Giving founders brutally honest feedback

Want to start your business the right way (with less than $1k)? Get the guide: https://clickhubspot.com/wsu Episode 741: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talk about the most common mistakes founders make and how to fix them PLUS old school businesses that are making a comeback. — Show Notes: (0:00) Business Traps (21:21) The Onion selling print papers again (31:36) Oberweis milk delivery (39:31) Joe Lemandt and Alpha School (1:00:05) Grind Academy home schooling facility — Links: • Mobile Emissions - http://mobileemissions.com/ • Purple Cow - https://tinyurl.com/mdbfksx8 • Train Hard, Win Easy - https://tinyurl.com/2raksmas • The Triple Package - https://tinyurl.com/yebnt9nx • The Onion - https://theonion.com/ • Colossus - https://joincolossus.com/ • Oberweis - https://www.oberweis.com/ • Mentava - https://www.mentava.com/ • The Grind Academy - https://www.grindlv.com/ — 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 — 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?

  And so it's like, damn, you have written off the most obvious growth channel with this internal narrative of, we tried that, it didn't work. It didn't work is a sentence I'm very skeptical of now.

• 0:19Shaan Puri?

  Here's what I got for you today, this podcast. I have a story about two kind of like blue collar founders who just got their business off the ground and I met up with them. And they asked me these questions and it was like, it was a set of mistakes that I think everybody makes. And so I think it's worth talking about. And so I want to talk about what the three things these guys said. And then I want to tell you about this business that's really fascinating. Because that's a small business. Then there's a huge business that's fascinating me right now. It's so new and interesting that like, I just kind of want to talk about it with you. And the last is I have like a, a marketing principle, a little framework that I saw, a great example that I saw, and I want to share that as well. So I got three things for you.

• 1:04Sam Parr?

  All right. I have a couple of things for you as well. Maybe we'll go back and forth. You want to start with your favorite one?

• 1:10Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. All right. So I went to Utah last week to do a podcast with this guy, Ryan Smith. He owns the Utah Jazz and he's like, he started Qualtrics. And so anyways, that's going to come out. It's a good, good, it's a good episode. He's a crazy dude. While I was there, and one of the reasons that happened was Ryan plays pickup basketball at six in the morning. And there's a guy who's in his regular run, he's been doing that for like 16 years with the same group of guys in Utah. Very like honestly aspirational thing. I was like, oh, man, I kind of want that. That sounds kind of great to have. One of the guys in the run had DM me like two years ago. And he was like, hey, I play pickup basketball with this guy, Ryan Smith. I told him the podcast is great and he should come on. And

• 1:53Shaan Puri?

  he's like, if you guys come to morning basketball, I'll do the podcast. And we're like, done, we'll be there. We play basketball, we do the podcast, all this good stuff. He tours us around the stadium and all this crazy stuff. We're just hanging out. We're just getting a, like a meal before we head to the airport. And so I invite those guys who, the guy who put in the good word. I was like, hey, you know, we should come hang out. You know, you kind of made this whole thing happen in a way, like he probably wouldn't have done it had you not. You know, told him, hey, this is something worth doing. Come hang out. And so he comes and he starts telling me about his business. He's got this business called Mobile Emissions. So the idea is like, you know how you have to get like your smog check? You have to get like an emissions check for your car every year.

• 2:32Sam Parr?

  They do it at your house?

• 2:34Shaan Puri?

  They'll come to you. That's the idea. Okay, great. So normally you go to some like dump of a mechanic place and you wait in line or whatever. You book appointment, you go, these guys will come to you for like 50 or 60 bucks. Okay, cool. And so I'm like, how's the business going? He tells me how it's going. It's going great, you know, blah, blah, blah. And then he basically says three things that like, I just thought were such, such typical traps that every founder falls into, myself included. That's, you know, if you spot it, you got it. That's how I even noticed, oh, that's that trap. I've been in there before. I got some scars on my ankles from stepping into that one. So the first one is, you know, he's asking about growth. And naturally, Sam, when somebody asks you like, you know, what do you think we should do to grow this thing? What's your first question? I'm curious if you have the same first question I do.

• 3:19Sam Parr?

  What have you tried? What's worked? What's like the one thing that's actually going well? And what's like the 10 other things that you've tried that aren't going well? And stop doing them and start doing the one thing.

• 3:28Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. So it was basically, it's like, where are the customers coming from today? And let's start with that. Okay. So how do you get customers today? And then they said, oh, you know, Google search results. And I was like, oh, so Google Ads. And then he goes, no, no, like just Google search results. I go, oh, like, why aren't you doing Google Ads for when somebody searches like smog check near me or whatever, right? Emissions testing near me. And he's like, oh, we tried that. It didn't work. So we're really thinking about, we're thinking about this and this and this is like fancy new cool.

• 3:57Sam Parr?

  And you're like, well, tell me about the try.

• 3:59Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. So I'm like, tell me like, I was like, that's interesting. It didn't work. What, what, what part didn't work? Tell me more. What was the data? And then suddenly, cat's got the tongue. Don't know the, don't know the data. Don't know what happened. Oh, it turns out actually what the, what it actually had happened was Google gives you like a couple hundred bucks for your Google ad credits.

• 4:18Sam Parr?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:19Shaan Puri?

  They had spent it. They didn't have tracking set up. And then like anecdotally, they were like, oh, I think we got like lower quality leads. Like, some people were like, the price is too expensive. So, you know, it didn't really work. What was the ROAS on it? I don't really know. We, you know, we didn't have it set up properly. And so it's like, damn, you have written off what's probably the most obvious growth channel with this internal narrative of, we tried that, it didn't work. And then it didn't work is like, A sentence I'm very skeptical of now. I think, because I think so few people truly try things to the point where they got a definitive answer and the answer was clear and they actually had iterated on it and tried it enough

• 4:59Shaan Puri?

  times to really know that that was like, let's say, trap number one, looking for the new fancy whatever thing, when the obvious thing hasn't been done properly yet.

• 5:09Sam Parr?

  I make that mistake all the time. I've made it previously, like with the hustle, we grew via Facebook ads and I got really lucky. The very first, so, so the hustle was my daily newsletter. In year one, it was zero to 100,000. Year two was 100,000 to 500,000. Year three was like 500 to a million. And at, at the end of year one, we hit a little bit of a plateau and I said, let's try Facebook ads. We know how much we make per subscriber. Let's just spend a little bit of money. And the first ad that I made on Facebook, we ended up spending collectively something like eight or 10 million dollars over the lifetime of the company. And that trained my brain that I still struggle to break it, which is if it doesn't work in the first couple of tries, it's just, it won't work.

• 5:54Sam Parr?

  And the reality is, and I've since have, I have examples of where this is true, you really need to do like potentially 50 to 100 reps. If you're talking about an ad, it could literally be your 100th ad that like changes everything. Because this one ad that we ran, it converted, I think we acquired a customer for a dollar 50. Everything else was $3. It was literally two times better, which is a big deal. It changes the, the business. So I understand exactly what you're saying.

• 6:20Shaan Puri?

  And by the way, there's a fix for this trap of thinking, which is you also can't just stubbornly do things forever either, right? So that's not the answer. Write everything down. So when you write down what actually happened, you will realize how flimsy of a grasp you have, or how flimsy the attempt was. Cause, and the way I do it is almost like the Socratic method. Like I, by the way, I literally do this. It's not a, it's not like a metaphor. I open up a Google Doc. And then it's basically me and then there's like smarter, wiser, older me, right? A smarter, wiser, older me basically asked a question. I put that in bold and then my answer, I unbold and I just typed right underneath. And I just advise myself because I have the full context. I'm sitting right here.

• 7:03Shaan Puri?

  I have infinite time to do this for myself. So let me go ahead and ask myself a question. So I'll be like, what's already working? Cool. Can you do more of that? What would it mean if you did more of that? Is there a way to double doing just the same? Like, you know, without finding a new thing? Could you, do you think you could double with just that? Or, okay, what's the next most likely thing to work? And then you answer, oh, maybe it's Google Ads. Cool. Did you try them? Like, yeah, we did. Was it a real try? What happened? And then you sort of have to write it down and you have to go look up the data and you have to do, and you basically writing is sort of like, it's like an exposing function.

• 7:37Sam Parr?

  Writing forces clear thinking.

• 7:39Shaan Puri?

  It forces clear thinking and it just highlights sloppy thinking because you can't fill in the gaps. You can't just say like, it didn't really work. If you just sit there, you're like, well, if I read this, I'd be like, what does that mean? Is, you know, like, just provide the actual answer instead of this like hand wavy way of saying it. And so anyways, that's the force of it. All right, so that's trap number one. Trap number two. So I was like, okay, so what's next for you guys? Which by the way, was a trick question because already we had already figured out like what's next for them is to do Google Ads properly.

• 8:08Sam Parr?

  All right, so a lot of people will talk about how you need a million dollars and three years of experience to start a business. Nonsense. If you listen to at least one episode on this podcast, you know, that is completely not true. My last company, The Hustle, we grew it to something like 17 or 18 million dollars in revenue. I started it with like $300. My current company Hampton does over 10 million in revenue. Started it with actually no money, maybe $29 or something like that, nothing. And so you don't actually need investors to start a company. You don't need a fancy business plan, but what you do need is systems that actually work. And so my old company, The Hustle, they put together five proven business models that you could start right now, today with under a thousand dollars.

• 8:51Sam Parr?

  These are models that if you do it correctly, it can make money this week. You can get it right now. You can scan the QR code or click the link in the description. Now, back to the show.

• 9:03Shaan Puri?

  Second trap was not dog fooding your own product. So one of the great like simple tests with everybody when you meet a founder, you could spend like 45 minutes talking about the business, but the better way to do is take out your phone or your laptop right then and just mystery shop the product. And so I just, I was like, yeah, like, um, I was like, yeah, you guys should do Google ads. I was just checking, does anyone run Google ads for that same search? Nobody was running it. And then I was like, guys, you said all your traffic comes from organic. You're not even on the first, like, you're not even in the top section of Google. Like you're like, you know, in the middle. And I was like, but this top section, it's not SEO. It's like, you know, like the Google, like business results, like where it's like a, gives you like a map and a phone number to call of like

• 9:46Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 9:47Shaan Puri?

  Business that thinks you're trying to find.

• 9:48Sam Parr?

  I see him there. I see him there.

• 9:50Shaan Puri?

  And I was like, but they were like, you know, even there, they were like lower and they didn't have as many like reviews. I was like, also, like, it seems like your value prop is that like, you save people a bunch of time. You don't really write that there. And I was like, then I go to your website and then I see this. And I was like, you gotta walk through your product from the eyes of a user and face the pain. And we used to use user testing.com for this, but there's a bunch of different ways to do it.

• 10:15Sam Parr?

  I love user testing.

• 10:17Shaan Puri?

  You basically pay, I don't know what it is now, but like, let's say it was like 10 to 20 bucks a test. And basically it just sends a user to, the user goes to your site and it screen records what they're doing and they're talking, they have to talk out loud while they're using it.

• 10:30Sam Parr?

  Didn't your mom do that for a long time and they gave her stock in the company when it went public?

• 10:34Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. My mom made like a hundred grand off this company. Cause she, she started as a tester and then became a, like a monitor of the testers, like a quality control. And like, she got like a stock grant and then the company ended up going public.

• 10:47Sam Parr?

  That's awesome.

• 10:48Shaan Puri?

  Kind of amazing. That was like, you know, I got my, my parents, I got my mom on that and I got my dad to Airbnb his house and like, that's become their like last 15 years of retirement is just doing those two things.

• 10:58Sam Parr?

  You know, so I love that story.

• 11:00Shaan Puri?

  So anyways, face the pain. I think most entrepreneurs don't actually face the pain. They think the problem is elsewhere. Like the problem is most likely. Right there on your site, in your core flow that users are going through where you're just not clear enough, or you're not compelling enough, or you're not visible enough. And it's like one of those three problems. If you just say, how do I become more visible? How do I make my proposition more compelling, like more juicy? And then how to make it more clear? And so I just thought like, that was like thing two. And thing three was, they were like, should we expand? We're only in two counties right now. Should we expand to like a third or if we can get into this one? Or should we like focus on like fixing the funnel, like the core first? Right? And I think this is like the constant debate that people have.

• 11:44Shaan Puri?

  And my, you know, obviously my advice was like fix, like make the system work and then replicate it is like always going to work better than spread yourself out, make your system more complex and not really, while it's not really working very efficiently. I think it's like typically it. But I would say there are so many of these fork in the road decisions of like, do we go left or right in entrepreneurship? And I think there's a simple heuristic, which is which one seems easier to you? Like, meaning like which one is a lower perceived pain or difficulty? Because if you think there's two equal options, but one has, one feels like it's less pain, it's actually a worse option. It's just being boosted by the fact that you're trying to avoid pain a little bit.

• 12:28Shaan Puri?

  And, and so therefore it's like, it's become a 50 50, but it's not truly a 50 50.

• 12:33Sam Parr?

  One of my favorite quotes that I, I heard when Charlie Munger died, I went and researched a bunch of his stuff and he had a quote that I actually think about almost all the time, which is, "A smart man does first what a dumb man does last." And I've made that decision incorrectly so many times, which is, I'll do it this easy time, this one time, and then eventually I'll do this. Or like, I can't start this way because you need scale, you need this, you need that. So like, an example would be like, had I known what I know now about Hampton? I only would have done New York in real life and then very slowly scaled from city to city to city. But that's not fun. That's not fun because I can't scale quickly. That's very slow.

• 13:18Sam Parr?

  And there's just been so many examples of where I've taken, I mean, everyone does it. Where I've taken the easy route first, when I should have taken the hard route first. One of my favorite books, when I was in high school, I ran cross-country track and field and I ran in college and I was pretty decent. And there was a book that changed my life. It was called Train Hard, Win Easy. That's the same phrase where I think about that all the time. Train hard, win easy.

• 13:43Shaan Puri?

  Yes, yeah, exactly. I think, you know, most people will realize that your judgment, ultimately, your personal judgment, the judge in your head with the gavel who's deciding, go left or go right, go up or go down, start or continue, start or stop. All those micro decisions are, obviously become your destiny. And the question is, how do you make that decision-making function better? And I don't think most people will invest in making their decision-making function better. They'll invest in a lot of other things, but they don't invest a lot in that. And I think there's a few, like, kind of short list of tools that you should be doing regularly, exercises you should be doing regularly to work out that decision-making muscle.

• 14:26Shaan Puri?

  And, you know, one of them is basically the thing we talked about earlier, writing. Another one is understanding your biases. So like, I bias towards things that sound easy, or sound fun, or sound cool to others. And so therefore, those are getting like overweighted in my, in my decision-making versus these other things. And so there's just a few, few ways you can make better decisions. Another one, by the way, if you can't tell, a little bit under the weather, or have been sick for about a week now. And dude, making decisions when you're sick, just my entire thought process when I'm sick is probably

• 15:01Shaan Puri?

  I don't know, five times worse than my thought process when I'm healthy and I'm feeling active and energized and like, anything is possible. And I'm the same guy. I didn't read any new books. I didn't like, nothing changed. Except for my actual energy levels, my fatigue levels. And I'm a totally different person. So I literally abstained from making like, any decisions.

• 15:26Sam Parr?

  You know how like when you can't, you can't text your ex when you're drunk?

• 15:30Shaan Puri?

  Exactly.

• 15:31Sam Parr?

  It's like, I can't make any decisions while I'm sick. I do that all the time.

• 15:34Shaan Puri?

  Fatigue makes cowards of us all. It's like, you know, what they say in like, you know, in, in fighting. I, I think there's that. I think, and, and that's another one where I, I had the realization. I was like, man, okay, today I'm on the extreme end of the spectrum. It's very obvious, right? Like, if I'm this sick, I already, my mind, my, my mood, my mindset is in such a shitty state that like, this is not a good time to be making good decisions. This is not a time where I'm going to make good decisions. It's not a time when I'm going to have, be like, super creative or productive or any of those things. Okay, that's extreme. But on a day-to-day basis, like, I don't really do as good of a job as I should of first getting into a great, great state of mind before then going and trying to perform whatever that performance is, whether it's being a good dad or being

• 16:17Shaan Puri?

  a good CEO or being good anything. And I was like, and I'm in probably the top 0.1% of people who think about this. Most people don't even have the word state in their vocabulary. And I'd like, have practiced this for years with the Tony Robbins stuff. Like, that's a thing for me. And I still am like, I don't know, pretty average at it.

• 16:33Sam Parr?

  No, I don't think you're average at it. I definitely don't think you're average. I actually think you're great at it. Um, there's a book called The Triple Package. And the author, um, claims to have analyzed incredibly successful groups of people, ultra-successful people. And she narrows it down to three reasons, uh, as to what, there are three things they all have in common. The first is a superiority complex. So they feel that they are born to be better. You know, there's a lot of people listening to this podcast and you look around at your job that you hate and you think, I, I was destined to do something greater than this. I, I, I have it inside of me. I'm special. I can do it. That's trait one. The second trait is- Conversely, or very interestingly, in inferiority complex, in the sense of I am not good enough.

• 17:17Sam Parr?

  I'm not where I need to be. I am shit. I need to improve. And that creates urgency and that creates like a fear, which is actually quite good of like, I have to work to be better. In order to get to where I think I'm destined to go. And the third one, impulse control. Can you control your urges and your impulse? And an example of this is like when you wake up at 6 a.m. and you said you're going to go to the gym. It's like your, I think the story you have to tell yourself is like, my emotions don't dictate whether I go or not. The alarm, the alarm clock dictates whether I go or not. And it's the same thing with making business. I've made so many decisions impulsively. It sounds like you're trying to prevent yourself from making a decision while being emotion, emotional. And that ability to put the gas pedal on and off and control your impulses a bit is incredibly valuable.

• 18:01Shaan Puri?

  I would agree with all three of those.

• 18:05Shaan Puri?

  And I would just say like even, I don't know, the bigger picture takeaway for me is, man, this seems like a under invested area for myself, but generally at large is one of the most important things that it doesn't seem like is talked or taught anywhere.

• 18:20Sam Parr?

  Yeah, just a reflection. I think Chris, what's Chris Spaulding?

• 18:24Shaan Puri?

  Sparling, yeah.

• 18:25Sam Parr?

  Sparling. He said something to you, which you told me, which was amazing, which is someone was telling him a story and he's like, well, but at least I, I learned X, Y, and Z about my company going out of business. And Chris looks at him very sternly and goes, are you sure that's the right lesson that you should take away from the situation? Did you learn the right thing? And so constantly, what did I learn? What's the right thing that I learned here?

• 18:46Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I learned so much. Okay. What'd you learn? Oh, well, it's like, oh, that didn't seem like you've actually had any clarity of thought around that. And then a lot of times the things they learned is like, I learned, you know, you really can't trust people. It's like, whoa, that's the takeaway you had of this whole thing?

• 19:04Sam Parr?

  Yeah, that's a wrong takeaway.

• 19:05Shaan Puri?

  You know, like how many times do people actually have the right takeaway? Becoming very skeptical of this thing that we all nod and agree with, like, yeah, well, you learned, you know? It's like, no, you probably didn't learn, actually. Actually, in my experience, most people who think that they learned at the end of thing, didn't really learn. Or if they'd learned, they learned some, you know, the wrong, the wrong lesson that's probably not even going to help them. They did not actually have the right takeaway from the situation. Once you realize that, it's sort of like, you know, like a red pill moment.

• 19:32Sam Parr?

  Can I tell you a couple of businesses that are fascinating to me right now? And I think, I think you're gonna get a kick out of the first one.

• 19:40Shaan Puri?

  All right, let's go.

• 19:40Sam Parr?

  So I'm interested, so you actually posted something, you said, I don't like running.

• 19:45Shaan Puri?

  I don't care about running, don't follow running, but there's a story right here in this picture that I want to talk about.

• 19:50Sam Parr?

  And what was it? It was Cameron Haynes, his son, Tanner Truitt, is a beast right now. He basically is running marathons at a wicked fast pace, like two hours and 30 minutes, which for anyone who runs a marathon, that's, he's, that's A, that's fast, B, he's like 220 pounds, he's like huge, and C, he's doing it in blue jeans, is that right?

• 20:09Shaan Puri?

  That's exactly right. There's a guy who's running long races, marathons, ultra marathons, he's running them fast, and he's running them wearing, like jeans, not shorts, not jean shorts, like full jeans.

• 20:22Sam Parr?

  And so, and you're like, that right there is a purple cow. And Purple Cow is a book by Seth Godin, and it's one of many books that basically say the same thing, which is like, in order to stand out, you have to have, it's better to be different than it is better. And I've been thinking about that a lot lately, I've been thinking about that a lot lately, because we had a guest on, and he said something like, if you split test everything, you're just gonna have porn. And it was basically, I think it was George Mack, and it was like this idea that like-

• 20:47Shaan Puri?

  I don't even know if he said that, but that's great.

• 20:49Sam Parr?

  I think he either tweeted it, or he said it to us.

• 20:52Shaan Puri?

  The, if you just start A/B testing your website, and you just run an infinite number of A/B tests, you end up with Pornhub, that's gotta be it, actually, that's so true.

• 21:02Sam Parr?

  Yeah, if you split test everything, it just adds up to porn, but at one, at some point, you need to take a stand, and you want to be different, and you have to stand out, and it doesn't make sense why you're doing that, but it's just cool, and the market tends to adjust and like, recognize that that is badass. You know, there's a billion examples that we could go on what that means, but let me give you two that interest me right now. The first. So you're familiar with The Onion, right? The comedy news website?

• 21:28Shaan Puri?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, of course.

• 21:29Sam Parr?

  Okay, so The Onion was founded in 1988. And it's kind of funny. It's gone through so many different owners. I think it was started at University of Wisconsin as just like a newsletter. So it was originally founded as a funny newsletter that made fun of like campus life. And over the years, it's become like a popular magazine. And then now a digital magazine where they make fun of shit and it's hilarious. And very like, it's kind of interesting that it's been owned by like a variety of people. I think in like 2003, some rich fun hedge fund guy bought it. And then they were sold and bought again in 2013. I think if you remember like Geo Media, it was called, they own like Gawker, like a bull crap media company. Bought it and it wasn't working out.

• 22:12Sam Parr?

  And then eventually in 2024, Jeff Lawson, the founder of Twilio, bought it. So it's kind of been like one of these things where like wealthy people feel like they need to be like the patron and like steward of like, you know, like and be the steward of like making fun of stuff that deserves to be made fun of. And then that's pretty cool. But last year, they did something very interesting, very purple collie. They brought back the print magazine and they went really hard on the print magazine. And within a year, they already have 53,000 paying subscribers. I think it costs $10 a month and they're expecting from that something like $6 million in revenue this year. Last year, they did less than $2 million in revenue. So a print magazine, 3X their revenue. And I think that is so cool.

• 22:58Sam Parr?

  I think I've talked about magazines on this podcast a couple of times. But I think magazines are incredibly interesting. Have, do you subscribe to any?

• 23:07Shaan Puri?

  You know, I've been playing with this. So there's a couple of people that are doing this. So I currently have an arena subscription, Colossus. So

• 23:16Sam Parr?

  Awesome.

• 23:17Shaan Puri?

  Patrick O'Shaughnessy.

• 23:18Sam Parr?

  Awesome.

• 23:19Shaan Puri?

  Who has a podcast, basically sort of like expanding his media empire, whatever, whatever you want to call it. With long form journalism, like old school print magazine, you know.

• 23:32Sam Parr?

  It's really good.

• 23:33Shaan Puri?

  We did a feature story on this person and it's like beautiful photography, really long form stuff. And it's good. I like, I like the quality of the product on that side, but I don't subscribe to the physical thing. I think they have one.

• 23:45Sam Parr?

  Yes, they do. It's new. I think it's only on edition number three, but it's, but it's new. So you just subscribe to two, is that right? Anymore?

• 23:51Shaan Puri?

  I mean, that's a lot. Two, two is. Way over the Vegas over line of what they thought I had here for a magazine subscription.

• 23:58Sam Parr?

  I subscribed to two, actually. Popeye Magazine, which is a Japanese magazine, actually, and it's called, it's like, I think the tagline does it, it's kind of a gay translation. It's City Boy Life.

• 24:11Sam Parr?

  But it's like, it's sort of like GQ for Japan, where they talk about like clothing and coffee and like urban culture.

• 24:17Shaan Puri?

  Gotcha.

• 24:18Sam Parr?

  Which I love. And interestingly, I don't know if all Japanese magazines are like this, but it reads backwards. So it doesn't like, you don't fold it like this. It's like upside down. So you like go to the left. And that's, and that's kind of interesting. And then the second one is Thrasher Magazine, which is like a skateboard thing that I had when I was a kid that I love. But I just think that magazines are so interesting. And so can I tell you what I would do? I thought about doing this. I read the biography of JFK Junior. That was John Kennedy's son. And that, he actually had a magazine in the eighties and I went and bought the first edition. This is what Sidney Crawford, it was a very, it's a very famous magazine cover. It's what Sidney Crawford dresses George Washington and it was cool and everything. But what I would do, I would call it a newsletter, not a magazine.

• 24:58Sam Parr?

  And I would literally do it on white paper that is stapled together with like 10 or 20 sheets and put into an envelope. And I think that I can do something. I've thought about doing this. I think someone could create some type of wealth or like for high net worth people or for tech companies and sell it for around a thousand dollars a year and only do four to eight editions per year. And if I did it on wealthy people, it would all be getting like tips and tactics and strategies and stories on what high net worth people are doing. Or if I did it on tech companies, I would sell it to the tech company and I would list as many names of the tech companies and explaining what they're doing in a particular industry as like a roundup, sort of like a high school newspaper.

• 25:43Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's interesting. So you're just saying physical sort of takes you into a new category.

• 25:49Sam Parr?

  Physical? So yeah, so I guess I didn't like round that out, but like the purple cow here is no, no digital, only physical. I think nostalgia is like a thing. I think you and I have talked about our own habits about how we're getting sick of.

• 26:04Sam Parr?

  Digital, I think everyone is experiencing that. And I think that someone can actually build a great business. I think what a lot of people do though, is they tend to go flashy, shiny, premium. And I would argue, you should go the opposite. You should go like homemade, mom and pop, almost like a punk rock zine, what it used to be. Exactly what you're pulling out right there. If you put it in a folder like that.

• 26:25Shaan Puri?

  So this, I think I've showed you this before, but my guy Diego basically delivers me these. I don't know if you can see, there's like tabs on the side, right? So he basically prints out this thing. And it's a collection of like, the best things to read. So it might be like, oh yeah, Howard Marks put out a new memo this week. It's like, we should read that. We should really digest, so we should slow down and read that. Don't make it just Chrome tab number, you know, 93. Oh, that's open alongside Twitter and a bunch of other dopamine, you know, fast food dispensing. You know, like Chrome is basically like, you know, that Coca-Cola freestyle machine? That's what basically my internet browser is, that's what my phone is.

• 27:04Sam Parr?

  Unlimited options.

• 27:06Shaan Puri?

  It's unlimited options of syrup and water, you know, like syrup, water and bubbles. And that's not really what I want to be having. And this is like, when somebody gets a coconut and they just chop off the top. They give, put a straw in it and they're like, here you go. And you're drinking out of a coconut. And so he delivers these to me basically like once a month. So like, you know, for example, in the last one, it was Brett B. Shore had wrote an annual letter about his private equity fund, and it was basically like the performance of the fund. So he knew I'd find that interesting, like, oh, what have they invested in? How, how's that fund actually doing? It's, you know, are they doing really well? Is it okay? What's, what's going on? And then he also has like his, like, you know, he gets his like Warren Buffett on in that where he's like very philosophical about life or the markets or whatever, you know, in there. So he knows I enjoy reading that.

• 27:51Sam Parr?

  I think you can charge a lot for that.

• 27:53Shaan Puri?

  He'll put in like a, a science thing. So it'll be like, oh yeah, these guys are working on, uh, there's a lot of people out there trying to study the,

• 28:02Shaan Puri?

  the genes for, for short sleep. So there's some people like Trump and, uh, I think Clinton before this, like people who genetically only need five to six hours of sleep. And what an advantage, basically to, you know, have three extra hours a day, but still be at full energy. And that there's people actually trying to figure out like the way we did Ozempic. And we were able to limit your need for food, make you not need more food. Could we make you not need as much sleep? If we studied this, like, oh, that's fascinating. So I'm reading, you know, there's like a science thing in there.

• 28:33Sam Parr?

  A briefing, it's a brief.

• 28:34Shaan Puri?

  And like, if I just productize that thing that he's already giving me, it's basically what you're talking about, right? It's all in the curation, right? It's like you have, it would have to be somebody who is like, I trust or knows my taste or, you know, like is genuinely, because if the first thing I open, if it's like meh, I'm out, I'm out on this altogether, you know?

• 28:53Sam Parr?

  But you can tell a story as to why something should be important. So for example, like the, the, the sleep thing, that's not like inherently important. But you think it's important because of X, Y, and Z. And you tell that story about why it's important. And what I would do is in the first page, I would put directions on how to read, which is, if you have children, it's after your kids go to bed at 8:00 PM. What, don't turn the TV on and sit there and read this in your living room. If you don't have kids, like this is don't go out and on a Thursday, read this for one hour and your life will be better. Like you give like these like really intimate instructions to make someone feel good. And I think that this could be a hit. Um, I sent you a link to my friend, I think I've talked about this before, but, uh, Nev Box.

• 29:34Sam Parr?

  So my friend Neville Medora, he did this thing years ago where he sent people three boxes. And he called them three important copyright, copywriting lessons that you need to know. And it was literally just a UPS box with three envelopes in there that had, uh, paper, like, uh, printed paper. And it was awesome. So.

• 29:52Shaan Puri?

  Should we just do this as MFM? Like basically me and you curate, like, you know, two to three things each that we think is whatever with our little editorial note on top of why, you know, the sticky note of like, why I think this is worth paying attention to.

• 30:06Sam Parr?

  It could be awesome.

• 30:08Shaan Puri?

  So, you know, a thousand fans who are willing to pay a thousand dollars a year to have like proper info diet, right? You know, like. I pay a lot of money to have a proper diet of what food goes in my body. And I know people that go to an extreme, they'll go straight farm to table. They have their favorite ranches that they source meat from and they'll get vegetables from certain areas at certain seasons and like, people have realized like it matters. What you put in changes whatever, you know, what's going to happen inside your body. But our minds were just like, no, no, go ahead, pour like social media sludge right on, right on top. Yeah, go ahead. Just top, top me off. It's okay if it overflows. I'll just.

• 30:41Sam Parr?

  Dude, and there's all these good analogies for how to sell it. Like there's a lot of like ammo here to like sell this.

• 30:48Shaan Puri?

  Oh, I don't know. This would actually be kind of fun to do, you know? I think this would be fun.

• 30:51Sam Parr?

  It would be fun.

• 30:52Shaan Puri?

  You know, I, this is something I like, I get these binders every month. Like this, one of the best things in my life is getting that. And so I guess like, why would I not just share a version of that with other people? It doesn't hurt me to share that with other people. In fact, it would help me, I think, because I think these are cool ideas, cool, cool things worth sharing.

• 31:11Sam Parr?

  So let me tell you the second one. You're the son of immigrants, so I don't know if this is going to, if this experience is going to hit the same. But in the Midwest, in Missouri where I was raised, one of the greatest things like that I got to experience as a kid was getting milk delivered to my home at, once a week in a glass bottle. Did you ever experience this as a kid?

• 31:31Shaan Puri?

  Never, never.

• 31:33Sam Parr?

  Okay, so there's this company called Oberweis. It was called Oberweis Dairy. So Oberweis was started as a dairy farm in 1915, I think in Missouri or Indiana, but it was very Midwestern. And they eventually started, um, they sold their own milk to like their little small town and it expanded, it expanded and expanded. And it's mostly regional in Missouri and Illinois. So I think they have them in Chicago and St. Louis. But as a kid, uh, this is where we would get our milk. We would also get our lemonade from there and our ice cream. That was like their, their thing. And it felt amazing. Well, this company kept growing and growing and growing, started in 1915.

• 32:12Sam Parr?

  It was now on its fourth generation of family ownership and peak revenue, I think in 2020 or 21 was 120 million in revenue. So it was good top line revenue, but it's a. Hard business, it's it's low margin. And because of a bunch of silly decisions that the management had made in 2024, it went bankrupt. And a guy who we talked about in the podcast, his name was Hoffman. And in fact, one of the early podcasts was pre pandemic back in when we were in the office. He ended up buying the company and I think he bought the company for $21 million. Plus, I think he said he was going to invest another $15 million into it. Who's Hoffman? Who's this guy? David Hoffman, maybe? Is it David? Yeah, I think it's David.

• 32:56Sam Parr?

  He started a recruitment agency that after 20 years was making so much money that he started buying businesses. He bought like a boat cruise business, which is basically like, what are those like things in San Francisco that are like swan? Like, what are they called? Were they like boat cruise? It's not like a real cruise. It's like a like a tour in the bay type of like, like, and then he bought like a blue collar businesses like that, I believe. And he eventually, overwise, which David Hoffman, he's based in St. Louis. So for all St. Louis folks, this is like an interesting brand. But I saw that they went bankrupt and I saw that he bought it. And I thought it was very fascinating. And the reason I think it's fascinating is I think over why milk delivery.

• 33:40Sam Parr?

  I think that could be a thing. I think that you could do, you could absolutely make this a wonderful business. That people our age, so in our 30s and 40s, people who have children grew up with something like this. And it's not part of the experience that you and I have at all anymore. You know, we probably just go to Costco or get something like Instacarted or something like that. But I actually think that oat milk, almond milks, I think those non dairy milks, I actually think those are like trending downward right now and dairy is up, which it like took a hit over the last decade. And glass and nostalgia. And I would have an entire campaign around something like making it now like it used to be made way back when, when it was made better. Like I would lean super hard into that.

• 34:25Sam Parr?

  And I then I would upsell with better eggs, better for you, all types of products, eggs, whatever, hopefully higher margin things. But I think, I think the milk delivery business and when I was thinking of like nostalgic things. I think that could be really fascinating. Where's that land with you?

• 34:41Shaan Puri?

  Less good, um, partially because I'm like, cause when I'm looking at their thing, they have like, they have the dairy delivery, but then they're like breakfast and snacks and dinner and desserts and juices.

• 34:53Sam Parr?

  No, that's not what you do. That's not how you do it.

• 34:55Shaan Puri?

  Into everything, but I can see why you would need to, right? Like what, how much money could you really make? Just delivering only milk, right? Or only like core dairy, milk and eggs. Like it's just doesn't seem, doesn't seem like it's big enough. Doesn't seem like there's enough, uh, you know, average order value, basically to make the whole like logistics worth it. I do think that just building a premier dairy brand. So not like the home delivery part, but being like, yo, okay. All of you guys went anti dairy. Got it. Cool. But if you like rich, good dairy, we got you. And so like, you know, when I go to the grocery store, there's these brands. I don't even know if they do anything differently, right?

• 35:36Shaan Puri?

  Like Alexander is like, oh, we have like six percent milk. I'm like, I don't even know what six percent is, but like, give me that. What is that?

• 35:43Sam Parr?

  Three times better than two percent.

• 35:45Shaan Puri?

  And then they put it in a different shaped bottle. And then there's like, what's the other ones? Like Strauss Farms or whatever. Like, there's these, it's just, you know, like, like every category packaging, but like, I think just tripling down on like rich dairy and like actual high quality dairy. I just feel like the grocery store is, um, like there's still shelves that need that sort of, uh, that, that need that sort of stuff. And, but the, the trick is, if you actually are operating a farm, it's very different than the kind of like D to C, D to C repackagers of stuff, you know what I mean? And so if you actually have a story about your, you know, your farm and where you're at and why it's better and like all that stuff, whether it's for,

• 36:27Shaan Puri?

  for beef, whether it's for chicken, uh, I think somebody, somebody came on the podcast, they pitched us for chicken. They're like, you should just make, the, the world needs like a better chicken brand. And, um, like what is the, what's the like Snake River Farms for chicken type of thing? Um, I think there's, there's that for dairy and for chicken and for beef, for all these staples, you know?

• 36:45Sam Parr?

  Did you see what Cracker Barrel did?

• 36:47Shaan Puri?

  So they changed their logo, right? Is that the?

• 36:49Sam Parr?

  More than that, more than that. They made the inside look like a Chipotle. So.

• 36:53Shaan Puri?

  Like overnight or they've been doing that for a long time and people just started paying attention?

• 36:57Sam Parr?

  You know? I haven't been to a Cracker Barrel in a very long time. But it's like.

• 37:02Shaan Puri?

  I didn't even, is a Cracker Barrel a restaurant? I thought it might be like Home Goods. Like is, is it like a hybrid?

• 37:08Sam Parr?

  Cracker Barrel, it's like my, when we take, it's our road trip. Uh, Destin, it's like, when we take road trips, it's where we stop. But it's basically a, um, so it's a huge chain. It's publicly traded, billions of dollars. And it's a, um, it's a restaurant that has like chicken and dumplings. It was like their famous thing. But it's definitely like disgusting.

• 37:26Shaan Puri?

  Chicken and dumplings, like Asian dumplings or what do you mean chicken and dumplings?

• 37:29Sam Parr?

  Brother, no, it's like, like, it's basically like Bisquick. You know, remember Bisquick? Like, it's like, the chicken, uh, basically biscuits and gravy, sort of. It's sort of like biscuits and gravy. And they, uh, but then they have like a huge store where you can buy like crap you don't need and just junk. So you can buy like suckers.

• 37:45Shaan Puri?

  So it is part store, part restaurant?

• 37:48Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's like half, more like gift shop. It's like, it's like borderline gift shop on the edge of store. Uh, but, but like, and restaurant. Yeah, that's what it is. So it's like, the idea is like, they always have a wait because they're crowded and you just go in there and you buy like tchotchkes. Basically like the optics of it, I'm not saying what the reality is. The optics are that this young, like 40 something, 30 year old woman who's now the CEO. She appears as though she's like a yuppie New Yorker, which is the exact opposite of who the clientele is of Cracker Barrel. It looks like she just kind of came in and like, uh, behaved in such a way where she's out of touch with the average Cracker Barrel. Uh, the average crap, uh, she's out of touch with the average cracker who goes to Cracker Barrel. Yeah.

• 38:37Shaan Puri?

  Lot of barrel, no cracker.

• 38:38Sam Parr?

  Yeah, she does not own like one pair of overalls. Uh, so like, it, it, it, I'm not, again, I don't know the reality. I'm just saying that's what it looks like. And there, the, the stock just like crashed after she made this announcement. And, uh, but there is something about that where it's like, dude, don't, don't fix this stuff. It's supposed to look disgusting. That's a feature, that's not a bug. It's supposed to look like a filthy restaurant.

• 39:01Shaan Puri?

  Right, right, worse is better here.

• 39:05Sam Parr?

  All right, what do you got?

• 39:06Shaan Puri?

  All right. So before this podcast, I spent probably the last hour reading a profile on Alpha School and what's his name, Joe Lamont.

• 39:15Sam Parr?

  Dude, we were on that early, but we didn't have a lot of information on him and, and they explained why Joe Lamont hadn't done the interview in 25 years.

• 39:23Shaan Puri?

  So there's more info out now about Alpha. So, so well, I basically, this isn't like, this is, we're now treading in the waters of the unknown a little bit because it's a little bit mysterious. Plus there's just, it's new. Plus you haven't been there in person. Plus, who knows?

• 39:39Sam Parr?

  Well, say who Joe is.

• 39:40Shaan Puri?

  All right. So Joe Lamont is basically like a software entrepreneur who's super, super successful, like $10 billion net worth type of, type of situation. Uh, he dropped out of college his senior year at Stanford, I believe. He starts Trilogy Software. Trilogy Software was basically like an enterprise sales system of some kind.

• 39:58Sam Parr?

  I still don't entirely know what they did after all my research on them.

• 40:01Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's like before my time. It's like, all right, cool. Like,

• 40:04Sam Parr?

  Like the analogy that I think I heard is like, if you're an airplane company and you need to buy lots of parts to build your airplane, it would help you decide which components to purchase. That, that's, that's the best I could tell, but it became huge and he, it was basically like him and Microsoft were like recruiting the best talent, him, Microsoft and Dell. They were, he was the type of, he was, when he was like 28, he was on the Forbes list of richest Americans.

• 40:28Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. So he was the youngest guy on the Forbes list, Forbes 400. He was worth like $500 million at that stage. He then also creates a private equity firm called, I think ESW Capital or something like that. And basically starts buying small, small software companies that are cash flowy type of companies. And then similar to Constellation Software, basically bought like hundreds of these companies. And then, you know, that's now a big deal.

• 40:55Sam Parr?

  Which I think, I think, I think he's, he has a lot of mystery because allegedly one of the tactics is that he would buy dying software companies, fire everyone, outsource it to India and just acknowledge that it was dying and not invest in it and hire the cheapest people, which is not inherently wrong, but it's not maybe the thing that you want to brag about all the time.

• 41:14Shaan Puri?

  Software hospice.

• 41:16Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 41:16Shaan Puri?

  So, okay. So, so, so whatever. He's, he's obviously mega, mega successful. Um, again, worth sort of like tens of billions of dollars, one of the richest guys in the world. He, um, recently his thing that he got obsessed with.

• 41:30Shaan Puri?

  Is called Alpha School. So the story here is that, um, from what I can understand, there's a woman who used to work for Trilogy Software. She and her husband, um, I think her name's Mackenzie Price. They create a school first for their own kids. Um, and they kind of are like inspired, they're kind of motivated because of the following problem, which I agree with the, the problem statement entirely. So, uh, you know, if you look at the world's greatest, you know, the greatest people that, that, um, that have accomplished things in the world. So whether it's like, you know, Mozart or Beethoven, they're composing symphonies at age five, right?

• 42:10Shaan Puri?

  Or it's Alexander the Great, he like conquered most of the world by the time he was 22, started at 16. There's many, many, many examples of people who at a very young age were capable of doing a lot. And so, you know, there was a central question of like, why don't we have more Alexanders? Not like conquerors per se, but people who at a young age are able to do a lot. If you look at Einstein, you look at Alexander, you look at like Marcus Aurelius. One of the things about a lot of these sort of great achievers is that the way they learned was not in a traditional school, but was through direct one-on-one tutoring from a sort of wise mentor. So like Socrates, Plato, you know, that, that sort of, that, that lineage of one-on-one tutoring.

• 42:51Sam Parr?

  Like a, like a, like apprenticeship.

• 42:54Shaan Puri?

  A little bit like apprenticeship, but they're not working for the person. They're just daily study, daily tutoring, one-on-one with a master. And, um, there's all these studies that have happened over the years of what is the best way to teach? You know, like, I think we would all agree, we would love education to be more effective. We'd all love to improve education. It's like super high leverage. If you can educate people better, you know, the world prospers. So how do you do it? And for a long time, there's been this thing called the two sigma problem. Have you seen this Bloom's two sigma problem?

• 43:23Sam Parr?

  According to Wikipedia, it's, um, the two sigma problem. This one-on-one mentorship, about 90% of tutored, tutored students attained a level of achievement reached by only the highest 20%. So basically, um, you are almost guaranteed to be in the top 20% if you use this one-on-one tutoring methodology.

• 43:43Shaan Puri?

  Correct. And so for a long time, it's been the case. All right, now what's changed? AI has changed. So now with AI, the idea is. Any kid with a tablet, an iPad, you know, whatever, can have a tutor that is fully designing custom lessons plans on the fly for each student, perfectly tailored to their current levels of expertise. So there's other, there's other parts of learning science, you know? For example, you wanna not pass people until they have mastery of a concept because otherwise they don't have, they have a shaky foundation. So the problem with traditional school is you pass if you get a C. A C is about, you know, 70% or better. Well, what they've shown is that if you get a person to 70% or 72%,

• 44:26Shaan Puri?

  basically their rate of learning as they progress will always like decrease because 70% was actually a bit of a shaky foundation. They didn't actually understand it. So when they tried to learn the next thing and the next thing, it was too wobbly of a foundation and it collapses. Whereas if you get them to 90% mastery of subject, they'll do really well. So one thing is like classrooms today, it's taught to get everybody to seven, you know, at least 70 to move forward. But the problem is you actually want people at 90 to move forward in terms of percentage. The second part is like, you know, you want people to be tested at a level that is, you know, not so easy that it's boring, it's not challenging enough, but not so challenging that it's too hard, I don't even understand, I'm drowning, right?

• 45:07Shaan Puri?

  And so finding that like, you know, that peak middle zone where I'm being tested enough, but not pushed so far that I'm gonna, you know, go over the cliff, that would be great. But you can't do that in a classroom because every kid's at a different spot. So, you know, you just sort of, you, you sort of keep everybody comfortable. Now, that means that the smartest kids are not challenged and it means that the kids that are the furthest back are just utterly confused. So you're kind of going for this like average, you teach sort of the average, the lowest common denominator. I'm just like oversimplifying everything, but this is the, this is the complaint of normal school. Okay, so what is Alpha School doing? Basically, it's a school in Austin where K through eight, you go and you do two hours on an iPad.

• 45:52Shaan Puri?

  And the idea is that your two hours on an iPad with your AI tutor will teach you not only everything you needed to know as that, for whatever grade level you're in, but you'll learn double that. So you basically are doing, you learn double, but in only two hours.

• 46:09Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so that's the, that's the promise. And then what do you do the rest of the day? They basically just have like random life skill workshops. So go rock climbing. Hey, build a piece of Ikea furniture.

• 46:19Sam Parr?

  So they say, um, life skill means public speaking, entrepreneurship, outdoor education. These experiences build grit, creativity and adaptability.

• 46:28Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. And so like, for example, they, uh, they did this thing where, and they called the teachers guides. So the guides were like, they had a group of second graders and they go, all right, let's come up with five impossible things, impossible for a second grader to do. So the first one was to run a 5K in under 35 minutes, I think it was. So it's like, run a 5K in under 35 minutes. So it's like, can your second grader even run a 5K? Like most second graders could not even run a 5K. That's a pretty long run for a second grader. Second grader, you know, is seven year old.

• 47:05Shaan Puri?

  And so they asked all the students, do you think you could do it? Nobody raised their hand. They asked all the parents, do you think they can, your kid could do it? And nobody raised their hand. And so that became one of the missions, one of the workshops, one of the impossible missions.

• 47:16Sam Parr?

  We're going to train like, uh, a seven, a seven year old how to run a 5K. That was it.

• 47:22Shaan Puri?

  So what they did was the first day, they just walked the 5K. They said, all right, you've, you've completed it. You've, you at least know that you can go the distance. The distance is a manageable distance. And so they did that for like a couple of days. Then they, then they just said, all right, cool. We're gonna, we're gonna try to run the first quarter mile, or for the first quarter of it. And then we're gonna walk the rest. Great. They did that for a couple of days. Then they, then they did half, half of it running, walked the rest, sat three quarters of it running, then walked the rest until they could run the whole thing. By the end of the, um, like couple of months, not only did one second grader do it, every single second grader did it. And some of them did it in under 30 minutes. And they were, basically they were like, here's, you know, so they had these like five impossible, you know,

• 48:05Shaan Puri?

  like challenges, they, they made them want to do it. And the reason they're able to do this is because they're doing all their learning in just a two hour window. So they could spend the rest of their time doing things that are, you know, interesting life, life type stuff for themselves.

• 48:16Sam Parr?

  Well, and they're teaching them how to like break down a problem 35 minutes. So we'll start small and build up confidence. Yeah. I mean, I see, I, that's amazing. I totally see the value.

• 48:24Shaan Puri?

  Seems kind of amazing, right? Now here's some more just things that are just fascinating about this. So Joe Lamont pulled out a billion dollars.

• 48:32Sam Parr?

  I saw that.

• 48:33Shaan Puri?

  Companies to invest in Alpha School. He then said, this is the best product I've ever built by far. Better than anything I ever did at Trilogy, better than anything I've ever done since. This is so much, and it's this app that he's building called Time Backed. And so it's basically like a custom AI tool that basically you are on your iPad, you're learning or your little tablet laptop, you're learning and it is doing two things. One, there's a little waist meter in the corner. So just because the camera's watching you and recording the screen at all times. So it sees if the kid just leaves, just like gets up.

• 49:10Sam Parr?

  Which is what, which is what he used at his companies.

• 49:12Shaan Puri?

  It's what he used at Trilogy, right? Like that is, or when he would like buy these companies. He was known for having like pretty extreme.

• 49:18Sam Parr?

  Like keyloggers.

• 49:19Shaan Puri?

  Monitoring productivity, monitoring stuff like controversially extreme, right?

• 49:24Sam Parr?

  That's awesome. This is so cool. I didn't real, I saw the article and I started reading about his, I wanted to know about the business stuff. And the article was like, Joe's not going to talk to you about business stuff. He, he doesn't want to talk about Trilogy, EWS. He doesn't want to talk about any of that, but he will talk about Alpha School. And I was like, well, shit, that's like what I want to know. Um, and so when it started getting into school stuff, I was like, I don't know if I want to read that. But this sounds so much cooler than I thought. I didn't realize how big this was going to be. And I'm on their website and my kid isn't school age yet, but I'm thinking I would absolutely want them to go to this. Uh, would you send them yours?

• 50:01Shaan Puri?

  Dude, I wish this was around us because, um, so I'll just give you like my little side, side stories here. All right. Just like personal, personal life experiences. So my kids were home this summer and it was our first summer break. Like my daughter is, she just did what they call TK, like pre K. So she just finished that. She's going to be a kindergartner this year. And my son was about to be a pre K student. And then we have a baby who's small. But I had this mission. I was like, okay, three things I'm gonna do this summer. We're gonna take two epic trips with their cousins. Cause I was like, that was always like core memory for me.

• 50:33Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 50:33Shaan Puri?

  I'm gonna teach them to swim. Cause they love just, they love to do it. It's summer anyways. Plus it's like a good life skill to have. And, uh, you know, I, I haven't like taken the time to like actually teach them to swim, but I can do that. And then I'm gonna teach them to read. Uh, because this, I'd noticed I was like, all of the like schools we send them to, like, school is a very generous word for what's actually happening, right? Like it's a, it's by and large babysitting, daycare. And I think this is true, you know, for generally for most schools, like, you know, even through high school, college, like there's a lot, that's a big aspect of what school is. Uh, but when they're little, it's very much that, like, uh, you know, I would ask them kind of like what they've learned. It's like, well, they mostly just like played and then they'll learn like one thing, but like, you know, they can't do math or they can't read.

• 51:17Shaan Puri?

  And I'm like, are they teaching you that? They're like, no, no, no. They're just doing letters. I'm like, but you know the letters. You know, all the letters you could write already. And they're like, yeah, but you know, they're just teaching at that pace. If I want you to learn anything, I'm gonna have to do it outside of this. So I discovered this app called Mentava.

• 51:33Sam Parr?

  Mentava.

• 51:35Shaan Puri?

  Go to Mentava.com. Now this is a learning app that was so expensive. I was just actually offended by the price when I saw it. I don't know if you've ever like downloaded apps for iPad for kids stuff, but it's usually like, I don't know. $5 to unlock the thing. Maybe it's like a $7 a month. You know, if it's like really good, like, you know.

• 51:53Sam Parr?

  Oh my gosh. I just saw.

• 51:55Shaan Puri?

  This is a $500 a month per kid. So I'm paying a thousand dollars a month for this app. And with this, but this app has a very simple promise, which is we could teach any three to five year old to read. If they just spend, I don't know, 15 minutes a day doing this thing for a couple of months.

• 52:13Sam Parr?

  Dude, talk about value pricing. Your old boss, Emmett Shear, he's a investor. Emmett is, you gotta ask for the discount code.

• 52:20Shaan Puri?

  So I was like, wow, this is incredibly expensive, but I'm incredibly intrigued. So I, I get my kids on it. They've been doing it all summer. And sure enough, it actually is pretty effective. And like, I would say the app itself is incredibly janky. It's like the polish is janky, the animations are janky, like everything is janky. It's not like the best app. But the core idea, which is like, it's a simple value prop. I can teach your kids how to read if they do this thing for like 10 to 15 minutes a day. And like, they just broke down readings. Cause if you think about what is reading? I think there's like 45 different like sounds you need to be able to make. So it's like 45 sound combinations, uh, which is like, you know, you have to learn that like, you know, A is ah and B is buh. And then you have to learn that like CK is together.

• 53:05Shaan Puri?

  You have to learn like those sound, first, so first they teach them all the building blocks. And then they show them how they, they work when they're put together in words. And like, sure enough, both my kids are starting to read now. I'm just like, you can't, you don't get cartoons or anything else till you do your reading today. Right? Really very simple trade and they like doing it. It's kind of a game and they enjoy doing it.

• 53:22Sam Parr?

  And by the way, the investors, if you go to their investor page, it's like, like literally everyone who's been on this pod. Like every investor has been on our podcast.

• 53:30Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I know. It's $500 because he's comparing, I don't know, they wanted it to be is the real answer. It doesn't need to be $500, but they're comparing it to like tutoring, human tutoring. So they're like, oh, it's five times cheaper than a human tutor. It's like, okay, cool, but it's also 500 times more than, you know, a normal learning app on the iPad, which is my frame of reference coming into this. But I, I've now seen the value of this type of like personalized learning. Cause let's say they're, they're playing this game. If they don't understand that, um, you know, SH is sh sound. If they fail, like if they get, they get it wrong three times, they lose that little game level. It knows that, okay, you just don't understand SH. So you don't just replay that level.

• 54:13Shaan Puri?

  You hop back three levels and I'll reteach you that building block to make sure that you understand it. And I'm going to get you to repeat it, you know, in these, I'm going to use five different games as spaced repetition to teach you these same, you know, same few, few concepts.

• 54:26Sam Parr?

  But it makes me nervous to have my kid on an iPad.

• 54:30Shaan Puri?

  Not, I mean, sure, maybe it's a personal, personal thing, but um, dude, my kids are on devices all the time. I've, I've, that, that, I've let go of that rope. That, that rope is like, you know, what is it that like, that horse is out of the barn already? So now it's just a question of like, how bad is it? You know, well, what, what are you doing with your time there?

• 54:48Sam Parr?

  And so what, okay, bringing back to Alpha School, what are you saying?

• 54:52Shaan Puri?

  I believe that they're going to be able to do this. I believe that they're going to be able to, if somebody actually with like, the guy took a billion dollars out and he has, I think, a 300 person, like, AI lab that he's building, his own little OpenAI that he's building to basically like custom train these models, build applications on top of them. And I think this is an insane thing that's going to happen. And I think it's going to take over, is my, my, like, my unhedged, my unhedged true belief is that something like this is going to exist. And this is the best bet I've seen so far.

• 55:26Sam Parr?

  I don't think it's going to take over. I think it's going to be a massive success. I see, like, so many reasons why someone would protest this, um, which, like, there's what we've talked about going the opposite of AI and technology. There's a massive contingency of people that will go into that category. One of our good friends sends their, their kids to a new thing that I've never heard of called nature school. Have you heard of nature school?

• 55:48Shaan Puri?

  My sister runs a nature school.

• 55:50Sam Parr?

  And I don't entirely know what it means, other than you're outside and it involves nature. I guess that's it. But there's, uh, but there's like an entire contingency of people that want to go that route. But I do think that Alpha School will be a massive hit. And I am interested in, like, when I was reading it, just while we were talking, I'm like, I'm open to this. This sounds very intriguing. Does it help you get into college? Or are they like anti-college? Or they didn't get to that point yet?

• 56:13Shaan Puri?

  No, it does. Their high school, they have a, they go all the way up through high school and they're like, yep, our high school students like crushed the SAT and ACT compared to, and they're like, basically, they use these like, um, pretty standardized metrics called MAP about like, basically how much you learn. So let's say, it's like, uh, you do a test and it's, let's say, the average third grader is at like, a 100 score in math. Well, by the end of a normal semester of school, they would have gone up seven points. But with Alpha School, they go up 15 points. Well, then, well, but of course, that compounds because they did that in, you know, a shorter amount of time. Plus, then when they enter the next level, they'll grow again. So they're growing like by a bigger amount and at a faster rate. And so, you know, obviously that compounds the longer you would do it.

• 56:58Sam Parr?

  Dude, you know how like, you know, I don't know if this is true, but the story is like Magic Johnson became a billionaire not through basketball, but through like franchising McDonald's? You said you wanted to open up a school, like you could be the biggest franchise.

• 57:09Shaan Puri?

  Well, I don't even know if you have to franchise. I think you just literally license the technology.

• 57:13Sam Parr?

  Yeah, similar.

• 57:15Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's just, do I want to do it for young kids versus like college? You know, like I'm more interested in college, but because young kids have their own set of problems.

• 57:22Sam Parr?

  You know, it's really complicated. Well, yeah. But I mean, like, that's super rewarding. Running my company Hampton, it gives me the chance to meet with hundreds of different businesses. And I'm always surprised by how many of them still use spreadsheets, emails and clunky tools that do not talk to each other. It's like watching someone build a house with duct tape. So here's my take. Custom software that actually fits your needs isn't just convenient. It's a competitive advantage to transform the way you do business. And that's why you need to know about a no-code platform called Bubble. With Bubble, you can build powerful web and mobile apps by literally dragging and dropping different elements out of the screen. No coding required. By the way, I use Bubble on a ton of different apps, including Hampton.

• 58:07Sam Parr?

  And if you want help building something complex on Bubble, you have to bring in zero-code. They're the top Bubble agency out there and literally the biggest plugging creator for the platform. They can build anything, custom portals, SaaS products, and they do it about 10 times faster and cheaper than traditional development. Zero-code is also all about AI business automation, transforming manual and slow processes into efficient automated ones. So stop cobbling together different tools and solutions and head to zero-code.com. That's zero-code as in the word zero and then code, Q-O-D-E. Again, code is with a Q and tell them that Sam sent you.

• 58:45Sam Parr?

  I feel like you and I, so we're both in our mid 30s. It sort of feels like one of the last eras in which high school was the same way that it was for like the trailing 50 years. And that now the current high, it's radically different. So I remember when, I remember, I think I was a sophomore in high school when the iPhone came out. And if you, the teachers didn't even know to ban. Because no one, no one even had one. And I think Facebook came out when I was, I think in high school or maybe like in eighth grade. And so none of these problems were particularly like problems, like online bullying wasn't a thing. And it, when I see what high schoolers are like now, I do not envy them.

• 59:27Sam Parr?

  The, the, the way that children are going to be raised from like five to 18 years old, it's significantly different than how the trailing, let's say, probably 60 or 70 years were raised. And I think that we don't give them enough credit because I think that the systems that they have to go through now is significantly more difficult. And I'm very eager to see how like some rat, like if you told me about the school 12 years ago, we would said, you're insane. What are you talking about? Like, you know what I mean? And so I'm very eager to see how parents are going to deal with not being able to empathize with what their children are going through. Do you know what I mean? Like, we all had the same thing going to high school. Our parent, when we had, well, being an immigrant, maybe it was slightly different, but it was like,

• 1:00:13Sam Parr?

  your parents could kind of guide you on what to, how to act. But now it's way different.

• 1:00:17Shaan Puri?

  I think for me, it already was different. You know, my parents had an arranged marriage, right? So like, imagine like their relatability to like the dating scene and high school, you know, like, do they, do they understand any of that stuff? Like, not really, right? Do they understand like, you know, they grew up in India. So it's like, everything was different for how we were growing up. So I guess like that is just sort of the immigrant experience. I don't know. You just sort of do your best to hang on. Check out these two pictures I just texted you. I want to tell you about one more example of this like alternative schooling.

• 1:00:46Sam Parr?

  Okay, so you just sent me a photo of, it looks like a warehouse, someone's building something, and then it's a bunch of kids just hanging on a field, right?

• 1:00:55Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So the first picture of the warehouse. So this is basically my brother-in-law, Sinjeev, who was on the podcast recently. When I went to visit him in Vegas this summer, I'm like, okay, great. And he's been in just commercial real estate for a long time. He's a builder. And he's been doing that. He was tremendously successful. And he's like, yeah, you know, I did something that's kind of crazy. And I go, what? He goes, so I just bought this building in downtown Las Vegas. Like a $10 million building. And I'm gonna, he goes, he basically had this experience with his oldest son where he was like, you know, my son, he's really smart, but he's bored at school. Cause again, like he already knows the stuff they're teaching. And so he just, he just disengages because it's like, not that interesting.

• 1:01:40Shaan Puri?

  And he really loves baseball. He's on like the national, he got picked for like the national team of his age. And he's like, but because he's at school for, you know, like eight hours a day. By the time he gets off school and it's time for baseball practice, he was like kind of tired. He just does it for an hour or two, and then he like comes home and he wants to just chill, eat, play video games and go to sleep. And so he's like, we are going to homeschool him this year. But he's like, instead of homeschooling where he's just sitting at our house, uh, you know, he just rolls out of bed and it's like, hey, I'm at school now, whatever. And like, we're busy parents. What are we going to teach? How do we do this? He basically created like a WeWork for kids to homeschool. So check this out. So what he's doing is called the Grind Academy or something in Las Vegas.

• 1:02:21Shaan Puri?

  Basically a sports prep school where you homeschool your, so the kids are, the kids are homeschooling. So they go to this, they go to the, the idea would be that they would go to the school. They'd spend, I don't know, two to four hours a day on like the education or using like Alpha School type of software, right? So there's, they're all doing, they're all doing their, their curriculum, you know, on their computer or their iPad. There's a teacher sitting there who's there to help in case you don't understand something. There's like a tutor available that will help you unblock, get unstuck. And then when you're done with your work or like, you know, but when you start your day, you go there, you do like a morning condition, like a morning workout. So you get like a, a morning workout in, then you do your school stuff. You grab your smoothie, your protein shake, you go upstairs, you do your school stuff.

• 1:03:04Shaan Puri?

  And then you have your afternoon skill specific, sports specific training. You're getting like two a day stuff. He got like pro coaches and like top level like strength and conditioning coaches to come in and be like That's crazy. Doing this for kids. It's like IMG, is that what it's called? Yeah. So he's basically building IMG, but just as a private school for like, you know, middle schoolers, like youth sport, you know, youth athletes. And I was like, this is a crazy move. And he's like, I would, I guess I, I would never do this. Cause he'd actually been in the gym business. He had built an 82 store chain. So he's already been in the gym business for, and he's like done well in that, but also knows all the pains of scaling a gym. He's like, you know, I didn't just want to like create a gym for kids or create a gym at all.

• 1:03:42Shaan Puri?

  He's like, but you know, for my kids, he's like, I just got tired of like, the stuff they're learning in school was too slow, too boring and too not relevant to like what's going on in the world today. He's like, you know, I would rather them come in here, they would learn their math, their reading, their writing. And then take like a workshop on starting a YouTube channel or a podcast. Or, you know, learn like, you know, what's going on with AI, like what, what's going on with drone tech? How do you, what is that stuff? How do you, how do you learn about that? Like where the future is going, like marketing classes, business classes, like open up a lemonade stand. He's like, I don't know, there's other ways you can learn outside of just this, uh, you know, like the traditional sort of school model. And so he's like, dude, I think that model's dead. And so he's created his own private school and the two photos I sent you, that's in 30 days. So I went there and I was like, oh wow, this is like a kind of a raw building.

• 1:04:27Shaan Puri?

  And he's like, yeah, I'm opening up in 30 days. And I was like, what? Does he have any one who's enrolled? Yes. So 40 kids are enrolled right now. How much does it cost? Uh, it's, I don't know how much it costs exactly. I think the first cohort is like a, you know, whatever, like more like five to seven grand a year. Uh, but it'll get up to like, you know, when, when he, once he has the full school built out, rolling and he's like, kind of proven his model. Um, it'll be closer to like a $20,000 a year, you know, basically prep program.

• 1:04:56Sam Parr?

  This is crazy. This is crazy.

• 1:04:58Shaan Puri?

  Is that insane?

• 1:05:00Sam Parr?

  My kids aren't there yet. This is overwhelming. Like this whole idea of like guides, I've heard this so many times. Ramon sent his kid to a school where they had a guide.

• 1:05:11Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:05:11Sam Parr?

  And I found it very, I'm not open to things very easily. But there could be a better way because like the current way is a great. It's very, this is, this is a very scary thing because it's, it's your, it's your children. And it's a very overwhelming to like learn about all this. And I don't know what the right way is, but there has to be a better way.

• 1:05:29Shaan Puri?

  I feel visibly stressed out right now.

• 1:05:32Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I'm stressed out about, does this stress you out? Because obviously you care about this.

• 1:05:37Sam Parr?

  But like your A B test, you should send one kid one way and one kid to the other way. Just, it just tested.

• 1:05:42Shaan Puri?

  That's hilarious. But, but it, yes, it's an, it's like a super important thing. But first of all, like none of these things are permanent, right? Like our friend who sent their kid to like one of these alternatives. He just took him out like after a semester if he didn't, like he didn't feel like it was working for him. Right? It's, it's, yeah, it's not the end of the world.

• 1:05:58Sam Parr?

  Dude, I, one, we have a kid, uh, we have a buddy who went to one of these schools. And I asked him, I go, hey, are you, uh, he was in eighth grade. Are you gonna ask any girls out? And he's like, they're all nine, non-binary. So, uh, they're not, and I was like, oh my God, man. I'm so happy I don't have to deal with this. This is a very stressful, a very stressful situation. I found it very stressful. I was like, oh, well, I don't have any advice. I'm sorry. I was like, I don't know what to tell you.

• 1:06:24Shaan Puri?

  Dude, the, the bar is so low. Once you realize like the, like, once you just go sit in the, the current like status quo. You're like, okay, what's my real risk here? Like my real risk is so low because this current experience, you know, it's not like I'm trading something that's really good for something that might be better. It's something that is pretty dissatisfying. And it's like, well, do you want to try something that could be better? That sort of logically makes more sense?

• 1:06:52Sam Parr?

  Dude, I went to, uh, do you, have you, have you ever been around Catholic stuff? Have you like hung out with a nun?

• 1:06:58Shaan Puri?

  Have I? No.

• 1:07:00Sam Parr?

  I went, I went to Catholic school.

• 1:07:02Shaan Puri?

  Something people do if they're not like Catholic?

• 1:07:04Sam Parr?

  I went to, well, you like, you don't even see them anymore. They're like rare. I went to Catholic school. I had nuns teaching me and like they were the convent and like it was Sister Mary.

• 1:07:12Shaan Puri?

  Whoopi Goldberg?

• 1:07:14Sam Parr?

  Yeah, they're all like Sister Mary, Sister Teresa, Sister Catherine, and they would hit me if I misbehaved. And I find it.

• 1:07:22Shaan Puri?

  That's a pretty, that's a much more radical experiment.

• 1:07:25Sam Parr?

  That's not radical. That's just how it's been done. It's, it's, it's not radical in the sense that it's not new.

• 1:07:31Shaan Puri?

  It's not that it's new. I guess what I'm saying is like.

• 1:07:34Sam Parr?

  Dude, I loved it. I went to an all boys.

• 1:07:35Shaan Puri?

  Acceptable, then I think this should be acceptable.

• 1:07:38Sam Parr?

  I went, oh, I agree. I went to an all boys college prep school, like a high school, Catholic school. It sounds fancier than it is. It was, it was a very blue collar.

• 1:07:45Shaan Puri?

  Was it called Exeter or something like that?

• 1:07:47Sam Parr?

  No, no, no, no. It was called St. Louis University High School. It was an all boys school and it was fantastic. I loved it. I can't say enough good things. I enjoyed my experience so much and I would have, I was a jerk. I was a jerk in high school and I would have a teacher kind of get in my face and yell at me if I did something wrong and it was exactly what I needed. I loved that strict disciplinary experience and it, and it had a big impact on me. So I, my, the reason I don't have too much empathy for wanting to change is because I enjoyed my experience. Had I gone to a public school, I think it would have been a lot different. I can't imagine a public school with five or 6,000 kids. That I feel like I would, I'm so intimidated of that, of the idea of that.

• 1:08:28Shaan Puri?

  Right. I mean, I went, I went to a high school in Houston, Texas that was like that, 4,000 kids. I remember like if you just walked into the bathroom, there was like an ear piercing parlor, basically.

• 1:08:38Sam Parr?

  Was there really?

• 1:08:40Shaan Puri?

  They would just give piercings in the bathroom. It was just insane.

• 1:08:42Sam Parr?

  Dude, it sounds like prison.

• 1:08:43Shaan Puri?

  There was like, yeah, there was scheduled fights of like which, like just scheduled fights. It's like, oh, these guys are gonna fight these guys today. And it's like, that was just like a pretty, it was like UFC 202. It's like, all right, it's happening this week.

• 1:08:55Sam Parr?

  Dude, my experience was so harmonious.

• 1:08:57Shaan Puri?

  Halfway through high school, my parents shipped me off to China. We all moved to Beijing and I finished high school. In the International School of Beijing and now I'm in a hundred fifty person expat only international school. So I could have like two totally different experiences, you know.

• 1:09:15Sam Parr?

  Was the second one good?

• 1:09:16Shaan Puri?

  Oh, it was amazing. Best thing that happened to me was to have that. Yeah.

• 1:09:19Sam Parr?

  Why?

• 1:09:20Shaan Puri?

  Well, first I needed a fresh start.

• 1:09:22Sam Parr?

  It was Chinese kids or Americans?

• 1:09:24Shaan Puri?

  No, it was mostly like it was a mix because like you, you, you had to have a foreign passport to attend.

• 1:09:30Sam Parr?

  Got it.

• 1:09:30Shaan Puri?

  You couldn't be a Chinese local and attend, no matter how much money you had. You had to have enough money where you had dual, you had a passport of Singapore or somewhere else to come. So a lot of the kids were Asian because maybe it was like Korea, Japan, whatever. A lot of, you know, Australians, you know, Europeans, Americans, whatever. And um, it was, I mean, it was great for me only because like a change of environment, even if the environment is not better, is great just because it gives you a blank, like a clean slate.

• 1:09:57Sam Parr?

  Also probably intimidating.

• 1:09:58Shaan Puri?

  You know, to, to just be like, oh, okay, cool. Like socially I was like this before, but now I could be different. You know, like sports wise, here's what I was doing before. Here's what I'm doing now, you know, whatever you could, you could do it all there. Uh, plus, I don't know, like it was just a better school overall. Like there was just no like,

• 1:10:16Shaan Puri?

  I don't know, I don't know. I don't know how to explain it. It was just like a higher quality, everything. The food was higher quality. The teachers were higher quality. The classes were higher quality.

• 1:10:24Sam Parr?

  Oh, yeah. You were with a bunch. It was a rich kid's.

• 1:10:26Shaan Puri?

  It was a rich kid's school. Like what do you, what do you want? It's gonna be, it's gonna be that, you know, and, and all the companies pay for it. So the parents don't usually pay for it. Like when the company moves you, they're like, all right, we're taking your kids out of like, you know, American public school or whatever. We'll have to give you an equivalent of an English schooling experience over there. So the companies pay for it.

• 1:10:45Sam Parr?

  That's pretty sick. I would, I've, I've dreamed of like moving away for a year or two with my, with my children. I think that'd be awesome. That's pretty badass.

• 1:10:53Shaan Puri?

  I would highly, highly, highly recommend it. I think it's one of the best things anybody could do is go.

• 1:10:58Sam Parr?

  China is not on the list. China's on the, China's on the, that's on the list. But you know, like Paris is pretty dope or something like that. Um, what did Scott Galloway said? America is the best place to make money. Europe's the best place to spend it. So that, that, that sounds pretty good. All right, that's it. That's it. All right, that was a great pod. Someone in the comments said, Sam and Sean, we're so, we like these guests and all that stuff, but we just want brainstorming. We just want old school ideas, old school episodes. That's what this episode was. Hope you enjoyed it. All right, that's the pod.

• 1:11:39Sam Parr?

  My friends, if you like MFM, then you're gonna like the following podcast. It's called Billion Dollar Moves. And of course, it's brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the number one audio destination for business professionals. Billion Dollar Moves, it's hosted by Sarah Chen Spelling. Sarah is a venture capitalist and strategist, and with Billion Dollar Moves, she wants to look at unicorn founders and funders, and she looks for what she calls the unexpected leader. Many of them were underestimated long before they became huge and successful and iconic. She does it with unfiltered conversations about success, failure, fear, courage, and all that great stuff. So again, if you like My First Million, check out Billion Dollar Moves. It's brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. Again, Billion Dollar Moves.