3 Crazy Billionaire Stories

Episode 490: Shaan Puri (https://twitter.com/ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (https://twitter.com/theSamParr) share 3 wild billionaire stories. From the secret acquisition of OnlyFans by a mysterious entrepreneur to Elon Musk's quirky right-hand man', to the controversial history of the Sackler family and their involvement with Purdue Pharma. Want to see more MFM? Subscribe to the MFM YouTube channel here. — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com/ Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Try Shepherd Out - https://www.supportshepherd.com/ • Shaan's Personal Assistant System - http://shaanpuri.com/remoteassistant • Power Writing Course - https://maven.com/generalist/writing • Small Boy Newsletter - https://smallboy.co/ • Daily Newsletter - https://www.shaanpuri.com/ — Show Notes: (0:00) Intro (3:10) OnlyFans Annual Report (5:00) Leo Radvinsky (17:50) The Sackler Family (32:30) Billy of the Week - Steve Davis (49:30) PostPilot (57:30) Kiss back — Links: • Companies House - https://tinyurl.com/mr3m28x8 • OnlyFans Annual Report - https://tinyurl.com/3nw46jxj • Leo Radvinsky - https://leoradvinsky.com/ • Guy Stokley - https://tinyurl.com/vhbn6jef • Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. — Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. — Other episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto • #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

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

• 0:00Shaan Puri?

  This may not be the best acquisition ever, but I'll be damned if it isn't up there.

• 0:04Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 0:05Shaan Puri?

  Right? Like, I think that he bought this. I don't know the, I don't know the exact number, but he bought the majority of OnlyFans for, I think, single-digit millions of dollars, maybe low double digits, possibly low double digits. But let's even say it was $10 million. This is now a more than $10 billion company.

• 0:24Speaker 02

  I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like a day's off.

• 0:32Sam Parr?

  I want to start the episode with a survey for the listener.

• 0:36Shaan Puri?

  Ah.

• 0:37Sam Parr?

  And we'll actually let John and Ben chime in. So just Ben, turn your camera on so I can see your face. All right. So we're gonna start with the survey. So on Monday morning at 7:30 a.m., I wake up from a text from Sean. And here's what the text says. It goes, "Hey, you got good topics for tomorrow? I just texted Emmet from Twitch to do a pod, and he said he'll do it tomorrow. So I'm gonna drive to San Francisco tomorrow and record an interview with him." And so what I want, Jonathan and Ben, turn your cameras on. What I want you to do a thumbs up if you think that it's the first one, a thumbs down if you think it's the second one. Do you think that this text means,

• 1:19Sam Parr?

  "Okay, in lieu of Sam and Sean recording together, I'm gonna do one with Emmet"? Or do you think that this means, "In addition to the recording tomorrow, I'm also going to do one with Sam and Sean"? Thumbs up for the first one, thumbs down for the second one. All right, great. I just wanted to make sure I'm not crazy, and I wanted to-

• 1:37Shaan Puri?

  Oh, Ben, the betrayal. Oh, you too, Ben, you too.

• 1:41Sam Parr?

  So I thought that that's what it meant, and when I heard that, I was like, "All right, so I have some free time between 11:00 and noon."

• 1:47Shaan Puri?

  Ladies and gentlemen, the jury, let me just say this. Would I say, "Do you have good topics for the pod tomorrow"? If we weren't gonna do a pod with good topics together? I don't know. Seems like that might be something that, uh, you know, that we're gonna do.

• 2:02Sam Parr?

  All right. Well, I just wanted to see what the audience thinks. So whatever. Um, I have a bunch of topics today. What do you have?

• 2:09Shaan Puri?

  I got, bro, you think you've got a bunch of topics? I got, well, however many topics you have, add one. That's how many topics I got.

• 2:14Sam Parr?

  Well, I see a big list. You have like an interesting, you have a few interesting things. What, you, you, you wanna kick us off with something?

• 2:21Shaan Puri?

  Let's start with this. Yeah. So um, we've talked a lot about one business on this podcast, probably more than any other podcast has talked about this business. I would say we are the champions of this company. We are the ones out here letting people know that this company is legit, that this company is big, that this company is very interesting. Everybody's overlooking it. We've been saying it for years.

• 2:44Sam Parr?

  Are you even a paying customer of this company?

• 2:46Shaan Puri?

  I'm not a paying customer because I'm a married man, but.

• 2:49Sam Parr?

  Well, you can be a married man and be a customer, but like I've never paid for.

• 2:52Shaan Puri?

  I'm not a paying customer because free porn exists and I'm talking about OnlyFans.

• 2:59Shaan Puri?

  The uh, so OnlyFans is annual numbers leaked and um, not leaked, actually. What happened was actually kind of interesting. You know this, but maybe a lot of people who are listening don't. Which is that any company that uh, that is based in the UK has, whether it's private or public, has to report at the end of the year, uh, sort of a financial summary. And the more, the bigger your company is, the more data you have to include.

• 3:27Sam Parr?

  Basically like a, like a public company, you have to report like.

• 3:30Shaan Puri?

  Like a public company. So in the US, if it's public, you can go look up their information, maybe the quarterly, quarterly earnings, or you can go find their S1. But if it's a private company, you're just shit out of luck. You're just guessing. But if you go to onlyfans.com and you scroll down to the privacy policy, click privacy policy, you will see that OnlyFans is run by a company called Phoenix International Limited. And what is Phoenix International Limited? It is a company based in the UK. So if you go to the, uh, there's a, a entity called Companies House and Companies House is where uh, all of the company information is housed. And so if you go there, you can find, uh, you can look up Phoenix International Limited, and then you can look at filing history and you could see that there are several reports.

• 4:13Shaan Puri?

  So reports about uh, this director replacing this director, but the one you want to, the one you care about is the one that basically says, here is um, the 2022 financial summary, year-end financial summary. And when you go to that, you're going to see the following picture of a business. OnlyFans is a business that generated or collected 5.6 billion in revenue in 2022. Its take on that, it was 20%. So their, their company took 1.1 billion. So for every $4 a creator makes, they make $1.

• 4:46Shaan Puri?

  On that 1.1 billion in net revenue, 525 million of profit. So this company is spitting off half a billion a year of profit. Pay a little tax, the after-tax profit is still $400 million. And then the beauty of it is if you scroll down to, uh, to the, I don't know, it's the balance sheet, somewhere down right at Raff for the P and L, it says dividends. And it shows that the owner, Leo, took 338 million in dividends last year. Oh, my. And the year before that, he took like 200 something million. This guy has taken out $550 million of dividends in the last two years off this business, which is just incredible because let me, let me remind you, this is a company that he bought in 2018. This is five years.

• 5:31Shaan Puri?

  What did he? Five years. He bought it. Do you know what he paid for? Non-public information, but he bought 75% of the business at the time for what I believe was low millions of dollars. Was he wealthy before that? Yes. So Leo is a, um, kind of a gangster of the internet. And he, by the way, if you just go to his website, his website's awesome. So there's really two things I love about his website. He's a listener, I think. Well, that's one of the things I love about the website. If you go to his website, which is just his name, leo, leo radvinsky.com.

• 6:09Shaan Puri?

  If you go to things I like, so he's got a things I like. And then the very first category, podcasts, the very first one of two podcasts is my first million. So he's a listener of the pot, which was, you know, just a cool thing, fun, fun thing to see. But I love his website because I love when people sort of put up their flag and they're like, yo, this is what I'm all about. And it's just, they just make it really easy for you to just understand, here's who I am. Here's what I do. Here's what I'm into. And if I'm into this, if you're into those same sort of things, we'll probably get along. So his, uh, his main thing says he's a software company, architect, angel investor and open source software. This guy gives millions of dollars a year to open source projects that probably would have died had he not done that.

• 6:53Shaan Puri?

  He is, he's a huge supporter of, of open source software and sort of like a, uh, Uh, he's like, you know, like a sort of uh, freedom entrepreneur, right? He, he wants projects that are increasing the overall amount of freedom in the universe. So whether it's uh, he'll fund these open source social networks that are like uh, like a Mastodon type of, type of social network that are, are not owned and controlled by like Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk, like one private company, closed source owned by a, a mega billionaire. He's funds projects that are alternatives to those.

• 7:25Sam Parr?

  And listen to this, if you go to his, so you see like he has sections about me, projects, open source, things I like. If you click projects, OnlyFans isn't even number one of the listed projects. It's number two, number, and he, it just says like one paragraph and it says what it is, but number one is some open source project. That's what he has listed.

• 7:45Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, before X, he's like, uh, before X is like tools for rapid prototyping and development. You know, Microsoft discontinued Visual Basics and before X stepped in to try to make this happen, probably would have died, you know, basically like when I looked into this, it probably would have died and then 2019, he decided to um, put a ton of money into it just so that's project could stay alive. And um, so then like under giving, he's like, yeah, I don't, I don't do a bunch of my time, effort and money to causes I care about, um, including open source initiatives and traditional charities. My goal one day is to sign the giving pledge. To sign the giving pledge, you need a billion dollar net worth. I'm pretty sure he has like a multi-billion dollar net worth now. I think he's achieved this goal because in the five years, and you can go look at the

• 8:26Shaan Puri?

  company filings, but like 2019, 2018, the company has like, he pulls out like 1.5 million in dividends. And so in like a three year period, he went from pulling out 1.5 million in dividends to 250 and then 340 million dollars in dividends out of this company. So this accelerated extremely quickly. And I think like, you know, there's all these great tech acquisitions. There's like uh, you know, Google buying YouTube for a billion dollars, probably worth 50 billion now. Facebook buying Instagram for a billion dollars, probably worth 100 billion now.

• 9:01Shaan Puri?

  This may not be the best acquisition ever, but I'll be damned if it isn't up there.

• 9:05Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 9:06Shaan Puri?

  Right? Like, I think that he bought this. I don't know the, I don't know the exact number, but he bought majority of OnlyFans for, I think, single-digit millions of dollars, maybe low double digits, possibly low double digits. But let's even say it was $10 million. This is now a more than $10 billion company. So he turned, let's just pretend it was $10 million into essentially $10 billion of value. Personally, not a fund, not a company. This is him. This is one guy.

• 9:35Sam Parr?

  Who owns the other 25%? And is there a story of him buying this and like what he saw? Cause like, I would, if, if, if this was me five years ago, I would have been like, dude, this would never, this will never work. Right? I mean, everyone would have said that.

• 9:50Shaan Puri?

  So it was already kind of, it was already working in a very small scale. So this guy, Guy Stokely, was the founder. And if you go look at Guy Stokely, he looks like an Instagram model. He is like a, like every picture of him, he's flanked by seven women. And the story is that Guy Stokely, his dad's in the finance world. He takes a small loan of like 10,000 pounds from his dad, starts OnlyFans, and they kind of co-owned the business or whatever. It's like a father and son was like sort of the origin of this thing.

• 10:22Sam Parr?

  Good bonding.

• 10:23Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Yeah. Some guys like golf, some guys like fishing.

• 10:28Shaan Puri?

  Some fathers and sons start OnlyFans. Like, right? Like, that's, that's amazing. And I don't know why he sold or when he sold, but, yeah, Leo approaches them and they buy, and he buys the business. At the time, it was reported that he bought 75% of the business. I don't know if later he bought the rest. I suspect he did because there's one of these filings that Guy Stokely is removed as a director in the company. So maybe he just voluntarily stepped down. I don't know. You're, at some point, you're just reading a bunch into these statements. You can't say for sure exactly how it happened. And this whole thing was very secretive. In fact, When I first found out about Leo owning OnlyFans, at the time, nobody knew who owned OnlyFans. It was not clear. There was nothing on the internet.

• 11:11Shaan Puri?

  This was several years ago, and I was trying to figure it out. Couldn't figure it out. And then I get a message from somebody who's, who's like, hey, I know the guy who owns OnlyFans and he loves the pod. I was like, whoa, that's cool. Like, I've been trying to find who owns this thing. I wanted to invest in this. And anyways, that's how we kind of like, we ended up having a chat. You know, I want to meet this guy someday. He's got a really interesting story. So now there's like a photo of him on the internet and there's, he's a very private guy. But now a little more information has come out about him. Very early on, I think when he was a teenager, like 15, 16 years old, he got into the business of first, I think, like domaining. So he would basically buy and sell like hundreds of domains, like maybe thousands of domains.

• 11:54Shaan Puri?

  In fact, there's like a, some, he got sued at some point, some, there's like a court filing of like, here's a thousand domains that this guy still owns. And it's just like every variation of like, you know, sort of like websites that you can imagine, many of which were sort of in the adult category. And then he creates MyFreeCams and MyFreeCams basically took over the camgirl market. And I think that site still makes great money. You know, that's how I think he got very, very rich was off that site.

• 12:26Shaan Puri?

  And he used that money then to invest and to parlay that into other, other businesses. But he owns a portfolio of these businesses. And now Phoenix International, which is OnlyFans, has become a major, major one.

• 12:38Sam Parr?

  This is amazing in a lot of different ways. One, it's amazing that Companies House, which always a weird name. I hate saying that. It's companies, plural, Companies House. It's amazing that that exists and it's one of my favorite places to do research.

• 12:53Sam Parr?

  It's amazing how fast this grew. Would you, would you invest in this company? Or do you not, do you like?

• 13:00Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I tried to several times. You know, the problem was they didn't need any investment. They were making so much money. And so I was like, hey, um, I can add value. And I was like, ah, you know, am I really, you're crushing it. What are you, what am I going to do here? Right? Like, hey, I'm a fan. I think I'm a good hang. Can I invest? That's really ultimately what my pitch was. It's like, I'm a fan of what you're doing. Unlike most people, I don't ju, like, you know, at the time when I was saying this stuff, like, only guys had a. It's over time become more and more mainstream, over time become more and more accepted as a thing that's legitimate. At the time, it was seen as very, um, very sketchy. It was sort of the butt of the joke.

• 13:41Shaan Puri?

  And, um, yeah, so I definitely would have invested in this. Um, I wanted to. They were doing so well that I don't think they ultimately needed to, needed any investment. Now, the one thing they do need is liquidity. Uh, like, you know, he's taken massive dividends, which is great. But like, you know, they could realize a several billion dollar liquidity event if they could go public or if they could sell. But there's no buyer and it's hard to go public with a business like this. And so I think, you know, I don't know what they're going to do with it, but, uh, you know, it's not a bad plan B to just suck out hundreds of millions and dividends every year. It's fine.

• 14:14Sam Parr?

  Yeah. I was gonna say, is that what he wants? I don't know why you'd ever want to go public with.

• 14:18Shaan Puri?

  I don't know if he wants that, but you always want the option, right? Like any business person will want the option, whether you take it or not is secondary. In fact, most of the things in my life I'm pushing for and people are like, uh, do you want this? And I'm like, oh, I haven't even gotten there yet. All I want is the option. And if I have the option off, then I could think, what, what I definitely know is I don't not want the option. Right? And I think that's just a better way to operate as a business person is to, uh, to make sure you have the options on the table for you.

• 14:44Sam Parr?

  At $400 million a year in a dividend, there's probably only five or 10, I would imagine, people getting, have, who have, in the world, or at least in America, who have, who have higher income. Like I remember Steve Schwarzman from Blackstone, one year made a billion dollars. And then the other guy is like, what's the guy's name? Is it Griffith or Griffin? The, uh, like, it's usually just like.

• 15:06Shaan Puri?

  Tim Griffin.

• 15:07Sam Parr?

  It's usually like the top five or 10 hedge fund managers who make this. And they're actually, if they're the best, there, it's fairly reliable. But they're like, those are the guys who are buying the hundred million dollar apartments in New York, you know, like the Bill Ackmans. And there's probably only 10 of them, maybe 20, but like that income, you'd be the highest in America in the top 30 or something like that. You know what I mean? So like.

• 15:30Shaan Puri?

  I don't know.

• 15:31Sam Parr?

  I don't know, man. I would probably still own that. Well, this is cool. Well, I

• 15:36Shaan Puri?

  One thing that's cool about this guy, by the way, when I talked to him, like, you know, eighty, ninety percent of our conversation was not about OnlyFans at all. It was about these different open source projects he's interested in. He was just, he's very like, he's a technical guy. He's very curious, very interested. So he was showing me like, oh, by the way, check this out. I'm gonna send you this link. You know, like, try this, uh, try this site out. It's kind of like, it's this fringe niche site, open source project, but like, I think it's really cool for these reasons. And, um, I just love that. I love, you know, one of the things I love the most about tech is that it redistributed wealth to a bunch of people who had different interests. So like, when the wealthiest people were all from finance, you just got this, like, one homogeneous pool of, of rich people. It's like, here's a bunch of rich dudes that live in the same place.

• 16:19Sam Parr?

  Like alpha.

• 16:20Shaan Puri?

  I like the same stuff.

• 16:20Sam Parr?

  White guys wearing suits.

• 16:22Shaan Puri?

  Alpha New York, um, you know, power suit, watch wearing, art buying.

• 16:28Sam Parr?

  Greed is good type of guys, yeah.

• 16:30Shaan Puri?

  And then like crypto made a whole bunch of other people rich, right? Because it was like, you know, a different type of person got rich through that and they had different interests. They're like, yo, I'm gonna spend money on this digital squiggle and this bored ape. And I'm gonna donate to this other thing. And I'm gonna fund these types of projects and these types of, this type of worldview, I'm gonna fund. And, you know, tech companies were started by, you know, like Mark Zuckerberg and, you know, this guy didn't, he wouldn't want to start a hedge fund. He wanted to do something else. And because he does that, now he could spend his money doing other things. Or Elon Musk. He's like, I'm gonna fund companies that will do space travel when no investor would fund this. I'll fund it myself. And so I love when wealth gets distributed to new pockets of people who have different interests, different values, because they're gonna bring some new, like, it's not

• 17:15Shaan Puri?

  the thing they created. It's actually all the stuff they do with their money that creates a hundred new, new things. That's kind of interesting to me.

• 17:20Sam Parr?

  I've, uh, I've emailed back and forth with them just a few times. I've asked him to come on. Um, I think you have too. I don't know if that will ever happen.

• 17:28Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. He's like, I'm a pretty private person. I don't think, he's like, I don't think I would make a, a very good guess, but, um, you know, well, okay, fine. We'll talk about your dividends then.

• 17:41Shaan Puri?

  You either come on as a guest or we find you on company's house. That's the rules of this podcast.

• 17:46Sam Parr?

  Dude, let me tell you about another person that is hard to find information on and is really fascinating, but really evil. Have you ever heard of the Sackler family?

• 17:56Shaan Puri?

  I saw that there's a documentary or a movie out on Netflix about them or a show, but I don't know anything about them. So I'm in the perfect spot. I'm interested and aware, but completely ignorant. So.

• 18:06Sam Parr?

  So there's two documentaries, one on Hulu, or they're both actually fictional shows. They're both really good. One called, I think, Dope Sick, one called Painkiller, one's on Hulu, one's on Netflix. The story is about Purdue Pharma. So Purdue Pharma is basically, I want to, I'll tell you a little bit about that, and then I want to tell you about the early, even before that, because that's more interesting to me at the, at this point. But basically Purdue Pharma started by three brothers. They, it was Mortimer, Raymond, and Arthur Sackler. They were in, yeah, they are in the.

• 18:36Shaan Puri?

  Can you be named Mortimer and not be evil? Like that's.

• 18:40Sam Parr?

  And he's, and he's one of the evil ones. And so basically, these three brothers, I'll talk about their background in a second, but basically they were in the medical industry forever. Since they started as doctors, and then they worked at psych hospitals where they did lobotomies, and they're like, all right, let's create, let's start making these medicines and drugs. And so after 50 years of doing this, they eventually start, or buy Purdue Pharma, they buy it for not a lot of money, but they, it evolves over 40 years to where they create this drug called OxyContin. OxyContin was basically, it's an opioid, and it wasn't popular at the time. It was kind of unknown. They had a drug previously that was similar. They kind of changed it, and they, the big change they did was they called it a time released technology, I guess. So,

• 19:26Sam Parr?

  and they threw a lot of just shady practices. It seems like they bribed the FDA. They hired lots of ex FDA people after they approved the drug, and they promised them all this stuff. They got the FDA to approve OxyContin, and the big thing was that they called it time release, and they said that it was believed that, and that that word believed is important. It's the first time the FDA ever said that. It's believed that less than 1% of people who takes OxyContin will ever. Get addicted. So what they do is they go and hire literally 2,000 salespeople who go to all of these hospitals, these doctors, these clinics, and they say, hey, look, we have this new drug. It's for a moderate pain. It's you can use to prescribe Vicodin only if someone had surgery and had major pain or if they're dying from cancer.

• 20:08Sam Parr?

  We have this new drug. Very few people get addicted to it and has a time released capsule, which means that it's really hard to get addicted to. So you could give this people if they just have like a sore back or if they have headaches, like it's not that big of a deal. And they train these salespeople and they're very aggressive about training. They hold contests where you can win a trip to Bermuda. If you sell a certain amount of drugs, you could do all these types of things where they would give like watches. They would throw parties with hot girls, like they did all this stuff, but it was for medicine, particularly an opioid, which is incredibly controversial, in my opinion, very unethical. And so they make OxyContin popular to the point where the company is privately owned. It's owned by two families, each Mortimer and Raymond's family.

• 20:50Sam Parr?

  I believe Raymond's son, Richard, Richard Sackler becomes CEO and they grow this company to be doing like $30 billion a year in revenue. And they're also famous because in order to help their reputation, they donate billions or they had hundreds of millions, maybe billions that added up to two art museums. And so the Met in New York, they have a Sackler wing, like the Louvre in Paris, they have a Sackler wing. They, these guys never went to Harvard, but there's like the Harvard School or the Harvard Museum that's for the Sacklers. There's the Columbia, there's the NYU. Like they've donated so much of their money to arts and it's basically what they call a reputation laundering. So they try to like, get like into high society, even though they're selling this drug.

• 21:32Sam Parr?

  Turns out two years ago, I think the government finally cracked down on them, made them go bankrupt. And I'm not sure where they are now, but they're very private. So that's the story of Purdue Pharma. The, the book Empire Pains.

• 21:43Shaan Puri?

  Oh, wait. So sorry. The, the end was the government cracks down on them and it goes bankrupt. So the government did what? Cause isn't Oxy still like everywhere?

• 21:51Sam Parr?

  Well, so what's I I don't know much about these types of drugs, but there's OxyContin. That's like the brand name. And then there's Oxycodone, and I think that's the generic drug. And then there's Hydrocodone. And then there's, there's all these forms of opioids. I think you could still get OxyContin. But basically, at first, the government made them pay a $10 million settlement. And then people spent five years trying to track them down and like find like one thing that they did that broke the law. Because it was very weird because they weren't actually breaking the law. Or if they were, it was very hard to find which law they are breaking. Because the FDA kind of colluded and allowed them to get away with a lot of stuff. So technically, they kind of weren't breaking the law. They got hauled up in front of Congress. And what the government eventually does is they're like, oh, you lied to Congress.

• 22:32Sam Parr?

  Because you said you didn't know it was addicting, but we found this email from four years ago where you did say you knew it was addicting. And so that's actually what they got charged with, sort of like how Al Capone got charged with tax evasion, not killing people. It was sort of one of those things. And that led to a domino effect where eventually they had to pay something like an $8 billion settlement. The Sackler family had to give up control of the company. And they were no longer allowed to be involved in this industry. And so that's kind of where we are today. Where Purdue Pharma, it still exists, but not as it did before. But we'll see if there's any actually long lasting change with all that. But it's a, it's a really fun story, like in the sense of it's thrilling. Uh, in that they were just horribly unethical. They did a lot of crazy shit. Does that make sense?

• 23:14Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I mean, this basically killed hundreds of thousands of people, right? Like just through addiction.

• 23:20Sam Parr?

  It killed hundreds of thousands. It killed hundreds of thousand people directly. And that hundreds of thousands of people just taking that medicine were killed. But then what it led to is what we experienced in San Francisco and all these other places. You take oxy and then you're like, I love this. I need more of it. Now I need something cheaper and something more accessible, heroin. And then which leads to fentanyl. And so it creates this huge opioid crisis where Purdue was like, hey, we didn't do that. We just prescribed OxyContin. These guys are dying from heroin. When everyone's like, man, it's such a clear, like, there's such a clear transition here. Like, you guys are definitely responsible. So that's why it's like a thrilling story.

• 23:56Shaan Puri?

  At Harvard, there's still this, this building is still called the Sackler, whatever, the Sackler Museum, or whatever it's called, uh, still up, which is kind of crazy that they haven't sort of canceled the, the name off the building.

• 24:09Sam Parr?

  So here's where things get interesting, and this is what I want to talk about. So I mentioned there was three brothers, only two brothers owned Purdue. So the eldest brother, his name was Arthur. He died in, I think, uh, the late eighties or mid eighties. And basically he was the eldest brother and he got them all into the industry. When he died, his estate sold his portion of Purdue to the other brothers. And the other brothers are the ones who Purdue eventually created OxyContin. And so Arthur's heirs are like, look, we had nothing to do with this. Uh, it's same name, but like, we had nothing to do with this. And Arthur was the one who liked to donate a lot of money to museums. So same last name, but their argument is that it's different people. But Arthur was incredibly shady and I want to tell you his background.

• 24:53Sam Parr?

  This is where things get really interesting. So check this out. So this guy, Arthur Sackler, he was the eldest brother. So he was a patriarch, he kind of, and he brought in his two brothers into the business. And he was originally a doctor, but his first hit was as he was a doctor, he started an advertising age agency, a medical advertising agency. And he studied copywriting. That was his thing. He learned about copywriting through a traditional agency where he would work at a traditional agency at nights and weekends in order to help pay the bills. And he was like, copywriting is awesome. I gotta do this for Valium or this other drug, this other drug. And so all these huge pharmaceutical companies at the time, this was in the fifties, sixties and eventually seventies, like, um, what, what's that big one? Roche, R O C H E.

• 25:38Sam Parr?

  I believe that they were the inventors of Valium. And they start saying, hey, Arthur, your little agency, we hear you have good ideas. What are your ideas? He's like, well, we have to hire a sales force. Then we're going to create these ads. We're not allowed to advertise towards consumers, but we can advertise towards doctors. And they popularize Valium by making it like an everyday drug. Like, oh, if you're a little stressed and you know, just like you would take an Advil.

• 26:02Shaan Puri?

  Pop a V.

• 26:03Sam Parr?

  Pop a V. You'll be calm and they have like housewives vacuuming in pearls, like with a Valium, uh, like logo, or he also popularizes his tranquilizers. So he makes them popular. So he builds up this, uh, agency, but in secrecy, he does two things that are interesting. One, he finds his competition. There's another medical pharmaceutical ad agency, and he buys half of it. And so what they, what he does is he eventually corners the market for pharmaceutical advertising and he owns the other one secretly. And he'll say stuff like, "Look, you don't want to work with us? Fine. Go to our competitors. They sound like they're a good fit for you." And they collude together on how to like market together and like which techniques are working.

• 26:47Sam Parr?

  The second thing that he does is he creates this thing called the Medical Tribune. It's a bi-monthly newsletter for doctors. So he's in the newsletter industry. He, it's a free thing, a free newsletter that is eventually read by 300, 400, 500,000 doctors. And he, what he does is, no one knows at the time that he owns it. But he starts using his original company, MacArthur, for advertising, buys ads in the Medical Tribune. And through this, he, it creates two huge companies. And that is how he creates his original fortune. And I found, I went and like dug through the newspapers.com. That's one of my favorite sources. You can find old newspaper clippings. I found some of the numbers. So check this out. So Mick, McAdams, sorry, I called it MacArthur. It's called McAdams.

• 27:31Sam Parr?

  When he died, the company was doing $170 million a year in revenue. And that was in 1985, I believe. Uh, it had 170 employees. And then his other company, Medical Tribune, it was, it was not sold for a significant amount of money. It actually sold for around $70 million to Axel Springer, who also bought Morning Brew, uh, our friend Austin's company. So I've been giving him a hard time about this. Austin Sackler. Yeah, for sure. Austin Sackler. And so, uh, annual revenues for Medical Tribune ranged between 50 to 80 million dollars in the last few years of existence. This was in the late 80s and adjusted for today, that's around 150 to 200 million dollars a year. He also, Arthur, while he was doing this, he was buying, he owned like three New York City

• 28:15Sam Parr?

  townhomes. He was making seven, sometimes eight-figure dollar donations to art, to museums. And he had an art collection valued at $60 million. When he died, I think he was 75, that was in the late 80s, he was worth around $150 million, which today is around $400 million. Maybe five or six years after that, that's when Oxy was created. But besides the fact that these guys are, you know, do illegal, horrible, unethical things, what's crazy is this guy owned two companies that were doing, close to each of them, over $100 million a year, and it was medical advertising and a medical newsletter for doctors. And he owned, it was him and his wife owned the whole thing. So like, super fascinating background story about how this guy originally got wealthy.

• 28:59Shaan Puri?

  Wow. Prolific, prolific family, for sure. That's crazy. That's a crazy story.

• 29:05Sam Parr?

  It's crazy. So a lot of the stuff like that the Purdue families or the Sackler families about, it's about OxyContin. And I thought that was interesting. But what I thought was really interesting was just like, I was like, well, just from an entrepreneur's perspective, how to get started. And so I did all this research, I dug deep, and then I went into like, I used this thing, it's like a historical money calculator. And so it helps you calculate how much money is worth today. I then went, looked at real estate prices from the 70s and 80s in New York City, and I found out how much he was paying for homes. And I found, and I basically like reverse engineered like the income from this medical newsletter, because I was just curious how it works. I think, by the way, that still works today. And there was another company, I don't know if you remember this, but there

• 29:46Sam Parr?

  was a company that used to give out free TVs to doctors, TV, and these TVs had like skeletons on them. And you could like, you could like move the skeleton around in order to like show like, all right, your colon is actually right here, and we'll zoom in on that. But on the TV was ads for drugs. And this company eventually got in trouble, interestingly enough, for fraud. It turns out they were lying about a lot of stuff. But this pharmaceutical industry is so interesting to me, because it's something that we're supposed to trust. Turns out... It's a lot of it's bullshit and it's just as shady as someone would say that this MyFreeCams website is, or even worse. And it's really fascinating how this whole industry works.

• 30:28Sam Parr?

  But medical newsletters, super fascinating. A legit company, Axel Springer, which is a $5 billion German newspaper company, bought it. And so I actually think these still work today. And if you go on TV-

• 30:40Shaan Puri?

  Is it still running, by the way, or no?

• 30:41Sam Parr?

  No, they shut it down. They, I believe they shut it down and like everything involving stacklers, like people don't want to have anything to do with it. But if you, if you're on, do you ever watch cable TV?

• 30:50Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, sometimes.

• 30:51Sam Parr?

  Dude, it's only car commercials and drug commercials. That's like all it is. It's like Cialis and like it's, so anyway, this pharmaceutical advertising industry, it's, I would never enter it, but it's really fascinating how it's done and it's incredibly lucrative. It created this fortune and I think it could still create more.

• 31:07Shaan Puri?

  Well, I put this out there before, which was that we get asked a bunch about, hey, I'm doing a newsletter. Can you help? Can you invest? Can you advise? Whatever. And we've, basically, I think both of us say no to pretty much all of them. The one that I think is interesting still, or two, the two areas that I am interested is who's doing an amazing job of this in real estate and who's doing an amazing job of this for the newsletter for doctors. Those are the two that I really care about. And I'm like, I really want to find whoever's doing a great job of that and, you know, invest or advise or partner with them to like help make that bigger. Cause I think those spaces are amazing spaces if you have the right person going, like doing it the right way. There's a lot of nuance to it, but yeah, I still think this idea would just work again.

• 31:48Sam Parr?

  And they, and they sell for huge multiples. So Aging Media did this for nursing homes, so somewhat-

• 31:54Shaan Puri?

  Senior Living, yeah.

• 31:55Sam Parr?

  Yeah, somewhat related. I, I don't remember the multiple, but I heard rumors. It was like 15 times profit, which is really great. And so these businesses are still super lucrative. And I think what Arthur did, whether you think that's good or bad, the way that he did it, I think is bad inherently. I don't think it's bad, but the way that he did it is, I think it's still incredibly lucrative.

• 32:15Shaan Puri?

  So- Let me tell you, let me tell you another story about a, a smart weirdo. All right. So here's, here's-

• 32:21Sam Parr?

  This is the episode, smart, smart weirdos slash maybe bad people.

• 32:29Shaan Puri?

  This guy I don't think is considered bad, but he's my Billy of the week.

• 32:40Speaker 03

  A million dollars isn't cool. You know what's cool? A billion dollars.

• 32:44Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so we've had, we have some actually multiple contenders. This is a Billy of the Week runoff, actually. A, a, maybe this is actually a campaign, but this guy is, is doing something interesting. So his name's Steve Davis. You probably don't know who that is just because it's a fairly generic name, but.

• 33:03Sam Parr?

  And if you Google his name, it's a, it's a professional snooker player. What is that pool?

• 33:08Shaan Puri?

  Yes, like some kind of like pool. If you, if you had like, you know, the wrong color balls or something. So this guy is Elon Musk's long trusted like right-hand man. So let me tell you about this guy. He joined SpaceX back in 2003. So very early on, crazy background. He's got a twin master's degree in particle physics and aerospace engineering. Right? So, you know, guy's got a dome on him. And he, but I think what he was doing, I think he was doing something like completely unrelated, but he was one of the first employees that ended up getting hired by SpaceX. I, for some reason, I feel like I remember he wasn't like working in the industry. He was doing something else and then he got hired. And the stories about this guy are kind of legendary.

• 33:53Shaan Puri?

  So when, when Elon bought Twitter, people were like, who's gonna, who's he gonna make CEO? And a lot of people were like, it's gonna be Steve Davis before he put the, the lady from NBC in charge, which was sort of a weird pick. It seemed like it was gonna be Steve Davis. Why? Because Steve Davis was living and sleeping in the Twitter office with his wife and their newborn child that they had just birthed like three weeks prior.

• 34:14Sam Parr?

  What a brown-noser.

• 34:17Shaan Puri?

  Intense. So this guy, if you go read the stories about him, it's like, it's like folklore. So one person said, he's been working six hours a day, every single day, seven days a week for years and years. Another person said, he's insane. He gets more work done than 11 people working together, just himself.

• 34:39Shaan Puri?

  One time, one time Elon Musk, they were doing something with the production of a, of a part in, in one of the parts of the, of the rocket, I guess. And this was a hundred and $20,000 part. And Elon's like, we need to get this down to $5,000. And nobody was, everyone's like, what are you talking about? Like, yeah, of course. I wish, I wish it was free too. But like, that's just not how things work. He's like. $5,000 and he's just left the room, right? And Steve Davis takes that as a personal challenge. He's just working for months and months to try to figure out, how can we do this for 5K instead of 120K? He ends up getting it done for $3,900. He figures out a way to do it. He emails Elon so excited. Elon, we did it after months. We figured out how to lower the price of this part

• 35:24Shaan Puri?

  down to only less than $4,000. You said five, we got it at less than four. Elon just replies, okay, period.

• 35:32Shaan Puri?

  It doesn't matter. Steve Davis is undeterred from this and he just keeps going. He's become, now he's the CEO of Boring Company. So Elon's like, you know, third company or whatever that he, that he created after, all that.

• 35:45Sam Parr?

  And that company is legit, right?

• 35:47Shaan Puri?

  Boring Company.

• 35:47Sam Parr?

  They actually are making stuff or is it just a t-shirt company?

• 35:51Shaan Puri?

  No, they are doing things, but there's a lot of criticisms like, cool, like how, you know, how, how's that tunnel going?

• 36:00Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 36:01Shaan Puri?

  Like where's, what's going on? You dug this tunnel, but like it's only compatible with Teslas. And they have to put like roller blades on before they go through it. It's like, I don't know, this seems kind of shitty, right?

• 36:11Sam Parr?

  Dude, I want my cities to look like Swiss cheese, just holes all over the place. Like what's, what's going on? You're just selling flamethrowers.

• 36:17Shaan Puri?

  And so, you know, on one hand, they have improved the speed of boring, of actually digging the tunnels. But the reason I found this guy interesting, so not only is he like, Elon's right-hand man that you haven't heard of that, you know, I find that interesting. Not only is he probably worth maybe a billion dollars at this point, like based on SpaceX stock has appreciated like crazy since 2003. But this guy's totally weird. So he just is, he's got a great sense of humor that he takes to business. Okay, so he, basically Elon sends him, Elon trusts him, right? He's like, hey, we need somebody on the ground in, you know, he's got like this like city in Texas.

• 37:00Shaan Puri?

  And like at one point that he sent him to DC for a lot, like, you know, they needed to be near DC because a lot of their contracts are government contracts. So he's like, send Steve out to DC from California and. Steve's living there. He's doing his job, but he's like, God, you know what I miss? I miss just having great frozen yogurt. He's like, they don't have that DC. He's like, all I got is crap. I miss the California frozen yogurt. You know what? So as a side job from his very important job at SpaceX, he opens up a Froyo shop called Mr. Yogato. And he not just opens it up. He goes and he works there after work for fun.

• 37:38Sam Parr?

  What?

• 37:39Shaan Puri?

  And so he goes and he works there and he starts to make it fun for himself. He creates just a bunch of ridiculous policies. So if you go to Mr. Yogato, if you can stump him with a Seinfeld question, your Froyo is free. If you come in dressed as Bjorn Borg or whatever, the like tennis player, you can, or I don't know if he's a tennis player, maybe he's a musician or something. You get 25% off. If you let him stamp Mr. Yogato on your forehead, 10% off. And so he created this long list of rules essentially on the secret menu. For what he could do. And then when he had to leave, he had to move away. You know, SpaceX needed him in some other place. He's like, ah shit. I'm not going to be able to go work in my yogurt shop after work. Okay.

• 38:24Shaan Puri?

  Hey, whoever comes to Mr. Yogato today, one of you is going to get the shop for a dollar. He just gave the shop to some guy for a dollar at the end. It's like, here's the keys. The only rules. I want to keep, you know, being able to come here and eat half off. And, um, you know, uh, and also you got to keep some of the, the, the, the rules alive. Like if you can recite a speech from Braveheart in a Scottish accent, 20% off. And so he, so he does this yogurt shop. He also opened up at one point.

• 38:55Sam Parr?

  The, the headline, if you Google Mr. Yogato is, it's from an article in the Washingtonian. It says Twitter's next CEO might be the Mr. Yogato dude.

• 39:04Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 39:06Shaan Puri?

  He goes, bro, like the rules are amazing. You just, you should go look at the rules of this. Rule number eight, anyone wearing a kickball uniform and has played hard, evidenced by dirt on their knees, will automatically receive 10% off their yogurt. Anybody who can reenact the 47 second Michael Jackson Thriller dance, 20% off. If you perform a shorter choreographed dance, you can get 10% off.

• 39:27Sam Parr?

  This is actually genius, by the way. Order a yogurt for 30 consecutive days and we'll name a flavor after you. I mean, this guy's awesome.

• 39:33Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So he's having a good time. So then he opens up a bar called Thomas Foolery, short name Tom Foolery. And same things. Instead, you know, every bar has a happy hour. He created the angry hour, where if you shout your order of the drink to the bartender angrily, you get a discount on your drink. Um, you know, they served like cookies and ice cream at this thing. And he's like, this is a place where we're going to take you back to being a kid, but with alcohol.

• 40:00Sam Parr?

  Oh my god.

• 40:01Shaan Puri?

  And I was like, dude, I love this guy. This guy is hilarious and weird and all the best ways. And I just went down this rabbit hole because he's, this guy kind of fascinates me. There's nothing about this guy really on the internet. Nobody does interviews with him. Um, people discovered this mystery yogurt thing, but there's not much out there about him.

• 40:17Sam Parr?

  How'd you find the bar thing?

• 40:18Shaan Puri?

  There's only a few times, uh, that's like, you know, part, you know, just digging in, like, what are some of the other crazy things that this guy does? When they announced, um, The Boring Company, it was a press conference with Elon and some guy. The some guy is Steve Davis, sitting next to him during the, the talk. And what they did was to make their point, this is, I kind of love this marketing, to make their point that like, why did you create The Boring Company? And he was like, well,

• 40:44Shaan Puri?

  in like, whatever, a hundred years, we haven't gotten any faster at drilling. Like, we're still the same speed we were like 50, 75 years ago at digging these tunnels. Nobody's done anything innovative. And to do, when they did the press conference, it's them talking, but around them is a circular track. And on that track, they put a little like a snail or a slug or something. And it was just walking around the track super slowly to represent how slow this industry is and how slow other people are drilling. And at the end of the two hour seminar, it was still only halfway around the thing.

• 41:17Sam Parr?

  Oh, my God.

• 41:18Shaan Puri?

  And they're like, you know, that's the industry today and we're going to change it. I love these little nuggets, these little sort of like marketing gimmicks that make a point in the sort of simplest, most memeable viral way possible. You know, I gotta give Elon credit and this guy Steve, Steve credit for how they do that.

• 41:35Sam Parr?

  Where, where did he work before? How did he get a job with Elon?

• 41:39Shaan Puri?

  Uh, well, just early on, you know, if you're twin master's degree in particle physics and aerospace engineering, there's not that many places to go work. You work at NASA or you work, you know, Boeing or you go work here, right? So he, he got a job there early on and just like, started grinding like crazy. And that's why like even now, just sort of grinds like crazy, sleeping in the office with the, with his newborn child. That was just like, his wife just, just gave birth.

• 42:01Sam Parr?

  I have a rule, we have a rule in our house, in the, in the par house, where I will only sleep under another man's roof for one night. And if it's my father, if it's my father-in-law's house, he gets two nights. I don't like sleeping in another man's home. It's the most emasculating thing on earth. I can't imagine moving my wife and newborn baby into the Twitter office.

• 42:25Shaan Puri?

  To my boss's house.

• 42:27Sam Parr?

  Yeah, my boss's house. Like Eli's like, hey, how's our wife doing?

• 42:32Shaan Puri?

  And you're like a billionaire. You're not like an intern.

• 42:37Sam Parr?

  Yeah, you're, you're like, I, I don't even like, I don't stay at another man's house. And I don't even like staying at my father's law's house, let alone staying at the Twitter HQ. Can you imagine with a newborn, with a newborn or a baby? I can't imagine that. That's not for me, dog.

• 42:52Shaan Puri?

  What, what's your phrase? Cornrows and face tattoos?

• 42:55Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 42:56Shaan Puri?

  It's not for me, but I'm glad freaks like you exist. So I've got it exists.

• 43:00Sam Parr?

  Sleeping at the office with my wife and baby? You, you can have that. I'm happy you exist, but that ain't for me. Is there any part of you that is envious of this guy? Cause I don't find any amount of envy, other than I appreciate his sense of humor.

• 43:13Shaan Puri?

  Oh yeah, I think this guy is great. I think, uh, do I want to be him? No.

• 43:17Sam Parr?

  That's what I mean.

• 43:17Shaan Puri?

  Do I think that this guy's probably, you know, this guy's interesting and seems like he thinks differently. And I think I could learn or be inspired by it. Sure.

• 43:29Sam Parr?

  For sure.

• 43:29Shaan Puri?

  For example, I went deep. Uh, so one, so one of the things he did while he was working at SpaceX and they moved him to DC. In addition to the yogurt shop, he went to George Mason and got like a PhD. And his thesis, I found his thesis paper and I read it, which was very hard. I don't want to go into too much detail on it.

• 43:48Sam Parr?

  How did you find this? I, when I'm Googling him, I can, you can barely find anything. It's the same, like four photos.

• 43:53Shaan Puri?

  Just a lot of grit and determination.

• 43:56Sam Parr?

  You're the Steve Davis, you're the Steve Davis of researching deep Steve Davis.

• 44:01Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. Uh, I, I apply it to searching, researching other great men more so than being one myself.

• 44:06Sam Parr?

  Slept on your couch for literally hours to find this. It was literally six hours.

• 44:16Shaan Puri?

  So I'm just gonna read you two things. So first, the paper, the reason I really liked it is it's about the debasement of the US currency. I think he wrote this in, uh, what year was this? It's basically like very, it's very early. It's like kind of like early, early Bitcoin days. So let me just search Steve Davis. Basement. Um, so yeah, 2010. And his paper is called the trend towards the debasement of the American currency. And he talks in a lot of-

• 44:46Sam Parr?

  Does that mean it's at the bottom? Does that mean?

• 44:47Shaan Puri?

  Devaluing, devaluing. So, so, you know, he, he talks about the history of like, you know, basically, uh, you know, I don't have my notes in front of me now, but like, uh, one of the things he talks about is, you know, um-

• 44:59Sam Parr?

  Did you take notes on this thesis just for yourself?

• 45:04Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Um, so I was like, you know, he's like $1 or whatever, you know, one or sorry, one ounce of gold was worth this many dollars before. And now that same ounce of gold requires whatever, like, you know, 100x more dollars. Like basically, like, we used to be pegged to gold, we got off the gold standard and look at how, look at how much the dollar is devalued relative to gold in that time. And he's basically like, there's a trend towards the debasement of, um, of currency. And he talks about like, people think this is like a, you know, over time, slow, slow thing, but actually like 95% of the debasement has just happened in the last like 40, 50 years

• 45:45Shaan Puri?

  or something like that. Uh, like it has accelerated quickly. And this is not just like, uh, yeah, this is not just like, you know, a, a slow thing. Um, all right, here we go. So 98.3% has occurred from 1917, 92 to the present time. But even if you shorten that, like, still 90% of it happened in a very short window of time. He talks about why, he talks about how, he talks about like what that, why that's such a big problem. And this is basically like a cryptocurrency, like, like, he's not talking about Bitcoin in it, but this is like, this is crypto is a solution to this problem, right? Like Bitcoin, what if you had a currency that could not be debased? Exactly.

• 46:24Shaan Puri?

  Uh, which is like the meme, but it's, it's also like, uh, the truth. It's like, these things are cliche because there, there's an element of truth and then those, that's why they stick around. In his acknowledgements in this paper, so he says, oh, I want to, I want to thank this professor, this professor, I want to thank this person. And at the end, he's like, I want to thank my mom and dad. He's like, finally, thanks to the unknown chef that makes great brownies at the small enterprise hall cafeteria. Hopefully they will one day become a topping at Mr. Yogato or its successor, Little Yohai.

• 46:57Sam Parr?

  Dude, this guy's been plotting.

• 46:59Shaan Puri?

  This guy's just hilarious, man. This guy is just so funny to me. And yeah, there's like a hundred page paper if you want to go read.

• 47:05Sam Parr?

  The most impressive part is that you read this guy's thesis paper and you got as far as to the acknowledgements at the end.

• 47:13Shaan Puri?

  No, no, acknowledgements at the beginning must be my friend. That's like the, uh, the thank you at the beginning of a book. Uh, so I didn't read the whole thing. It's a hundred sixty-two page thesis. I read like forty pages, maybe. Uh, and he's like, step by step, step by step, where the deep basement started and how it happened. And I'm like, oh, wow, this is fascinating. Like, I never knew any of this.

• 47:32Sam Parr?

  Is that what we have to do to become a, to get your PhD is to write a hundred and forty page, like, original work on something? That's amazing. I didn't think, I didn't know that theses were that long.

• 47:41Shaan Puri?

  Not only do we not have a PhD, we honestly don't even know what the hell a PhD is or what it takes to get one.

• 47:49Sam Parr?

  I used to tell people I had my PhD. I thought I meant poor, hardworking and driven. Uh, like, that was my joke. I, I.

• 47:55Shaan Puri?

  A play of hate and degree.

• 47:57Sam Parr?

  Yeah. I didn't realize that it's, you have to write a hundred plus page, like, report on this. That's amazing.

• 48:03Shaan Puri?

  Like, I'm not that hungry and driven.

• 48:05Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Yeah. Definitely not. That sounds really challenging. Uh.

• 48:11Shaan Puri?

  By the way, one of the great get to know you questions in the business world, that's sort of dorky, but actually is a good one, which is, if you had to give an impromptu forty-five minute talk on a subject, what would you give it on? Like, for you, it might be like copyrighting or newsletters, right? Like, something like that?

• 48:28Sam Parr?

  The history of denim.

• 48:32Sam Parr?

  What? I'm not joking. I could do it.

• 48:37Sam Parr?

  You were talking about denim. I got you.

• 48:42Sam Parr?

  What would yours be?

• 48:45Shaan Puri?

  There is no answer that is better than that answer. I don't want to continue the podcast. It was so good.

• 48:52Sam Parr?

  You see, the things about looms is in the pre-war. The evolution of the jor. Yeah, the shutter looms pre 1944 were particularly special, but you know, I could talk all about it. And then post-war, when Japan was rebuilding Hiroshima, they needed just a ton of machinery. And that's when the shutter looms of America went to Japan. I mean, I could do it. That's insane. All right. Your, your turn. What's your topic? Where do we go from here? You want to do post pilot? I like post pilot. All right, let's talk about. I invested in post pilot. Did you? Yeah, me too. I didn't, you know, I don't like, as you call it, talking your own book too much. I don't like talking about stuffs that I'm involved in, but since we're both involved about it and we're upfront, we could talk about it. Well, explain what it is first.

• 49:34Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so let's talk about it. So our connection to post pilot is with the owner. His name is Drew, but he actually bought the company. And the reason he bought the company was because he owned, he used to buy software companies. So he bought designandpublic.com. He bought, he bought karma loop.com. And then he owned this thing called auto anything, which was an auto parts store. And the thing about his whole like playbook is that he would buy these e-comm companies and he would be like, well, your email list stinks. So we can like improve that. We could do this. We could do that. And one of the things that he used to do at these companies that worked really well was he would email or mail them, like snail mail them, like flyers. Direct mail. And direct mail pamphlets on the company. However, it was really hard to do. It was

• 50:16Sam Parr?

  like a painstaking process. And so he bought this company called post pilot. He bought it, I think he bought it for $60,000. And what it does is if you're a e-comm brand, you just sign up to post pilot and they plug in, I think to Shopify, to WooCommerce, to like a lot of the popular platforms. And they have a done for you service, meaning they'll help you design a pamphlet that you could send to not only your customers, but I think some of your email subscribers and people who haven't already bought from you. And they can send direct mail in a click of a button. And so what he has found, like this whole thesis is like, look, If I have an email list and some of these companies that I bought, their email list was 100,000 people, but 90,000 people wouldn't even open the email. 10,000 would, but how do I get the other 90,000 people to interact with me?

• 51:02Sam Parr?

  Well, let's just send them mail. And so they created a process that you can use someone's address that they've already supplied to you. Or I believe what they do is you can, you can use someone's email and phone number and help use other data sources to find out roughly where you live. And they'll send mail to you or that area or people who match your, it's like a lookalike audience. And they send you mail and they could track if you eventually bought something through their mail. So it's a very ROI positive business, ROI positive marketing channel. And I think he bought this company in 2018. He bought it for 60 grand. It's making well over 60 grand a day now. I think that the last, the, the public information that they said was they crossed 10 million a year in revenue. Like 18 months ago, I think, and it's growing like a weed and he sends amazing investor updates.

• 51:47Sam Parr?

  Where like there'll be like a theme. So for example, him and his co-part, or him and his partner sent an update where it was him and his partner dressed like stepbrothers. And so like he does these really funny updates, but the business is growing like a weed. It's growing crazy and they're, it's really fascinating. Is that what, what, I'm not an e-comm guy. Is that what you, what?

• 52:08Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So we use it. So, so we use it and like, you know, if you advertise on Facebook or you advertise on Google and you know, the key metric for any ecommerce brand is your, your return on ad spend when it comes to marketing. So you spend a hundred dollars on ads. What's your return? Are you going to get a hundred back? Are you going to get $200 back? And you get $50 back. $50 would be a point five return on ad spend. $200 would be a 2.0 return on ad spend. If you can be like getting a 2.0 return on ad spend at scale, you're printing money, right? You're putting in a hundred dollars, you're getting $200 out every single day. And that's a, you know, obviously if you could scale that up, that's, that's extremely, extremely lucrative. If you use PostPilot, you can get like a 10x return on ad spend.

• 52:52Shaan Puri?

  It's not the most scalable, but it is pretty ridiculous, the type of return you get.

• 52:56Sam Parr?

  He said a lot of people are getting five to 10x. He said, most retention campaigns come in between five and 10. Five and 10. So like, he kills it. I don't use it.

• 53:07Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, and these are, these are like retention, right? So you're, you know, you're trying to get people to come back or you're trying to get a warm lead who hasn't bought from you, but they gave you their, their info to try to convert. So it's, you know, obviously different for a completely new customer versus a returning customer versus whatever. But the blended ROAS for these is really, really good. So it's very effective, right? You send a postcard, it's got a bunch of, it's got photos, it's got photos on it, it's got an offer on it. And the cool thing, what they did was they basically took this, they weren't the first to do, you know, how do you send mail campaigns? We'll send it for you. What they did was they're treating it like it's Klaviyo. So those people outside of ecommerce don't even know about Klaviyo, except for the fact that it just filed to go public. So now a bunch of people are paying attention to this like $10 billion company.

• 53:48Sam Parr?

  That raised very little money.

• 53:50Shaan Puri?

  Email marketing for, for ecommerce. Actually, it didn't raise very little, it raised 400 million. It only burned net $15 million, which is, shows how capital efficient it is.

• 54:01Sam Parr?

  That's what I mean, yeah, sorry.

• 54:03Shaan Puri?

  So every econ brand basically uses Klaviyo at this point. It is like the dominant player in the space. There's some others like Sendlane or whatever. But they basically said, we're going to automate this. So like, we will take all your, your customer data from Shopify and we'll be like, cool.

• 54:19Shaan Puri?

  When somebody first joins, we'll put, make a welcome flow. So automatically it will drip out like one hour after they, after they sign up for emails, they'll get this. Three days later, they'll get this, and 30 days later, they'll get this.

• 54:28Sam Parr?

  Klaviyo.

• 54:29Shaan Puri?

  Klaviyo.

• 54:29Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 54:30Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. And now what PostPilot did was they took the same thing. They were like, cool, you want to send a one-off blast? You can just go in our editor and do that. You want to create automated flows that are just going to be triggered based on customer behavior? You could do that too. So they basically did for physical mail, the same thing that Klaviyo did for digital mail, which is very, very smart. So yeah, anyways, I think they're, they're doing really well and we'll see kind of how, how big. I think the only question of this one is just, how big does it get? It's a high floor. Unknown ceiling. So it's like, uh, this business is definitely going to work. Now, the question is, is it a, yeah, even when we first invested, it was like this clear, this was going to work.

• 55:07Sam Parr?

  And it was a low, it was a low valuation compared to everything. It was not low. It was a reasonable valuation compared to everything else. I think I have about 25 grand in the company.

• 55:17Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I did something similar. It wasn't, it wasn't like, you know, massive, massive bet, but um, you know, the question is, is this going to be a $50 million business? A hundred million dollars, a $500 million business or billion dollar business? I have no idea on that one. Like, we'll see, but um, but it's definitely like, it was like a clear, this isn't going to be a zero type of investment. So I did this one personally, not out of the fun, because I was like, you know, you don't know the profile of this one.

• 55:39Sam Parr?

  I thought, so I have 25,000 of my own money into the company, I think. I, uh, in my head, when I was looking at it, I was like, I think the, the, the likely worst case scenario is that this will sell for 70 or 80 million dollars. I was like, I think I could 5X, 4X my money. I think in a unlikely but high uh, outcome scenario, I was like, many, many, many hundreds of millions of dollars this could sell for. Uh, and I could for sure 100% 10X this, maybe more. Um, that, that, that was kind of my thinking with that investment. And 25,000 of my own money is, I, I usually do small, small checks. That, that's a smaller checks. That's a, that's a good one for me.

• 56:19Shaan Puri?

  Right on. Um, I have some other topics, but I think we should save them. One thing I want to do is I want to start doing episodes that are business ideas only. So sometimes, basically, if you take an episode of my first million, you, you kind of don't know what you're going to get. There's a box, you might get a Billy of the Week story about crazy people who have done crazy things. You might get a business breakdown like we did with OnlyFans, just like, here's a business, here's the numbers, here's how it's doing. Uh, maybe it's a business like Post Pilot, like a business you never heard of, that's doing really well. Uh, where we kind of expose you to the sort of uh, things that are under the, under the radar or not, not on your radar. And then sometimes we do ideas and opportunities, things that we think people could do that could be, that could work. And um,

• 57:04Shaan Puri?

  Monday, I say I'm proposing this to you. Monday, I think we should do, when we record Monday, we should do business ideas only.

• 57:10Sam Parr?

  I think, I think we're good Monday, and I have a good one.

• 57:14Shaan Puri?

  Which are people's favorites. The, the business ideas and opportunities is definitely people's favorites. So we'll do that. But you know, if we're gonna do that, people gotta do something for us, right? Like, I don't know about you, but if I kiss, I like to get kissed back. If I hug, I like to get hugged back. And if I provide value, I like to get value.

• 57:32Sam Parr?

  Yes means yes.

• 57:36Shaan Puri?

  And all we need from you to give value back, put your wallet away. You know, we don't, it doesn't take money.

• 57:42Sam Parr?

  It's not free, though. It ain't free.

• 57:44Shaan Puri?

  It ain't free. It sure as hell ain't free. But, but your money's no good here. What we do need is for you to take that little finger of yours, open up the podcast app, click subscribe. Go to My First Million, click subscribe. The next thing you're gonna do.

• 57:56Sam Parr?

  Where do they do that? Where do they do that? They do it on Spotify?

• 57:59Shaan Puri?

  Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever, whatever's your comfortable place. I'm not trying to get you to go somewhere you're not comfortable. Right? Go where you're comfortable, but just make sure you're clicking subscribe. Now go to YouTube. YouTube, go open YouTube. Type in My First Million, click subscribe, hit the little bell so you get alerts. We need both of those things from you. We just need it. And I don't ask for much, but I ask for this. Don't let me down.

• 58:25Sam Parr?

  And if you want, leave a comment. You could leave a comment. We read all of them. And we even, the funniest ones, we send to each other. Particularly if they make fun of us.

• 58:33Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, the most insulting ones definitely get the most attention. And we can't resist. We're not one of those, we're not those people who are like, nah, I don't read the comments, I don't read the haters.

• 58:42Sam Parr?

  Read all of them.

• 58:43Shaan Puri?

  Oh, we read you. Think about you.

• 58:45Sam Parr?

  And I recognize usernames.

• 58:48Shaan Puri?

  You're living in our head.

• 58:49Sam Parr?

  Yes. I've Googled some of these people. I do a reverse Google image search and find out their LinkedIn.

• 58:58Sam Parr?

  And here, I'll actually leave, I'll leave like a hint. So for next Monday, you can see on here which company I'm talking about if you scroll down. So I was going to start this with a business that used to exist that was way ahead of its time that I think should exist today.

• 59:14Shaan Puri?

  Now is the time.

• 59:15Sam Parr?

  Now is the time if you could possibly pull this off. Do you agree with me? Do you see what company I'm talking about?

• 59:20Shaan Puri?

  I know what you're talking about. I agree with you. I can't wait to talk about that one. And I have one that is similar to one of the best businesses in Andrew Wilkinson's portfolio. And I think you could create a new version of that that would work really well. That's the teaser.

• 59:39Sam Parr?

  All right. Manic Monday, we'll call it. I don't know. Would we just go from ideas to ideas? Or where we just look at the comments and just stress out over like blemishes we have on our face. But it's Manic Monday. So you don't have to pay money for this show, but it ain't for free. And you know how to pay for it. So, all right, that's the pot.