#147 - How Sam Hacked Amazon's Book Rankings, A $600m Exit, And Crypto with Brother Aaaron

Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (@theSamParr) discuss: - Sam explains the origins of the QAnon movement - Could buying collectibles from infamous people work? - Romance stories are big business: Sam almost launched a company in the space (https://www.shortbutromantic.com/daily-story) - Wattpad which started as a romance novel community was sold for $600m recently - Sam explains how he hacked Amazon's book rankings for his novel "Captivating Clare" - Sam brings up pickleball (a booming sport in Austin) -- Shaan points out, there are always opportunities when new sports are created - Aaron Barrera (@TheGrinchofAS) joins Shaan to go down the rabbit hole of crypto and more Today's episode is brought to you by FOCUSAID. It’s the #1 and first nootropic drink in America that’s sold over 100m cans. For 30% off your first order, go to DrinkFocusAid.com. Check it out! 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. Editing thanks to Jonathan Gallegos (@jjonthan) 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.

• 0:01Shaan Puri?

  On this episode of My First Million, me and Sam, we talked about the idea of romance and romantic fiction books. I feel like we talk about that a lot, but we did it again because Wattpad sold for $600 million. So we got into Wattpad, the idea of romantic fiction and how you would build a business around that and an experiment that Sam ran in that space and how he made a bestselling book in the romantic fiction category on Amazon Kindle. We talked about an idea around the COVID smell test. And at the end, the last 15 minutes, we invited Brother Aaron back on to talk about his latest From the Rabbit Hole. And so that's at the very end, last 15 minutes. All right. Enjoy this episode.

• 1:00Sam Parr?

  So today's episode, I thought we could dedicate because it's the inauguration day. I just wanted to talk all about politics for the next two hours. Are you okay with that?

• 1:09Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, people love that.

• 1:10Sam Parr?

  So I'd read a couple of articles. I think I know what I'm talking about. I figured today strictly politics.

• 1:16Shaan Puri?

  If you read a couple of articles, then I mean, we have an expert. So that's, we're good then.

• 1:21Sam Parr?

  Well, I read the headlines of a bunch. So I read the comments and read it. I think I know what I'm doing. So if it's okay with Abreu, if it's okay with you, we're going to dedicate the entire episode to politics, particularly our opinion and why that should be the rule of the land.

• 1:37Shaan Puri?

  I tweeted out a thing, just a bunch of memes, basically celebrating Trump's last day in office with like a bunch of funny Trump moments of the last four years. And I got three DMs just now saying, bro, I didn't follow you for politics. They're like, hey, you said you tweeted about business. This is not business.

• 1:53Sam Parr?

  Well, but it's also funny.

• 1:55Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I was like, this is a joke. This is not politics.

• 1:58Sam Parr?

  Yeah, like

• 1:59Shaan Puri?

  We'll see if they like that response.

• 2:00Sam Parr?

  You know, we actually get a lot of compliments that we stay away from politics. I wouldn't say I'm not a political person. I wouldn't say I'm not not. I don't know. I'm pretty, well, mildly interested. I think you are too, but we don't talk about it here because it's not really important. And if we do do it, I think it's from a relatively objective standpoint.

• 2:16Shaan Puri?

  I don't know if I agree with any of that. I personally don't think, I try not to spend any energy on it in my own personal life. Therefore, I'm pretty badly uneducated on it. Therefore, whenever I speak on it, I'm kind of speaking out of turn. But, you know, I think most opinions are quite uninformed also. So I would say I'm just, I'm right in there with everybody else. So mostly uninformed bias.

• 2:36Sam Parr?

  I want to bring one thing up. Last episode that I didn't make it, it was you and Suli. You guys, I heard, talked a lot about religion, right?

• 2:43Shaan Puri?

  We had a segment on, yeah, creating a new religion.

• 2:44Sam Parr?

  You just admittedly are a political guy, but, and I don't give a shit if you listeners think this is fake or real. It's interesting to me and it's interesting to you. I would sound like an idiot. I'm like, you know what Bitcoin is? Are you familiar with like QAnon?

• 2:58Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, like I don't spend a lot of time figuring out what the QAnon conspiracies are of the moment, but I'm, I'm aware of it. Yeah.

• 3:05Sam Parr?

  But do you know the origin?

• 3:06Shaan Puri?

  No, tell me about it.

• 3:07Sam Parr?

  So this is just someone who has listened to a 60 minute podcast and I don't care if it's real or fake, whatever you believe, whatever. But basically it started, I think in 4chan, this, right when Trump got elected, this guy, just an anonymous guy. No one knows who this person is. He says that he has the highest level of clearance at the White House called Q. I guess it's Q clearance, so they call him Q. And he starts writing these vague messages on 4chan and he sends updates every couple of weeks, a couple of months about what's going to happen. They're all relatively vague and they're kind of like puzzles and the people believe it. So a lot of the people who stormed the Capitol, I believe they were Q folks, but I just think that like, just, let's just be objective. Let's just, who cares what he's saying or she's saying? How crazy is it?

• 3:50Shaan Puri?

  Hold on, is QAnon supposed to be a person? I thought it's a group or like an ideology.

• 3:54Sam Parr?

  It's a person and these people are all followers and they they'll say like Q's a patriot. We love Q, you know, Q's not gonna let us down. It's probably fake, right? It's definitely fake. It's definitely like a a young person. They've made some predictions that are mildly true, like for example, like finance in Hollywood is controlled by pedophiles.

• 4:12Shaan Puri?

  But you're saying it's a person. I'm Googling right now. Everything I'm Googling says QAnon is the umbrella term for a set of conspiracy theories and a kind of a set of believers who believe, you know, for example, there's a satanic worshipping, you know, pedophile sex ring.

• 4:26Sam Parr?

  Keep reading. It comes from one guy named Q.

• 4:28Shaan Puri?

  Okay, yeah, Q is the is the is the clearance patriot. October 2017.

• 4:33Sam Parr?

  Yeah, he writes all these things and they believe that Trump is like their, I think, like the savior or who's gonna like right a lot of the wrongs that Q is saying exists. And so they like, I guess technically, like maybe he was right because Q said that they're like pedophiles controlled or were powerful or something like that and like Jeffrey Epstein. And so the fact that Bill Clinton wrote on Jeff Epstein's jet, like you'd be like, oh, wow, he predicted it, whatever, yada, yada, yada. But it's just crazy that a guy behind his computer is making this up. I mean, you guys, I'm sorry if you believe this, like this, you have to imagine, you have to believe this is probably made up. It's amazing that this person is convincing all these people to do that. I find that to be amazing. It's crazy. I hopefully this Q is selling his own T-shirts.

• 5:17Shaan Puri?

  If not, who is? I think that these guys are, you know, totally crazy, but it it would be interesting to know who is behind this. And I bet there's, you know, elements of truth to their story. Like I bet, I would believe you if you told me there is somebody with a high level of clearance, or maybe it's like the IT person or whatever, like somebody who has some kind of access in government, who, whether for fun or out of their own kind of mental illness, decides to propagate these conspiracy theories on 4chan. And I also believe that just like Jeffrey Epstein and his island of like young girls that Bill Clinton and whoever else were going to. Look, when there's powerful people, powerful people do some pretty disgusting

• 6:00Shaan Puri?

  stuff. And whether whether it's a satanic worshipping, you know, pedophile sex ring, I don't know. But I would bet that this person does have clearance, that there is somebody who has clearance, who is posting this stuff, and that there are elements of truth to some of the things that they do. Now, people are gonna be like, you're crazy. I can't believe you're validating this stuff. I'm not saying it's all true. But I wouldn't be surprised if if there was such a person doing such a thing.

• 6:23Sam Parr?

  Maybe. But the reason why this interests me is it's the same reason why, like, does it interest you to who created Bitcoin?

• 6:30Shaan Puri?

  Oh, yeah, for sure.

• 6:30Sam Parr?

  It's really fun.

• 6:31Shaan Puri?

  Okay, I should say, it interests me. But I also, I'm glad it's an anonymous person. And I wouldn't, if I knew their identity, I wouldn't out them type of thing.

• 6:39Sam Parr?

  Sure. But just from like, I want to watch a documentary that speculates like, it's fun.

• 6:42Shaan Puri?

  No, yeah, cuz this is like movie shit. You know what I mean? It's like, oh, this mysterious creator creates this digital gold, becomes a billionaire. It's like, okay, that's cool. That's like a sci fi book. And it's real life. And then same thing with this QAnon thing. It's like, there's underground forum of internet trolls and hackers. They actually crack a conspiracy, but nobody takes them seriously. And everybody discredits them. But you know, blah, blah, blah. You know, I just think that that's like movie shit. And therefore, I can't look away. I'm rubbernecking, you know, looking at it, even though I know I should probably just ignore it.

• 7:11Sam Parr?

  So I've been fascinated by this. And it's cool to me. Just like the same thing with like, the Ross Ulbricht, who all was behind Silk Road. That stuff's quite interesting to me. This whole Q thing, you know, I got into it since the storming of the Capitol. I got curious about it. Fascinating. Very interesting. Had to do with what you guys were talking about religion. And then let me tell you one more tangent before we get into it. And I've got a couple ideas I want to run by you. God, I sound, I kind of am embarrassed to say this, what I'm about to say. You know how we were talking about collectibles?

• 7:41Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 7:42Sam Parr?

  And we were talking about different categories that are interesting. So I'm a big true crime fan, right? I like Dateline. I like Q. I mean, that's all like, I like Silk Road stuff. I love like, these mysteries are just fun. It's just like a man version of a soap opera. I watched The Night Stalker on Netflix about serial killer, about that serial killer, Richard Ramirez. Horrible guy raped kids, killed people. I think he hurt 30 people. He's the guy who held up his hand and you see like, the pentagram, you know, I'm talking about that picture?

• 8:11Shaan Puri?

  No, I have no idea what you're talking about.

• 8:12Sam Parr?

  All right, type in Nightcrawler. I bet you know this photo. It's like a very famous picture of him in court. Or sorry, Night Stalker. Night Stalker.

• 8:18Shaan Puri?

  Okay, Night Stalker.

• 8:22Shaan Puri?

  Okay, I see the guy. Yep. And I see the hand thing. Yes, I've seen this before.

• 8:26Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's like real famous, whatever. And I started thinking like, I'm a huge fan of American history. This Night Stalker thing was a big thing of history. You know what what else was was Ted Bundy? Everyone knows that name Ted Bundy.

• 8:38Shaan Puri?

  Yep.

• 8:38Sam Parr?

  Everyone names knows the name Jeffrey Dahmer, Charles Manson. I kind of was curious. I'm like, well, these guys are in prison. Can you buy stuff from them? Like, can you buy like a Charles Manson? Like, piece of art? Or can you buy like a

• 8:52Shaan Puri?

  You're trying to wear like a Unabomber hoodie?

• 8:53Sam Parr?

  No, I don't want like, I don't want like memorabilia. I want like artifacts, like historical artifacts. For example, you could buy the confession letter. Or like when Bernie Madoff went to jail, you could purchase like his Mets baseball hat. You could buy even his underwear. Like, if I was old enough, I would totally would have bought something like that. I've been so fascinated, because like, we love crime in America, right? Obviously, true crime is the top podcast stuff. Like, I'm incredibly fascinated. And I went and found a couple auctions that do sell this stuff. It's so weird and so fascinating. It's kind of neat. Is that kind of creepy that I'm saying I might collect that?

• 9:29Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. And actually, so our friend Ramon had this idea not too long ago. That's totally tangentially related, but you said true crime, and it reminded me, which was to do true romance, which are basically like, a blend between the true crime genre and romantic kind of fiction, like, you know, whether it's Fifty Shades of Grey, or more recently, like, the number one show on Netflix, Bridgerton, is kind of just like this, like, you know, romance thing that like, every woman in my life is like, oh, my God, I love Bridgerton. I love this dude on Bridgert, the Duke of Hastings. And so he had this idea of taking, you know, creating these fictional stories, whether it's audio or in text format, and making a subscription service, but have the content be like true crime, where it's like,

• 10:13Shaan Puri?

  You take these crimes, but then you like, you take these famous names, but then you like, do the romance version of what's going on behind the scenes, or you just make it up altogether. It's like the Clinton and Lewinsky story, and you just use their names. You use like either their names or names like theirs to, to do this.

• 10:30Sam Parr?

  Splitin and Klowinski.

• 10:32Shaan Puri?

  You know, that's how Fifty Shades of Grey started, right? Like, it's a fanfiction off of Twilight. So there's the Twilight series, which was kind of like romance slash vampire stuff. And then Fifty Shades of Grey was just somebody in a fanfiction forum on the internet was like, I wrote this thing and they used the names, you know, from Twilight, which is like Bella and, I forgot what the dude's names are, but it's like, whatever, Team, Team John and Team Harry, or whatever their names are. And basically they just used that and they wrote kind of like a raunchier version of it, and that was Fifty Shades of Grey. But then by the time the book came out, they changed the names. They couldn't use that IP, so they changed the names just something else altogether. I'm like 95% sure that's the story behind Fifty Shades of Grey, which is the most bestselling book in like last decade or something.

• 11:15Sam Parr?

  Let's move on from my creepy, my creepy.

• 11:18Shaan Puri?

  Serial killer shit.

• 11:19Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and let's actually talk about that because I, that's actually something I brought up. So our friend Ramon had this idea for a little while and he actually raised money for it. And then he gave the money back to investors because he actually started working on something else that took off. And it was called, uh, well, it doesn't matter what it was called, but we could explain the app another time, but it was in the space of true romance and I actually ran tests with him and we collected hundreds of dollars of subscription revenue in a matter of three days doing this test. I helped him set it up. And what you would get is you have first story of a romance, a thousand words of a romance story that was also audio and we paid someone 50 bucks to do it. We said for part two, sign up. And that got me interested in Wattpad. Do you know Wattpad? So I've been following this company Wattpad and we brought it up a bunch of times, I think.

• 12:04Sam Parr?

  So did you see that they were acquired today for $600 million?

• 12:07Shaan Puri?

  No, I, I. I think I was just on the founder's Twitter. They replied to my tweet or something recently. So I was just checking them out. Oh, they sold to Naver. Wow. $600 million. Amazing.

• 12:19Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So Wattpad was based in, I think, Toronto. They had roots in Hollywood and Silicon Valley. They had 160 million users. They raised a ton of money. So I don't know if the exit is considered a home run. They raised $117 million. And the whole idea was that there's this group of women who love romance novels. And there's a lot of amateur writers out there and they created a place where they can meet and share stories for free. And they did not make a lot of money. I think at the time of sale, only $25 million in revenue. They were only making money through advertising, I believe, which I think for them was really dumb. But eventually in 2016, they established Wattpad Studios, which was striking licensing deals with the most popular stories and authors.

• 13:03Sam Parr?

  And they would help turn them into movies and then they would buy the IP from them and turn it into stuff. But the biggest challenge for their business was that the company didn't own the underlying IP. The writers did. And so to lock in some of that value, Wattpad had to persuade some of these people to partner with them and turn it into movies, yada, yada, yada. Very, very, very, very fascinating. And so my question to you, oh, and one more thing. The company raised a little bit of money from China Literature. I brought that company up a while ago. China, there's a company in China that is doing this exact same thing. It's just called China Literature. Obviously, the translation is a little funky. It's only in China. They do close to $1 billion in sales on a platform that allows readers or writers to share stories with their readers. It's wild. It's a conglomerate. It's owned by a...

• 13:46Shaan Puri?

  So check out, so in this article about the sale, they say Wattpad, which is like 14 years old, sells to Naver, which is a South Korean, like, kind of like media conglomerate. They also have like a messaging app that's really, really popular. They said they plan to incorporate it with Webtoon. Have you seen webtoons.com?

• 14:02Sam Parr?

  No.

• 14:03Shaan Puri?

  So webtoons.com is Wattpad, but for just creating comic strips. So anybody can go publish a comic strip and other people can come read them. And then you could look and like this, the top one on there, right? Today. So it's Wednesday. True Beauty is the top one on there. It has 31 million likes. It's on episode number 129.

• 14:22Shaan Puri?

  If you click it, you just sort of start scrolling and it's like, I mean, I wish this is not a podcast. I wish you could just see this. I'm literally going to share my screen so you can see and react to this. But look at this shit.

• 14:30Sam Parr?

  So let me explain what I'm seeing. It's like a clearly like a, is this a, an Asian company?

• 14:37Shaan Puri?

  Yes, South Korean.

• 14:37Sam Parr?

  Okay. So they've Americanized these Asian women and they make them look like hot, like big boobs, big butt. So it's like, clearly there's some like sex appeal thing going on here.

• 14:48Shaan Puri?

  What this says, so this says, uh, so this guy sees this girl, he says, what on earth? There's a celebrity here. She turns around while holding her Starbucks coffee and it says, hey, what diet are you on? You've gotten super hot. I saw your Instagram. You've become even prettier. And it's just people like complimenting this pretty girl and she's on the breakup diet. And it's like, I don't know what this is, but look at this, like, and look how like this is just like mobile optimized for webtoons. So I feel like something like this can exist.

• 15:14Sam Parr?

  It looks great.

• 15:15Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. Like, I don't know how, if this is amateur publishing this, I can see why this has 31 million views. And like pages and pages, 4,000 comments on today's episode.

• 15:24Sam Parr?

  This is crazy.

• 15:25Shaan Puri?

  So that's pretty cool. I really like this. This is like, you don't really hear too much about this in the West, but honestly, like somebody could do this for the US. Somebody could do this for India. Somebody could do this for the Philippines. Like you could build a business that does exactly this in different regions. And like the way to, one way to start it would be to like, just honestly, kind of rip the content off one of these sites, translate it or have it modified. But just take the core stories and seed your platform using this type of content.

• 15:51Sam Parr?

  I've actually brought this up before, but I'll say it again. I think there's another website. There's a bunch of these. There's one called, I think it's called Lit erotica, like literature erotica. Is it called Lit erotica or is it called, it's, it's called something like that.

• 16:02Shaan Puri?

  Literatica.

• 16:03Sam Parr?

  Literatica. Do you have similar web on that? I think it gets like 50 million monthly uniques.

• 16:08Shaan Puri?

  50 million monthly visits.

• 16:09Sam Parr?

  And look at the time spent on the website.

• 16:11Shaan Puri?

  16 minutes. That's like an eternity for times, average visit duration. Are you kidding me? Like, that's insane.

• 16:16Sam Parr?

  And it's like a Geo City looking website, right? Like there's nothing special.

• 16:19Shaan Puri?

  Look at this. It looks like, I mean, it's just literally a black and white website with text and blue links, blue like URLs to different, different things. This was the MVP of how we were telling, or at least how I was telling Ramon to do his, uh, his site was just like, hey, make a page like this.

• 16:36Sam Parr?

  That's what ours was. You want to see it?

• 16:37Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, let's, let's pull it up. It was like, let me put in my email and just get the next story in my inbox every day or text it to me or something like that. So I, you know, you can hook them, but it's really simple. It's like, people just want to read. There's a lot of people that just want to read stories. And I think. Fanfiction works. That's a lot of what was on Wattpad. I think kind of this like romance slash like literature erotica that works. I know somebody who's doing this for audio erotica, basically. It's so it's like, it's like a podcast version of this. It's kind of like two characters reading, you know, like, kind of like doing the dialogue of the scene. And it's, you know, supposed to get you all hot and bothered. And I bet you that shit's gonna work. Like, I don't think these are big VC-backed things.

• 17:14Sam Parr?

  Click your Zoom thing.

• 17:16Shaan Puri?

  What is this? So this is shortbutromantic.com. This was your, your landing page?

• 17:20Sam Parr?

  I built this.

• 17:21Shaan Puri?

  So people can check this out. So shortbutromantic.com, daily short romantic stories. Exactly. The header is perfect. Guy next door. And it's this girl who's literally taking her shirt off. You can't see anything yet, but she's got her hands in the right places. And this guy who's like super into her, I see audio and then I see the story.

• 17:39Sam Parr?

  Yeah, click it. You don't see the story?

• 17:40Shaan Puri?

  I do see the story. Yeah.

• 17:41Sam Parr?

  Oh, click audio or click that button.

• 17:43Shaan Puri?

  Dude, the audio is hilarious already.

• 17:46Shaan Puri?

  Who's reading this?

• 17:47Sam Parr?

  We paid a guy.

• 17:48Shaan Puri?

  That's so good. And then, did you like the story? Hey there, I'm Carly. Carly's a fake person?

• 17:53Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 17:53Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Okay, I'm Carly. Carly, the fake person. I'm the managing editor of Short but Romantic. We put out one new story a day. Do you want part two of this story? Great. It's ready. Click the button below. So this is a great example of what a MVP looks like for an idea. Cause most people don't know where to start. They're like, oh, I need to make like an app. Oh shit. Okay, let me go find a guy who knows how to make apps and like pay them. Oh man, they want $20,000. Like, in this case, this is a perfect MVP for this.

• 18:18Sam Parr?

  And just for the record, this was all Ramon's idea. I just, we were sitting in my office one day brainstorming it. And I go, we go, I go, watch this. I'm just gonna make it right now. We made it in 30 minutes and got sales that night.

• 18:27Shaan Puri?

  Uh, yeah, I think probably like literally, I think 50 people who listen to this are gonna go do this thing. Cause every time we talk about this, two more people go start this business. A few people have had success with businesses like these. They've came back and told us. And I bet you more people will do it after this.

• 18:40Sam Parr?

  So let me ask you this, Sean. I've got two questions for you. And you have experience because Twitch has been acquired. So my question is this, I think they are the leaders in this space. After they get acquired, do you think that that means there's more opportunity for upstarts? And second, Wattpad was terribly horribly under monetized. They had something like 150 monthly users and they made $25 million. They could be saying like, well, we're building up the audience and we're gonna monetize. I guess that's an okay shtick because they actually did have the audience. But how would you have actually made this more money? Because China literature has $800 million in revenue. There's a way to do it.

• 19:18Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, there's a way to do it. I actually don't even think that's the more interesting question because you'd kind of need to look at their assets and figure it out. But the first part of what you asked, I am 100% in agreement with. So I have this theory in general that it that's eight or nine years into a company's life is the perfect time to go disrupt that company. And why? Because that's usually when either they get acquired, they're trying to go public, the focus is on profitability. They've, you know, scaled up their employees and now like innovation has kind of slowed down and it's about managing what you have. And really just like, you know, like handling all the different problems that you now have, you know? I don't know how much time at Wattpad is probably spent on fraud or spam or like inappropriate content. Like as a startup, you just don't need to think about.

• 20:00Shaan Puri?

  And so in general, I've seen that eight or nine years into a company's life is when the upstarts see openings. It's also where technology just changes enough, enough stuff in the world changes that there's more opportunities. So in this case, what I would try to do is unbundle Wattpad. So I'd go to Wattpad and I would look at what are the most popular types of content? Is it true crime? Is it romance? Is it fan fiction? And it's actually just Harry Potter spinoffs that people just, you know, Harry Potter fans just want to keep reading about Ron and Hermione like going and making babies or whatever. Like, you know, what is the content that's actually most popular here? And then I would unbundle that. And so like, I think what you guys did is a perfect example of an unbundling, which is to say, cool. Romantic fiction content is super popular. We're going to be the romantic fiction shop. We're going to brand ourselves accordingly.

• 20:44Shaan Puri?

  We're going to run ads to get users here. Also, maybe change the model. So they did a good job of basically being a marketplace where, or like a user generated content platform where, you know, millions of people are writing stuff, most of it's crap, and then a few things rise to the top. I think what you guys did here, which was guaranteed quality content behind a subscription is a really cool way to attack the problem from a different angle. And I would just be brainstorming different models that work. That go all in on one of the genres that you unbundle from Wattpad. Maybe true crime.

• 21:15Sam Parr?

  I'll give, if you're thinking about doing this, I'll give you a little bit more feedback because I actually researched this quite a bit. I think romance novels next to business is the hottest, has the most movement on Amazon Kindle. And there's subcategories and like, I'm just going to say this, but I'm not saying like it's cool or whatever, but like there's some really weird and odd subcategories. For example, women who want to have sex with werewolves.

• 21:37Shaan Puri?

  Tell the story. You guys published a blog about how you created a, I don't know what the idea was. It was like, let me see if we can game the bestseller charts or something, right? Tell the story, what you did.

• 21:46Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So we wanted to become a bestselling author because I knew a guy who was writing books on how to sleep with women. And he was not a ladies man, but he was just plagiarizing people. And I did it because I actually thought that what he was doing was highly unethical and stupid and not right. But Amazon knew about it and they were going to like, let it fly. So I go, okay, we're going to do something funny just to like prove our point. And so we wrote a bestselling book in the romance novel category. We gave it a fake woman's name, a fake name called captivating Claire.

• 22:14Shaan Puri?

  What was the book called?

• 22:15Sam Parr?

  It's taken down. You can't find it.

• 22:17Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 22:17Sam Parr?

  Captivating.

• 22:18Shaan Puri?

  That was the name of the book. Okay.

• 22:19Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Captivating Claire. And um, we um, got fake reviews off Fiverr and we got to number one in the category for a few hours and it worked out well. Anyway, someone's asking me, is that it captivating?

• 22:33Shaan Puri?

  Looks like it.

• 22:34Sam Parr?

  Yeah, that's it.

• 22:34Shaan Puri?

  Taken down?

• 22:35Sam Parr?

  It's still there, but.

• 22:36Shaan Puri?

  Looks like it is there.

• 22:38Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it is still there. You can buy that? I don't know what they did. We, we did our part because like the publisher, we told the owner of this, what we are doing and they went along with it. And afterwards we did our part to take it down. I don't know how it's still up there.

• 22:52Shaan Puri?

  What did you learn from this test?

• 22:54Sam Parr?

  That it's easy to game Amazon Kindle. I mean, this was, uh, how long did I do? I did this three years ago. So the rules.

• 22:59Shaan Puri?

  How do you become number one? I missed that part. Well, what did you do to become number one?

• 23:01Sam Parr?

  It's about velocity of buys and you can get a bunch of friends. There's like rings of these Kindle writers. There's like a whole ring where they go, all right, my book's out. Everyone go buy it. And then you just do that with all one another and then you can get fake reviews on Amazon.

• 23:13Shaan Puri?

  About how many buyers do you think it takes or did it take at that time? Are we talking?

• 23:17Sam Parr?

  I don't remember, but.

• 23:18Shaan Puri?

  Thousand, 10,000?

• 23:20Sam Parr?

  No, it was about 500 for us.

• 23:21Shaan Puri?

  Gotcha.

• 23:22Sam Parr?

  It was about 500 and you got to game the category. So there's like a whole way to game it. I mean, like, if you just look at like Amazon. Yeah, this for sure is not ours because ours had reviews and this says there's no customer reviews. So I don't know what's going on here.

• 23:35Shaan Puri?

  Did these names Carter Voss? He's damaged. Sophie Woodruff? She's a virgin?

• 23:41Sam Parr?

  My, my friend's name was my best friend. My best friend was Joshua Drift, so.

• 23:48Sam Parr?

  But so here's my point, though. There's all these categories of like, women who wanna hook up with billionaires, women who wanna work with werewolves, because there's a category of women who wanna have sex with werewolves, women who want to hook up with military men, with people of different ethnicities. There's people who want it rough. I mean, there's all types of categories that you could do this for.

• 24:06Shaan Puri?

  Amazing. I think this is amazing. And the reason I say amazing is because it just shows like, there's this quote that I love that I always repeat to people, which is, I forgot who, what's the guy's name who wrote the Boron Letters? Gary Halpert, is that his name? He said this thing in a talk once that stood out to me. He goes, "Never has more money been lost than trying to market what people should do instead of what they want to do." It's such a big lesson, especially for Silicon Valley and engineers and stuff like that. Like, there's a lot of really idealistic people who wanna be successful. They want their product to be used and they want more customers. They wonder why they're not growing. And it's because they've built something that they think people should do rather than what they want to do. And what this is, is the thought experiment played out of what do people really want?

• 24:50Shaan Puri?

  It's like, people wanna read trashy romantic fiction about a woman who is, you know, being pursued by this hot muscular billionaire.

• 24:58Sam Parr?

  I wouldn't even say it that way. Do we think that porn is good? I mean, I think that like, some porn can be healthy and it teaches you what yada, yada, yada. It just seems that maybe this is like the women's version of porn. Like, this just helps people get off. So I wouldn't even call it trashy. I would just say it is what it is and there's a place in it.

• 25:13Shaan Puri?

  That's what I'm saying. To you, it feels like, yeah, this is what it is and there's a place for this and people want this and who's to judge? Most people, the reality is, most people, if we were to go talk about this in, you know, the middle of, you know, some conference, we were gonna talk on stage, some people would be offended, some people would be horrified, some people would be like, that's trash, that's a waste of time, that's blah, blah, blah. Most people talk about, it's not what most people think about. Most people are not really aware. And I think most people don't really talk about the fact that. The products that work, the products that spread are tapping into things that people want. Tinder works because, oh man, I could just see a bunch of pictures of nearby girls swipe right. With a flick of the thumb, I might be able to like, you know, hook up tonight with somebody if I wanted to. That's why Tinder works. And like, we'd like to

• 25:56Shaan Puri?

  think that no, dating should involve all these cool variables that are really matching you based on your personality and your values. And it's like, that's not what works. Simplicity spreads and like, the fastest path to the seven deadly sins is what spreads the fastest.

• 26:12Sam Parr?

  That's a good rule. I always say if it makes you like, more powerful, more money, look better naked, or have better sex, like, it's probably gonna work well.

• 26:19Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. All right. What else you got? What else should we talk about? We did, uh, politics and porn. So I think, you know, that's, that's off to a good start.

• 26:28Sam Parr?

  Well, you had Nitro Circus.

• 26:30Shaan Puri?

  Uh, I don't want to talk, I was gonna do research on that one. I, you might actually know much more about it than I do. I just knew.

• 26:35Sam Parr?

  I know a little bit, but I thought like, I was gonna piggyback off your stuff. Also, have I talked about pickleball on here?

• 26:41Shaan Puri?

  No, we haven't. Go ahead.

• 26:42Sam Parr?

  Okay. A lot of people in the south where I'm living now and where I'm from, but a lot of people are gonna be like, oh, pickleball, like, that's so old. Of course, you guys are acting like you're talking about some brand new thing. I get it. It's been around for a bit.

• 26:53Shaan Puri?

  I found out about it like, nine months ago. And when some guy was like, yeah, I just sold my company for $10 million selling, you know, pickleball equipment. And I was like, what? What about all the equipment? And he's like, yeah, pickleball. And I was like, what the fuck is that? And he's like, ah, it's, and I actually still don't even know how you play. But

• 27:07Sam Parr?

  I'll tell you.

• 27:08Shaan Puri?

  What I do know is that this sport is like exploding in popularity somehow.

• 27:11Sam Parr?

  It's exploding. It is exploding. Sorry if you guys laugh at us. Yeah, it's popularity. It's new to me because it wasn't popular in California until, it probably isn't, but in Austin, they have pickleball courts now throughout the city and they are always full.

• 27:24Shaan Puri?

  Dude, what is it? It's like full body ping pong? Or what is this?

• 27:27Sam Parr?

  It's like tennis.

• 27:28Shaan Puri?

  Wait, first question, have you played?

• 27:30Sam Parr?

  I have the equipment. We got a pickleball like, membership. Like, there's like, a bar nearby that has a bunch of courts and you pay money to rent. And they're building out, this billionaire guy's building out a pickleball league here, when you pay like, a country, it's like a country club only for pickleball. This is how popular it is. It's like tennis, but the court is half the length, so it's much shorter. The ball is like a wiffle ball. You're not American, a wolf ball is like a really light plastic ball. And you just kind of hit it back and forth. There's some rules that like, there's some like basic rules, like you've got to stand here when you serve. And for the first two hits, you've got to stand this other place. But then after that, it's just tennis.

• 28:04Shaan Puri?

  Is it, okay, so is it basically tennis, but you don't have to run around so much and be as athletic? Is that what the thing is? Is it like easier?

• 28:11Sam Parr?

  It's tennis, but you don't have to be as skilled.

• 28:13Shaan Puri?

  Great. Okay, I love it.

• 28:14Sam Parr?

  It's not hard to hit it over the net. It's not hard to have a rally. Anyone can have a rally. It's easy to have a rally. So it's more fun.

• 28:21Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so I'm really interested in this and I'm really interested in just generally new sports. So let me tell you three things that I think are interesting. First, that story of the guy who was selling the equipment. That also means that, you know, anytime there's like an emerging sport, you just take all the shit that exists for the existing sports. And you say, cool, there's going to be a leader in this category. So blogs about information, rules, leagues, equipment, that stuff. Those are a bunch of opportunities. The other side of it is like, who's going to take advantage of this? So for example, if you're Barstool Sports, what if Barstool was like, look, we can own pickleball. No one's looking here. It's still early. A bunch of our readers like pickleball.

• 28:58Sam Parr?

  It's definitely kind of like a bro-y.

• 29:00Shaan Puri?

  Right. It's a bro-y thing. Seems like you could play with a beer in your hand. Okay, so let's say if I'm Barstool, I'm looking at pickleball and I'm saying, 10% of our audience thinks pickleball is the shit and 90% has never played and never heard of it. So here's what we're gonna do. We are gonna go buy the league right now and we're gonna own the league. We're gonna basically own the NFL of pickleball. You know, we're also gonna like sort of be the lead sponsor and we're just gonna go all on pickleball. It's gonna be like half joke and half like real content and real money behind this thing. I think there's even big companies that could do well with this. If you're Twitch or YouTube, you know, why not go pick up the rights to, to pickleball, for example? The last thing is there's other sports that are like this. Are you familiar with 2020 cricket?

• 29:39Sam Parr?

  No, what is that?

• 29:40Shaan Puri?

  All right, so this is a crazy story. You're gonna, you're gonna love this. And I don't even know the full story. So we, I'll just give you the, the surface. You know cricket matches, like a normal cricket game and cricket's like obviously super popular in India and like Pakistan and the UK, they like cricket, Australia likes cricket. A normal cricket match can last like five days. So it's like, it's, you know, this worked back in the day when like, you would kind of play the sport and then like the sun would set, there was no lights, there's no electric, you know, fucking no, no outdoor electricity. So people would just like go home for the day. They would come back and resume the game the next day and these would be like five day matches. So obviously this didn't like keep up with the way the world changed and the way people's attention spans were shrinking and like TV providers were like, you know, how the hell

• 30:22Shaan Puri?

  do we show this? Like this thing, you know, takes hours every day and then like spills over to the next day and the next day and the next day. So these people got together, they formed something called 2020 cricket and it's basically a shortened version of cricket that only lasts, I think like two hours or three hours or something like that. I'm going to get a bunch of the details wrong, but the high level ideas, they took cricket of three to five day match and they shrunk it down into like an accelerated two to three hour actual sport.

• 30:49Sam Parr?

  Who did this ECB? Is that like a company? Oh, there's like a board. I don't understand how this is like a board.

• 30:54Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I don't know exactly who invented it. Bray, you can check that. You can look it up, but basically.

• 30:58Sam Parr?

  Like is this owned by an entity? It's always kind of confusing to figure out.

• 31:01Shaan Puri?

  It's like a group. I think it's like a business. I think a group of people basically like made this thing and created this league.

• 31:06Sam Parr?

  So the guy, the people who own it, it's called England and Wales Cricket Board and they have a chairman, they have a CEO. I don't know if it's, it's weird. I don't know how the entity is structured.

• 31:17Shaan Puri?

  And so this, this got really popular. So 2020 cricket, I think is probably more popular than normal cricket, except for maybe some of the like, once every few years, big matches between countries, uh, sort of like the Olympics. And then a bunch of the star players were like, shit, we get paid more if we go play 2020. And so they started going to play 2020. And so it's like, what? So you, you look at baseball today, right? In America and you wonder like, is somebody going to do this for baseball? Baseball is like this, the most fucking boring sport, golf, right? Like you have like these kind of spinoff variants, like skins matches in golf or pro-am tournaments in golf that like get a lot of attention. In boxing, now there's like the YouTuber boxing, celebrity boxing is like a new variation. Baseball, maybe somebody's going to do like the shortened form of baseball. That's like more home run. It's like, you know, sort of like bigger boobs

• 32:02Shaan Puri?

  and bigger butts. Like how do you do more home runs, less time spent and whatever? It's like, what's that movie? Uh, you know that movie I'm thinking of?

• 32:09Sam Parr?

  Baseball?

• 32:10Shaan Puri?

  Baseball. Yeah.

• 32:11Sam Parr?

  I was thinking about this when I was thinking about Spikeball. I'm like, how do we basically all this?

• 32:14Shaan Puri?

  Somebody's gonna do a baseball, or I think that would be really fun if somebody tried to baseball this.

• 32:18Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I was thinking a lot about that and I was like, man, that is pretty interesting. There's a great book that I've read. I don't know if it's up here. So this person that I admire, because they're just like funny looking, is Bernie Aclestone. Have I told you about him?

• 32:31Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 32:32Sam Parr?

  So Formula One was kind of ragtag in the seventies and he organized it and he formed this company. He formed a, A, a governing body and he was the chairman of the governing body. And then, B, he formed a sub-company that was responsible for getting all the sponsorships for the governing body, which would then distribute it to even teams. He was like, yeah, and that sub-company gets 50% of the money, by the way.

• 32:52Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 32:53Sam Parr?

  And he what? But he was that sub. So he kind of like pulled a fast one and now he's worth $4 billion. And so it worked out really well. We just got to do this for pickleball now, eh?

• 33:01Shaan Puri?

  Well, okay, so there's other ones too, like these like little fringe sports. So Abrey just put this in the chat. Have you ever heard of the sport kabaddi?

• 33:08Sam Parr?

  Uh-uh.

• 33:09Shaan Puri?

  All right. So this is an Indian sport and it's like the most fucking Indian sport there is because it's a sport played with zero ball, zero skill, zero equipment. The only thing, so here's how it works. Imagine a volleyball game. So you have two teams on two sides of the net, but there's like, I don't know, like 10 people on each side or something. It's like a lot of people. It's a bunch of Indian dudes with their shirts off. What happens is it's kind of like Red Rover, where one guy from one side has to cross under the net and go to the other side. And he's trying to like, he's trying to tag as many people as he can. And then he's got to get back to his side. And they're trying to like stop him. Here's the catch. And here's why the game is called kabaddi, which is the whole time he has to keep continuously saying the word kabaddi. So he goes over and he goes kabaddi, kabaddi, kabaddi, kabaddi, kabaddi, kabaddi, kabaddi, kabaddi. He has

• 33:51Shaan Puri?

  to keep saying it in one without like taking a pause or a breath. And as soon as he runs out of air, he's out if he's on the other side. So they're trying to hold him onto this side. He's trying to tag as many as he can and get back to his side of the thing.

• 34:03Sam Parr?

  That's a joke. No one would want to care about that. And that's the thing that-

• 34:06Shaan Puri?

  It's a popular sport.

• 34:07Sam Parr?

  That's that. That's the thing that pickleball would have to overcome, which is like, is this just going to be darts, shuffleboard and bowling?

• 34:13Shaan Puri?

  Arm wrestling, paper scissors, rock.

• 34:15Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Or is this going to be like tennis? Because right now, in my mind, it's still a little bit like darts. It's like a drinking game.

• 34:23Shaan Puri?

  I think it can be darts. I think it should embrace being darts in the same way that like- You know, they took the spelling bee and the spelling bee, I mean, literally couldn't be a dorkier thing in the world. You know, they put it on ESPN, they gave it production value, they tell the backstories of these kids. And watching the spelling bee is a great three days like that. I've watched many years of the national script spelling bee. I don't know if you have, but that shit is amazing.

• 34:47Sam Parr?

  You're genetically predisposed to like that, I think.

• 34:52Shaan Puri?

  So yeah, I think that there's a bunch of fringe sports. I think you could just embrace being the fringe sport and just put it like, go direct to consumer, you know, behind a paywall, basically with the fringe sport.

• 35:00Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's gonna be interesting to see what happens with pickleball and see if it keeps up with the pandemic demand, but it is pretty cool. It's not new to anyone who's lived here for a while, but since I've been in Austin, it's news to me. I had no idea what it was. And it's just weird. But let me tell you one more interesting thing. At the top of the hour, at three o'clock for me, I got asked to go and interview this woman who's making a hundred grand a month from OnlyFans.

• 35:25Shaan Puri?

  Nice.

• 35:26Sam Parr?

  Is that wild? Apparently she's like a marketing whiz and has done a really good job. And you know, it's even, listen to how crazy this is.

• 35:33Shaan Puri?

  By the way, shout out to a listener from the pod for making onlyfansmetrics.com. Go to onlyfansmetrics.com and you could just type in a name of any OnlyFans creator and you could see how much they're earning.

• 35:42Sam Parr?

  That's cool. I didn't know about that. Do you follow WorldStar on Instagram?

• 35:46Shaan Puri?

  Of course. WorldStar, The Shade Room, I follow them all.

• 35:49Sam Parr?

  Have you noticed that a lot of the sponsored WorldStar ads are OnlyFan pages?

• 35:56Shaan Puri?

  Like the individuals themselves?

• 35:57Sam Parr?

  Yes. These women with these OnlyFan pages are buying drops on WorldStar. It's so nuts. It's so brilliant. I mean, it's not brilliant because like this is exactly what they should be doing, but it's just neat to see that this industry and these young entrepreneurs, like these women who like you wouldn't expect to, I don't know, we're gonna stereotype is like, I didn't think they'd be as sophisticated as they are. They totally are.

• 36:20Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think it's amazing. I did expect it because I think that they are smart and they're kind of like ballers in their own way. And they just needed the tools, like the traditional kind of like industry for this stuff really had them at a disadvantage. And as soon as those, the power structure changed and the power was in their hands, they became like super entrepreneurial, very smart marketers and have done really well. By the way, I just saw on the WorldStar hip hop, this thing that I've just been seeing advertised everywhere. I bet this company is spending like, Five million dollars a month right now. I see them on TikTok. I see them on

• 36:50Sam Parr?

  What's it called?

• 36:50Shaan Puri?

  It's called Dose of Roses, dose-roses.com. You might have seen it. They have this giant rose teddy bear. Like it's like a huge stuffed animal made of roses that you can get for Valentine's Day and it costs $60. And they've been selling this thing like on every channel that I can see, like leading up to Valentine's Day, they just show these like really hot girls. Happy with their like, kind of like average looking boyfriend handing them this like amazing.

• 37:16Sam Parr?

  Wait, are these real roses? I'm looking at their website now.

• 37:19Shaan Puri?

  I don't know. I haven't, I haven't got one, but uh, and I think it kind of like breaks apart or something like that. So it's basically just a bunch of different variations of roses. And they have, you know, 300,000 followers on Instagram and I just feel like they are really clever with their marketing. So I've seen them. They, they market basically through memes, memes on Instagram, memes on Twitter, memes on, on TikTok, I mean. And yeah, I bet this company is doing really well and they're spending a ton of money right now. And so what are you going to ask your OnlyFans creator? What are you gonna, what's gonna be your hard hitting interview questions?

• 37:47Sam Parr?

  I don't know. What should I ask her?

• 37:49Shaan Puri?

  I would try to figure out the marketing tactics. Like, how are you growing this? You know, basically I was just trying to figure out like, is this awesome for you? Like, are you like, dude, this is amazing. I used to do X, you know, I used to make X and put in Y. And now I make 10x and I put in one 10th of Y and that's what I want to hear. And so I'd love to just hear kind of like, what were you doing before? How hard was that? What were the downsides of that? How much were you making? And then now, how much more are you making and how much easier is it what you're doing or how much more enjoyable?

• 38:16Sam Parr?

  She has a bio and she has like a website, like a safer work website that just explains everything that she does. It's called, uh, I'll, I'll see what it's called. Anyway, she's, oh, here, knowingless.com. So the word knowing and then L E S S dot com. And uh, if you click her about page, she says that she got started because she has the number one post of all time on Reddit's subreddit, Gone Wild. And that is how she started her career.

• 38:45Shaan Puri?

  Uh, that's funny. By the way, this website is not what I expected it to be. Um, when you said.

• 38:50Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's like a proper blog.

• 38:51Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it looks like she's talking about like history or like, you know, medieval France or something like that. Like this is, this weird looking website to me.

• 39:00Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And she has a survey section where she asks her people survey, her folks surveys in order to learn about her customers.

• 39:06Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, this is wild. Okay. So that's cool. What else? Let me do one quick idea and then we're gonna bring on my brother-in-law, brother Aaron, to give us his latest internet rabbit hole. Back by popular demand, people liked his making fun of Tim Ferriss and Silicon Valley people and how kind of obnoxious we can be. And they liked his kind of tax rabbit hole last time. So we'll see what he's got. Maybe he was a one-hit wonder. I don't know. We'll find out. But I have one quick idea. My friend is a doctor. I think there's a business opportunity here, but I don't have time to do it. He's like, there are a lot of people out there right now who have had COVID and they're fine, but they lost their kind of sense of smell. He's like, you know, to get it back takes quite a long time. It could take months to recover your sense

• 39:50Shaan Puri?

  of smell. So you have like, you know, I think 400,000 people have died of COVID. I think, you know, how many tens of millions of people have had it to some level of severity, whether they tested for it or not, I don't know. But let's say you now have a new market of millions of people who have lost one of their, I don't know how many senses we have, what, five or six? One of their five or six senses that we have. Can you help them get it back? And he's basically like, there's this kind of like medical procedure, like this, there's like a series of like exercises you could do to accelerate the return of your sense of smell.

• 40:18Sam Parr?

  Oh, my God.

• 40:19Shaan Puri?

  He's like, but it's done in such a medical way. He's like, someone should just make this as a kit. And he's like, if anybody wants to do this, like, I can tell you like the right process, basically a step-by-step kit, like what you should do kind of each day. He's like, but there's just like, you just need some essential oils and like, you need a certain structure of how you're gonna do it and a certain dilution for it. I think somebody should make this. And I was like, dude, that is a great idea. It would be so easy to market and it wouldn't be a long-lasting business, but like, you could make half a million to a million and a half dollars of profit, I believe, in the next 12 months if you just did this one thing. So I thought that was a cool idea.

• 40:52Sam Parr?

  We have friends that own essential oil companies. Why haven't they done anything like this?

• 40:55Shaan Puri?

  I think they're just busy. I sent it to one of them. I think this is like small for them. They're big now, but I think that You know, for somebody who's got nothing but time on their hands, I think this is a cool idea.

• 41:04Sam Parr?

  I'm just fooling around on this tool I had to look up how many people searched COVID lost smell or anything like that. Not too much.

• 41:10Shaan Puri?

  I know it's popular because on TikTok, one of the most viral TikToks nowadays is this one where you like take an orange with the peel on and you put it on your stove and you burn the orange on the bottom. If you've lost your sense of smell, do this to get it back. And then you like do that and then you like, I don't know, sniff it like a bunch of times or throughout the day. And it helps accelerate the return of your sense of smell. And like all the comments are like, oh my God, I thought this was a joke, but this actually works. And there's like millions and millions of views on this thing, which means it's getting shared.

• 41:37Sam Parr?

  That's a great idea. I don't think this is like a hundred million dollar idea, but it could be a good way to get your foot in the door and make something neat.

• 41:43Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. I think, you know, this could make, I think it could make half a million to a million dollars of profit if done well. Easily make tens of thousands of dollars of profit.

• 41:51Sam Parr?

  I dig it. We gotta come up with a cute name for it and then we're going to advertise wherever these roses company, Bear Roses or whatever the hell the thing's called.

• 42:00Shaan Puri?

  Those are roses. All right, cool. Sam and I, you gotta jump.

• 42:02Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I gotta jump. Aaron's coming on now. I will talk to you all in a week.

• 42:13Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so back by popular demand, brother Aaron, how did it feel to get so many tweets and all the feedback, man?

• 42:22Speaker 02

  It was great. In one day, I went from four followers to five followers on Twitter. So I was like 25% in one day. If my Bitcoin was that much, it'd be great. Anything is possible. KG.

• 42:34Shaan Puri?

  Tell people, tell me about your Bitcoin thing. I think this is funny, by the way. So you own a bunch of Bitcoin, but you jumped in kind of like headfirst, a little bit recklessly. So explain your Bitcoin thing and then we're going to go down whatever rabbit hole you got for us this time.

• 42:46Speaker 02

  Okay, so this was like maybe the second week or first week of December. We talked and you said something about, oh dude, get Bitcoin. And I was like, what's Bitcoin, right? Like, I know what it is, like the word, right? And so I looked at it and I was like, oh man, like that's a lot of money. And I was like, Well.

• 43:04Shaan Puri?

  Well, what was the price back then?

• 43:05Speaker 02

  I think it was like eighteen, eighteen point two, eighteen point three. And so got one and went down a miniature Bitcoin rabbit hole and started being very distrustful of fiat currencies and started to understand what it was about. And then a few weeks later, like, I'm not going to say how much, of course, but I was like, bro, this Bitcoin is messing me up, man. So I just sort of like stopped. And then there was a week or two towards late December where it just exploded. And I couldn't believe it. And so then I called you and was like, bro, man, what's up with that Bitcoin?

• 43:44Shaan Puri?

  Right. You doubled your money so far. So there's a lot of people in Bitcoin who, some people like it because it's like, ah, this is like a good store of value. It's like a digital version of gold. Some people love the technology. They're like, this is great to do a trustless system, a decentralized financial system. And then some people are like, oh, my God, the government is printing money like crazy. I don't trust fiat currency. And, you know, I feel like for you, you're a man who loves a conspiracy. So, you know, this is like introducing a fish to water here. What was it that hooked you?

• 44:16Speaker 02

  I think it was like the whole, don't trust the government and don't get me wrong. I love America. I love the military. Shout out to the troops. But the government and the military and the government and the country are two different things. And so when you started to sort of dig into the budget deficit being twenty five trillion, twenty six trillion, twenty seven trillion, and just kind of us living and understanding about inflation. And so you'll go, oh, okay, well, you know, things go up two or three percent a year. And it's really that your money's being the base. And so when I looked into that, that conspiracy was all about, okay, get out of fiat and get into Bitcoin. As you know, I got into gold and silver, so I'm also a stacker and a hodler in one. So it's two for one.

• 44:58Speaker 02

  And so anything that's not a dollar, if you give me a million dollars, I might just slap it out your hand, man. You know, I want real estate, gold, silver, Bitcoin, pizza, but I don't want your paper, man.

• 45:09Shaan Puri?

  What rabbit hole have you been going down lately? Because you told me, you said, all right, I got a new one. I'm ready. I've been down a rabbit hole. I'm just coming out for air. What rabbit hole have you been down? I don't know if I'm gonna like this one, but you tell me what it is.

• 45:22Speaker 02

  Dude, like for all the listeners, when I went to this rabbit hole, I didn't have any facial hair. And now I look straight Muja Hadeen over here, man. So I went down the second residency, second passport rabbit hole. Because people like you, Sam, Suli, like the sort of the tech people that I know of have left San Francisco. So they'll go to, you know, to Austin in Sam's case, or in your case, they'll go outside of the city. And they're doing that to live better, be it, oh, I can actually afford a house. So I actually not pay state income tax. I can have all this space. And so I took it a step further because I used to live in Texas and you still have federal income tax in Texas. So you still have to pay whatever that rate is. And if you're big ballin' and you're paying 30, 40% of your income.

• 46:07Speaker 02

  I took a step back and I went down this rabbit hole of, well, what if I didn't live here? Right? And so when I was looking into what a second residency and second passport means. It's a way to take your lifestyle to an Indonesia, to a Mexico, to a Panama. As the Latina say, and then being able to, if you are a tech entrepreneur like you, like Sam and all these guys. You can make that same amount and actually not pay any property taxes or any federal income taxes. And your life can be better to explosively better from your time in Indonesia. From my time in Indonesia, you know, that's a fact.

• 46:48Shaan Puri?

  Is it better because stuff is cheaper there? So you can live like a king? Like when I lived in, I lived in China, I finished high school in China and we had a private driver. We had a live-in maid who would clean everything, who would cook everything every single day. In Indonesia, same thing. We had a driver, we had a live-in maid. When you lived in Indonesia, you had a live-in maid. Can you share what you paid for somebody who? And they were happy. This was not like, this is not slavery. This was somebody who wanted this job to work in the city. And they wanted to basically work with a family like yours. They would clean and on the weekends they would go home or send, send money back to their family where in the countryside. Can you say what you were paying at that time?

• 47:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, man. And I actually, this is something that me and your sister talk about. I think that we only paid, we paid what the rate was and it was like a hundred and twenty, a hundred and thirty dollars. We should have paid triple that.

• 47:39Shaan Puri?

  Explain per what?

• 47:40Speaker 02

  Oh, per month, per month.

• 47:42Shaan Puri?

  Right, not per day.

• 47:44Speaker 02

  Not per day, not per week. And it's more that at that time, this was 10 years ago. We really didn't understand. It's not that we were trying to be cheap or trying to take advantage, but we would just ask other expats.

• 47:56Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, we were paying the same rate or 10% more than what the going rate was. It's just that the going rate is ridiculously low, unbelievably low.

• 48:04Speaker 02

  Dude, it was incredibly low at the time. Of course, as you know, no kids. So it's not like she did much work because we would be at work all day, come back and, you know, she makes some dinner and it was great. But those are things that if you have a second residency or a second passport, and it's not very difficult to get one of those, that what you could do is live like a celebrity there for what you're making here. And it's not as easy as just, oh, I'm just gonna get a plane ticket and go there. There's some work that you have to do.

• 48:33Shaan Puri?

  Why do you need a passport? Why not just go on vacation? A lot of people go to Bali right now and they work from Bali. Why do I need a passport to Panama or anywhere else?

• 48:42Speaker 02

  So a passport or a residency visa would give someone, say, who's listening to this program, the chance to work in those countries. So if you wanted to work, that's a way to get income. There's also access to health insurance there. So these are the two things that Americans think about. Oh, man, I'm gonna lose my health insurance. Oh, man, I'm gonna lose my job. Yeah, but if you have a passport or a residency, what you can do is avoid those. Okay? So that's the big difference between a visa when, just going through all this COVID thing, Sean, and seeing what's happening with, you know, at the Capitol, with the riots and the protests, you know, that have happened in the last, you know, 10 months since COVID has happened, America's, it was kind of dicey, man, like for the inauguration.

• 49:24Speaker 02

  I think the listeners know they had 20,000 troops and tanks. For President Biden. This isn't like the Dominican Republic, man, right? And so I'm just sort of thinking about this stuff never happened when I was younger. And now it's very politically juiced here, right? Like you can't post this thing or your friends will be friends. You, you can't say this or you'll get fired. And it used to not be like that. So there's kind of this little shift in America, which is all good.

• 49:50Shaan Puri?

  You've said one thing before about entitlement, uh, cause you live in San Francisco right now. I personally believe the reason you're interested in a second passport is not even for the tax savings. It's not even for the greater lifestyle. I think you're sick of the entitlement of San Francisco. Tell the people what you believe about the entitlement of San Francisco.

• 50:07Speaker 02

  Dude, here's my hot take, and I hope you're ready for this. San Francisco, and I've been all around the world, all around America, the most beautiful city in America, with the worst people. And that's because everyone here is entitled to everything. You have rich people that are entitled to this. You have poor people entitled to this. You have homeless people entitled to this. You have Hispanics, blacks, everyone is, uh, this is my space. Get out of here. Your kids are too loud. Stop making noise. And it's for someone like me who's from Texas or someone like Sam who's from St. Louis. People are not like that there. And so if you offend anyone, they can call the cops. They can do this, they can do that. Now this stuff hasn't happened to me, but I see it.

• 50:49Speaker 02

  It's just that everyone here, I'm all about equality, but they're just like, look, my kids like should also have everything. So you gotta give it to me. That's all good because it's, it's my choice to be here or not. But the second residency or the second passport can help you avoid San Franciscans.

• 51:06Shaan Puri?

  Right. There's a great talk by, um, Bologies on YouTube, or it might be a blog post, but I think he gave it as a talk as well called Exeter Voice. And basically what he's saying is like, you know, and people think, oh, it's a democracy. So, you know, you have a voice, you have a vote, you have a voice. And, um, that's what makes America great. And that's what gives you the, you know, the chance for change is that you have a voice here. His point is, you know, this is the really dumbed down simplification of it. But his, his point is, hey, you know what's better than a voice? Uh, the ability to exit. Meaning if you can leave, if you can vote with your feet, that is a much more powerful factor for change and competition and driving like, you know, different governments to treat you well than you having a voice where they can either

• 51:50Shaan Puri?

  listen to you, they can ignore you, you can kind of keep waving your fist in the air, but do nothing. Right now, for example, we see people leaving for Austin, for Miami, for places that either have, you know, in the meantime, San Francisco is talking about, hey, California is talking about like, we're going to increase the wealth tax. And then you have like companies walking out the door, you have investors walking out the door, you have entrepreneurs leaving because San Francisco and California is actively making things worse while these other places are making it better. And the thing I think is really smart is have you been following this mayor of Miami?

• 52:23Speaker 02

  Francis Suarez, you know it, bro.

• 52:25Shaan Puri?

  So he is doing what I think, you know, he's like Mr. Steal Your Girl out there. So he is basically saying as California, every time California does something dumb, he personally handwrites a letter to an influential person saying, come out to Miami, I would love to have you here. Yesterday, he was talking, you know, Elon Musk has been trying to do his boring company where he's drilling tunnels under the ground. And in California, you know, he runs into bottlenecks and bureaucracy and all this stuff. The mayor tweets out at him and goes, come do this in Miami, we're ready for you. And like, we'll, we'll lay out the red carpet. We would love for to have you here. We would love for you to be doing this, this project here. And, and Elon responded, he goes, if the governor and the mayor are both on board, things can go real quick.

• 53:07Shaan Puri?

  And the governor responded also, let's talk. And so this guy is recruiting Coach K at the McDonald's All American Camp. These guys recruiting entrepreneurs out of California, out of San Francisco, because now they have an option to exit and go somewhere else because you're not tied to the Silicon Valley network. Because, hey, everybody's kind of gone remote, everybody's moved. And that has opened up the door.

• 53:30Speaker 02

  It's something that in all of the research I did on YouTube, there was this one guy named Andrew Henderson. Nomad capitalist, shout out to this guy. He would say, don't go where you're treated better. Go where you're treated best. And so what Texas is doing, what Florida is doing is they're saying, hey, look, we want you here. We're gonna give you tax credits. We're gonna roll out the red carpet. And that's why Oracle, HP, Tesla, all these big companies are taking those jobs to Texas. And for Texas, that's great. But for us, California is a lot like that great athlete in high school who has it all. I mean, he's six foot seven, two thirty, jumps out the gym, but he doesn't practice, man.

• 54:15Speaker 02

  And eventually.

• 54:17Shaan Puri?

  Pissing it away.

• 54:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, eventually that athleticism is less and less of a factor because people have real skill. Like this guy is saying, hey, Elon, come here. Austin is saying, hey, look, we're already like the tech capital here. And so people are moving in places like California. What this means for San Franciscans and all Californians is taxes, taxes must go up because California, unlike the government, cannot print fiat currency. And so that's going to happen for a fact because all these jobs that are leaving, me and your sister run a small business, those employment taxes, bro. Man, they'll kill a lot of companies. And so the taxes on the existing employees and people that live here, a hundred percent will have to go up, unfortunately. So that's why the second passport and second residency.

• 55:00Shaan Puri?

  They said that there's like a $500 million shortfall already just from people who have left and companies who have left. This has been like just a few months, so.

• 55:09Speaker 02

  Sean, and that's just in San Francisco. That's not in LA and all the other big cities. There's going to be a day of reckoning, but it's for us, unfortunately, leadership did it themselves. I mean, it wasn't like the rest of the country didn't have to deal with COVID.

• 55:20Shaan Puri?

  You've been going down this kind of like sovereign man rabbit hole right now. What do you think is the next rabbit hole? Where, where are you, where are you looking next?

• 55:29Speaker 02

  So all of my rabbit holes have to deal with taxes because taxes in the world of business, taxes is the thing that you can control, right? And so now that we know about buy, borrow, die, now we know about why we invest in real estate and write down those expenses. Now that we have a second residency and a second passport, I think the next one is going to be more the gold and silver slash Bitcoin rabbit holes because if we printed trillions of dollars in this last year, the currency is going to go down. So where can we go other than a recommendation from you just to buy Bitcoin? I need to like really dig in and see, okay, what is Ether about? Okay, I have this gold and silver. I'm like a Lannister right now in 2021.

• 56:12Speaker 02

  Aaron Barrera always pays his debts is the new slogan. And so I'm hoping that I can get a little bit more educated about those things because I don't know as much as y'all do for sure.

• 56:23Shaan Puri?

  Okay. Well, I appreciate it. I appreciate you coming on and Brother Aaron giving us the, giving us the latest from the rabbit hole. So go back down there and we will see you again in a month or so when you, when you come up for air.

• 56:36Speaker 02

  Roger that. Take care.

• 56:38Shaan Puri?

  All right. See ya.

• 56:39Speaker 02

  All right, man. Bye bye.