4 dumb ideas that made people rich

Get a list of 100+ side hustle ideas to make $: https://clickhubspot.com/dha Episode 788: Sam Parr ( ⁠https://x.com/theSamParr⁠ ) and Shaan Puri ( ⁠https://x.com/ShaanVP⁠ ) talk about simple $1M businesses that anyone could do. Show Notes: (0:00) Fun Party Hats (7:58) Star Registry (18:29) 10-hr fireplace (26:39) Don't get bored of greatness (36:23) Receiving feedback (42:46) Billy of the Week: John Catsimatidis, Supermarket Baron (55:14) the billionaire tax (1:00:18) Shaan takes his son courtside — Links: • Foam Party Hats - https://foampartyhats.com/ • Star Naming - https://star-naming.com/ • Brain.fm - https://www.brain.fm/ — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Shaan's weekly email - https://www.shaanpuri.com • Visit https://www.somewhere.com/mfm to hire worldwide talent like Shaan and get $500 off for being an MFM listener. Hire developers, assistants, marketing pros, sales teams and more for 80% less than US equivalents. • Mercury - Need a bank for your company? Go check out Mercury (mercury.com). Shaan uses it for all of his companies! Mercury is a financial technology company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column, N. A., and Evolve Bank & Trust, Members FDIC • I run all my newsletters on Beehiiv and you should too + we're giving away $10k to our favorite newsletter, check it out: beehiiv.com/mfm-challenge — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com • Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth • Sam’s List - http://samslist.co/ My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by HubSpot Media // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano /

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

• 0:00Shaan Puri?

  Sam, I have a list of what I'm calling dumb ideas that made a million dollars. These are obscure lists that really only people like you and me would ever even keep. But I have a list of dumb ideas that actually worked.

• 0:20Shaan Puri?

  I say dumb, not because I think they're dumb. I actually think they're genius because I think being clever and doing simple things is actually a form of genius. But I think other people would call these dumb ideas. So I want to run through them with you and I want you to give me your reaction to each one. All right, let's hear it. All right, first one came up. I was watching the NFL playoffs, which were on this weekend. I don't know if you've paid any attention, but like the Chicago Bears, who have sucked for a long time, are in the playoffs and Chicago has this rival, the Green Bay Packers. And the Packers have been great for a long time and the Bears have sucked for a very long time. And so it's like kind of a rivalry just by like location, but they're not really, they're not really like close rivals.

• 1:01Shaan Puri?

  And so I'm watching the game and I look and in the crowd, I just see a ton of people wearing, like, I don't know how much you know about football, but do you know what the Packers fans wear on their head? Yeah, cheese heads. Cheese heads. So what do the Bears fans wear? I don't know, helmets? Cheese graters. And so I see all these fans wearing this like silver cheese grater hat. And I was like, oh, that's clever. Like we're about to shred the, the, the Green Bay Packers are going to shred the cheese heads. Um, and I'm like, this is really smart. So I've started looking, what's the story behind this? And the story behind this is kind of crazy. So if you go to foampartyhats.com, this business started in 2017. So Grace Rojas and her son Manuel Rojas, they, they create this thing.

• 1:45Shaan Puri?

  And they had actually for like, you know, 15 years, they had just for fun been making like fun party hats. Like I think for their own daughter's like party, they made fun party hats for all the guests. People loved it and they kind of gave it up and then they moved and then they like started again. And they're like, we're going to make these foam hats for special events, parties, occasions and sports. And so they've been kind of like trucking along. They got on Shark Tank and they got a, they gave up 25% of their company for a hundred grand, right? So like, you know, did they really? Mark Cuban, yeah. And you know, birthdays, wedding. Corporate events, they had all these novelty hats and then came the boom. So this greater head thing has just taken off and become this like viral frenzy.

• 2:28Shaan Puri?

  So like basically at the Bears, they have this coach. I don't know if you've seen this guy, Ben Johnson. He's kind of got like if Sam Parr was into football energy a little bit. He's just basically this young coach who's supposed to be really, really smart. He's super like ripped. So every time in the post game, he'll like in the locker room, he just like rips off his shirt, which like most of the old like 70 year old coaches would never do. And he gets his team like really fired up, but he gives the game ball to this guy who comes out. And I don't know if you can see this, but he's this wide receiver, DJ Moore, he's wearing the hat. And so he's, he's wearing this, this guy DJ Moore, and he starts dancing. The whole, the team starts chanting, go DJ, go DJ. There's a little Wayne song. He starts dancing. This clip goes viral, right?

• 3:11Shaan Puri?

  This has 2.2 million views and suddenly these hats are flying off the shelves. And they, they do like 10,000 orders in a week, which is like half a million dollars in a week. They have this huge waitlist now, huge backlog because they make these by hand apparently. And this idea of like team specific novelty merch. Cause like if like sports fans, like when I went to that Warriors game, I walked out, I bought my son a jersey, a little ball, but it's like also like vanilla. It's all cookie cutters, like the same things over and over again. But with social media, the teams now have little like trends, little meme moments. And if you could fast follow those meme moments and create stuff that's going to like,

• 3:55Shaan Puri?

  kind of make somebody laugh or be worth sharing on social media, you can actually get a lot of spread. And so that's what this company's been doing with these hats and going viral. So they've built basically a, you know, million dollar plus business now off of these like novelty foam hats. Isn't that wild?

• 4:12Sam Parr?

  They do a really good job of making me into the story. Like it looks like it's a, like a Hispanic, like family and looks like the son is kind of the CEO and the mom is like one who is the brains and kind of came up with the idea and originally made it. It looks pretty awesome.

• 4:27Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, but I think if somebody takes this idea, there was another company, like a T-shirt company. I can't remember the name, but. They were doing this for sports teams where they they realized like the dropshipping infrastructure has become so good that if anything happens in the game like last night, within an hour after the game, they can have the store up for that product, for that slogan, for that thing. Linsanity happens in New York and then they go, they have like the Linsanity like line ready to go. And so I forgot what the name of this company is, but they're basically like rapidly, like much faster, like orders of magnitude faster than the typical like merch industry, creating team-specific, moment-specific, uh, merch. And I just think that's like a,

• 5:10Shaan Puri?

  it's not the, it's not the best business, not a business I would want to be in, but it is like a simple man's business. Like anybody can understand what they're doing and be able to like try to replicate that. And then if you niche down even all the way, forget t-shirts, like to giant oversized foam hats. It's like there's a million dollar business sitting in oversized foam hats, which is pretty wild. All right. Ready for the next one?

• 5:31Sam Parr?

  Yeah, that, that was a quotable last line. It was a million dollar business sitting in oversized foam hats. All right. So a lot of people watch and listen to the show because they want to hear us just tell them exactly what to do when it comes to starting or growing a business. And really a lot of people who are listening, they have a full-time job and they want to start something on the side, a side hustle. Now, a lot of people message Sean and I and they say, all right, I want to start something on the side. Is this a good idea? Is that a good idea? And again, what they're really just saying is just give me the ideas. Well, my friends, you're in luck. So my old company, The Hustle, they put together a hundred different side hustle ideas and they have appropriately called it the Side Hustle Idea Database. It's a list of a hundred pretty good ideas, frankly. I went through them. They're awesome.

• 6:16Sam Parr?

  And it gives you how to start them, how to grow them, things like that. It gives you a little bit of inspiration. So check it out. It's called the Side Hustle Idea Database. It's in the description below. You'll see the link. Click it. Check it out. Let me know in the comments what you think.

• 6:29Shaan Puri?

  All right, here's the next one. So as you know, a long time ago, I was running a business called birthdayalarm.com. This was a business started by Michael and Zochi Birch, had been going for 20-plus years, printing, you know, millions of dollars a year. It was one of the earliest viral businesses ever. So I think Birthday Alarm has had like 50 million plus members with zero marketing spend, because Michael was one of the pioneers of viral marketing, and so he understood how to, how to get this business to grow virally.

• 6:58Sam Parr?

  How much revenue has this done over the course, it's 20 years, it's 20 years old?

• 7:03Shaan Puri?

  Uh, yeah, I think he says more than that. It's probably 25 years old now.

• 7:06Sam Parr?

  And so has this done like 100 million over 25 years?

• 7:11Shaan Puri?

  Probably not 100, probably like over 50. So maybe 75 million is my guess.

• 7:16Sam Parr?

  Wow, so uh,

• 7:18Shaan Puri?

  And just hyper profitably, by the way, like that's like, that's not just revenue is profit for a business like this.

• 7:22Sam Parr?

  So 3 million every year for 25 years-ish?

• 7:27Shaan Puri?

  Not exactly, but yeah, average. Let's say average 2 to 3.

• 7:30Sam Parr?

  Okay, wow, amazing.

• 7:32Shaan Puri?

  Because the business model is very simple. So it's reminders for your friends and family's birthdays. Fantastic. And then I was like, but that, the reminders are free. So you make the money when people pay to send a card. And I remember when we were trying to like grow the business or revitalize the business, I was brainstorming ideas with him and I was like, you know, I try not to be too smart. So I always just like, what's already working or has worked in the past, or is working for other people. And so that was my first question. Before I tell you any of my bad ideas, tell me about some things that are already proven to work. And he goes, you know, at the beginning, these guys approached us with this goofy idea that I thought was a total scam. He's like, but I think they've actually made even more money than, than we did

• 8:13Shaan Puri?

  without the 50 million members. And I go, what is it? He goes, it's this thing called the International Star Registry.

• 8:20Sam Parr?

  Oh my gosh, I have heard of this.

• 8:23Shaan Puri?

  So he goes, they let you for like a special occasion for your friend of, you know, friend's birthday or whatever, you can gift them their name on a star. You can name a star in the universe after your friend. It'll tell, it'll show you the star, it'll tell you the location of it. And for the low price of $25, that star is yours. Technically, not technically yours at all, not owned, not even officially named, just named in our book that we're going to keep in our office. And so these guys have been printing millions of dollars for also 20-plus years.

• 8:55Shaan Puri?

  Just naming stars after people. And this got popular. It was like, it's been referenced in movies. It was like in A Walk to Remember. They like, someone is dying. They name a star after her. Like, it's this emotional sentimental thing. And I love it because the, it's a pure play marketing product. There is no product. Like, you don't get to have the star. They don't, you know, there's nothing, nothing changes hands. It's literally not even officially naming the star after them. It's literally just, we are going to write it down in our book permanently. It's like something I would trick my kids with.

• 9:28Sam Parr?

  What's really funny is if you Google star registry, you could see they're buying ads against each other. There's like dozens of these companies. Which begs the question, like, you know, like, whose book is like the more permanent book? But is this the one that was founded in 1979?

• 9:42Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, 1979, when like, kind of space was hot and the moon and all that. So you get a, you get a certificate. You get a map of where the thing is and you get to, you get to have that forever in their book. And so the funny thing is like, they are like, kind of the, the, the details of this, which I think are like, pretty funny. You know, think about it from a marketing point of view. How do you legitimize this, you know, frankly illegitimate thing? And what they did was they basically like, they made their book so official. They're like, it's placed in the Library of Congress. And we store the official book in a Swiss vault, in a Swiss bank in a vault. And right, like, just leveraging like prestige and-

• 10:23Sam Parr?

  Like, are any of those things impressive? Like, how do you get a book into the library?

• 10:27Shaan Puri?

  Like, you'd probably donate a copy.

• 10:30Sam Parr?

  Like, one of my favorite copywriters, Joe Sugarman, wrote this famous ad for Casio watches. And he asked the guys who made the watch, he was like, explain to me how this watch is made. And they say, well, we use a quartz movement and then we use this type of aluminum. And he goes, hold on, did you say quartz movement? And they go, yeah, it's like a movement that every $10 watch uses. He's like, but tell me more about quartz. And he finds out what quartz means. And then he's like, tell me about the steel. He's like, yeah, or this metal. He's like, oh, it's just aluminum. It's just like, you know, we use it, this, this pen company uses it. Hell, even like NASA uses it. Did you just say space-grade aluminum? And so if you read this old ad for the Casio watch, he was like made with the same aluminum

• 11:13Sam Parr?

  that's space grade or is like it's space grade aluminum. It is called that because NASA uses it on their rocket ships to make it so strong with the with the with the quartz movement, which is the most precise movement. It's the same thing that Rolex uses or like something like that. And so he like took like a truth and made it sound a lot cooler than it is sort of like in a Swiss bank account.

• 11:37Shaan Puri?

  Took a fact and he made it valuable. By the way, I think this is the, what's that thing called the Rorschach test, whatever the the ink blot and you're like, is this a buddy rabbit or a serial killer? Right? Like to me, that's what you just described is the thing for this podcast. It's like, if there was like a speakeasy and you had to come in and like, we had to decide who gets in and who gets out. I'd tell this just this Sugarman story. And I'd be like, do you find that amazing or repulsive? They're like, well, that's bullshit. And you're like, cool, you should you should just head to the next bar. And if they're like, that's amazing. How do I do that? Like, come on in. Welcome to MFM.

• 12:11Sam Parr?

  That's pretty good. How long, uh, do you, did you ever look up who owned this company? Do they have like some crazy story like Michael Birch?

• 12:17Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, so it was owned by, uh, this Canadian advertising executive, but only for like a year. I think he like passed away, uh, two years later. And then this mom of 12, who gifted a star to her husband, loved it, finds out that like the business is like, you know, for sale. She buys it and then they've grown it as a family business. Now her son is the operator of it or something like that. Uh, so this mom of 12 did it, which by the way, if you're a mom of 12, you're hired. You're capable of doing anything if you can be a mother of 12. Like, is there a, like, I don't know what Navy SEAL training is like. It does not compare to being a mother of 12.

• 12:55Sam Parr?

  Dude, on their, uh, on their, it's called starregistry.com on their about us page. They explain how they're democratizing the cosmos and all this stuff. And then they have a line that says, Do not be fooled by the imposters. And it's this.

• 13:11Shaan Puri?

  Those other guys.

• 13:12Sam Parr?

  It's this big paragraph that says, in the vast experience of celestial naming, and there are also imposters seeking to capitalize on the allure of the stars. Numerous companies have attempted to copy us. And they go on to say why they are the more official one.

• 13:29Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 13:30Sam Parr?

  It's pretty funny.

• 13:31Shaan Puri?

  Snake oil salesman says, other guys' oil is terrible for you.

• 13:35Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 13:36Shaan Puri?

  Did I tell you how he came up with this idea?

• 13:39Sam Parr?

  No.

• 13:40Shaan Puri?

  Michael had a, they were both, I think, working at an insurance company. And he's like, we were making really good money because he's like, computers were new and like, not many people knew how to do programming for computers. The internet was new. Insurance companies needed somebody who could do like database programming or whatever. So he's doing that. I think he told me they were making like a really good salary, like maybe like 200 grand a year, maybe combined, maybe two of them, I don't know. They're doing well. So the internet boom starts kind of like 1998, 1999. And he's like, what am I doing sitting here at an insurance company? I gotta be a part of this, which I'm sure today many people feel that way about AI. And, you know, the way the robotics and the way the world is going.

• 14:21Shaan Puri?

  So he said, his friend sends him a site, a link to, you know, some Friendster or something like that. He's like, wow, this is incredible. I gotta get, I gotta get in there. I gotta start doing things. And so he decides, I'm going to create a self updating address book. So like, you know, today, this is still an unsolved problem, by the way. Sam, you move. I don't have your new address. I have to keep asking you for your address. I don't know when you move. So he had this idea. Well, the way it should work is when Sam moves, he changes his address once and it changes automatically. And anybody who he's already accepted, like to have his address, like it changes for everybody. A great idea, still a great idea. This is an idea that he had many, like Sean Parker, you know, who's famous from the social network and, you know, Facebook. He tried to start a company doing this too.

• 15:05Shaan Puri?

  Like a bunch of smart people have been like, we're going to solve this problem. It just turns out people don't really care enough to do it. Uh, but he's building this thing. It's called Lemonlink. He's like, you know, the best thing that ever happened was he's like, we had no money. So he's like, I'm the programmer, I'm the designer, I'm the product manager, I'm customer service, I'm the janitor, I'm everything, right? Cause there's nobody else. And he told his wife, when he quit his job, he's like, give me three months to try this computer thing and like this internet thing. And like, if it doesn't work in three months, I promise, like, we'll, we'll go back to having a job. Because I think they were like pregnant with their second or third kid. And so it was like, you know, not, not super like stable time to just quit your job. Well, two years goes by and he's like, I'm so close. I've just, just keep, I need another three months.

• 15:50Shaan Puri?

  I just, let me keep going. So he's still trying, he's doing customer service and Lemon Link is not growing. He's like, the only thing I'm getting in customer service is basically like shut down my account. I don't need this. Or, hey, thanks for that birthday reminder. You saved my butt, you know? Cause he's like, I added this one feature in addition to the address thing, like, oh, by the way, like save their birthday too, and I'll tell you when it's their birthday. That's a good feature. And he's like, I kept seeing that. And this was pre-Facebook, so people didn't have an easy online way to know when their friend's birthday was. And so he realized, oh, this is a thing. And that's, that was the, because he was doing customer service and because he finally faced reality, which is like, nobody wants my idea, but they do seem to want this.

• 16:33Shaan Puri?

  Then, you know, overnight he creates birthdayalarm.com. And like, within a couple of weeks, he gets like 10,000 members. And he's like, oh my God. He's like, this was, cause he figured out a viral loop. And he's like, there's, he's like, to this day, you know, that was still the best feeling. That, but even before we made any money, getting to 10,000 members, like that was, that was crazy.

• 16:51Sam Parr?

  It's pretty crazy he had the audacity to stop working on that and work on Bebo. Like, most everyone else would say, all right, birthday alarm, how do we make anniversary alarm? How do we do this? How do we do that?

• 17:01Shaan Puri?

  It's, it's working and it starts making a little bit of money, not much, but a little bit of money. And his friend Morgan sends him a link to Friendster at the time. And he's like, oh, of course, people are gonna wanna like, this internet thing, it's not just looking up information, they're gonna wanna like, talk to their friends and post photos about each other, you know, like stuff like that. Like, that makes total sense. So he created a, before Bebo, he created a Friendster like product. It goes viral again. Because he really understands virality. But he's losing money because the more members that sign up, the more his bandwidth costs. And at the time, social networks didn't have any way of making money. Like today, Facebook is known for like Facebook ads. There was no ads at the time. And so there was no ad network.

• 17:46Shaan Puri?

  Nobody had ever done that before. Nobody knew how to make money off of those things. So he went to a meetup and he sold the business to James Courier for like 2 million bucks. And he was like, and he went and worked for them for a year. And then kind of like as social networking was was maturing, he's seeing what MySpace is doing. He's like, oh, okay, I think I know what I should be doing. I learned even more about virality here. Now I'm going to go start Bebo. Then he started Bebo and that was the one that took off.

• 18:10Sam Parr?

  And that was like in two or three years. He grew it from nothing to like an 800 million dollar exit, right?

• 18:15Shaan Puri?

  I'm not sure how many years yet, three, four years, probably.

• 18:17Sam Parr?

  Like very short.

• 18:19Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 18:20Sam Parr?

  What a baller. Damn. And now he's just the sole proprietor of a little birthday alarm.com.

• 18:28Shaan Puri?

  Just a mom and pop shop.

• 18:29Sam Parr?

  Yeah, just trying to make it make it.

• 18:32Shaan Puri?

  Today's episode is brought to you by HubSpot. Did you know that most businesses only use 20% of their data? That's like reading a book, but then tearing out four fifths of the pages. Point is you miss a lot. And unless you're using HubSpot, the customer platform that gives you access to the data you need to grow your business, the insights that are trapped in emails, call logs, transcripts, all that unstructured data makes all the difference. Because when you know more, you grow more. And so if you want to read the whole book, instead of just reading part of it, visit hubspot.com. I have one more very dumb idea that I admire for its simplicity. So you probably are a subscriber to this YouTube channel. Can you just type in 10 hour fireplace?

• 19:11Sam Parr?

  Of course. I mean, everyone is, aren't they?

• 19:15Shaan Puri?

  So there what you will see, describe what you see when you type in 10 hour fireplace and then click the YouTube channel.

• 19:20Sam Parr?

  They have done a very good job of naming it. So I see, oh my God, I didn't realize it was that big. Okay. Holy moly. Okay, so obviously it's what you guys expect. It's a 10 hour video of a fireplace with 157 million views.

• 19:36Shaan Puri?

  There's how many videos on this channel, Sam?

• 19:39Sam Parr?

  Uh, so they posted this 10 years ago and shockingly, they have 120,000 subscribers and there is one video and it is, it's so funny. There's like points in the video that you know how when you scroll over YouTube, there's points where it spikes, like where the viewers are like, why?

• 19:56Shaan Puri?

  The viewers are just loving it?

• 19:57Sam Parr?

  Yeah, like, why is it?

• 19:59Shaan Puri?

  Oh, let's look at the most replayed section.

• 20:01Sam Parr?

  Oh, they don't even add logs. They don't even add logs to the fire. So it must be like a 30 second loop just done over and over and over again. Like there's parts where it spikes. You see this, the part at five hours and 55 minutes?

• 20:13Shaan Puri?

  Thrilling. Everybody knows about that part.

• 20:17Sam Parr?

  Oh, the top comment, bro's a millionaire.

• 20:19Shaan Puri?

  Bro's a millionaire because this guy is, this channel was started by one person in Romania. It's a channel with one video. So this guy just hit it and quit it. This is the one hit wonder of the business world.

• 20:34Shaan Puri?

  He posted one video of a 30 second loop of a fireplace, or I don't know if it's a 30 second loop, but a 10 hour video of a fireplace crackling and this guy made a million dollars in Romania. And did he try to follow it up with another video and then turn it into an empire and then create, no, he just put the video up, let it run, baby. I admire this. I admire the restraint maybe more than I admire the ingenuity.

• 20:59Sam Parr?

  Dude, have you noticed on YouTube what's been going on with these types of things? So I don't know. I guess what you can call an ambient channel. Let's call it these, let's, let's categorize them as ambient channels. I like, I love ambient, ambient channels. I listen to like the weird music. Yeah, it starts, it started as white noise. There's this company called Brain FM. Do you know Brain FM?

• 21:19Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 21:20Sam Parr?

  I love Brain FM. So they make some of my favorite noise.

• 21:26Sam Parr?

  Just great noise. I was a paying subscriber to Brain FM years ago.

• 21:30Shaan Puri?

  Oh, my God.

• 21:31Sam Parr?

  So I love Brain FM, but then I started going down the rat hole of like other music. So there's like, they call it like, like, um, is it like lofi Mac Miller? It's basically just Mac Miller. For some reason, I don't know how I got, I like Mac Miller, but not enough that I would think he'd start popping up on my channel. So it's tons of like lofi Mac Miller, which I love. But what I've noticed is that there's basically like a quadrant or like a huge graph where it's like, let's do old money. Let's do 1980s. Let's do this. And then it's like, now select country. So for example, I keep getting targeted with old money, Brazil or 1980s finance. Or like, it's like, and they create the best AI thumbnail. So type in old money, Brazil music.

• 22:13Shaan Puri?

  Old money, Brazil.

• 22:16Sam Parr?

  Trust me, it's so strange.

• 22:19Shaan Puri?

  All right. I see this gentleman in this nice suit with a cigar. And old money, Brazil elegant bossa nova timeless luxury instrumental playlist 74,000 views.

• 22:30Sam Parr?

  I get targeted with so many of these. There was another one where it was like, um.

• 22:34Shaan Puri?

  You get targeted or you you select, you you you beg for them.

• 22:38Sam Parr?

  You make the algorithm. So yeah, like if I see that image, it might get a click.

• 22:42Shaan Puri?

  First we shape our algorithm, then our algorithm shapes us, like old Winston Churchill.

• 22:47Sam Parr?

  But then, but then there was like, there's even crazier ones where it's like greedy American revolution. Like, I don't like, like locked in American revolution or something like that. Like, it's like, it's crazy how like specific they get, but they basically just take like, like.

• 23:02Shaan Puri?

  You're joking. This is.

• 23:06Shaan Puri?

  90 minutes of American war revolutionary music, uh, liberty song playlist.

• 23:12Sam Parr?

  And they like, it's like, do you see like a good, a good one?

• 23:15Shaan Puri?

  Define good, bro. I'm never gonna click any of these.

• 23:18Sam Parr?

  Like the thumbnails are so funny. Like, um, I'll have to find a different one, but the thumbnail, I tweeted out the other day. I was like, the thumbnail gods have been smiling on me. And it's like an American revolution, um, uh, like music, but the best thumbnail ever. And I keep getting targeted over and over and over again. These guys are, are, must be doing well. You, you, uh, you've never seen these?

• 23:41Shaan Puri?

  Well, I've seen just a normal lofi. So like lofi girl, for example, lofi girl, I think is probably the biggest channel in this category. 15 million subscribers, two and a half billion views, uh, on, on the channel. Making about a hundred grand a month, uh, on this channel right now. And that's just, that's like one channel. Right now, she's live. There's 30,000 people just listening to this right now while we're recording this.

• 24:08Sam Parr?

  It's the best. So look at the, look at the.

• 24:10Shaan Puri?

  Why don't we just do this?

• 24:12Sam Parr?

  It sounds awesome.

• 24:13Shaan Puri?

  Why, why are we talking?

• 24:15Sam Parr?

  Look at the thumbnail that I sent to you.

• 24:18Shaan Puri?

  Oh, this is incredible. Uh, what is this?

• 24:21Sam Parr?

  Explain what you see.

• 24:23Shaan Puri?

  I mean, I don't even have a word for this. It looks like, you know, like that, what's the painting at the top of the Sistine Chapel? Where like the naked man's reaching out to like God and their fingers are about to touch. It looks like that guy, but he's got his dukes up like he's about to fight and he's like a hairless naked man with like half a mullet. And it just says classical music that goes hard.

• 24:43Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Or I'll see them where it looks like paintings like that and they're giving like the shocker sign. And so I just get like so many of these and um, I think it just, there's like this weird underground world. There's that underground world and there's the underground world of the comments. So if you look at MFM's comments, people can't see this, but on the backend, we've tried to ban them where it's like, I can't believe no one has been blessed. Why hasn't anyone blessed me before? Like they've just blessed me after I read this book called like, you know, millionaires are us. Like, or it'll be, it'll be like, I totally agree with this video. And it's so funny that, that this video that you guys are making these points. Cause I had read, I read about this exact thing in the millionaires are us book by this person who's a total saint.

• 25:26Shaan Puri?

  Dude, this is, uh, those guys are like the bane of my existence, by the way.

• 25:29Sam Parr?

  Same, it's the worst.

• 25:30Shaan Puri?

  I just sit there and like manually try to get rid of them. Have you seen this guy, uh, Yang Mun on Instagram? It's like an AI monk.

• 25:42Shaan Puri?

  And he's got this like healing guide. He's got a million.

• 25:45Sam Parr?

  I'm so into it.

• 25:46Shaan Puri?

  He's got like one to two million followers and it's a monk who's just giving, doing like talking head, um, advice videos. And then he sells a healing guide. And again, it's like, you know, it's a guy who's like, you know, it's a kid who's 17 with like the broccoli haircut. Who had just moved to Miami and he's in a house with seven other guys and they're all creating these accounts that are like, there's one of just.

• 26:07Sam Parr?

  It's so many whoop. You know, what's that they called? WAP or whoop? Where you buy like financial newsletters? If you go to his, if you go to Yang Mun's, uh, link tree, you click on.

• 26:16Shaan Puri?

  That's what a monk would do, right?

• 26:18Sam Parr?

  He would be on one whoop.

• 26:21Shaan Puri?

  The ebook, time to heal, young man.

• 26:25Sam Parr?

  And it's like things you might love and that it's like newsletters that it's like 10x your wealth with this stock tip.

• 26:33Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, but there people are doing this. They're doing this with fake grandparents. So they have like an account that's like wisdom from like grandparents, but they're all AI. And it's like, what I wish I knew when I was younger, like the one thing, you know, the, the love that got away. And they just post content like that. They're just printing views right now.

• 26:48Sam Parr?

  Dude, this stuff gets me every time. It sucks. I love this stuff. I fall victim to this worse than like a grandparent falls victim to like buying the top listing on an Amazon. Like, like every birthday for every like for every gift giving experience at my house right now from grandparents. It's like you guys all just typed in by kids bike and bought the exact same thing.

• 27:09Shaan Puri?

  I gotta show you one more. This is the best one. All right. So I, I'm on YouTube the other day. And you know, when the algorithm just like has a commission and five star, you know, experience for you. So this is one, the most intense shoe salesman you'll ever meet. It's a CBS News archive from 1983.

• 27:28Speaker 02

  There's shoe store here in Sharon, Pennsylvania is just, you know, a shoe store. Oh no.

• 27:37Speaker 02

  That's the playing field of a champion.

• 27:45Speaker 02

  Here he comes now, out of the bullpen, the hottest pitcher of retail shoe game today. Big number one, Larry Jolton. Lemon C, come on up.

• 27:56Shaan Puri?

  All right. So this video is of this guy Larry Jolton, who was the number one shoe salesman in America. And he sold, this is back in 1983, he sold 400, $400,000 worth of shoes at this physical shoe store himself. By hand. It's in Pennsylvania. It's some like rayers or something like that. It's a famous shoe store. And so he was the number one hustler and this video is amazing because they just show him.

• 28:21Sam Parr?

  I want to see.

• 28:22Shaan Puri?

  What's that?

• 28:23Sam Parr?

  The hook is great. I'm in, I'm, I'm bought in.

• 28:25Shaan Puri?

  Here you go.

• 28:26Speaker 03

  I wouldn't go any bigger than that. That's a nice dress. Here's 20% off. Like a light bed. I need to, especially in the summertime. Listen to me. You order the two shoes, whatever color you want. If it comes in, it don't fit, you don't like it, you're not able to get it.

• 28:40Speaker 02

  Big day, clean it up. Larry Jolton is the Cy Young of his time, the best of the big league shoe pitchers. There are only 38,000 feet in Sharon, Pennsylvania. Last year Larry Jolton sold $423,000 worth of shoes.

• 28:59Speaker 02

  We're busy today, fellas. I can feel it. I can feel it. It's gonna be busy. His stats make him the MVP, the officially recognized champion shoe salesman.

• 29:11Shaan Puri?

  All right, so watch this. So they show him doing his thing, and there's a couple of amazing parts. There's, there's, all right, so one is, he's like, I'll, he's like, he's like, the worst thing in the world is someone leaves without a shoe. He's like, that's not gonna happen on my watch. So he's serving like four or five customers at once. And he's like, he's basically like selling them on like, it's about, not about the size, it's about the fit. He's got all these like go-to slogans. And he's like, that's a good looking shoe right there on you. And then he'll, um, he'll like deliver them to their house. He's like, I'll deliver to your house. I'll deliver to your office. I'll find you on the street. I'll give you the shoes. Don't worry. And he's like, if you ever have a problem, you just give right back to me. I'm there. And then he, they show like he never takes a lunch break. They show, he's eating a burger.

• 29:52Speaker 02

  You have to keep up your strength because sometimes the game goes into extra innings.

• 29:56Shaan Puri?

  He's just eating a burger in the back, uh, like he just has a burger in, in the shoe rack where he finds the sizes. He just takes bites as he's running back and forth to get customers the shoe size. This guy's awesome. He's like, and then he's like, you know, he's, he's like his sales philosophy. So he's like, you don't want to be the nice guy. He's like, you know, you gotta, you got, some people just want to be told. They want to be told what, what they need. And he's like, you know, they come in, they think their shoes are size eight and a half. They're, they're walking around with cramped feet all the time. He's like, you gotta give them a size 10. He's like, he tells the story about this guy, like, didn't know what he wanted. He's like, the customer doesn't always know what they want. You gotta help them. And he's like, yes, that's the art of shoe sales. But just his overall energy. And when he's like walking around the bullpen, like, he's like, gonna be a big day today, boys.

• 30:40Shaan Puri?

  Got a lot of shoes we gotta move today. And like all the other shoe salesmen like clearly don't care. And like, this is a very inspiring video about just like being the best, just be championship mentality in anything you do.

• 30:52Sam Parr?

  Dude, so he died this year, which is, uh, he died this year as his obituary. It goes in depth about how he was on that show and a bunch of other shows. And he said he was the National Shoe Retailers Association, named him salesman of the year in 1983, 84, 85. They say he was a larger than life figure. This guy's awesome.

• 31:09Shaan Puri?

  He's incredible, right? I love this guy. I love this man.

• 31:13Sam Parr?

  Larry's a salt of the earth type of guy.

• 31:15Shaan Puri?

  If you're gonna do anything today, you bring that Larry Jolton energy, that championship mindset to whatever you do. You sell whatever you sell the way Larry sold shoes today. All right? That's, that's the final word here.

• 31:26Sam Parr?

  Have you ever studied sales? Like, I imagine, if I had to guess, you did something, you and I have behaved similarly, which is like, we're pretty charismatic and we think that's all it takes. But then I've hired salesmen before and saleswomen before, and I've like seen the difference between a really, like a winning one and a pretty good one. And it's just like a total, like the greats have both the talent and, and this thing that I'm gonna describe. But the second thing that they all have to have is process, where like they know that saying this gets that. It's like such a, um, a mouse in a finding a cheese type of energy, where it's like the really good ones just kind of blindly, oh, that worked. No ego. I'm just gonna do that. Oh, I just threw that thing out there. That caught, that got a laugh doing that one.

• 32:11Sam Parr?

  Like they follow like, uh, this process.

• 32:14Shaan Puri?

  Guys like you and me actually suck at sales. And the reason we suck at sales is because we wanna use charm, charisma, talent, whatever. And they, you know, the best people use process. And even the reason we actually suck isn't even because we can't adapt that. Cause over time, we're like a problem solver. Like it's a puzzle. Oh, I gotta do this and then that gets me the solution I want. We would get bored doing that. The most impressive thing of this guy isn't that he sold $400,000 shoes, it's that he just kept doing it year after year after year. He never got bored of it. I have this phrase I say now, cause every day when I do my, my workout, we start with this 10 minute routine, where I basically like loosen up my IT band. It's like, I'll do like a, like a fascia release on my IT band, which is painful.

• 32:59Shaan Puri?

  It's boring. It doesn't look cool. You don't feel like you're getting any stronger or more athletic. It's like the opposite of what you want when you go into a workout. But I need it. I need it because like I've had knee injuries and I gotta keep doing this. And then you can't do it once, twice. You can't do it for two weeks. You basically have to just constantly do this if you wanna stay healthy. If you're like, if you're got sort of my, my leg, uh, condition. And now every day when I go in, I say, all right, boys, we're not getting bored of greatness today. Let's not get bored of greatness today, right? The Larry mentality of like, you can't get bored with doing the thing that leads to great results, even if it's the same thing you've done. You can't get bored. You can't become sort of nonchalant about it. You can't become autopilot with it.

• 33:41Shaan Puri?

  You can't like cut the corner or cut it short because you already have done it before. Like, you have to do this. And that's when I'm coaching my team. It's the same thing. Like, we played a game the other day in the warm, in the warmups. I knew we're going to kick this team's butt because their warmup was so sloppy. I was like, if they warm up like this, they're not going to be able to play at some high level because this tells me everything I need to know. I don't need to do a scouting report. It's over. And sure enough, we beat them by almost like 50 points. And it was, yeah, they didn't have a lot of talent, but they were shortcutting the process. And so, and like, I just feel like that, like, getting bored of what gets great results is a real problem. It's been a real problem for me in my life. And I know that like for other people, if you're sort of like smart and talented, you get off on solving new problems and new puzzles, it could become an Achilles heel.

• 34:26Sam Parr?

  Dude, I'm always, I'm the biggest victim of these stories where it's like a company does the small things right? And it like levers up or levels up to the big thing. So for example, have you heard of Rakuten?

• 34:38Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I, I know them well.

• 34:40Sam Parr?

  So Rakuten's a Japanese company. I think they're like the Amazon of Japan, right? Ish?

• 34:45Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's, it's kind of, it's retail, but then there's also like a big like discounting kind of component to it. I think like deals component to it that I think that Amazon doesn't really have.

• 34:53Sam Parr?

  Yes, but it's just like a multi-billion dollar, huge massive thing, whatever.

• 34:57Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 34:57Sam Parr?

  And for some reason I came along, the founder, and I started reading about him. And they have a book because they're famous for having a culty culture. So the culture is like, they're like super into it. And he released a handbook on what their culture and what their values is. It's one of these things where it was supposed to be internal. And it was a hit. So now everyone reads it or a lot of people read it. And like, he has like, Thirty rules or something of Rakuten. And like, rule number one is every Tuesday from three to four, everyone at every office throughout the world, you stop what you're doing and we clean. And we refuse to have cleaners, hired cleaners. And his reasoning was that if we keep our desks clean, it's the same thing. You can, you already know what's gonna, I'm gonna say, you, you keep your desk clean and you have a clean desk, you're gonna have a clean mind, it's gonna keep you disciplined.

• 35:42Sam Parr?

  Same thing like, you know, general, I forget what the general is, who had the famous speech.

• 35:46Shaan Puri?

  Make your bed.

• 35:47Sam Parr?

  Yeah, yeah, was make your bed. And then there's all these other famous stories of like, of coach of Indiana basketball or something like that, who turns around the team and he's like, I started by teaching the front desk kind of answer the phone.

• 35:56Shaan Puri?

  Tie the shoelaces, yeah.

• 35:58Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's like these stories over and over and over again. I love all of them. I'm always, I'm always, I'm always into these. I, I don't know how often they are true, but I buy into it. Do you, have you ever tried one of these things with your, I mean, it sounds like you're doing it with your basketball team, warming up, right?

• 36:13Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, we try. I mean, the hard part is to have the courage to actually live by it. Right? You could read the story back, ah, that's great. And that makes total sense. Then you get into an environment where you got all these people who they're not as bought into it. They don't, you know, they don't really care. And are you gonna really force it? And are you really gonna enforce it? And how, how much of a standard really is it? And how many exceptions are you gonna create? And are you gonna let your best player not do it? Or are you gonna let a meeting get in the way of it? Right? Like, it's all the compromises is where things get interesting. And it, I have never gone to the extent where I'm like, truly hardcore about it. Because I think it takes like, just a different level of leadership and courage that I personally don't possess.

• 36:53Sam Parr?

  Let me reframe it for you. So in high school, I tweeted this out the other day, but in high school, my freshman year of high school, first practice, I went to an all-boys school, first practice for cross-country. The coach gets up and he goes, and it was like, I remember the Titans moment. He was like, I'm gonna teach you guys something. We're not gonna, I'm not here to teach you how to be the best runner. What I'm here to do this year is I'm gonna teach all of you boys how to become men. And we're gonna do it by learning how to run better. And he goes on to say like, you know, we're gonna like show up earlier than we anticipate. We're going to like run when we don't feel like it. We're gonna like go through the pain no matter what. We're gonna stick around until the last person's finished because that's what we do with our teammates. You know, the whole thing. And at the time, I kind of like laughed a little bit about it, but then I started buying into it. And it brought us all together, our team did.

• 37:39Sam Parr?

  And the cross country team at my, my high school slew. You know, it's a nerdy sport, but we won all the time. We always won. And he used to have this idea of like being great and how you're going to be a great man just via running. And we're going to teach you how to do all these little small things. And it totally worked on our team and it was awesome. And because of that, this coach has a very cult personality. We used to have this phrase, it was tradition doesn't graduate. That was like, I still remember it like tradition doesn't graduate. You know, like, he was like, he's like, I've been doing this since the eighties. Tradition doesn't graduate. You guys are going to graduate, but we've been doing this the same way and it works. And I just remember all of these like culty lines and we're talking high school cross country. Nothing like significant, but it like meaningfully impacted me and it was awesome. And so this type of like inspire you to be a better human being by teaching you how to work better or clean your desk better.

• 38:24Sam Parr?

  I love that story.

• 38:26Shaan Puri?

  My buddy Jason told me an amazing story like this. So Jason Hitchcock, I think you know, Jason, he used to work at Bebo and I was pretty hard on Jason or like, I would give him feedback all the time. Like, hey, you gotta do this, you gotta do this, you gotta do this. And like, maybe it's because he was one of the non engineers. So I felt like, you know, there's only a few non engineers. I'm going to tell you what I think. The engineers, I don't really have as much to say because that's not my domain. And I noticed he took it really well, always like incredible attitude. So I was doing a one on one with him and I gave him credit for that. I was like, man, I think that you have just like a 10 out of 10 attitude at life and at work. And I just really respect that. And I know that like I give you a bunch of feedback, but you take it so incredibly well, like, you know, whatever. And he was like, I receive it. I go, what? And he goes, I don't take it, I receive it. And he goes, can I tell you a story like where that comes from? I said, yeah, sure.

• 39:11Shaan Puri?

  He goes, my freshman year, I go to high, I'm a, I'm a high schooler and I wanted to play water polo. My brother was the like captain of the water polo team, my older brother. And I was, I, I thought I was like as good as him or gonna be better than him. So I feel, I'm feeling myself a little bit. I'm like a hot shot. And he's like, we get in the pool and I guess like for water polo, like you're basically treading water while you're playing the sport, right? So it's kind of a hard sport. So during the warm up, you're probably not going as hard. So he's being a little sloppy in the warm up where he's treading, but he's like, when he's throwing the ball, his like arm is like skimming the, it's like in the water still. It's not out of the water like you would want it to be if you were really playing a game. And so the coach, the varsity coach walks by, he goes, Jason, get your arm out of the water. Keep your arm out of the water. And Jason's like, yeah, thanks, coach.

• 39:56Shaan Puri?

  Keeps going. Couple of minutes later, he's like, you know, being a little lazy again, does it again. Jason, keep your arm out of the water. And he's like, yeah, coach, sorry, I will, I'm just getting warmed up. He has something to say back to the coach. Coach blows the whistle. Everybody comes over. He goes, hey, everybody. I'm coach. I just want to introduce you to Jason. Jason is a freshman. Jason is too good for feedback. Jason takes the gift of feedback and he does not care. He doesn't want, he doesn't want your feedback. All right. And he basically pulled him aside, he like embarrassed him in front of everybody like Jason is too good for feedback. And then he's like, he's like, look, Jason, feedback is a gift. If I'm going to give you that gift, you got to receive the gift, right? Don't, don't just throw the gift away when I give you that gift.

• 40:41Shaan Puri?

  He goes, think of what it, what it takes to give somebody feedback. You have to be kind of vulnerable. You're risking conflict. You have to care about making that person better. These are what it takes to give that gift. And so he was like, feedback is a gift. And so like at the whole company that became like, you know, a mantra for us, which is like feedback is a gift, which is really important because otherwise you can create a kind of defensive mentality or people shy away from saying something to somebody else. They'll only do it as a last resort. And that's not good. And so the feedback is a gift thing like changed us and it was a lesson from his high school water polo coach. But the story with the lesson is what we needed for like people to get it.

• 41:19Sam Parr?

  I love stories like this. They always like get me going. I, you know, I distinctly remember we did a podcast a year ago where we were talking about, I think I was actually like motivating you. I think like you had said something like, I haven't done anything like world changing, but I've been doing this thing. And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, why are you saying that? Like, who cares? Like if it's world changing, like, you know, just, just creating a small game that makes someone just a little bit happier is worth it. Like that, you know, like that's not, it's not necessarily less meaningful than anything else. And I sort of have grown to believe that to like work where high school sports are very insignificant. And yet it's like such a world changing experience for many. Kids and I think that we need to take that same energy to work, which is like,

• 42:03Sam Parr?

  you know, we're making a podcast. That's fine. But like, let's even go something way less glamorous. We're making like B to B software. Like, it's not that special, but like you can, you can, you can learn how to be excellent here. You can learn how to follow through here. Like you can learn how to like, say you're going to do what you say and whatever. You can learn how to have this unearned pride where you make these tough decisions when no one is looking. And so I think that like that has carried over to like employees and how I've been working with my team.

• 42:27Shaan Puri?

  That's cool. I like it. Sam's in his leadership arc. That's the, that's definitely the season you're in. You started, you gotta like, start going by like Samuel or something. I feel like we need to upgrade the name, everything. I think, I think you need to reinvent yourself here, actually.

• 42:41Sam Parr?

  Father, just father.

• 42:46Shaan Puri?

  So at work, everyone calls me father. At home, they call me Sam.

• 42:51Sam Parr?

  The, just the same way the stargazing thing exists. There's this thing called universalministries.com where you can sign up and get ordained as a minister. And I've had to do that in order to like, I've had to do that to like, because I've, I've officiated a couple weddings before. And it's all obviously a crack of bullshit, but I am a minister. So we could, if we could go by minister. I am a legal witness. So.

• 43:17Shaan Puri?

  All right, let's take a quick break because I gotta tell you a story. Let me tell you about the first time I tried to run payroll for my team. I was using a traditional bank and you know the type. It's got a janky interface. It's built like a 2002 tax form and it was open only during business hours. And I hit send and it froze. They flagged the transaction. They locked my account. They put me on hold for 45 minutes and then they told me I gotta visit my local branch. And that was the day I started looking for a new banking solution. After asking a few founders what they were using, I found out about Mercury. And so now my payroll is two clicks. I can wire money. I can pay invoices. I can reimburse the team, all from one clean dashboard. That's why I use it for all of my companies. And so do 200,000 other startup founders. And so if you're looking to level up your banking, head to mercury.com and apply in minutes. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banked the services are provided through Choice Financial Group,

• 44:02Shaan Puri?

  Callman A and Evolve Bank and Trust, members FDIC.

• 44:06Sam Parr?

  All right, Sean, I want to show you someone who's in the aviation business, in the grocery store business, and actually had a pretty important character in a movie, Marty Supreme, which recently just came out.

• 44:19Shaan Puri?

  Okay, I haven't seen the movie yet.

• 44:20Sam Parr?

  Okay, well, you know what it is, right? It's like the biggest movie going on right now.

• 44:23Shaan Puri?

  Timothy Chalamet and ping pong? I don't really, that's literally the only two words I know.

• 44:29Sam Parr?

  Or as Adam Sandler says, Timothy Chalamet. Like, he like, have you seen that? But he does that so good. Okay, so Google John Cat Mia Dondes.

• 44:39Shaan Puri?

  All right, John the Big Cat. Here we go. Who am I looking at? American, okay, here's just the quick description. American billionaire businessman and radio talk show host. He's the owner, president, chairman, and CEO of grocery chains, Gristeds? I've never heard of that. DiAgostino supermarkets in Manhattan. Okay, go ahead. Five billion dollar net worth.

• 44:57Sam Parr?

  Yeah, have you never heard of this guy, have you?

• 45:00Shaan Puri?

  No. He, but he's a, is this guy the famous actor? Like, why do I, why does this guy look so familiar?

• 45:04Sam Parr?

  He's a familiar face. He's one of these guys, he's sort of like the character in The Dark Knight, who plays the police chief, where like, you're like, I've seen this actor everywhere, but what's his name? He's, he sort of has that type of energy. So here's his story. So I think he's 80 now. So he was born, I guess that would mean sometime in the 40s, and he immigrated as a baby from Greece. He came to New York. I believe he moved to Harlem. And then he was an okay student, went to Brooklyn Tech, which I think New York is a pretty good school. But eventually actually got into West Point. So he's clearly smart, but didn't go, didn't decide not to go to school. And instead, he bought a small grocery store. So at the age of like 20, he convinced a failing grocery store to sell to him

• 45:48Sam Parr?

  at like an owner financing type of setup, where he didn't have to come up with a lot of money. But do you know anything about grocery stores? They're like the hardest business to run.

• 45:55Shaan Puri?

  It's like no margin business, right?

• 45:57Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's a commodity. There's like, it's, there are no margins. So if you look at like the biggest grocery stores, or at least some of the mid-sized grocery stores, like the regional giants, they do like 3% margins. It's incredibly challenging. You have food that's going to spoil, and particularly back in the 70s when he was doing it, you don't have the most, like, the best systems to like, make sure your food's not going to spoil. Very hard. But, he's a, he's a dog. He's got that immigrant hustle, and he's able to grow this business. I think it's something like seven years. So by the time he's only 32, he has this cool quote that I found in newspapers.com in this old article, where he grew the business to the point where he was making something like 40 million a year in revenue, had like 12 or 15 locations. And he goes, I'm now paying myself at the age of, and this actually, he said this at the age of like 28, he was like, I'm paying

• 46:41Sam Parr?

  myself a million dollars a year. So through like, just hustle and grind, like, he kind of makes it work. And he does like, a lot of like, stuff that we take for granted now. Like his grocery stores, they were called Red Apple. They did free cash checking, they did free delivery. It was a discount store, like, a lot of stuff that isn't particularly groundbreaking now, but he just like, provided like, a pretty simple service, but he did it really well. Now, Red Apple, which is, I think they have like, 100 locations in the city. They own Gristides. Have you heard of Gristides?

• 47:10Shaan Puri?

  No, is that like, a New York thing?

• 47:12Sam Parr?

  Yeah, these are all, it's all, these are all local things. But, here's where it gets weird. So, he does two interesting moves. So, at the age of 32, I think it is, he was like, well, I was going to get into West Point. My dream was to be a pilot. I've never been able to do that. Gets his pilot license as an activity, just for being, for fun. And he does this move that I've actually heard Richard Branson do as well. He buys a jet, and it's like, kind of interesting and kind of fun, but then he's like, I gotta turn this into a business. I gotta do something. And so, he buys one plane, like, a relatively small plane. He has a biography, and it was just a Cessna, like, nothing fancy. And he starts allowing customers to charter his plane from New York City to Atlantic City. And this is like, in the 70s and the 80s, so like, the airlines are still a little bit nascent, but it's still like, pretty complicated. But he pulls it off. And he's able to, so

• 47:57Sam Parr?

  now officially, he's in the aviation business. And like, one thing leads to another, and it grows for like, eight years. And eventually becomes like, a fleet of like, 40 planes and jets, which eventually, he sells to Warren Buffett, or, yeah, Warren Buffett. And that is like, one of the beginnings of NetJets, which is one of Berkshire Hathaway's like, crown jewels, I believe.

• 48:16Shaan Puri?

  And so he was doing it as private charters, not like an airline like Branson?

• 48:20Sam Parr?

  No, private charters, but he tried to get into the actual airline business and I don't think it worked out. Now, while all of this is going on, he's still only like thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five years old. He does another crazy thing. He hears about an oil refinery going out of business in Pennsylvania. And the grocery store business, it's a commodity, lots of unions, very low margins, twenty-four hour, like you have to be working twenty-four hours to make it work. And somehow, which I never would have thought this would have been a thing, he made the leap that they are comparable. And he gets into the oil business and he finds an oil refining company, which, do you know what that means?

• 48:56Shaan Puri?

  Not, I mean, not really. They are a middleman in the oil process between drilling for the oil and selling it to the end customers, my guess, but what?

• 49:06Sam Parr?

  Not exactly. It's, it's, it's so, these are all very vague terms. So I had to like figure out like what exactly is oil refining? Basically, if I had to dumb it down, they do two things. One, they have a massive pool or tank in the ground that can store tons and tons and tons of oil. So you drill the oil, it goes to this thing. And it's not particularly useful. You can't use it. And so there's this process where you have to refine it. And you could take parts of that crude oil and turn it into oil that you could use in cars. Oil that you can burn as kerosene. You know, oil can turn into multiple products along the way. And that's what he did, was he bought a business that did that, which is actually kind of ridiculous. Like, you never would have thought that that would have been a thing, but it works.

• 49:50Shaan Puri?

  And by the way, when you're reading about this or watching whatever you watched for this, is it, is he just like a gunslinger? Like, why is he going into all these different spaces? He can't help himself? Does he have some aspiration? Is he just, you know, he's just wired that way? Like, what did you get? There's a sense of like the, why is this guy doing all, why is he bouncing from, from? Totally different hard thing to totally different hard thing.

• 50:13Sam Parr?

  This is why I wanted to bring him up. And so I think you and I will get a kick out of like people like him. But let me just add that the last thing, he does two things now in his six, I think he's close to 80 now. In his 60s, he does two other wild things. One, he starts an AM radio station, political, like weekly radio show, which he still is the host of. You can't find it on YouTube and you can't find it on Spotify. You literally only get this on AM radio and he records every single Sunday. Uh, and I've like listened to it and like his co-host is this like Long Island guy who's like, hey, uh, John, what do you think about this, uh, Mondani guy? Like, it's hilarious.

• 50:54Sam Parr?

  Like, he's a very, uh, unrefined billionaire, I would say. And I mean that in a cool way. And the second thing, the reason, or the second thing that he did was he ran for mayor, uh, in 2012, I think. And he almost won. And he was like, I'm going to be a mayor for, for the people in Harlem and the people in Wall Street. So he's this very like, sort of salt of the earth immigrant energy type of billionaire guy. But the reason why he's interesting is A, what did that, what's that word that you have been obsessed with? Generative?

• 51:24Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 51:25Sam Parr?

  He's very generative, but he does this in a way, you know, like the charm that when Donald Trump is being like a nice guy, you know, like the charm that he has where he's like, ah, screw it, let's just do it. You know, what's money amongst friends? This like old timey, like, uh, like what's a little like, you know, I'll take a little, you take a little, we all win. Like this type of energy.

• 51:44Shaan Puri?

  My word is my bond. My word is, my word is stronger than oak.

• 51:47Sam Parr?

  This guy is actually that. He, he has that energy with him, but it's not, he, he, like, he doesn't, he's not hateful at all. So he's a Republican, but he talks very fondly of Obama and Hillary. Like he, he's, he's not, uh, he's not a hater at all. And he's got this very folksy types of vibe. And when you hear him talk, he's got this thick New York accent, but it's very much a like spit on my hand, shake your hand type of energy. And I have found him very fascinating because, uh, that and also.

• 52:13Sam Parr?

  Now his company, it's called Red Apple Holding Company, I think. They have like eight or nine thousand employees. His family runs it and I believe him and his kids, they all, they own a building in New York City. They all live in the same building. They run this company together and he's still like incredibly active even at the age of 80. And he's just constantly doing stuff. He's very interesting to me. And also he looks very funny, like he looks-

• 52:38Shaan Puri?

  And then he was just an actor? He just had a cameo? Was he playing himself or he was-

• 52:41Sam Parr?

  Listen to this. So Marty Supreme, which is the hottest thing going. I went and saw it the other day.

• 52:46Shaan Puri?

  By the way, how is it? Like must watch? Okay, where are we at?

• 52:49Sam Parr?

  Did you see Uncut Gems?

• 52:51Shaan Puri?

  Loved Uncut Gems.

• 52:52Sam Parr?

  Loved, then you'll like this. So if Uncut Gems is a nine out of 10 on the stress scale, Marty Supreme is an eight out of 10. And for people like me, if you're in my, if you're in my boat, you'll hate it. I hated Uncut Gems and I hate Marty Supreme.

• 53:04Shaan Puri?

  Too much stress.

• 53:05Sam Parr?

  Yeah, all the characters are pretty evil and there's no like redeeming qualities of any of them. But, but he, this guy, John, has like a pretty like interesting, like not minor character in Marty Supreme. And so I was like, this guy is everywhere. He's a man about town. He's just always doing stuff and he just seems like, um, sort of in that Jesse Itzler category of people who have fun while winning and doing well. And he's just a really fascinating guy to me.

• 53:32Shaan Puri?

  Dude, I'm reading this guy's Wikipedia and I'm like, wow, that's really amazing. Oh, that's really amazing. And then it's like, he gave a speech at the Stern School of Business, uh, expressing his unease about his daughter's graduating class. He said, 480 of the 580 kids are Asian, including Indian. And that's scary when you think about it. We're going to deport most of these kids. So then I was like, oh, well, that may not be so amazing for, you know? He might kick me right off this podcast.

• 53:59Sam Parr?

  Did he really say that?

• 54:00Shaan Puri?

  I don't know, it's on the Wikipedia page.

• 54:02Sam Parr?

  I didn't see that one, but I did see other things where, uh, I'm like, I couldn't tell if you were trying to be funny and it reads stupid or what. But yeah, he it does. He does seem like he's an 80 year old New Yorker who has a little bit of a big mouth, but my vibe, my read on him was that he was an all right guy, but maybe, maybe I could be wrong.

• 54:21Shaan Puri?

  We're assembling this list of what you call capital men, and I feel like he would be one of the capital men, where he just takes money, goes into these, you know, sort of mavericks into new spaces, creates new investments, new entities and whole new and a whole new industries and, you know, wins more often than not. Doesn't win every time. You actually can't be a capital man if you have a perfect record. It kind of means you did not, you know, you weren't playing as, as, as rough as you should have, but, but wins more often than than not. I feel like this guy's in that bucket.

• 54:56Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I was reading his book and there seems like a common theme. A lot of these guys, there's one point in their life where they're just, what was the phrase we used? They're, they're leveraged up to the tits. Like they're just like crazy amounts of debt.

• 55:07Shaan Puri?

  What's the scientific?

• 55:11Sam Parr?

  Derek from More Plates More Gates, More Plates More Dates, he always says, this guy's juice to the gills. And when I was, when I was reading about, uh, uh, old, old John, Johnny Katz, I was like, this guy's, this guy's leveraged to the tits. He's leveraged to the gills. Uh, and so, yeah, there's the, you have to pay the price to do a lot of this stuff, but I love these young guys who are like, have this gunslinging energy.

• 55:33Shaan Puri?

  So he is your, your Billy of the week?

• 55:36Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So the whole anti-Indian thing, I didn't know about that when I got into this. So this is a little, this is

• 55:41Shaan Puri?

  Sorry to throw you.

• 55:43Sam Parr?

  So I should have done a little capital J journalism. Otherwise I was going to say we should have invited him onto the pod, but I think, I think that probably won't be happening.

• 55:52Shaan Puri?

  Hey, we could still invite him. Let's see, let's see what happens.

• 55:54Sam Parr?

  You should, you should ask him about that quote.

• 55:56Shaan Puri?

  We'll just make sure we do it remote. I don't disclose my location.

• 56:02Sam Parr?

  I didn't realize he said that. So uh, did he say, what other dumb stuff did he say? He said, he said a few dumb things.

• 56:09Shaan Puri?

  About like, there's something about Hitler. I don't know.

• 56:12Sam Parr?

  Oh man, classic blunder.

• 56:14Shaan Puri?

  He compared raising taxes on the wealthy to how Hitler punished the Jews, which is.

• 56:18Sam Parr?

  Yeah, that's probably not the best place to go to.

• 56:20Shaan Puri?

  A trap we've all fallen into.

• 56:24Sam Parr?

  I did read that line and I was like, oh dude, like we have seen time and time again, that type of comparison. People have tried to make it. Literally not once has it ever worked.

• 56:34Shaan Puri?

  Dude, I might end up being the richest man in California. Have you heard about this billionaire tax?

• 56:38Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So is the gist of it that net worths will be taxed at 5%?

• 56:44Shaan Puri?

  Yes. Uh, one time tax of 5% for billionaires. So all the billionaires are leaving, which will mean they'll just be like, okay, we'll move to the next class of people. Soon enough, I'll be the last man standing in California.

• 56:59Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I think that's a pretty stupid law, but at the same time, I'm like, isn't it crazy how little power a billionaire has if they have to leave their home?

• 57:08Shaan Puri?

  If Rohana can bully you.

• 57:11Sam Parr?

  Yeah, like, do you really have that much power? It's like another Dark Knight reference. Have you seen when Bane is talking to the guy doing construction and the little guy's like, I'm in control. And Bane puts his hand on his shoulder. He goes, do you feel in control? Cause like Bane is about to like snap his neck. That's sort of like.

• 57:28Shaan Puri?

  That's the 850,000 votes it takes to put this on the bill.

• 57:32Sam Parr?

  That's sort of the energy that I'm feeling right now, which is like these billionaires being like, you know, we're the big shots. It's like, you know, it looks like the billionaire's big shot. If you have to leave, if you have to flee your home. That said, it is kind of a stupid rule because so like the analogy that I always use is let's say that you buy a Picasso painting for $5 at a garage sale and turns out you didn't realize it, but you bought like, you know, a one of one rare piece of art. Now your net worth is hundreds of millions of dollars or whatever the painting is worth. How are you supposed to pay taxes on that assessed value?

• 58:05Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's complicated. I mean, you don't even have to go as far as the finding a Picasso at a garage sale example, which is, you know, that's more of an edge case, but like, you're a founder of a startup in San Francisco. Your on paper net worth is $200 million, but that's just because you just got a, you have an AI company that was hot and you raised around. That doesn't mean you have that money. That doesn't mean that that money is anywhere close to guaranteed for you, but you would be on the hook for the taxes the following year, which is, which is pretty wild. I mean, all it'll do is just obviously going to drive the wealthiest people out, obviously drive the startup founders who want to get wealthy out, because why would you start here? And literally like, you know, strangle the golden

• 58:49Shaan Puri?

  goose of California. It's like, oh yeah, you know, what did you achieve? What did you accomplish with that?

• 58:54Sam Parr?

  I read that, like, it said like 20 or 30 families have left, like prominent families. You should make a, like a public announcement.

• 59:02Shaan Puri?

  Oh, I'm leaving?

• 59:03Sam Parr?

  The 31st, yeah.

• 59:05Shaan Puri?

  Oh, what a great idea. That's hilarious. That's like that one time that I tweeted that I was buying Bitcoin and then it somehow got picked up by all the Bitcoin, like, magazines and newspapers. And they were like, executive Sean Puri says he's moving 20% of his net worth into Bitcoin. And I'm like, I don't think y'all know how small that net worth is, you know, like that, that's not magazine worthy. This has escalated far too quickly for me.

• 59:33Sam Parr?

  I saw some guy online announce that he was leaving and everyone was making fun of him. And they're like, you know, you're not, you're not important enough to like, for us to care.

• 59:42Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you own two duplexes. You didn't qualify for the bill. All right.

• 59:49Sam Parr?

  Is that, is that what it is, by the way, a billion?

• 59:52Shaan Puri?

  Well, there was a proposal for 50 million. That didn't make it. Then they went to the billionaire tax because it's like, who's going to not vote for that? And so that's the one that's currently proposed. But people have done the math, like even if you tax the billionaires, even if you took all the billionaires money, it doesn't like plug the whole of the California spending. It's like, basically it's setting precedent for, it's kind of like income tax, right? Income tax, I think, was supposed to be this one time. What was the first one, like 3%? It's like, is a one time only 3% tax on income, like? Don't, don't worry, guys. It's okay. And now like, everybody pays income tax, you know, 20, 30, 40%, 50% of your income every year now. And so the idea would be, once they set

• 1:00:34Shaan Puri?

  the precedent that they could just tax you on your property that you have not realized any gains on, then that's a problem. And if they could set the bar at a billion, then they could easily change it to, change it or add, well, also, if you're over 100 million, then you pay this. And also, if you're over 40 million, you're going to pay this. And, you know, they could sort of just continue on from there.

• 1:00:55Sam Parr?

  I've always found it interesting how they, people come up with round numbers to make as the thresholds. Like, so if I remember correctly, like, I think, like, in the 1910 or 1920s, this idea of a millionaire kind of came to be where like, people were using the phrase millionaire, like, you're a millionaire, you've made it. And it's kind of funny that 100 years later, we still use that as like, a threshold. Because the millionaire in 1920 would be something like 20 million today. I think it was 18 or 20x or something like that. And then billionaire, like, people are like, billionaires shouldn't exist. And I'm like, okay, but why 1 billion? Why not 800 million? It just, I've always found that to be interesting, how we like, have settled on this perfectly round number.

• 1:01:37Shaan Puri?

  Dude, so yesterday, I took my whole basketball team, like, the team I'm coaching, to the Warriors game. And I like, wanted to make like, a special thing. So like, after they won their last game in the locker room, you know, normally, we're just sort of like, saying like, you know, you did this well, you did this poorly. And then I was like, want to do something for you guys. It's your birthday coming up. You guys want to go to a Warriors game? And then we went as a group, and they got to go courtside and see Steph Curry. Like, it was cool.

• 1:02:01Sam Parr?

  And you've just ruined all of their eligibility for going to NCAA by providing.

• 1:02:06Shaan Puri?

  I accidentally violated like HIPAA.

• 1:02:09Sam Parr?

  Wait, how did you get courtside? You just knew a guy, knew a guy?

• 1:02:13Shaan Puri?

  I don't, I don't know if he wants me to say, so I won't say his name. But yeah, know a guy who's with the team, ex-player. And so he, he was like, he just literally like waved his hand. He's like, I'll, I'll let them come down in the security. I was like, I guess if he's waving his hand, you can go. And I was like, yeah, me and these other 18 guys. It's who we all went, but the anyways, it's part of a story of take, I had one extra ticket. So I took my son who's four and a half years old and um, you know, taking a kid to a game like this. Like his first basketball game, you know, we have to leave at after the, you know, second quarter cause it's like bedtime and I gotta drive him back back home. But on the drive back, so I'm hoping I'm gonna have this amazing father, son time bonding. And like, I'm like wanting him to love him like, watch, that's the greatest shooter ever.

• 1:02:55Shaan Puri?

  Steph Curry, like that's the closest we've ever been to God right here, this five feet away. And he's like trying to care, but he doesn't really care. He's like, can we get his candy now? And I'm like, okay, I had got him some M and M's and I'm like, every time the Warriors make a shot, you get an M and M. Now he's like locked into the game. And so then finally we leave and of course, the drive home was this like amazing moment. I would basically, I put Tesla like self-driving, I just talked to my son for like an hour and it's like a one-on-one cause my, I have three kids, so normally it's not one-on-one, but I get to talk to him. So he was my, he told me, he goes, you know what I want to be when I grow up? I want to be a builder. And I was like, amazing builder of like what? And he's like, do I have to pick? And I was like, no, I guess not. And so I'm telling him about builders like that, somebody built this bridge, somebody built this building, somebody built this car and I'm, and somehow I start explaining to him who Elon Musk is.

• 1:03:39Shaan Puri?

  I basically took a podcast episode for him and I'm like, you know, rockets? This guy builds rockets that land themselves. And he's like, what did they do before they landed themselves? And I was like, honestly, I don't know. Maybe that's actually hype cause like people went to the moon and came back. So I don't know, they like, you know, they come back, they do come back. Anyways, don't ask too many questions. So I'm telling him about Tesla and he's like, did he start it? And I'm like, no, I'm not technically, but let's not get care, let's not get into those details. So I'm telling him about Elon Musk and I tell him he's the richest man in the world. He's got, you know, money, he's got the most money in the whole world. And he's like, how much money does he have? And I was like, he's got like 300 billion dollars, 400 billion dollars, something like that. He goes, he's like quiet for like 30 seconds. And then I'm like, did you hear how much money he had?

• 1:04:23Shaan Puri?

  Like are you still there? Did you fall asleep? What happened? He goes, Can it even fit in his wallet? And I was like, no, he goes, so we used to use a grocery cart?

• 1:04:34Shaan Puri?

  Explaining the concept of banks and so anyways, I had this long conversation with him about, about money and about like, you know, these, like the sort of the builders and the prolific people that that sort of make all this happen. And it just reminded me like, I don't know.

• 1:04:48Sam Parr?

  By the way, did your son have a take on the simulation?

• 1:04:51Shaan Puri?

  We didn't get there. That'll be the next time. He does have a lot of questions similar to that, like, you know, like, where did the earth come from? And then I'm like, yo, honestly, like, we're very much past the edge of my understanding of like, I don't know, to be honest. And like, who's older, the earth, the sun? I, there's a lot of questions that are, that are pretty tough. But the good thing is in the car, they have like AI built in. So you just, like, if I don't know, we just turn on AI and ask AI and AI tells us. Anyways, so that's that.

• 1:05:18Sam Parr?

  All right, that's the pod.

• 1:05:30Sam Parr?

  All right, my friends, I have a new podcast for you guys to check out. It's called Content is Profit and it's hosted by Luis and Fonzie Camayo. After years of building content teams and frameworks for companies like Red Bull and Orange Theory Fitness, Luis and Fonzie are on a mission to bridge the gap between content and revenue. In each episode, you're going to hear from top entrepreneurs and creators and you're going to hear them share their secrets and strategies to turn their content into profit. So you can check out Content is Profit wherever you get your podcasts.