#132 - A Simple Email Hack That Generated Millions, The World's Cheapest Billionaire, and A Simple Startup Idea No One Has Done

Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) discuss: - The crazy story of J. Paul Getty (Billy of The Week) - The importance of acting the part and story telling in creating your personal brand - What do all successful people have in common? Can you not be intense and be successful? - Who will win the self-driving wars? - Elon Musk is polarizing -- is he always right? The story of how he got kicked out of PayPal - An incredible Brooklinen Black Friday sales hack - Why has no one created the landing page for ecomm? - AI generated stock photos is a million dollar idea Reference links: - How to Be Rich by J. Paul Getty https://www.amazon.com/How-Be-Rich-Paul-Getty/dp/0515087378 - How to Get Rich by Felix Dennis https://www.amazon.com/How-Get-Rich-Greatest-Entrepreneurs/dp/1591842719 - The PayPal Wars https://www.amazon.com/PayPal-Wars-Battles-Media-Planet/dp/1936488590 - Kyle Vogt video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sliYTyRpRB8 - 3D images marketplace https://sketchfab.com/ Have you joined our private FB group yet? It's a page where people share each others million dollar ideas or what they're already working on: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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

• 0:21Shaan Puri?

  All right. What up, Sam? We got a Thanksgiving special, special episode. Other people would take the day off, but um, that's not how we roll.

• 0:30Sam Parr?

  What's going on?

• 0:31Shaan Puri?

  To be honest, we were like one minute away from taking the day off, but Sam said he's got something big to discuss, so I'm excited.

• 0:36Sam Parr?

  Ah, well, I don't know. I don't want to. It's a little different, but...

• 0:39Shaan Puri?

  You can't un-hype the hype. I already, I already hyped it.

• 0:42Sam Parr?

  Okay, I, so Sean doesn't know about what I'm gonna talk about. It's not big, but we'll see if you have anything to say about it. I wanted to talk about a couple of things. Okay, so I'm really interested in a few things. Family wealth. So there's a book called Family Wealth. Not that I'm even implying that I have family wealth. I'm just, it's just a topic that it, like, the idea of how someone can have something and pass it down. Like, anything that lasts 100 years kind of interests me.

• 1:08Shaan Puri?

  Right, the Par Dynasty.

• 1:09Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and so like, I, I like buildings that last a long time. I'm reading about wealth. I'm also interested in books written about business that are already from like crazy successful people who don't care if you read it or not. So, like, you know, not like people who get rich writing about getting rich.

• 1:28Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 1:29Sam Parr?

  There's this one book that I came across, and it's by a guy that's incredibly fascinating to me, and it's called How to Be Rich, and it's by J. Paul Getty. You know who that is?

• 1:38Shaan Puri?

  Uh, well, Getty Images, is that who that is?

• 1:40Sam Parr?

  No, that was his grandfather. So this is why, that's why it's interesting, is because Getty Images is a, Getty Images, I don't know what they're worth. They could be worth like $20 billion. They do a billion a year in sales. I don't know what that's worth, but it's a, because it's a privately held company.

• 1:54Shaan Puri?

  And I think Getty Images is just a part of it, right? They have like kind of a broader empire, right?

• 1:59Sam Parr?

  That's, that's why it's interesting. So, let me tell you the background about the family. So, J. Paul Getty died in the 70s, and in the 60s, the 50s and 60s, officially in the 60s, he was the richest man in America. He wasn't quite like the Jeff Bezos, but kinda. He didn't have that same...

• 2:17Sam Parr?

  The world didn't view him kinda in the same light. He was known as being a lot more stingy and a lot more greedy. Whereas Bezos definitely gets that, but a lot of people are like, "Yeah, he's so smart. He's brilliant," whatever. He was a little bit different. And it started because J. Paul, I think people call him J. Paul, or John Paul. I don't actually know what they call him. I call him JP, but yeah. JP Getty, I think. I don't know what, like, they called him back then. But anyway, his father was an insurance guy who somehow worked his way up and hit it big by buying an oil field for a relatively small amount of money, and it worked out so where the father died with around the equivalent of a hundred million dollars. His father died

• 2:56Sam Parr?

  with a net worth of like ten million dollars, which now is about a hundred million, so incredibly wealthy. And before he died, he gave John Paul ten thousand dollars, which is about the equivalent of a hundred and fifty K. And John Paul bought an oil field at age twenty-one, which turned into multimillion dollars. And then what he did was he learned Arabic, and he was the first kind of American to go over to Saudi Arabia. You know, Saudi Arabia was founded, I think, in the thirties, like, the modern-day Saudi Arabia, founded in like the thirties, forties, I believe. It's, it's brand new. And JP made buddies with the, with the king. I guess that's the proper title. The sheik, okay. I think he's a king. It's a monarchy. I don't know if they call it a king, whatever. Sorry if you're from Saudi Arabia. I'm trying my best. And

• 3:41Sam Parr?

  he spoke Arabic, and they're like, "Oh, this white American speaks Arabic," so he's like trying to be respectful. Right, my dad. Yeah, and so he went over and he made these amazing deals, and he's one of the first people to go into the Middle East and discover oil. And then he started buying oil companies and eventually bloomed into Getty Oil, which is now out of business, but at the time was like it was the biggest, one of the biggest companies in the world, and he owned fifty percent of it. So incredibly interesting, but let me explain a few more things. So he was known for being super frugal and a huge asshole. And growing up, he was, he partied, and the rest of his family, like, his kids and his grandkids, if you look up what happened to him,

• 4:22Sam Parr?

  like, the reason I got interested in this is just the other day, like, two days ago, his grandson just died. And like, it's kinda like the Kennedys, but worse. All the great, like, so many, a dozen-plus grandkids and sons have died from drug overdoses. They love getting fucked up, and they love drugs. And JP's grandson was kidnapped in Italy. And held for ransom for seventeen million dollars. They cut off the grandson's ear, sent it to him and goes, because they, they said seventeen million. He goes, no, not a chance. So they cut off the ear and sent it to him. And he was like, fine, I'll do like.

• 4:58Shaan Puri?

  Sixteen five.

• 4:59Sam Parr?

  I'll do like, he like, he, he goes, I'll do two point two. And the reason he came up with that is that's like the tax deductible number for.

• 5:05Shaan Puri?

  Oh, my God. I always think about that with ransoms, like, why seventeen million? Why not like all the money? Cause is there really any amount that the person's not gonna pay?

• 5:15Sam Parr?

  According like with him, yes.

• 5:16Shaan Puri?

  With him, there was.

• 5:17Sam Parr?

  So he like would hang up on the negotiators and he goes, nope, sorry. He was known for being so frugal. And he also had five wives with five kids in his home. He had huge mansions. He would collect art, but in the home, it was all fake art. And he would only buy shit that could make money. So he bought art, but he wouldn't keep it in the home. And he would not, he would launder his clothes by hand. He would reuse paper all the time. So he was famous for sending you a letter and like only the backside was written for you. Cause the front side was like his note taken for something else. And he had a payphone in his house. And he would yell, one of his wives, he had a handicapped son, I think a blind son. And the wife, the mom would spoil the kid because she felt bad for him. And he would like yell at her, but like, no, no, no, no, no. Like you're spending way too much money on this kid. He was famous for that.

• 6:03Shaan Puri?

  Aubrey just posted something, so I'm just gonna read it out slower. It's what you said, but it's just the, the, the details. So when the kidnappers finally reduced their demands to three million, Getty agreed to pay no more than two point two million, which is the equivalent of twelve million today. This is the maximum that is tax deductible. He then lent his son the remaining eight hundred grand to get to the three million at four percent interest. The grandson was found alive on December fifteenth.

• 6:26Sam Parr?

  It's crazy. Like he was like, this guy was nuts. I believe that every great man is also a bad man. Like in order to like be great, you're gonna piss off a lot of people. This guy took that way too far. So I don't agree with a lot he said, but I still find him incredibly fascinating. Super interesting, very mysterious, polarizing figure.

• 6:45Shaan Puri?

  Sounds like rich in money, broke in wisdom. Like it sounds like this guy was like mentally destitute.

• 6:52Sam Parr?

  Yeah, he was a real piece of crap, but you know, there's something you can learn from everyone. And he has this book on called How to Be Rich. And it's interesting because the Gettys, okay. And then the Getty grandson started.

• 7:06Sam Parr?

  Getty Images.

• 7:07Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 7:08Sam Parr?

  So he was, the grandson was successful, but in general, a lot of-

• 7:11Shaan Puri?

  Playing with house money.

• 7:12Sam Parr?

  The, yeah, he was totally. So yeah, definitely started on third base and got a homerun, or whatever the phrase is. Have you heard that phrase?

• 7:21Shaan Puri?

  He's born on third base. Yeah, I've heard that one, but I don't know about the-

• 7:25Sam Parr?

  What's the phrase? Oh, no, it's, he was born on third base, but thought he hit a triple.

• 7:28Shaan Puri?

  Still home.

• 7:29Sam Parr?

  Or something.

• 7:30Shaan Puri?

  Okay, yeah. That's a good one.

• 7:31Sam Parr?

  Something like that. So, anyway-

• 7:34Shaan Puri?

  And I love your quote, by the way, the every great man is also a bad man. I love that quote. That's like in my top five, like, lifisms. Like, if I was gonna boil it down, like, what's the core philosophy? I think that would be in the top five of the core philosophy.

• 7:47Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I don't think I made that up. I mean, someone has said it. I don't know if I, I, I-

• 7:52Shaan Puri?

  Sure.

• 7:52Sam Parr?

  I, I think I've used that terminology on my own, but it's a very common idea, which is like, like, let's say you love Obama, like, he still had to kill some people, so they definitely didn't like him. So like, everyone hates you.

• 8:03Shaan Puri?

  Although you gotta do the 2020 remix to be, make it like politically correct, because it's gotta be like, every great they is also a bad they.

• 8:10Sam Parr?

  It's true.

• 8:10Shaan Puri?

  I don't know how you're supposed to say it.

• 8:11Sam Parr?

  Every, every great person is also a bad person.

• 8:14Shaan Puri?

  There you go. Much better.

• 8:16Sam Parr?

  Anyway, this guy, J, John Paul, it's so fascinating, and I just wanted to bring it up because it's interesting to me, but also, I wanted to get your opinion on a few things.

• 8:25Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so first, Billy of the week, I, I suppose then goes to, to John Paul. We should actually do the Billy of the week. I think, uh, I, I enjoy, every time we, I learn about a new billionaire, I learn something, something interesting. And so, so I think we should do it religiously.

• 8:38Sam Parr?

  All right, we'll do it next week. Next week is gonna be Bernie Aclestone. I think that's how you say his last name. The guy who started Formula One. Google that guy. Go ahead and Google that guy. Look at what he looks like.

• 8:49Shaan Puri?

  Okay, let me, let me do it. My-

• 8:51Sam Parr?

  He's five foot five, I think, with a bowl haircut.

• 8:54Shaan Puri?

  Echols, echols, maybe?

• 8:55Sam Parr?

  Echol, I don't even know how to say his last name. I've read his biography. He's, he's cool. And he'll, he has six foot tall. Smoking hot wives who are forty.

• 9:04Shaan Puri?

  Like a G. He looks like, um, like Professor McGonagall from Harry Potter, but, but the man version of that.

• 9:12Sam Parr?

  Yeah. You gotta like look up this guy.

• 9:13Shaan Puri?

  If Dumbledore combined with, with, uh, with her, this is what he would look like.

• 9:18Sam Parr?

  So that's the one we'll do next week. But JP, what do you think about this guy? Kind of, and you see what he looks like? He looks like scary and like, he looks like a miser. Is that the word? Miser?

• 9:27Shaan Puri?

  He looks like a dork, uh, to me. He doesn't look scary, but if I was sitting at a poker table, I would not want to get into hands with this guy. Like, I know this look. This look is the look of a person who, uh, who knows, they know more than you about whatever you think you know. And so, so, so I definitely, I, I think it's fascinating. I didn't know this story. I only knew, get the images. I knew they had some family wealth, but I didn't know from what. So, so I, I find that interesting. Um, what I really love is this is actually kind of like, while you were talking, I was like, okay, this guy just sounds ridiculous. Sounds like, you know, like I said, like wisdom, poor, money rich, but that's okay. I think there's, there's still some interesting stuff in there, but the part that always stands out to me is I have this theory about like branding or especially personal branding,

• 10:11Shaan Puri?

  which is like, a lot of people want to be known as whatever, right? I want to be known as smart. I want to be known as bold. I want to be known as whatever. In this case, I want to be known as frugal. Then this guy is a great example of, you don't just say he's frugal. You say that, you know, when his, when his grandson was put up for ransom, he only agreed to play, you know, he offered 10% of what the kidnappers wanted, because that was the maximum that was tax deductible that year, right? Like it's the anecdote that gets the person to think, man, this guy's cheap. Man, this guy's frugal. And so this, what you told me was like 12 straight anecdotes that anecdotes that, that painted such a vivid picture of this person, uh, about being like, both like really smart and clever, but also really frugal and also like a real asshole without you. You didn't even need

• 10:55Shaan Puri?

  to say any of those words, but like the stories just tell that story. So like, Amazon does a great job of this too, where they were like, in the early days, it'd be like, You know, they don't buy desks. They would go to the hardware store and get these like doors because they were cheaper than desks. And they would just come in and they would, you know, so if you go into the Amazon office, every desk is a door.

• 11:13Sam Parr?

  Which by the way, when we started our company, we did that. It's way more expensive to do. Doors cost more expensive than an Ikea table.

• 11:19Shaan Puri?

  Exactly, because it's a PR story, right? So the lesson to learn from this is that you can manufacture these. So I'll just give people a little tip. I did this exercise. I have this exercise called the three pillar exercise. I'll do a video on it sometime to explain how it goes. But the short version of it is you write these three words, three words that you want everybody to know you are, and one word that you want them to all know you're not. So Sean is blank, blank, and blank, and he is not blank. And then the test in the game is can you just tell us, you know, three, you write three little anecdotes under each one? And if you just said those anecdotes, would the person have this conclusion about you? Right? So like for me, I wanted to say that I was bold, right? I was going to a job interview and so I made this game up and I was like, all right,

• 12:01Shaan Puri?

  I'm going to make sure that I'm going to have five interviews lined up today with people in this company. When they go and debrief about me, I want them all to say the same things. That guy was blank, blank, and blank, and he is not blank. And so I wrote bold as one of those, one of those blanks. And so I was like, all right, how do you, how do you make someone see that you're bold? How do you make someone believe that you're bold? And so I started looking into my past, like, are there stories of me being bold that I could drop in? Or, you know, mentioned during the interview that would make them think this, right? And so the one I thought of was when we were doing this sushi restaurant, we want, we had this idea for a sushi restaurant. Never made a sushi roll in my life, but I was watching TV, watching the Food Network, and I saw this sushi chef on TV. And right then and there, I Googled him and I cold called him and he's a chef in LA.

• 12:45Shaan Puri?

  And I pitched him to join our company, right? And like, people were like, whoa, that's like a bunch of, that's a bold action you took. And so I had like three under each. And so when you were telling this story, I was just like looking at these anecdotes. And if you go to his Wikipedia, it's, it's these same stories that you're talking about. Like he washes all his clothes by hand, right? What does that mean? That doesn't mean anything. It's probably a dumb thing to do, but like, man, for the brand of like rich guy who washes all his clothes by hand himself. Okay, frugal, like emphasized, you know? And so, so once you start to realize that, that little hack, that little storytelling hack, uh, like the branding hack, you'll see it everywhere. Anytime a brand is trying to tell you some story, you know that they're just using an anecdote to build up some word that they're trying to like associate with themselves.

• 13:27Sam Parr?

  I think that's a great exercise. I'm gonna, I'm gonna do that later.

• 13:30Shaan Puri?

  Five Guys does this, the burger, the burger chain, they say, we have no freezers, all our food is, you know, all our burgers are fresh, we don't even have freezers in the restaurant. And so they, they say this and like, you know, in reality, they just, you know, their, their inventory, their supply chain model is a little bit different. It's not that there's that much fresher than anybody else, but they say this so that you think that their burger tastes different than anybody else because it's fresher. Right? And so we used to do this with our sushi restaurant. We, we used to say, you know, all of, uh, we started off saying, our, our salmon is never flash frozen. And then like later, like this, the chef was like, yeah, why do you guys say that? And we're like, because people want fresh fish for sushi. They want it to be like super fresh. And he's like, you know that the freezing is like really critical for salmon. It like kills the bacteria and stuff like it's,

• 14:13Shaan Puri?

  you should really not serve anything that's not flash frozen. And we're like, oh shit, okay.

• 14:18Sam Parr?

  So that's actually a famous copywriting technique. So there's this guy named Joe Sugarman. He's a great copywriter. He's real famous. He's probably in the seventies now. And he wrote a really great ad for, was it Casio? I forget what it was for a watch company and like not an expensive watch, like a $59 watch. And I think he was one of the first people to use the phrasing, space age metal is in this watch. And then something like quartz movement. I think it was quartz movement. I could be wrong, but something like this. And I'm almost positive that like that space grade, like I don't think that means, not only does it not mean anything. I think all watches, like it's like, that's like a very normal thing. Same with, same with, I think, was it quartz movement?

• 15:02Sam Parr?

  Something like that. It's like, well, like they all have that. And he was like, yeah, but like the people don't know that. You know what I mean? Or like, if someone's saying like, you know, this is like polarized sunglasses. It's like, yeah, but like every sunglasses polarized.

• 15:16Shaan Puri?

  Right. 16 hour aged pork or whatever.

• 15:19Sam Parr?

  Right. It's like, they're all like that. And so that's like a really good, it's called, um, it's like based on this idea of the knowledge complex, which is when you're trying to sell something, you have to remember, or you have to keep in mind that most people have no idea about the story or like the insight behind this. And so because you know, you think other people know, and you forget that this simple shit is not simple.

• 15:41Shaan Puri?

  Right. We had a mentor from college, this guy Dan Ariely, who wrote the book Predictably Irrational. And so we went to him and we were like, hey, we're, you know, you're super smart. We're starting this sushi thing. What do you think are some things we can learn from your experiments? That will teach us about, like, that will help us with our sushi chain. And he goes, well, first thing is you have fast food sushi, right? People, people don't want, may not want fast food version of sushi. They may look at that very differently than fast food burgers and fries, you know? And so he goes, he goes, I would learn from the wine industry. And we said, what? He goes, wine is just grapes. He goes, but the wine industry will tell you that it's not just grapes. And he was basically saying like, they built a whole dictionary of terminology.

• 16:24Shaan Puri?

  There's like, you know, like certifications you can get to be a sommelier. And there's like, all this mystique into what the different types of wines are and why one's more expensive than the other. It's like, how do you charge $6,000 for a bottle of grapes? Because you create this whole lexicon of, of words and knowledge around what is amazing versus good versus great versus outstanding versus, you know, you create all these like tiers and you have to educate the market first. And then you decide which tier your brand is going to live in. I thought that was pretty fascinating.

• 16:53Sam Parr?

  I like that. Yeah. And I buy into that as well. So to wrap up Getty here, he was, I think of a lot of words to describe him, a lot of negative words, but the guy was crazy intense, like super intense. Do you think that these people who are the best, so in the field of business, that likely is correlated to who are the wealthiest? Do you know any examples of people who are not intense at all? Who are up there or does everyone who you know? We might have a couple billionaire friends amongst us, or at least they will be in the next 20 years, if just with compounding interest. But I think we probably do have someone in that range.

• 17:31Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah, for sure. We, there's a handful. So I would say, yes, all of them carry an intensity. Some are very vocal and some are, some are not. Some have a lot of ethics and others are like ruthless fucking killers. Like, so I think I've seen differences on that. Like, I've definitely seen a difference in who's willing to like, cut their partner's throat versus somebody who's like, never, I'll never do that. That's not a differentiator, but the intensity and the like maniacal focus. I have seen as like, I have never seen one who's not. In fact, I've told you about, about Michael Birch, who I worked with at the idea lab that he had started called Monkey Inferno. And so Michael had, had made it rich. He's, he had sold his company for $850 million. So by the time I met him, this was like four years, five years after that sale.

• 18:14Shaan Puri?

  And I was like, this British dude is chill as hell. Like he, you know, he's funny. He's really like engaging. He's really thoughtful. The work culture was like nine to 4:30, um, you know, every day. And then Fridays, we'd stop at three and kind of have our happy hour and like all this shit. And like, he was traveling all the time and he was just very laid back. And so I thought, oh, this is a good example of someone who, you know, I guess you can make it while still being, you know, a good dude and not a workaholic and not a, not a super uber intense, demanding guy. And then our COO is his sister-in-law, Lucinda, and she, she was also the COO when he was doing Bebo, the startup that he had sold. And so I asked her, I was like, was he, you know, the same way during that?

• 18:58Shaan Puri?

  She goes, oh no. It was like night and day difference. Basically she's like, we had to beg him to just come home at night. Like he just wouldn't leave the office. He was a maniac. Like he would just always be thinking about it, always be working on it. And, um, you know, he wasn't hiring people. He was just trying to do it all himself. Like it was crazy. He worked crazy, crazy, crazy hard. And now I just don't think he does, I just don't think he wants to do that anymore. And to the point where like, he had like a pretty serious surgery four months after they sold because of like the toll that the stress had put onto his body and, you know, and all that stuff. So even the one example I thought I had found of like a not uber intense person, turns out I was totally wrong. And he was, he just, now he was in chill mode.

• 19:38Sam Parr?

  So there's this, um, so I'll, what I'm about to say will tie exactly into that. And it ties into the premise of this conversation, which was, I like reading books of people who they don't really, they don't need to make money off the book. There's this great book called How to Get Rich. Again, it's a really poorly titled name, titled book because it's pretty tacky, but it's by this guy named Felix Dennis, who started

• 20:02Shaan Puri?

  Maxim.

• 20:03Sam Parr?

  Maxim magazine, but before that, he, the Maxims and the music magazines of Britain, you know, he was like a Richard Branson, but more vulgar type of person where he's pretty eclectic and had his hands in a lot of stuff, probably worth 800 million, I think, when he died. He did drugs, a lot of drugs, and he died single. And he wrote that, he's like, if I could do it all over again, I would have worked my ass off till I was 35. Hopefully, I would have made enough money that I could last for a little while and live comfortably. But then, and then I would quit because I was like a boxer who was punch drunk. I like, I had to go back every single time. I'm like, he's like, I actually, he, this guy actually wrote a biography on Muhammad Ali. He was like, I was like that. I like, I should have retired, but I kept going fighting and I just looked like an idiot

• 20:46Sam Parr?

  and I regret it all and it hurt me. And he ended up dying from cancer because he was a big smoker and alcoholic and drug guy. Sometimes I wonder like, what, should you just grind as hard as you can, starting at a young age and hope that you can get something relatively young? Or do you know just that you're going to be punch drunk and just keep going? You know, like, I think about that sometimes.

• 21:11Shaan Puri?

  So there's, um, what's it called? There's, there's a, there's two like schools of thought. So one is that, which is like, you know, you, you hustle really hard at the beginning and then you sort of shift gears as you go. I see that, like Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, he has a phrase like this where he's like, in your twenties, you work hard for someone else. In your thirties, you work really hard for yourself and your own company. In your forties, you invest and in your fifties, you, you give back or something like that. Like, I don't know the exact chain of events, but it's that idea. And so there's some people that definitely advocate for that. Definitely seen a lot of people who just, you know, you get addicted to the medicine. You can't, you can't get off of it. And you just keep going and there's like a never ending more. But it does seem

• 21:55Shaan Puri?

  like there's like another way, which I think you hear less about these people because they're not extreme athletes. So because they're not extreme, they're not in the news because they're not extreme. They don't go for the eight billion or 80 billion dollar outcome. They go for the like eight to 18 million to 80 million, you know, over time, get rich slow tactic. And so I think that there are some people who play the game a different way. And their way is basically they work on the stuff that they're interested in. They don't care too much about the money, but they work really hard at it. And because they're interested in it, they become some of the best, they become the best person at that thing or one of the best. And because we're one of the best, they make money, right? Even the best plumber in the world is a multimillionaire, right? So like, it doesn't matter which field you go, if you can get to the top.

• 22:38Sam Parr?

  Just a really good one in a local area.

• 22:40Shaan Puri?

  Right. I personally think that there's like, the better method is not the, not the like, let me work super, super hard for till I'm 35 and then come to a cold stop and then figure out what I want to do with the rest of my life. I think that's the extreme athlete path. Um, that's like literally what most athletes do is like they were, they're, they're, you know, Michael Phelps until they're 33 and then they retire or they're Kobe Bryant and they go till they're 37 and then they, they retire and they have to figure out what the hell life is after that. Personally, that's not the path for, for me, I, I've realized, but I do think that for extreme success, it does look like these Olympic style athletes where you are, you devote your whole life, you sacrifice like crazy, you sacrifice your personal life, all that's good stuff. Like Elon Musk, he's got what?

• 23:22Shaan Puri?

  Five, six kids, three, four wives, you know, like for all his, like, for however much you idolize him in the business realm, for by most people's definition, he's totally failed in the family realm, right? Uh, you know, sleeps in the office 200 days a year, like, I don't know if that's life, right? Doesn't seem to look like the healthiest guys. He's not winning in that, that front. So I just think that there's like, there's an extreme cost to extreme success and I haven't personally seen outliers from that.

• 23:49Sam Parr?

  There's, um, Uh, Getty in his book, he said, um, I hate and regret the failure of my marriages. I would gladly give back all my millions for one lasting marital success.

• 24:01Shaan Puri?

  Right. And like, you know, I'm trying to think like even like Warren Buffett, for example, seems like a very even keeled guy. You know, has had long sustained success. I, I don't, I think, I think he got divorced. I don't think his, his marriage ended up working out, which is okay. But, you know, no harm there, but that's not my goal. My goal is different. So I don't want to follow a blueprint that seems to be leading to that. Doesn't seem like the healthiest dude in the world, but he's got good energy. So, so, you know, that's cool. He's lived a long time. He's got a lot of energy. So I think that's good. I don't know. I'm of the opinion that the extreme, extreme success takes a big toll out of the other areas of your life. That's kind of, it's kind of like the laws of physics. It's like energy is not created to destroy it. It's just transferred. And if you're going to transfer the energy it takes to become like mega, mega, mega successful like that, I'm talking about like billions and up.

• 24:44Shaan Puri?

  I definitely know people that have a hundred million dollars that live a very balanced life and have, have, have been able to not like, they work hard, but they're not like, they're not working 10 times harder than anybody else.

• 24:56Sam Parr?

  I do too. And I know a lot of people who, so like, well, you're kind of disproving your point.

• 25:00Shaan Puri?

  I'm just saying for the top, the absolute top, like their company is the leader in an important category. They're, they're in the billions category on, uh, in terms of wealth. They're, they're, you know, they have that sort of like, that, that's the top to me.

• 25:13Sam Parr?

  Well, I want to also acknowledge that, like, I know people that are hardworking and smart. And I hate when, and I used to do this, but I don't anymore. Like, we have to acknowledge that there's definitely a lottery ticket type of luck thing there for some of them.

• 25:25Shaan Puri?

  For sure.

• 25:26Sam Parr?

  For some.

• 25:26Shaan Puri?

  For sure.

• 25:27Sam Parr?

  Uh, like I, there's a bunch of people who are like, they're going to crush it no matter what. But they had, they maybe had a little lot of ticket that in one of the, you know, they're playing a ton of different hands. And it's like, well, one of the hands, it, it just kind of worked in their favor. Like they likely would have won something in all those hands, but that particular one, it just. Was kind of magical.

• 25:45Shaan Puri?

  Yes, exactly. I always say the fact that they succeeded was not luck. The amount that they succeeded had a big degree of luck. Like, I sold my company, you're gonna sell your company someday. Whatever that outcome is, we have friends like, I could just take Michael's example again, right? Like, sold that company for 850 million, the timing was perfect. Social networking was at its absolute peak. Facebook was too expensive for anyone to buy. MySpace had already sold for 500 million, so they were the only, you know, the only girl left to ask out to the dance. And so they got like a very high bid from a big bidder. And that same company a year later might have sold for half the amount or less.

• 26:21Sam Parr?

  And not to disrespect Michael, that acquisition is, that and Mark Cuban's acquisition are considered the two worst acquisitions of all time.

• 26:28Shaan Puri?

  Right, that's not the fault of the seller, that's the fault of the buyer.

• 26:31Sam Parr?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 26:33Shaan Puri?

  So, but I guess that's what I mean, like, but he would have been successful either way. And he already was, actually had built multiple smaller successes. The first one for like, single-digit millions, and the second one for a little bit more, and the third one, you know, like, it was gonna always be successful. Now, was he always gonna end up kind of in the 800 million category? Like, no, I can't, I can't say that that's true.

• 26:53Sam Parr?

  Well, uh, what do you want to talk about now? I blew, I, I, I don't have much.

• 27:00Shaan Puri?

  I have, okay, so I have a couple of-

• 27:02Sam Parr?

  Well, what I mean is, that was my, that was what I had prepared.

• 27:05Shaan Puri?

  Okay, yeah, no, no problem. I saw something cool, I don't know if you saw this, but the guy who started Cruise, this guy Kyle Vogt, put out this video, did you watch this video that he put out? Which is a video of 75 minutes of their cruise vehicle driving through San Francisco. And it's him talking to Sam Altman, who's the CEO of OpenAI right now, and was kind of like the head of Y Combinator, and he's kind of like, I would say he's like, probably the number one, like, young gun of Silicon Valley, yet young being relative, like, just like, kind of like, powerful people under 40. I think Sam Altman's probably number one in Silicon Valley. What do you think of that? Is that, is that right?

• 27:41Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 27:42Shaan Puri?

  Maybe, maybe Zuck, I don't, I don't know how old Zuck is, but-

• 27:44Sam Parr?

  Oh, well, Zuck, Zuck's, you know, you realize Zuck's like, 35?

• 27:48Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So, so, okay, Sam Altman's maybe in the top five.

• 27:52Sam Parr?

  Well, he's like, not the richest, but he's like, got his hands and everything. But give the background of this Kyle guy, because he's actually more interesting, I think, than Sam Altman.

• 27:59Shaan Puri?

  So he actually was the co-founder of, or co-founder, I think, I think he would be considered the co-founder. He was definitely the early engineer, the first engineer at Twitch. And so he helped start Twitch and he is a brilliant guy. And actually Emmett made a good point about this recently. So somebody said, somebody was saying this like, kind of common startup wisdom, which I think is actually true, but there are always exceptions. So some, some guy was like, hey, you know, sometimes when you want to disrupt an industry, you want to be an outsider, right? Like, you actually don't want to be from within the industry, because then you think, just like everybody else in the industry, sometime an outsider who doesn't know anything is the best person to disrupt it. I think, I think the guy was kind of making a stance, not saying sometimes, he was like, that's usually who does it. And then Emmett made a good point.

• 28:42Shaan Puri?

  He goes, you know, for technical products, I actually think so the exact opposite. I think for technical products, it's the person with deep domain expertise. That's actually the best person ability. He goes, Kyle had been trying to build self-driving cars since he was in high school. Like Twitch was like a detour for him. And he's like, you know, the, the timing wasn't right back then, but he had been thinking about this and working on this and fiddling with this for a long time. He was the, probably one of the five people on earth who should have started a self-driving car company was Kyle. And so he starts Cruise, sells Cruise for a billion dollars to GM.

• 29:13Sam Parr?

  Like 12 months or something into the journey?

• 29:16Shaan Puri?

  I think two years and something like that. Yeah, before, basically, there's no, no self-driving cars on the road, right? But like, you know, sells, sells the technology to GM, because these big car companies, they're very worried, right? Like, a car company needs self-driving, because once cars are self-driving, people don't need to own cars. Once you have self-driving cars everywhere, you'll just push a button, a very cheap Uber will come to you, essentially, because there's no driver inside. So it's super cheap. And you just take it from wherever you want to go to the next spot, and then you hop out and it keeps driving around. Like, you're not going to need to have your car and park it. You know, cars are parked, I think, 95% of the time, doing nothing, just like a depreciating asset that's just idle. So buying a car is a horrible idea. So that's why GM and others are trying to buy their way into self-driving. So anyways, it's been multiple years now.

• 29:59Shaan Puri?

  Seven years or something like that. I don't know how long since this company's been around. And so he just released this video and it's a cool video because they're just like two, two absolute nerds nerding out.

• 30:08Sam Parr?

  And if you want to look it up, the guy's name is Kyle, what is it?

• 30:11Shaan Puri?

  Vought? Yeah, Vought or Vought, I don't know.

• 30:13Sam Parr?

  V O G T. So Kyle V O G T. And then type in the word Sam Altman, you'll see it. It's, I'm watching it now. It's 75 minutes of autonomous driving with Kyle and Sam Altman. This company I think is worth like $20 billion under GM. It's worth a ton.

• 30:26Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I don't know how.

• 30:27Sam Parr?

  Like they raised funding as a subsidiary.

• 30:29Shaan Puri?

  They've raised $7 billion or something like that now. By the way, this guy's like one of those total ultra achiever nuts. Like he's the one who did that. Seven marathons in seven days on seven, in seven different countries or seven different continents or something crazy like that where you basically you run a marathon during the day, then you hop on a plane and you fly to the next country and then you do it again and you do that for seven days straight. He did one of those recently, right? So like, if you're trying to feel bad about your life, look this guy up. But anyways, I love this video and I only understood what 15% of it because I don't know shit about machine learning. I don't know shit about self-driving cars. Like, I don't know the difference between deep learning and, uh, you know, like whatever the hell else, like ultra deep learning and, and any, any other technique that there is, and they're talking about stuff like that. But I just love watching people nerd out about shit and

• 31:14Shaan Puri?

  self-driving is like one of those game changers. It's like a one-way door. Once we walk through it, we'll never go back. And so it's going to happen in our lifetime. It's one of these like, like the internet happened in our lifetime. This is going to be, I think, like, I'd say the internet, cell phones and this, those are the three big ones in our lifetime, probably that we will see. I think, check it out. It's crazy how good the car is itself driving. Now, of course, these are all demos and sometimes they kind of like, you know, like cheat a little bit in the demos to make it look good, but man, this thing is impressive.

• 31:43Sam Parr?

  Do you know this guy, Kyle?

• 31:45Shaan Puri?

  I never met him, no.

• 31:47Sam Parr?

  He has to be like, I find him to be one of the most interesting people there is because I think that like, sometimes when I imagine like these like gritty, tough people, like, like I think of like a tough guy, I think of like a formidable person who I never like, who I don't want to be enemies with. I think of like a tough looking person, right? Like tattoos or like, like I think of like an MMA fighter or something. And then I see a little like, I mean, He's not like that dorky looking, but he's like a small, kind looking.

• 32:13Shaan Puri?

  If you told me he sells insurance at a small company in the Midwest, I'd be like, yeah, that makes sense.

• 32:18Sam Parr?

  Yeah, like he doesn't particularly look like a killer. I mean, like, you know.

• 32:22Shaan Puri?

  By the way, I'm surprised people don't make fun of us for this because we always judge when we hear about these remarkable people. We have this like instinctual reaction to their looks and we talk about it. Everybody has it. When we talk about it, we're like, look at this guy. This guy looks like a fat rich guy. It's like this guy looks like, you know, like a dork or whatever, but I'm surprised we don't get called out for this.

• 32:40Sam Parr?

  Like, have you ever seen the guy who created Ethereum?

• 32:43Shaan Puri?

  Of course, yeah.

• 32:43Sam Parr?

  I, when I see that guy, I'm like, yeah, you look like you created Ethereum. Like you look like the part.

• 32:48Shaan Puri?

  He looks the part. I literally bought a shit ton of Ethereum early on. Not super early, but like early enough where right now I'm looking good. Because I saw this guy and I heard him talk and I was like, okay, I didn't understand pretty much any of that, but I'm pretty sure this is like the next Zuck. So I'm just gonna like place a bet, you know, seems like this guy is, I have a hard time believing this guy's gonna fail in life. I think this little super genius who's like really obsessed with cryptocurrency is gonna make some shit happen.

• 33:12Sam Parr?

  Exactly. And it's like, and then when I see bros with abs and tattoos who are doing ICOs or whatever those crypto things are called. I'm like, oh no, stay away from that. It don't matter what that person says. They should not look like that. They should be dorks.

• 33:24Shaan Puri?

  And it doesn't, it doesn't take much. You, you can make money just doing that.

• 33:28Sam Parr?

  But yes, but this guy, it's so funny because he kind of breaks the mold of what we were talking about earlier of intense. I, I don't know if he's intense or not, probably. Uh, yeah, of course he is, but he looks like just a gentle, nice person. And yet I think the word genius is thrown around too much. A person like this definitely has to be genius IQ, genius level at many different things. And I follow him on Instagram or something where he did his marathon in seven days.

• 33:51Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 33:52Sam Parr?

  Seven days, seven, I'm like.

• 33:53Shaan Puri?

  Seven X, seven, seven, yeah, seven, seven.

• 33:55Sam Parr?

  Wow, like how courageous and bold must this person be in order to do something like, who is crazy enough to think at the age of 28? Or however old, old he was, or probably younger to start a self-driving car and now. Like the founders of GM or the CEOs of GM are like, well, Kyle, like, what do you think we should do? It's just like audacious. I think it's the right word. I just, I really, I just love these audacious people.

• 34:18Shaan Puri?

  So he, exactly. I don't know anything about him. Might be, might be smart, might not be. I mean, obviously he's smart, but I don't know if he's like a super genius. But what I will say is not knowing the person, you can learn a lot just by the fact that he took some very interesting swings. Twitch early on was not like a sexy place to go work, right? Justin TV was not a sexy place to go work. It wasn't like a clear, big market. Wasn't a big company. It wasn't making a ton of money. It wasn't like, you know, a smart person like this can go get any job they want. And to go work at Justin TV was because it was an interesting challenge, right? It was like doing what they were doing with live video at that time, when the infrastructure of the internet was what it was. That took some courage and it was an interesting swing. It was an interesting swing to be working on.

• 35:01Shaan Puri?

  Same thing with self-driving, right? Like Cruise, there wasn't that many self-driving car companies at the time that he started Cruise. And that was an interesting swing. And so I gotta give respect because I think that this guy took some really interesting swings. And if I want to do something more, like if I, if I think about my own career, I want to take more interesting swings. I think that's a lesson to learn from this dude.

• 35:20Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So I have the video on. It's playing in the background. It's, it's definitely amazing. I don't understand how a car can get all the data that this video has. It's pretty amazing. I guess they're using some type of radar or something.

• 35:34Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So they, the car basically has a combination of camera sensors, LiDAR, which is a long distance, like radar essentially. And then normal radar. And it has the combination of all three input sources to create essentially like a map of what's going on in the world. And so for self-driving, you need to create a map of what's around you. You need to predict what every, what they call agents, what every other thing around you is going to do in the next like five seconds. So you have to make a prediction and then you have to make a plan for what you're going to do based on that plan, that based on that prediction. And then you have to do it, do it. And so that's just constantly happening in a car. And so like in the self-driving car world, there's like this religious holy war of like, do you need LiDAR or do you not?

• 36:18Shaan Puri?

  Everyone thought you needed LiDAR and then Elon came out and was like, LiDAR is stupid, it's expensive, you don't need it, cameras can do everything. And so that became a big fork. Almost everybody took the LiDAR path and Tesla took the camera only path. And the LiDAR people said camera will never work. And the camera people said LiDAR is a fool's errand. And they were all very vocal about it. And now we're going to see whose technical decision was correct, which is actually very interesting because if you ever read the book, I think it's called PayPal Wars. Have you, have you read this book?

• 36:48Sam Parr?

  I've heard of it.

• 36:48Shaan Puri?

  Great book. I really like this book. So it's a book about the founding story of PayPal from one of the guys who was like, I think employee 15 ish at PayPal. So most people don't, don't know this, but Elon was the CEO of PayPal when the, so he didn't start PayPal. He started X.com. X.com was also trying to be what, what PayPal was doing, which was like a internet bank, basically. And they merged. When they merged, Elon became the CEO. Elon was the CEO for a while. And then when Elon went on vacation, he went on like a seven day vacation, had a coup and they basically like kicked him out. They went to the board and they said, we're not, you know, you need to get rid of Elon now. And they got rid of Elon.

• 37:23Sam Parr?

  Because I think he, he like, didn't want to sell or something.

• 37:25Shaan Puri?

  No, no, no. Well, in the book at least, they talk about, it was a technical decision again. Like, I'm sure there was many factors, a lot of pressure on the company in general. But one of the big things was that there was a technical architecture decision. He wanted to use .net, which is like this one type of infrastructure. And they all wanted to use this other like, kind of modern thing. And to this day, they disagree about which was the right choice. Like they ended up doing the other one PayPal work. And Elon's still like, no, like that would have worked just fine. And so him and Max Levchin kind of had like a huge butting of the heads about that. And then Peter Thiel became the CEO.

• 37:57Sam Parr?

  So who's right? Like with this Tesla stuff, I, I'm so uneducated with it, but a lot of people who I speak with say that the, that the self-driving Tesla stuff is pretty bad.

• 38:10Shaan Puri?

  There's two ways, there's again, nobody, nobody knows, right? Nobody knows till you pull it off. Because what a lot of people will say is, yeah, this works in most cases, but most cases is not good enough for self-driving because you're going to kill people if you can't do all cases. And so they'll say, yeah, cameras work, except for in bad weather. Because when it's rainy and your camera starts fogging up, you need LiDAR, you need radar to be able to, to detect stuff. And so that's like one of the arguments, for example, is that, yeah, camera's good enough most of the time, but most of the time is not good enough for this thing to, to really be autonomous. And Tesla says, no, we're going to do it. We're going to do it by the end of this year. Now, they didn't pull it off this year. You know, his timelines are kind of always wrong. So I have friends that are

• 38:49Sam Parr?

  They're like always wrong.

• 38:50Shaan Puri?

  They're always wrong. I have friends that are pretty deep in the space and the opinion has shifted from most people thought Tesla was on a, you know, on a dead man, dead man path, dead end path. And now, now most people would agree that Tesla is the furthest ahead. I shouldn't say most people agree because it's just a bunch of random opinions, but from what I can tell, a bunch of smart people now agree that Tesla is ahead because they are the ones that have humans driving cars around everywhere, collecting all the data, all the map data, all the city data, all the lanes data, and because a human is driving, they're getting trained, their system is getting trained by, so they, they run in what's called shadow mode. So basically while you're driving a Tesla, self-driving is predicting what it would do.

• 39:31Shaan Puri?

  And then the driver's driving, the self-driving is checking based on what the human did, like, oh, human did something different than I would have done. Noted. And then the engineers can go like, look at that and those, all those differences get noted. And so a lot of people think Tesla is getting better because they have the most data. And then other people think that Tesla is reckless and that, you know, Waymo or whoever else has, you know, the better, the better tech, but we'll see. Somebody's got to show it.

• 39:56Sam Parr?

  I definitely want Elon to be wrong some of the time.

• 40:01Sam Parr?

  He's right too often. No person should be right that often.

• 40:04Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I, I, I could see that.

• 40:06Sam Parr?

  And then he's become a little too smug for me.

• 40:09Shaan Puri?

  Oh, he's, he's super smug.

• 40:10Sam Parr?

  I like, I think it's cool to be a shithead sometimes, but he's kind of a, I respect him a lot and I like him a lot. I also think he's a douche.

• 40:18Shaan Puri?

  He was also super wrong about coronavirus and I think that was like another one he was really, really smug about. And then has proven to be completely wrong where he was like, oh, it'll be gone by April. And, you know, very just Trumpian and like, you know, saying the worry about coronavirus is stupid and stuff like that. And, you know, has been wrong on pretty much all fronts.

• 40:39Sam Parr?

  And he got it.

• 40:40Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 40:41Sam Parr?

  We want to keep going?

• 40:42Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, let's do it.

• 40:44Sam Parr?

  Let's do a. Brooklyn and.

• 40:47Shaan Puri?

  Okay, Brooklyn and tactic. This is just kind of a, this is a tactical one. So this shout out, shout out to people who like operational tactics. So my guy Ben showed me this thing that Brooklyn had done last year. It was Black Friday, right? Black Friday is in a couple of days, biggest ecommerce day of the year. And he showed me this thing that Brooklyn had done, which I thought was pretty cool. And they basically emailed all of their customers. And they said, they basically emailed them a whoops email, basically. So it was like, it was a forwarded email from two people inside the company, like the head of marketing to like the junior marketing person. It was like, yeah. Look, we like, we enabled the code, um, you know, Black Friday 20, 25 for 25% off. Should be ready to go for Black Friday, but it's, it's live now, but we'll announce it on Black Friday or something like that.

• 41:33Shaan Puri?

  And they forward this. So, so there's a, they sent an email to the whole user base. And the email is basically the reply, the two, these two people replying. And it's kind of like, it looks like, and the subject line is like, you know, re, you know, re Black Friday, like as in regarding Black Friday. And so they sent, and then they were like, oh my God. They said a follow up like, oh my God, oops. So sorry that, that that was not supposed to be sent, but like, you know, whatever, we'll honor it. And they get this huge rush and this huge spike in sales because people feel like they got something that they, that they didn't, you know, they weren't supposed to get. And, uh, and they went and rushed and then bought it before it got. And so we, so Ben was like, he shared it with me and we were like, let's try this. So we did this yesterday. And so we did it with my wife's ecommerce store. And so we sent out an email to all the customers.

• 42:16Sam Parr?

  Did it work?

• 42:17Shaan Puri?

  It worked like a charm, dude. Like it was the biggest sales day in, in the company's history. It was awesome. And basically what we did was same, same idea. So sent out a code. To, we did it a little bit differently. We sent it out to a small number of people. And then we went and said, and then they posted it on Facebook like, oh my God, guys. Did you, anybody else get this email? And they screenshotted it. And so then we commented on it like, hey, this was, this is an error. Like we told our developer to fix it, but you know, with Black Friday is really busy, like it'll get fixed soon. But like, hey ladies, like I guess in the meantime, you know, go crazy, go shopping. And so people thought, oh my God, this, I wasn't supposed to get this and it's going to get fixed soon. So we like turbocharged it by, by adding that like, this, we were going to fix this bug today, but like, you know, while it's up there, go ahead. And, uh, and people just.

• 43:01Sam Parr?

  I'm going to do that today. I'm gonna do that today.

• 43:04Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, do it. It's gonna work.

• 43:05Sam Parr?

  You know, they didn't make that up. The first time I saw that was Chubbies. Chubbies did that about four years ago. I remember Chubbies did it. Chubbies is like a short company and it was like from their accountant, Dave, and their accountant, Dave was like saying like, you guys, you cannot send this email to everyone. This is gonna bankrupt us.

• 43:23Shaan Puri?

  Right. That's a good one.

• 43:26Sam Parr?

  I'm gonna do that. I'm gonna like literally right after this, I'm gonna do it.

• 43:28Shaan Puri?

  Perfect. So I said, that's one tactic. Let's see how much time I got.

• 43:31Sam Parr?

  Where do I find that? Did someone?

• 43:33Shaan Puri?

  I'll send you an image of it. It's not like that well talked about. I'm putting up a blog post about it. So I'm gonna talk about it, but this would be great.

• 43:40Sam Parr?

  How did you format that in your mail provider?

• 43:42Shaan Puri?

  I'll show you. We just made it like a plain text email that has the, you know, like when you see a forward email, you can see the trailing email. So we just had the trailing email and then our email and then it just got sent.

• 43:56Sam Parr?

  But did you actually like send it to one? Like, did you and your wife talk to each other in Gmail?

• 44:00Shaan Puri?

  No, no, no. We just like, we just made it look like that. We just took an email like format and we could have actually emailed it, but we didn't need to. We just like copy paste and whatever.

• 44:08Sam Parr?

  And so that must only took a few minutes.

• 44:09Shaan Puri?

  Few minutes. Yeah. Great. Tens of thousands of dollars. Awesome. In a day. It was great.

• 44:14Sam Parr?

  Here, Abra, you just linked to it.

• 44:17Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, Brooklyn. There it is. That's, that's the one. This is written up in Architectural Digest, which is probably why most people haven't heard of it. I like these little tactics that kind of work once and then, you know, they get saturated and you gotta move on to the next one. But I like doing them and sharing them with kind of people who, who liked it, like to use them before they get, they get abused. Okay. I'll stick on.

• 44:37Sam Parr?

  God, I'm looking at this now. This is like the greatest thing I've ever seen.

• 44:40Shaan Puri?

  So I'll, I'll do another e-commerce thing. This is actually gonna be kind of boring, but I think there's an opportunity. So here's a free idea for somebody. You know, the website maker Card, Card.co?

• 44:51Sam Parr?

  No, it's like, or it makes like mobile friendly websites?

• 44:54Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, make single page kind of which are mobile friendly. It's like a super simple website builder. So I really like it. I've used this for a bunch of my like random projects. If I want to make my own personal website, I use Card. Like, to me, it's simpler than Webflow. It's simpler than Squarespace. It's like faster and simpler. It can't do everything that everything can do, but I don't need everything. I just need the basics. And Card does the basics really, really well. So a couple of things. So I met the founder of this, by the way, I think he's awesome. Yeah, just a guy living in the Midwest, built this as a side project, started to make some side hustle money and then just like it's just grown over time. And it's pretty, pretty great business. And so I was, I was looking at for e-commerce. So in e-commerce, you, you have these events, like let's say Black Friday. And you want to make a landing page or like you, what do you use for your landing pages? You use like Adobe Spark or some shit like that, right?

• 45:39Sam Parr?

  No, for landing pages, just WordPress or click funnels.

• 45:42Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, WordPress click funnels. Exactly. So most marketers use like click funnels or, you know, there's a whole bunch of different landing pages, you know, tools out there.

• 45:49Sam Parr?

  Unbounce.

• 45:50Shaan Puri?

  Unbounce, exactly.

• 45:51Sam Parr?

  Instapages, there's a lot of good stuff.

• 45:53Shaan Puri?

  E-commerce, I think needs, somebody needs to build the click funnels for e-commerce. That is basically, it just connects with your Shopify. So you use Shopify as the backend. But on the front end, it lets you really, really easily spin up these one-page, mobile optimized, basically card for e-commerce. And everyone's gonna be like, oh, that already exists. No, trust me, I tried all of them. They all suck. And there's a difference between something not existing and something not being done well. This is, something is not done well yet.

• 46:21Sam Parr?

  Hard.

• 46:21Shaan Puri?

  And see, it's two Rs, C A R R D dot co. So the big ones in this space are like Shogun, Netlify, there's stuff like that, that like is what they call headless commerce. Which is basically means your store is made in Shopify, but your front end that the customer see, you could use a bunch of different, you could use a different.

• 46:40Sam Parr?

  Dude, I've had the same exact problem. I've had this exact same problem. So often do I have the problem. I'm like, I just want to use Shopify for the backend. But I want to use click funnels to design my pages quickly.

• 46:50Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. And like even click, but, but somebody needs to make the, the most user friendly one. And if you want to see an example of what's a really user friendly one, look at Card. And like, I think somebody needs to make Card for e-commerce and I think that person will print money. Because every e-commerce site is constantly just trying to do two different things. Make ads, send emails, three, three things. Send emails, make ads, and then make landing pages that actually convert the, the, the traffic into buyers. And you don't want to make new Shopify templates. It's like way too much work to do that, to like use a different theme and like switch your store. It's like way too complicated. And so you just need to be able to spin up offer pages, deal pages, sell certain inventory that you're trying to move, launch a new product line,

• 47:33Shaan Puri?

  and just make that the focus of that page. Like, it's so simple. It's so simple.

• 47:37Sam Parr?

  I've had the same problem.

• 47:38Shaan Puri?

  If somebody can truly say, it's DM me, DM me everything you see that does this. And most of them will be like, this is not simple. This is not good. But if there actually is one, please send it to me because I need it. This problem is bad.

• 47:49Sam Parr?

  I've had this exact same problem. I dig it. I totally agree. I use Zapier or Zapier and like Woocommerce and we're, it's like, uh, it's all duct taped together. Same thing. I agree. I would love to use, I don't know why there's no good solutions. I completely agree.

• 48:07Shaan Puri?

  Okay, last thing that I wanted to do before we go. I don't really know where to go with this, but I'll just say it since we talked about Getty Images. So stock photo, stock sound, stock video websites have done pretty well historically. I just think they're great businesses because the people who use them keep coming back to them like kind of designers or like professionals that like, just keep needing the stock stuff. And like the bigger your kind of database and cert, the better your supply, the more defensible your business is essentially, because you have the biggest repository of stuff. If I want to go find a certain sound or song, I gotta go to Pond5 because Pond5 has just the most variety to choose from. So they become like the category leader. AI has kind of changed this, right? So artificial intelligence has kind of changed it. So there's all these little demo projects where it's like, look,

• 48:52Shaan Puri?

  this website plays songs that are generated by AI. Like the song you hear when you refresh this page has never been created before and will never be created again. The AI is just making up songs. And they're actually like pretty good. And

• 49:05Sam Parr?

  What's it called?

• 49:07Shaan Puri?

  The song one, these are little demo projects, but like here's another one for faces. There's thispersondoesnotexist.com.

• 49:12Sam Parr?

  Oh, I've seen that. That's great.

• 49:14Shaan Puri?

  It's basically like, hey, you need a stock photo of a person? Look, this is an AI-generated person. This is not a real person, but it looks exactly like a real person. If you just go to thispersondoesnotexist.com. I love that. Right? But it got me thinking like, dude, this means that somebody can. Basically disrupt all the stocks, the stock websites, because you can just programmatically generate anything anybody searches for. You can create, you can have the computer basically make 500 variants of whatever they search for based on their keywords and then they'll pick from them and then you're like, cool, those are all saved. And like, you can create like a huge database of stock, whatever, images, icons, sounds, videos, whatever it is. And you can programmatically generate a AI-based stock website and you don't have

• 49:58Shaan Puri?

  to pay anything to the photographers. You don't have to pay anything to the video makers. So your margins are going to be way better because you have, you have no supply side fees to, to, to get the content. So I think there's something interesting there.

• 50:10Sam Parr?

  I actually, I agree that it's awesome, but I actually think it would be a shit business because there's no.

• 50:15Shaan Puri?

  Not now, maybe because everybody can do it. Now there's no defensibility. It's like, the only defensibility is like, do customers know you and are you high up in search? You know, like, maybe that's the defensibility at this point. But there's, I don't know, there's something there, like, the technology can now do a thing it couldn't do before. So that means there's businesses to be made.

• 50:32Sam Parr?

  I would totally not want to be, at first it's like, yeah, it's awesome. I'm into it. Now I'm like, oh, I would never want to start that because it's like, starting Outbrain and when there's Tabula and they both do the same thing. It's a race to the bottom. He was just going to make prices the lowest and then they got to merge.

• 50:45Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. I think still the customer relationship matters the most. So like, that is a problem. But I don't know, there's, I think there's something there. I'm not sure exactly what it is. I've, I've been thinking about these stock websites a lot. I, because I think they're.

• 50:56Sam Parr?

  Well, we talked about it a lot. I've, I've always said I liked stock photos. We talked about Getty Images. We, in the past, we've talked about, not Flickr, but what's that one? It started by a guy in New York who's like.

• 51:06Shaan Puri?

  High Stock Photo or?

• 51:06Sam Parr?

  No, he like owns part of the Knicks now, or they like, I forget his name. John's, his name's John Oranger, I think. Right?

• 51:16Shaan Puri?

  Okay. I don't know what that is.

• 51:18Sam Parr?

  It's a shutter stock.

• 51:20Shaan Puri?

  Shutter stock. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So, so these have been great businesses historically. Maybe now they're not going to be as great because you can get disrupted by this sort of thing. I've also been thinking about like, where do you need stock stuff that's not this? So there was a recent one.

• 51:32Sam Parr?

  Video.

• 51:34Shaan Puri?

  Well, video, there's a few like, but I'm thinking like kind of even more on the edge. So let me find this company that I DM the founder and I was like, yo, I gotta invest in this. So his name is Albon and Sketchfab is the name of the company. Have you seen Sketchfab?

• 51:49Sam Parr?

  Yes, I've used it a bunch of times.

• 51:51Shaan Puri?

  So it's, it's a platform where you can publish 3D models. So 3D, if you go to their website, the first thing you see is like this Nike shoe. That's like, you can rotate it in all directions. It like, looks awesome. It looks realistic and this is like a rendering. And so people can, 3D makers can upload their stuff like here, I made a door. I made a table that you can, you can use in your whatever. And, and you could buy and sell them. So it's a marketplace and their traffic has been growing. This is like a very good company, I believe. And so I'm trying to invest in this, but I think that this is like, and they're going to be the category leader of this. And there's, there's the funny tweet was like, somebody showed that Google tried to like compete with them and Amazon tried to compete with them.

• 52:30Shaan Puri?

  And like, if you search for like common things like Tesla or a car on, on both of those engines. The Google one shows like zero results and the Sketchfab one shows like 300, right? Like they're just like dominating this market right now. And so I think there's, there's some niche things, there's some niche things that are for different types of stock items that are like, not just photos and sounds, but I don't know. 3D objects is a good one.

• 52:53Sam Parr?

  So they've raised eight million, nine million. Are they making any money?

• 52:56Shaan Puri?

  I believe they're, they're profitable as of, as of now. I believe that was, I think that was in the tweet, I might be wrong.

• 53:02Sam Parr?

  That's a great one. That's such a great one.

• 53:04Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 53:05Sam Parr?

  That's great. I'm 100% about to go do that email thing.

• 53:09Shaan Puri?

  All right, let me know how it goes and then, uh, yeah, we'll, we'll swap notes. Okay, we're out of here.

• 53:15Sam Parr?

  Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. If you're not in America, then happy Wednesday or Thursday, or whichever day you're listening to this. Thank you.

• 53:21Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, if you're not in America, go buy some mac and cheese and mashed potatoes and eat them. It's allowed.

• 53:26Sam Parr?

  Yes, it is. All right, see you all.