the cars thing. That didn't matter to me. One, I will say though, one thing that's fun about that. So whenever I hear of someone interesting, I always type in their name into Google, followed by the word house. One way that you can figure out if someone's legit is by their real estate holdings. And if they're a big deal, typically their home purchases come up on Google. Which is fun. And I'm, you know that Grant Cardone die? What's his name? Grant Cardone? I don't know how I feel about him, but he has this private jet and I noticed that the seats have his name embroidered into the seats. And I'm like, oh shit, that's like a legit, I'm like, holy moly, that, that whatever he's doing, he's got some cash somehow. So I, that's like a funny topic.

• 7:38Shaan Puri?

  We can get Grant on here. He, he used to use our product a ton. So I've been around, I've talked to him a bunch of times.

• 7:43Sam Parr?

  Let's do it. I would like to have him on.

• 7:45Shaan Puri?

  I either have his number. I definitely have his email. So I think we can get him on.

• 7:48Sam Parr?

  My friend, or Ramit Sethi, who we also have to get on, he was like, dude, he, his name is embroidered on his seats. He's like, that's a legit, he owns that jet. And I thought that was funny. And then last thing was Ty kept saying Silicone Valley. Huge pet peeve, but that's okay. Whatever. That's not important. But what he, something he kept doing. And our friends from Silicone Valley kept doing this where they were like, As Ty would say, Silicon Valley sucks for this reason. And then our Silicon Valley friends were like, "You internet marketers suck for this reason." And I'm like, "You guys are all like, kind of the same." We're all the, I mean, it's, it's like the same shit. It's like, Ty definitely was quirky, like, a little Aspergery. A lot of our friends are kind of Aspergery.

• 8:29Sam Parr?

  Uh, like, they all like, say the same, like, their strategy's the same thing, to charge a lot of money for quality products, and to hold companies forever, and do this, and it's all the same. They're all the same person. They all agree on a lot of the same stuff.

• 8:42Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I don't think, I don't think they're exactly the same, but I think they-

• 8:46Sam Parr?

  They have similar-

• 8:47Shaan Puri?

  -have a lot more in common than they, than they think. Uh, the second thing is, they're both hypocritical about each other, right? So like, for example, uh, when Reddit got started, the founder said, you know, "We went on, we created 30 different accounts, and we would be commenting on all the different posts to make it look like there was activity," right? That was their fake it till they make it strategy. Airbnb sort of, uh, famously got, got, uh, exposed for, early on, they would scrape Craigslist, pull the listings automatically without the permission of the homeowner, post it on Airbnb as an Airbnb listing, and then email under a fake name Jenny, uh, to different people being like, "Hey, I would love to rent your place, but do you guys use Airbnb? Like, I prefer Airbnb, it's much safer over there." And that's how they grew awareness. It's sort of a black hat technique. There was no Jenny.

• 9:31Shaan Puri?

  They did this without permission. And like, these are like, some of the, Airbnb is one of the best brands in Silicon Valley. It's like, kind of a awesome company that people look up to, and like, you know, it's admirable. And maybe Ty Lopez, you know, maybe he has his own versions of either faking it till he makes it, or, you know, charging in some kind of like, you know, duplicitous way, or whatever. I don't know. There's, I have tons of examples on both sides, where both sides have a ton of dirty laundry, internet marketers do, and so do Silicon Valley companies. Uh, so I think it's sort of hypocritical to be like, really virtuous, which I think was his point, was like, there's a lot of virtue signaling in good old Silicon Valley. But yeah, whatever. I don't know. Enough about Tai Lopez. I feel like, you know, you're gonna feel you're gonna feel about it.

• 10:16Shaan Puri?

  I feel like we did a decent job of it. I was interested in it and I don't hate the guy or think he's like, you know, the worst thing ever invented like some people do.

• 10:25Sam Parr?

  I would totally hang out with him. I would absolutely hang out with him. Did he text you by the way? He asked me for your number. Yeah. I was like, that's kind of cool. You're texting Tai. He's like some guy that like, he said seven out of 10 young men in America knew who he was and I bet, I believe that.

• 10:40Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you know, I think, I don't know, he's a character. What's there to hate about this guy? But if you hate him, whatever, you have your reasons to hate him. If you love him, you have your reasons to love him. I don't really care either way on that. My personal opinion is I think he's talented. I think he's a character and I think he's an over the top character and I find that fascinating. I think he has some tells where he overhypes and he quotes Buffett and he quotes, he's just a quote machine to kind of give himself credibility. Like I'm doing this thing. Well, here's a quote from Socrates that tells you why I'm doing this thing. And like, there's a talent in that, but it also reveals a little bit of like, well, can your actions and can your logic just stand for itself? You know, there's, that's, that's usually a masking technique that people use to do that.

• 11:25Shaan Puri?

  But like, whatever. I don't know. I'm cool with him. I think, I think he's an interesting dude.

• 11:29Sam Parr?

  Well, we, we've milked it for all it's worth. So it's good on us. Uh, you want to talk about ideas?

• 11:35Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, let's do it.

• 11:36Sam Parr?

  I'll bring one up first. Okay. So Ryan Beagleman, our mutual friend tells me about this all the time and I have been interested in it a little bit. What do you know about trade associations? Anything?

• 11:47Shaan Puri?

  Just that they exist and that they, they sort of have this like very beautiful business model where they're charging everybody for kind of like pretty simple amount of value.

• 11:57Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's like good straightforward value and I didn't know too much about them, but they're kind of interesting. Trade associations are kind of a business where it's like, everyone knows what they are or has heard of one, but you don't actually think about how they like came to be and nor do you think about like creating a new one, but I think you can. And the reason I'm thinking of one in particular is it's called the Society for Human Resource Management. And I discovered it because, uh, the CEO is like, uh, friends with Trump or something. So somehow this came up like on the news that the CEO of the society is with Trump for this. And I was like, just Googled it. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. So it has 350,000 members of this. Human resource management company and makes $150 million a year in subscription revenue.

• 12:41Sam Parr?

  And it's beautiful. Another one is there's one for all types of different engineers. So like, I don't even know the type of engineers. Could there be like, bridge building or whatever the?

• 12:53Shaan Puri?

  Mechanical, civil, yeah.

• 12:55Sam Parr?

  Yeah, like, you know, whatever it is, there's a bunch like that. There are so many trade associations and I actually, there's this one trade, there's one email list that I used to use to post my job in when I needed an office management manager. It was called the Org Org. Have you heard of the Org Org?

• 13:13Shaan Puri?

  This is for office managers, right?

• 13:14Sam Parr?

  Yeah, this young woman started it. I think she was like really young and it was just like an email list. That's all it was, but it was like super effective. And when I, when you hear the Org Org, I'm like, oh, this is like some silly email list. It's not that big of a deal. And then I see this business, the Society for Human Research Management. I'm like, oh my God, this thing could actually probably be huge if you, so anyway, kind of a cool business model. What do you think?

• 13:37Shaan Puri?

  You said the word beautiful earlier, so I call these beautiful businesses. A beautiful business, when I say it means it's just so elegantly designed to just be a cash cow. And a beautiful business is one like this where the product is incredibly simple. The lock-in is huge because you're going to join the big trade association. You're not going to join some small up and comer. So it has this amazing defensibility, just in the network effect. They charge, you know, annual recurring subscriptions and people are going to keep their fees. They're going to say, stay a member of the association on the average. And it's like zero work, zero innovation, zero everything. And I just think it's like beautiful business and the sort of the effort and difficulty

• 14:19Shaan Puri?

  to reward ratio is beautiful. So I think you said it absolutely right.

• 14:24Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and for anyone interested in this business model, maybe we'll do a deep dive later on. But they, trends, we did one on like peer groups and those are not beautiful. Those are a lot harder than they look, but if they work, they're beautiful. But a lot of trade groups are nonprofits. So you can research any type of trade group. And if you Google like, for like the name of the trade association, then revenue or name of this trade association and then what's the nonprofit filing number?

• 14:55Shaan Puri?

  Uh, like 5013C?

• 14:57Sam Parr?

  Yeah, if like, if you Google that word, that phrase, or if you Google the trade association followed by annual report, they all reveal all their revenue expenses. So you can be like, oh, wow. So this group charges 300,000 people, a thousand dollars a year, and they charge the company. It's like, it like, gives you the total playbook on how to do it. So pretty cool. Uh, so I saw this and I thought that was interesting. What else could this work for? And frankly, it could probably work for the same thing. You're probably just doing another HR one. All right. Today's episode is brought to you by Tempo. Tempo.fit is the website. I actually use this. I've used this for a few months now. And it's this machine that has a touchscreen and this 3D sensor. And what it does is they give you

• 15:39Sam Parr?

  weights, like 115 pounds in weights, and it's for strength training. So what it is, is it measures your body and it sees how much weight you're lifting. It sees how many reps you're doing and how much effort you're putting in, what your heart rate is. It's pretty amazing. And then you have a coach on screen walking you through what to lift, how many to lift, what workout to do, whether you want to do a 20 minute, 10 minute, 50 minute workout. It's pretty amazing. But the best part is the leaderboard. The other stuff, all the features that they have, that's cool. But I'm obsessed with the leaderboard because it measures how many reps you're doing and how much volume you're doing. And you can compete with other people who have taken the same class. So it's made me want to work harder, lift more weight, or have more endurance. It's just pretty freaking fun. And the whole point of working hard is to have money so you can spend it on stuff

• 16:22Sam Parr?

  that will make you live longer. And this product Tempo, it checks that box for me. So they're our sponsor today. If you use the code TEMPOHUSTLE, you'll get a hundred dollars off. So tempo.fit is the URL and TEMPOHUSTLE, one word, you'll get a hundred dollars off. So check it out. I use it. If you look me up on Twitter, you'll see I'm always filming videos where I'm talking to that company, saying I'm trying to crush their employees on the leaderboard, because I actually love this thing and I, and I use it all the time. So check it out.

• 16:48Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, or you could do this, I like the same, remember that sort of two by two matrix I talked about where it's like old problem, new problem, old solution, new solution. So what I would do here is, let's say this is a beautiful old solution. There's an existing solution that's proven that works. I would just look for basically a new problem. Basically, what's a new market, what's a new industry or trade that didn't exist, you know, five, seven years ago? Maybe it's Uber drivers, maybe it's Airbnb hosts.

• 17:15Sam Parr?

  Oh, that's a great idea.

• 17:17Shaan Puri?

  Maybe it's crypto miners, maybe it's, I don't know, like, whatever, those wouldn't be the best fits, but Instacart workers, just the gig economy in general, right? Like, maybe it's the gig economy trade association. And, okay, cool, there's hundreds of thousands of people, I'm going to apply this old business model that's beautiful to this new market segment where nobody has taken the pole position as the trade industry, the trade association leader in that group.

• 17:42Sam Parr?

  That's a great idea. How many Uber drivers do you think there are? I have no idea. Over a million?

• 17:48Shaan Puri?

  I think, yeah, there's a lot. There's, I think there's over a million. Try to find that for us, but yeah, I think there's over a million.

• 17:55Sam Parr?

  Wow. Yeah, that's a cool idea. The gig working thing is, yeah, that's neat. That's cool.

• 18:02Sam Parr?

  Historically, like AARP is like one of the greatest trade org, it's not a trade org, but like membership groups of all time. And then it's pretty cool. I guess it's kind of like a union. That's pretty interesting.

• 18:14Shaan Puri?

  And, you know, you could also do this with other groups that like, let's say, traditionally don't have this. So I would try to find, what are the common characteristics of this? Is it, you need to have like, let's say, a million plus people in the profession, right? Maybe that's the commonality. Maybe it's that they, they all are looking for certain resources. I don't actually know what value these guys add. Do you, do you know, like, what's the, if I joined the Society for Human Resource Management or whatever? I know with AARP, there's like discounts, but for, for the HR one, what is the core? Benefit I get.

• 18:46Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I looked it up.

• 18:47Shaan Puri?

  Why is this a must join?

• 18:48Sam Parr?

  Let me give you like the um, their, their, what they say is education, certification, networking, as well as lobbying Congress on issues regarding labor management. Um, that's what they say. Now, they also, really, where they make a lot of money is conferences. So, a lot of like trade show. So, like, I mean, it makes sense. If, if I would totally send our HR person to this, I'm like, hey, there's like this thing, it's four grand, it's a two day event. You want to go and learn best practices on how to, like, what's, like, for right now, I'd be like, hey, like, remote works a thing. How do you, like, fire people remotely and get your equipment back? Like, maybe that's just like a, maybe that's just like a conference topic. I'm like, yeah, sure.

• 19:32Sam Parr?

  Sounds good. If this, if our HR person wanted to go, I would say, yeah, no problem. Um, and so, uh, I, it's mostly education and they monetize that education with, uh, conferences.

• 19:44Shaan Puri?

  Right. I think this, I think it's a good to do for us to go say, go figure out, okay, what is the core, is there a common core benefit that the trade association provide? Uh, maybe it's education. Certification I know is one, like, personal trainers have to do this, where they have to keep their certifications up to date. And it's this giant, like, essentially a scam where you have to, you just have to keep paying a hundred twenty dollars a year or whatever, just to keep your certification, like, valid. Um, and your certification, nobody cares if, if you have that certification, if they're, if you're their trainer anyways, they, you know, take one look at your body and then they work with you, like, that's it. Um, and so there's certain things that I think are providing less value than others. But like, again, if you can find some new niche, like Instagram influencers, or like, whatever, online creators, Twitch creators, whatever, right? Like, why, why is there not an association? If, if you could find one core

• 20:29Shaan Puri?

  benefit. I actually think, okay, so here's a riff off this that, uh, I'm gonna sound kind of stupid because I don't really know much about this, but I know enough to know that it's interesting. Let's take a, let's take a profession like, like vlogger or streamer, right? So there are, you know, every given month, there's millions of video game streamers, millions of YouTube creators that are, uh, creating. Now, obviously, they're not all successful, they're not all full time, they're not all, all making money. Uh, there's like a power law, right, where the top X make it. I think, for example, on Shopify, the, you know, there's, I think a hundred thousand sellers that do over a million dollars a year. There's sort of a similar ratio, uh, when it comes to streamers or vloggers on YouTube. And, uh, they don't have health insurance, for example.

• 21:12Shaan Puri?

  And what happens is most of them don't care about it. They don't use it. They're younger. So they, you know, till 25, 26 or whatever they're covered on their parents' thing. Or they just like, whatever, risk it, win it, right? And so there's these things that churches do called healthcare co-ops. Have you ever heard about this?

• 21:31Sam Parr?

  Go on. Yeah.

• 21:32Shaan Puri?

  Healthcare share programs, I believe. And it's basically a, you can get healthcare, not through a traditional healthcare provider, but you can create a co-op within your community, within your church, where you basically pool money and insure each other. You should insure the other members of the church. This has become quite popular. I started looking into this market because I think it's one of those like secretly really big markets. A huge number of people now are participating in these healthcare share programs that are done by the church. And churches have this loophole where I think you otherwise need to have insurance, but this qualify, you could do it through the church and you don't have to do it through traditional providers. And so they sort of get this workaround.

• 22:13Shaan Puri?

  So I wonder, this is like crazy idea, but I wonder, can somebody find a problem like that for online creators? Right? Instagram, YouTube, Twitch, whatever. And solve one of their core needs such as healthcare. And can you, can you solve it in one of these like ways? Like could you, you know, create a, could you take an existing church and expand the model to where it works for them? Or could you create a new type of insurance carrier that, that will, that will live OTT on top of existing providers, but focus on this, this customer segment specifically? I think anywhere there's a new job, I just want to apply old services to new professions because they're usually pretty immature.

• 22:52Sam Parr?

  What I'd be curious about is how do like nomadic remote workers, what do they do for health insurance? And that's one of these new things. We, uh, I, does every company have this or for in October? I don't know if it's just us or if it's every company, but we're doing, we have enrollment for healthcare soon. And now that I'm out of state. I don't know. I gotta figure out what to do. And so this is the problem I'm facing. And I'm curious as to how people who live in Bali, like one of the woman who works at our company used to do, or how people who travel all the time. I mean, I don't know what they do for healthcare. I'm very curious about that.

• 23:30Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I don't know either. Again, I said at the beginning, I'm gonna look like an idiot because I don't know enough about it, but I know enough to know this is an interesting problem area to go look at. Anytime lifestyles change, work patterns change, new jobs emerge, opportunity has simultaneously emerged. And so that I think all these are sort of really, really interesting ones to look at. I've also seen a bunch of things fail in this space. Like I had a friend who was trying to provide the back office for Uber drivers. He's like, hey, they need to pay taxes and they need health insurance and they need these things. And, you know, company failed and he was like, yeah, it was just really hard to convince Uber drivers that they needed this. Like, I know they need it. They didn't know they needed it. I don't know if that was just his excuse or if that

• 24:11Shaan Puri?

  was like legit, the actual core fault of the of the problem, because fundamentally, I believe in that that idea. And so I reached out to find out why it failed. And that's what he told me.

• 24:22Sam Parr?

  All right, I'll give you one more quick hitter. Okay, so you know how so this guy named Tony, you know who Tony Fadell is?

• 24:28Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, the creator of Nest.

• 24:29Sam Parr?

  Is that how you say his name?

• 24:29Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 24:30Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So what this guy did was he helped Steve Jobs build the iPhone and or maybe the iPod, I forget, and or both. And he looked at, I guess what they did was they looked at kind of like things that we kind of use on a regular basis that many people had and had bad user experience. And they made it sexy and cool. And he did that with the thermostat. That is something that most every single American, maybe every American has. And they actually are a little wonky or they're not actually neat. And he like created this thing. It's like, oh, well, that's a no brainer, huge market. And so oftentimes, I think of products that are like that. And I think I found one. It's not actually a big enough market, but it might be. And here's what it is, um radar detectors for cars.

• 25:14Sam Parr?

  I am traveling now, I'm driving all over the place and I got a speeding ticket and I was pissed off because I was going seventy or I was going too below the limit and I just crossed, I was at midnight in the middle of Kansas and I just crossed this thing where it said construction zone and the speed limit reduced and the guy just got me and I was so pissed off, I was like dude, first of all, it's midnight and like no one's around except for cows. Second of all, you, I was going sixty eight and a seventy and you just like, that's kind of a bullshit. So I, I, out of defiance, I went and got a radar detector. They are so hard to use and set up and I started doing research and some of these companies, the top one is called Uniden. It's publicly traded, does like two hundred million dollars in sales, selling this radar detector for five hundred dollars.

• 25:56Sam Parr?

  And I had to watch a thirty minute video on YouTube on how to set this up. It was so challenging. And I still don't exactly know what it all means, but.

• 26:05Shaan Puri?

  Do you know roughly how many of these are sold or like, do you, do you know roughly what the, what the market size is for this?

• 26:10Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so the, the, some of the bigger guys are Uniden and I think it's pronounced S-COR. S-COR owns a couple of brands and, uh, uh, exec at GM was formerly, formerly the CEO. It does like two or three hundred million in sales. Uniden is a Japanese company. It's, uh, uni, like university and then den, D E N. Uniden does like a hundred and fifty million dollars in sales, quite profitable. So it's not like huge, huge, but hundreds of millions in revenue, but probably globally billions in revenue. And I'm shocked at how horrible of a product this is for the five hundred dollars that I bought it.

• 26:51Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that seems awful. Um, and I love this, I love this niche, right? Because who, who the fuck thinks about this on a daily basis? Um, but, but clearly, you know, this is a product that's been around for decades. And, uh, it serves a very clear pain point and I could totally see how these would be outdated. I'll give you an example of another one that's like this. Pools. So I have a swimming pool now in my, my, my new place. And you know, you always, the guy comes every week and like changes the like chemical balance or whatever to make sure the chlorine is good. And he has to measure it using this thing. So some guy, some founder who listens to the podcast had reached out to, I don't know, be in my mastermind or something like that. And I saw what his product was and it was a

• 27:32Sam Parr?

  I know who, that's my friend.

• 27:33Shaan Puri?

  Oh, nice. Yeah. It's like this floating pool chemical detector, right? It basically, it's a little, little buoy that floats around in your pool and will constantly just make sure that your pool is in balance. And you can look on your app and you can see, you know, whether it's good or bad and your, if your pool is in a, in a good state or not. It's like, take this kind of old problem. And it's not even like rocket ship, you know, type of technology that you got to build to make a better solution, right? Nest is not that amazing. It's like well-designed for sure, but it's not a thermostat.

• 28:02Sam Parr?

  It's okay.

• 28:03Shaan Puri?

  It's okay. Yeah. And, um, you know, it's got a screen and that's the core innovation. You can control it from your phone. Great. There's how many other sort of household products could use a little modern, modern touch-ups?

• 28:18Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And that I think about that all the time because I thought the Nest thing, I'm like, oh my God, that's one of those things where you're like, well, yeah, it seems obvious now. And

• 28:28Shaan Puri?

  Iiro did this with routers, right? So they, they modernized the router and, you know, had a decently, had a decent exit. I don't know how well it went for them. They raised a lot of money, but, they got adoption and that, that's another example of one of these.

• 28:41Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Routers are up there. I just, I, I like thinking about that. Like what are household products that we all use and we have forgotten about? And I, I grew up with a radar detector. My, we would, we would always drive to Florida for 20 hours and we would have one. And I thought it was funny. I'm like, that's kind of funny to like build a company just to detect, just to help you kind of break the law, which I think is awesome. Uh, but man, I'm using this freaking radar detector. I'm like, oh, well there's, and there's actually like a cult following. Like there's a lot of people like me who are gadget nerds and who are obsessed over this and, uh, it's a pretty cool thing. There's another company that's similar to this that is far more famous. Do you know WeatherTech?

• 29:22Shaan Puri?

  No.

• 29:23Sam Parr?

  Have you heard of WeatherTech?

• 29:24Shaan Puri?

  No.

• 29:24Sam Parr?

  You've never heard of WeatherTech? Okay. It's like they've almost, I would say they have done it. They've built like, you know how Yeti made coolers sexy?

• 29:35Sam Parr?

  Let's you here. You're you're gonna flip a little, little. You know what they made sexy?

• 29:39Shaan Puri?

  What?

• 29:39Sam Parr?

  Floor mats for a car.

• 29:41Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 29:41Sam Parr?

  Floor mats for a car.

• 29:43Shaan Puri?

  Looking them up.

• 29:44Sam Parr?

  So weather tech.

• 29:45Shaan Puri?

  Because what? They look better or what?

• 29:46Sam Parr?

  Super Bowl ads in the South. They're popular because it's like.

• 29:49Shaan Puri?

  Is it the design or is it just that it's like super high quality? Or why do people love these?

• 29:54Sam Parr?

  I think it's both. It's incredibly high quality. It's very expensive. So it's like I bought them for my car. I paid $600 and for some reason that made me like it. Uh, but it is high quality and it feel it's like they branded it like an outdoorsman thing. $400 million in sales, $100 million a year in profit.

• 30:13Shaan Puri?

  And how old is this company? Is this like a 20 year old company?

• 30:16Sam Parr?

  Yes.

• 30:17Shaan Puri?

  Okay. Yeah, this is cool. Okay, I like it. This is so like outside of my hobbies, my likes, my business knowledge. I'm like, I would be the worst person to ever start a weather tech type company.

• 30:30Sam Parr?

  Maybe, but you have a nice car. Don't you do care about having a clean car? I mean, that's like, kind of all it is.

• 30:36Shaan Puri?

  No, you've never been in my car. My car looks like shit all the time. I bought it. I buy a nice car and then my car looks like a closet. It's just awful. Uh, all right. Here's another really half baked idea. I've been thinking a lot about licensing brands. My friend Xavier actually.

• 30:52Sam Parr?

  Since Tai Lopez?

• 30:54Shaan Puri?

  No, not Tai Lopez. Uh, my friend Xavier, uh, got me thinking about this. So he was buying a company, uh, and I'm gonna have him on because he he's he's really great and he's.

• 31:04Sam Parr?

  I'm an investor in that fund.

• 31:06Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. Our our good buddy Siesta and Xavier worked together on this. And one of the businesses that they're buying or, you know, taking a stake in has a licensing component to it. I don't know how much I can talk about it, but it's basically they are, there's, maybe I can explain it. I don't know. Okay, I'll explain it. And then if he tells me we can't talk about it, we'll cut it out. So there's a company that has, um, that sells caricatures. So like I can go and for your birthday, I can get a picture of you drawn and have it have it sent to you. And what they did was they licensed certain styles and we're gonna go try to get exclusive licenses across several very distinct visual styles. Uh, and the business does really great. And so. That had me thinking about licensing. The very first episode of the podcast was with,

• 31:51Shaan Puri?

  you know, one of my best friends, Sully. And what he did was his company TinyCo, they made mobile games, but they would license big brands. So they made the Family Guy game. They made the Harry Potter game. And it was a pretty, that was the differentiator. They were just like every other mobile gaming company. But licensing popular brands was their hack to get better distribution and buy in from customers. And so I started to think, where should people be licensing popular brands that they are not currently licensing them today? And so, I don't know, really wild idea, but here's sort of mixing two different worlds together and seeing if there's something in it. Enterprise education. So corporate training and corporate education is like, probably the most sort of boring and stiff. It's like the worst content that gets paid for.

• 32:35Shaan Puri?

  And so I, you know, that seems kind of weird to me. Like, why shouldn't this be better? Companies are willing to pay for it. It could be, you know, it could be interesting, but the the content chops behind it are awful. And so the idea here would be to license popular brands and use those characters and use those, those, those styles to do corporate educational, corporate training, one of the two.

• 32:57Sam Parr?

  So can you hone in on this a little bit further? So you would be the one licensing, you would pay money for someone else's IP?

• 33:07Shaan Puri?

  Yes. I would like, let's just go through a hypothetical example, right?

• 33:10Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 33:11Shaan Puri?

  In the tech community, there's this cartoon that's really popular called Rick and Morty. And Rick and Morty is a great brand for the people who know it, but it's not such a big brand that it'd be impossible to strike a deal with them. And so I would go to the creators of Rick and Morty, the IP holders for Rick and Morty, and I would say, hey, I want to do a whole safety training and let's say, compliance training, series for big companies, but I want to do it using Rick and Morty characters to explain the concepts. And so I would, on one hand, I would say, I'll pay you X for, you know, the royalties or the licensing fee. And then I would take that and then I would go to companies like, you know, the company I work at now, or I'd go to Facebook or whoever and I'd say, hey, you have this compliance training that you need all your leaders to go do,

• 33:52Shaan Puri?

  but it's so dry that they hate doing it. They don't do it, or they turn it on and they walk away from their computer while the video plays. And we make entertaining training videos using characters that everybody knows and loves. And you, that's why you should buy from us instead of buying from the guys you currently buy from. And that's how I would try to build this business. I would totally stand out from the existing, you know, corporate training and corporate education companies by doing that.

• 34:17Sam Parr?

  That's interesting. And I actually learned, I, I didn't know anything about licensing. And I, do you want to explain what Suli did with his company? Cause you guys are the licensees or licensers.

• 34:32Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, we are, uh, what would that be? I think we would be the licensees. Uh, I don't know.

• 34:39Sam Parr?

  You are licensing, you are, you are paying the money. You are not the recipient of the money.

• 34:44Shaan Puri?

  No, no, yeah, the IP holder, right? So in their case, they go to, they went to the owners of Family Guy. And they said, hey, Family Guy, huge brand, love it. You guys crush it with TV, you crush it with, crush it with merch. You're not doing any mobile games. And they're like, oh yeah, yeah, we've thought about it, you know, we, we think it could be great. And they're like, yeah, yeah, but you don't want to get into the business of building mobile games. You don't know anything about that. But hey, we, look at this, let me open this door. Look, those 80 engineers, those guys know how to build mobile games. We've been doing it for five, seven years. We have some of the most popular mobile games. Here's what we'll do. If you license us the brand for, uh, for Family Guy, we will create a mobile game that uses Family Guy characters. And I'll pay you a $3 million a year licensing fee for this, plus, you know, an extra, you know,

• 35:26Shaan Puri?

  dollar for every $10 we make on the game. And, you know, that's a, you know, hypothetical deal structure. And

• 35:32Sam Parr?

  So I, I just read about this, which is why I, I like talking about this. There's a company called, I'd read about it through on a Substack email newsletter that I'm on. Uh, have you heard of MGA? Of course you haven't. MGA Entertainment?

• 35:48Shaan Puri?

  Uh, MGA, is that the guy who makes those dolls?

• 35:51Sam Parr?

  Okay, you have heard of it. Okay, so

• 35:52Shaan Puri?

  I love that guy. What's his name? That guy's a baller. That guy's the Billy of the week.

• 35:57Sam Parr?

  Isaac Larion, that's the founder's name. Yeah, or is, yeah, Isaac Larion, I believe that's his name. So, the world's largest privately owned toy company is MGA Entertainment and Isaac Larion owns it. Born to a Jewish family in Iran, he immigrated here and so, uh, originally, what they did was they they became a licensee for Power Rangers, meaning

• 36:23Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 36:23Sam Parr?

  Some guy, another Jewish, uh, or Israeli Ameri- or this guy's not Israeli, but he's Jewish, another Israeli American immigrant, created Power Rangers. This guy went to him and goes, "Let me make toys with the Power Ranger, let me make Power Ranger toys and I'll give you a, a large cut of the money." And he did that for a long time. And then he goes, "Cool, but I don't want to pay these guys the money anymore. I want to be the, the IP guy." And so, he invented Bratz. Do you remember Bratz?

• 36:52Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, Bratz dolls, uh, for those who don't know, is like Barbie, it's like ethnic Barbies. It was like black Barbies, cool Barbies, street Barbies, like, it was Barbies with like a little bit of an edge, rather than the sort of clean-cut image. Is that a good, is that a good description?

• 37:05Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I guess. I mean, I don't know, I'm not, we're not in their target demo, but, and now their new thing apparently, which is quite popular, it's LOL Surprise. Again, we're not gonna be able to talk about this.

• 37:16Shaan Puri?

  I know, my nieces are obsessed with LOL dolls, dude. LOL dolls are, anybody with kids knows that you have to buy LOL dolls.

• 37:24Sam Parr?

  So, this article that I was reading, "If you have a daughter between the ages of four and 10, you probably know exactly what I'm talking about. If you don't, meet LOL Surprise." And the company does $5 billion in sales. They're privately owned and it's growing like a weed and it started as licensing Power Rangers and then they made their own thing. Pretty amazing.

• 37:47Shaan Puri?

  Is, it is amazing. Even just the LOL dolls, like, we could do a whole episode just on the fucking genius of these LOL dolls. It's like a little surprise what you get inside, sort of like a buying a, you know, a deck of Pokemon, or a pack of Pokemon cards. And you don't know which characters you're gonna get inside. And so, you go, you know, it has the gotcha mechanics where you want to keep going back and buying another one.

• 38:08Shaan Puri?

  And this guy, Isaac Larion, is awesome. His story is great.

• 38:11Sam Parr?

  We should do a whole thing on that gotcha thing. Okay, so let's talk about these surprises. Have you ever heard of this thing? I actually don't know what it's called. I bet you've heard it though, and you'll be able to tell me. It's a candle and you burn the candle and at the bottom of the candle is a surprise. And one out of a certain number of the candles have a diamond ring in there worth a hundred thousand dollars.

• 38:32Shaan Puri?

  No, I haven't heard this, but I love this idea. This is the type of idea that I, these are the, you know, I said, weather tech would be like the opposite of the type of company I would start. The candle where one out of every hundred thousand has a diamond ring inside. That is the exact type of company I would start.

• 38:47Sam Parr?

  Is it called just, there's a diamond candles.com. That might be just what it's called. But they like the, the, I think it's, okay, so there's a thousand dollar ring at the bottom of a handful of them. Who knows if they're even actually there.

• 39:01Shaan Puri?

  It's the Willy Wonka golden ticket.

• 39:04Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And I just Google it. There's like tons of surprise. There's like a jackpot jackpot candles and they do the same for bath bombs. You know what a bath bomb is?

• 39:12Shaan Puri?

  Yep.

• 39:13Sam Parr?

  And I guess there's some type of, so I, I love that. So there's that. What's another surprise one? Like a Willy Wonka company, like a Willy Wonka product?

• 39:22Shaan Puri?

  Uh, so mobile games use this a ton. That's where like I, I have learned about gotcha mechanics. It's like, if you want to go look this up, look up gotcha. G A C H A, I think is how you spell it. It's like the sort of the game mechanics in a lot of the Chinese game, Japanese games. And so I think it's literally started, I think with, I'm gonna sound kind of dumb. I don't think I know this exactly, but I believe it was these like actual sort of like candy machines that you would put a quarter in and you would turn it and then you would get something and it, you know, it gets you hooked to the sort of variable random rewards. Where you're constantly hunting and searching. It's like in games, they do this with loot boxes. They create these digital boxes.

• 40:01Shaan Puri?

  You buy, you know, you, you play the game, you earn coins, you use the coins to buy the loot box. Inside the loot box, you've got the new thing. Or you didn't get it. And then you want to open up more loot boxes and it's just fun to open them up. And so these are so addictive that some countries outlaw games that use these mechanics. Uh, I think, I don't know where it was. I think it was in China or India. Somewhere they banned games that were using loot boxes. Because it was, it's so addictive. It's so effective. And so some people brought this into shopping.

• 40:30Sam Parr?

  And there's, yeah, for shopping, there's a bunch of other ones. There's, and a lot of them are scams. This business attracts a lot of scammers. Logan Paul or one of the Paul brothers like had a link to one of them. They, they, this company would sponsor all the YouTubers and it was called Mystery Box. And you purchase it and maybe you get, I don't know, whatever kids like Supreme Clothing or something.

• 40:52Sam Parr?

  And it wa- I think they got big, but they're definitely full of shit.

• 40:55Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, but I, I like this idea of the sort of the, the dream, right? Like I buy lottery tickets because I think it's fun to play the lottery. Um, I love scratch offs. I think scratch offs are, are amazing. Um, they're just like pure entertainment for me. And, um, I, I think that there's other spaces where, where you could potentially apply these mechanics that's not traditional. The candle is a, is a beautiful example of, of that.

• 41:17Sam Parr?

  So that's a, so we've discovered two different frameworks, which is like household items that are boring and boring and forgotten. And you could just make up just a little better. And just ugly, like, uh, and that you could like, maybe like.

• 41:31Shaan Puri?

  Three mechanics. We did trade associations for new, new trades. We did, um, the, the household items, the everyday gadgets, uh, that are ugly and hard to set up and hard to use. And don't connect to your iPhone. Um, that's like a kind of a core, core mechanic. And then this one is the gotcha mechanics or, or licensing, either, either one, either one could work here.

• 41:54Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Oh, we did talk about, uh, licensing, but got the gotcha thing is interesting. I like candles. Um, another one that's not the same, but it does involve candles. Have you ever heard of, uh, hometown candles or something like that?

• 42:08Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's, that's a funny one.

• 42:10Sam Parr?

  You know, the guy who, so for those of you who don't know, this guy, his name is Ricky Van, Ricky Van Nien? I think his wife is, do you remember, what's the white girl from Get Out?

• 42:28Shaan Puri?

  I don't know.

• 42:29Sam Parr?

  Yeah, you know.

• 42:30Shaan Puri?

  I've seen the movie, but I, I don't know who. I was, I was looking at the black guy, not the white girl. I don't, I don't, I don't know who she was.

• 42:35Sam Parr?

  Allison Williams, Allison Williams. You know Allison Williams? She's like in a bunch of sitcoms. Her dad is Brian Williams. Ricky Van, I think his name's Veen or Nien. He works at Facebook now.

• 42:45Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 42:46Sam Parr?

  He started.

• 42:48Sam Parr?

  Okay, so I'm telling this backstory because it's interesting. It's like everyone's connected. I mean, first of all, he was like a dork who started College Humor and he started Vimeo. And he married this Allison Williams woman, so badass and cool. Then he got a job at Facebook, where he works at Facebook as some executive. But as a side project, he started this thing called like Home State Candles, where they make candles that smell like your home state. So Washington is probably pine trees, California is probably ocean, Florida, who knows? So he knew this was gonna go viral because he was a content guy and he knew that state-themed things sell best.

• 43:28Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 43:28Sam Parr?

  And so he created like candles that smell like your home state. And probably, I bet you that's a really big business, to be honest.

• 43:34Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, my friend John started something called Birth Date Candles. So he's the creator of Gravity Blanket, he's the creator of the Moon Pod. And then his third kind of like invention that kind of worked is Birth Date Candle. So like, Sam, when's your birthday?

• 43:49Sam Parr?

  June 15.

• 43:50Shaan Puri?

  June 15. So there's a candle for June 15th. It says June 15th Birthday Can- Birth Date Candle. And it has a specific smell and aura and story around June 15th. And so you would buy this for somebody else, you'd buy a candle essentially that's like their specific birth date candle. And

• 44:09Sam Parr?

  He started, and he started Gravity Blankets too?

• 44:12Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 44:14Sam Parr?

  I mean, that's like one of the biggest things ever, like one of the most virally, that's like

• 44:18Shaan Puri?

  One of the most viral things, yeah.

• 44:20Sam Parr?

  Yeah, that's like, like the blanket where you wear in the front. What's that called?

• 44:24Shaan Puri?

  Snuggie.

• 44:25Sam Parr?

  I mean.

• 44:26Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's definitely like a notable, notable product. It did super well on Kickstarter or whatever. He came on the podcast, there's a whole interview with him. And on that, he talks about the birth date candle as like one of his things. And it does really well. Candles in general are huge, huge business. Like, I looked at this business because one of my kind of secret tricks in business is to try to go find what MLM sell and then sell them without the MLM. So there's huge MLMs around candles because people love to buy candles and they buy them recurrently because literally the product like burns to the ground. And so you need to keep replenishing it. And so there's, there's huge candles, MLMs, but then there's also huge non MLM candle companies. There's one that looks great, I think it's called Vlipso or something like that.

• 45:11Shaan Puri?

  Vlipso, I don't know, we have a bunch of them in our house. And it's just like a candle that comes in like this amazing looking, you know, packaging. That is essentially like art around the house. And yeah, so I think these are, I think candles in general are good. And then if you match popular product with, let's say, um, popular tribe like home state. I think that's a really interesting way to to think about little niche products.

• 45:36Sam Parr?

  Dude, that is a great idea. Like, I love all these frameworks and ways to get ideas. Looking at what are the most popular MLMs?

• 45:44Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 45:45Sam Parr?

  That is a great idea.

• 45:45Shaan Puri?

  And also, all MLMs have to publish their annual reports because of the law, because they, you know, they're, they're basically recruiting sellers. And so they have to tell sellers how much they sell, how much each seller tier sells, all that stuff. So you can go learn a ton. I've looked at probably thirty MLMs, um, you know, annual reports in the last year, uh, because of, because of this.

• 46:07Sam Parr?

  What's the most interesting one? And why are they all in Utah?

• 46:11Shaan Puri?

  Uh, they're all in Utah because it's sort of like Silicon Valley where the talent pool of people who know how to build these is all there. But, uh, but yeah, there's a whole, I mean, there's a whole bunch of interesting ones and they've ranged from like kind of legit to like pretty fucking scammy. And, you know, there's like keto product ones, there's candles, there's skincare, that, you know, like health and wellness is the biggest one, the absolute biggest one. Um, I'm not sure why I think there's sort of a, you can't prove the, you can't prove that the, the thing works or doesn't work, uh, when, when it comes to those things. Um, when like, kind of like hippie dippy wellness products. And that's also what an MLM mom seller, you know, tends to like, I guess.

• 46:53Shaan Puri?

  But there's interesting ones. There's like a wine club that's an MLM, there's Lulu Row or whatever. That's a clothing one. Uh, there's a shit ton of MLMs, dude. They're, they're, they're crazy.

• 47:03Sam Parr?

  Well, that's a good framework. I like that. Um, and I want to give a shout out. Apparently Sean told me that the founder of OnlyFans is a listener and listens to every episode. So what's up to that guy?

• 47:14Shaan Puri?

  Owner, owner of it.

• 47:17Sam Parr?

  I don't even know his name.

• 47:18Shaan Puri?

  Owner is different than the founder. Yeah.

• 47:20Sam Parr?

  Founder, owner, whatever it is, like the, the man in charge. So it's up to him. If he ever wants to come on, tell him to come on.

• 47:28Shaan Puri?

  Alright, sounds good. Um, cool. Alright, Sam, uh, where are you headed to next? Where's the next, uh, travel destination for you?

• 47:35Sam Parr?

  Either DC, cause I want to be there for the election. I think it'd be fun. Or Asheville, North Carolina. Which one? Where should I go? I don't know.

• 47:44Shaan Puri?

  I think Asheville is going to be more interesting.

• 47:46Sam Parr?

  I think so. I'm just a little nervous that it's too lonely, like too small.

• 47:50Shaan Puri?

  Right. You should go to, you should go to Durham. Uh, I went to college there. There's a very, it's a very interesting place.

• 47:57Sam Parr?

  Is it great?

• 47:58Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's kind of great. Uh, like I think you'll really like that town. Um, they totally like invested in it and there's all kinds of cool stuff. But like there's, there's two universities, right? So there's Duke, uh, that's in Durham. There's North Carol, University of North Carolina. That's not far away, Chapel Hill. Uh, and then there's what they call Research Triangle Park, which, uh, anytime there's like these hubs, so that's a hub for biotech companies. Um, anytime there's these hubs, the town gets built out with restaurants and cool shit everywhere. Cause there's a bunch of like well-paid people. Um, but also it just has like its own little vibe. It's its own little mini Silicon Valley or Hollywood, but it's like for researchers of biotech. And so there's just like a different, different vibe, just like Utah will have it for MLMs.

• 48:38Sam Parr?

  Alright, I'm going to Durham then.

• 48:40Shaan Puri?

  Cool. Um, also I was just curious, um, how's the like, we're now in month six of this quarantine. Um, are you going crazy or what? What's happening?

• 48:51Sam Parr?

  Uh, yeah, a little bit. I feel horrible. Do you?

• 48:56Shaan Puri?

  I would say I feel horrible. I feel pretty good, but, um, I tend to feel good in general. I'm not really easily, I don't know. I

• 49:05Sam Parr?

  I'm, I'm definitely impacted like emotionally and mentally. I am like,

• 49:11Shaan Puri?

  You got, you got any good quarantine stories?

• 49:14Sam Parr?

  I feel like I'm in fight or flight mode and when I, what I've noticed is like, I've said this before, but a lot of people who live in, a lot of people who are in elite cities will be like, oh, the South is all rednecks. And it's like, in reality, all cities are the same, all suburbs are the same, and all countries the same. And so when I'm in like rural California and I, and people are in the gas station not wearing masks, I find myself in fight or flight mode and I've definitely gotten into yelling matches with these people. And it's stupid because it's not going to solve anything. Like no one's, I'm not going to change my opinion and they're not going to change their opinion. But I have found myself in fight or flight mode and like getting into, getting into it with people uh who aren't wearing masks in the gas stations.

• 49:55Shaan Puri?

  That's really funny. Uh, I'll be, you said all countries are the same. That can't be right, right? Like have you?

• 50:00Sam Parr?

  No, like, like.

• 50:01Shaan Puri?

  Way different.

• 50:02Sam Parr?

  No, not countries like USA and India, like rural areas.

• 50:06Shaan Puri?

  I see, okay.

• 50:07Sam Parr?

  Like, like rural, northern rural California is very similar as rural, uh, rural Alabama. Like, it's not like a north or south thing. It's like a rural suburb city thing.

• 50:20Shaan Puri?

  And so what, what are you doing to keep yourself from going crazy?

• 50:24Sam Parr?

  Um, exercising is the only thing that I can do. Um, I mean, I don't have a home anymore. I'm just traveling. I guess that, that's all I'm doing. What are you doing? I mean, I, I feel like I just work and exercise. I don't do anything else.

• 50:37Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I pretty much do those two things and play with my daughter and uh try to help take care of her. But um, I got this trainer who is, he's my personal trainer for fitness. He comes to the house every day and we work out in the backyard. It's awesome.

• 50:51Shaan Puri?

  But he's also like, kind of like a mindset coach, uh, life coach. And so he's great because he um,

• 50:59Shaan Puri?

  I, I, I, I usually in relationships, I'm the one who kind of is bringing different mindset things, positivity, uh, different frameworks, different lenses to, to kind of see life through. That's what I usually bring to all my relationships and he does that to me. He's like even higher level of understanding and, and drinks more of that Kool-Aid than I do. And so he's given me these little, these little tactics, these little things that help. So I'll give you an example. He was telling me the story yesterday. He goes, he goes, yeah, I went to the, he's like, he's like, I normally I wake up great, feeling great, but I woke up feeling super anxious today. I was like, oh shit, what, why, what happened? And he goes, um, he goes, you know, I knew I had to drive over here. And he's like, I actually have had an expired license for two years.

• 51:43Shaan Puri?

  And so he was like, I'm always anxious that I'm going to get pulled over. And he's like, the only thing that makes me more anxious about that is having to go to the DMV. Like fuck, the DMV is like the worst, right? Everyone kind of universally agrees the DMV is the worst. And so he's like, so I just avoided it. And so he's like, so I, I woke up today, I recognize that I'm feeling anxious about it. And he's like, I got a playbook for anxiety, right? Like, okay, feeling anxious, therefore I do XYZ. And he's like, I don't have to like, I don't get lost in the, in the feeling. Like I, I have a recipe for every feeling. And so he, he was like, all right, so I'm going to address this head on and I'm going to turn my anxiety into joy. Okay. How do I do that? And so he's telling me the story. He's like, I went to the DMV. I was like before, I was like on my way there. He's like, I was like, am I the only one who feels this way about the DMV?

• 52:25Shaan Puri?

  So he goes to Yelp and he saw that the DMV locally had like a 2.3 star review or whatever, right? Like, you know, DMV is hated by, by most. And so he, he said in his mind, he goes, okay, it's rated 2.3 stars. I'm going to give it, I'm going to have a five star experience here. He goes, okay, how do I, how do I have a five star experience? He goes, I'm going to be a five star customer at the DMV. He's like, I'm going to go in, I'm going to be laughing, I'm going to be smiling, I'm going to be patient, I'm going to be flirting with the, with the staff there. And he's like, I'm going to find the most hospitable person here, right? Five star comes from hospitality. I'm going to find hospitality at the DMV. He's like, he goes, like, I went in, I was like, I started talking and met this lady Wendy at the front and she's this, you know, she's this big black lady who has, who I could tell she was ready to have a good time.

• 53:08Shaan Puri?

  Um, and he's like, I started flirting with her a little bit, started talking to her and she was like, you know what? Like come this way real quick. And she kind of shuffled him to the front of the line. He goes through, he doesn't, he, you know, he has an expired license. They're laughing at him for having a two years, you know, expired license. And he was telling them how anxious he was about coming to the DMV and they're like, look, no problem. He didn't even have to take his test. They just give him a new license like straight away. They're like, you normally have to set an appointment, but like here, sign this sheet, boom, you're done. Uh, get out of here. And he walked out and he was like, holy shit. He's like, if I can make the DMV a five star experience for me, then like, you know, whatever, not what can rock me if I, if I can own the DMV like this. And so he told me this little story and

• 53:50Shaan Puri?

  You know, the thing I took from it was like the I have all these things that I let piss me off or make me mad throughout the day like I'm normally very good, but then I'll dip on these like stressful situations or like a like a task that I think is going to be a pain in the ass. That's actually what gets me the most. It's not usually stressed. It's usually like tasks that are pain in the ass. And he took the most pain in the ass task going to the DMV. And he turned it into a story and he turned it into a good time. And so that became my challenge. That's this little mini game I'm playing in my head. Uh, that nobody knows I'm playing, which is I'm looking out for these pain in the ass burden type of moments. And I'm going to try to DMV it like he did. So that's, that's something that's been keeping me entertained lately.

• 54:32Sam Parr?

  That is a great, that's a great story.

• 54:34Shaan Puri?

  Thank you. I loved it. When he told me that story, I was like, this is a great fucking story. I'm just hearing it in my backyard alone. I gotta tell people about this. And so I didn't know how I was going to tell people, but it turns out it came out on the podcast.

• 54:44Sam Parr?

  That is a great one. And to wrap this up, you have a trainer who you see every day?

• 54:49Shaan Puri?

  Uh, four days a week. Yeah.

• 54:51Sam Parr?

  Who? Wait, what? And what, what is that? Should I get that? That sounds amazing. What does this cost?

• 54:56Shaan Puri?

  Uh, he's amazing. Yeah, he's great. Uh, in fact, it costs it. He's like a, a kind of like an alien, like most trainers are like most kind of people who are paid by the hour. They're very time conscious, right? Like they show up on time and then they, you know, hour on the dot, they leave because they gotta get to their next client and they're like zipping from place to place. And you know, they're very time conscious. And that always doesn't work for me because you, you know, you, you hate this about me. I'm late often, right? And, um, and he's the exact opposite. He is like not worried about time ever. Um, and I asked him about this. I'm like, dude, you, we're hanging out like an hour after the workout. We're just chatting. We're, we're, you know, we're just, we're just shooting the shit about stuff. He'll be asking me about business, whatever. And, um,

• 55:39Shaan Puri?

  I'm like, don't you feel like you've never, you're never seem like you're in a hurry. And he goes, oh, he's like, I, he's like, I, I, I pride myself on being a hacker of time. I said, what do you mean? He goes, he goes, everybody is so stressed all the time. And the reason, one of the roots of, of most people's stress is they feel like they don't have enough time. Like when they feel like they didn't get enough done in a day, that just means they didn't feel like they had enough time to get stuff done. Or if they're stressed about their relationship and they're stressed about having kids, it's like, cause they feel like they're running out of time and they're, you know, their biological clock is ticking or whatever, right? People have this like, a lot of stress is based in time. He goes, I felt that way in my life and I decided to change that. So now I focus on timing. Anytime I find myself worried about time, I think to myself the opposite. What is this great, what is, what is the great timing in my life right now?

• 56:24Shaan Puri?

  What if I just felt like it was perfect timing going for me? I was like, what do you mean? He's like, so like, for example, you know, whenever I'm in a situation like, you know, you asked me to drive out here to your house to train you. Most people don't do that. Most people come to my gym. But instead of worrying about how much time that was going to take, I thought about, hmm, what, how is this perfect timing for me? He's like, and then I drove into your neighborhood. He goes, I love this neighborhood. I decided I'm going to live in this neighborhood. Like I fell in love with this neighborhood when I came here. That's, that's how timing works for me. I met you. Normally I would have never worked with you because you were trying to get me to come to your house. But I thought, hmm, maybe there's some timing that brought this guy into my life. What is he going to teach me? What's he going to show me that? I wouldn't otherwise have had, what, what is this great opportunity?

• 57:05Shaan Puri?

  And so he's really focused on, let's say, timing. And so he's like this personal trainer who also has like all these life philosophies and he just operates with such good energy and such a good vibe that like, by the end of the hour or hour and a half that I work with them, like, I'm buzzing, dude. It's like, this is, it's like a drug. It's like being around him is like a drug because he's always in such a great, great state of mind.

• 57:31Sam Parr?

  Well, I, I, I want to do this.

• 57:34Shaan Puri?

  Can I give you one more example or are we, were you too far over?

• 57:36Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 57:37Shaan Puri?

  Okay. So here's an example of how he changed my life. It's a metaphor that, that I'm using now all the time. So I don't know about you, but like, no matter how successful I get, whenever I start a new project, I get stressed again. And I get stressed ultimately because I'm afraid it's going to fail, right? Like if I knew it was going to succeed, I wouldn't be fucking stressed. I'd be, I'd just be excited. Oh, great. I'm going to win. I already know I have the winning lottery ticket. But the reality is like with any new project, I'm trying to get more ambitious and then that brings in the possibility of failure. And, um, and what he taught me was he's, when we were talking about fitness, it was sort of the same thing. I've many, many times tried to get fit and struggled with either the diet or working out consistently or whatever.

• 58:20Shaan Puri?

  And, um, he's like, you know, what gets you off track, blah, blah, blah. And what we found was it was the same root cause. It's the same fear of failure. What if I can't stick to the program? What if the diet's too hard to maintain? Uh, and then I'll find evidence of that as I go, right? When it's like, it's really hard. I'll be like, fuck, it's happening again. I'm, you know, I might fail. I might fall off track. And, um, so he was like, look, not only are we going to get the results you want, not only are we going to win, but we're going to get there with enjoyment. We're not going to stress about it. And so he's, I was like, all right, well, how do you do that? He's like, let's say today you're at a four in your fitness level. He's like, and you could be at a four in anything in your life, personal finances, whatever. So let's say you're at a four in fitness and you want to get to your 10, right? Let's get real clear about the 10. Cool. Here's what your 10 is. And I described it in detail and he made me awkwardly describe how I want my body to be and my life to be as a 10.

• 59:05Shaan Puri?

  He's like, all right, that's a 10. You're at a four now. He goes, we're not just going to do what most people do. Most people, when they're at a four, they think about the 10 they want. And then they just feel shitty that they're not at the 10 and they try to use that as fuel, as motivation of like, fuck, I hate where I'm at. I want to get to where I want to be. And they just, they just continue hating the four and wishing they had the 10. He goes, that's cool. You might get there, but you'll feel shitty the whole time. And that's not a win. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to love the four. Okay. You're at a four right now. Fantastic. And all we're going to focus on is not the 10, we're going to focus on a five. Five comes next and we're going to get really excited every time we sense that we're going from four to five. And sure, five is still not nowhere near what our 10 is going to be.

• 59:46Shaan Puri?

  But we're going to really get excited about every time we see that signs of that five coming. And so he just kind of broke it down into much smaller chunks. And the last thing he said was, if I, what if I told you again that the 10 was inevitable, you were absolutely going to get there? He's like, imagine you go outside your house and there's a corner store. And at that corner store is, you know, the ice cream you want, right? He goes, you know, when you, when you're walking to your corner store, you're not worried. Am I going to get there? You don't fear failure. You know, you're going to get there. You also know you're not there yet. Right? So you know, you're far away today, but you're cool with that. No problem. You know, you, you need to do some work to get there. You need to walk to get to the corner store. No problem. I don't mind doing the work because you're absolutely certain that you're going to get to the corner store.

• 1:00:29Shaan Puri?

  There's no doubt in your mind that you're going to fail and fail to walk there. He goes, that's how we're going to think about success for our body. It's just this corner store that we're inevitably going to get to. We just got to take a bunch of steps. And we're going to go step by step all the way there, but there's no fear of failure because it is, it is as, we are as certain that we're going to get to our destination as we're certain that we could just get to that corner store. And we're not going to feel bad that we're far away right now. Like duh, we just left our house. Of course we still got a way to go, but we're going to enjoy the walk there. And that metaphor, I don't know why, but that just clicked for me. And I just got really, really fucking certain that it's going to happen. And now I'm enjoying the process on the way there. So I don't know that maybe it was too long of a spiel. Maybe we should edit this out, but that has changed my life.

• 1:01:11Sam Parr?

  Oh, well, well, I think that this trainer is your soulmate.

• 1:01:19Shaan Puri?

  You might be.

• 1:01:19Sam Parr?

  You guys are like, you guys are like the same person, I think. You, yeah, I think you got to marry that your trainer.

• 1:01:27Shaan Puri?

  I, you know, I actually, when I saw him and I was like, wait, you used to train my wife? And he's a good looking dude. And I was like, and he's real smooth too. So I was like, oh, this, if I knew that you are who you are, I would have never let my wife trade with you, dude. Like you're Mr. Steal Your Girl. And I was like, but now my wife should be worried that I'm just going to fall in love with you because we are the same brain.

• 1:01:48Sam Parr?

  What's the price per session?

• 1:01:50Shaan Puri?

  Uh, I think he charges me, uh, what is it? Like 85 bucks a session or something like that?

• 1:01:56Sam Parr?

  And it's

• 1:01:57Shaan Puri?

  85, 90 bucks a session? What's that?

• 1:02:00Sam Parr?

  I think I need to get a trainer.

• 1:02:02Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you should work out with this guy, but you gotta be back in kind of the area.

• 1:02:08Sam Parr?

  Um, well, this is a good episode. Uh, appreciate everyone listening. Leave a review. We read all of them and uh, maybe we'll be back next week with some more trainer stories from Sean Perry.

• 1:02:19Shaan Puri?

  All right. See you.