The 2021 Milly Awards

Sam Parr (@theSamParr) and Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) are joined by Andrew Wilkinson (@awilkinson) to go through their 2021 Milly Awards. They hand out awards like "billionaire of the year," "best investment of the year," "best podcast guest," and more. _____ * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. * Would you like to participate in our clips contest? Earn up to $10k by remixing My First Million episodes. To learn more, go to mfmpod.com/clips. * Want more insights like MFM? Check out Shaan's newsletter. _____ Show Notes: (03:00) - Billionaire of the year (15:00) - Company of the year (23:00) - Unsexy simple business of the year (29:40) - Best investment (41:30) - Worst investment (51:15) - Favorite digital tool, favorite physical tool, under $100 and over $1,000 (1:02:25) - Best thing you learned about yourself and best relationship hack (1:17:00) - Book of the year and best new follow or subscription (1:21:00) - Shaan's story of meeting Rupert Murdoch (1:28:00) - Best podcast guest and best hang (1:39:15) - Favorite company, industry, and predictions ----- Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. ----- Additional episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

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

• 0:00Sam Parr?

  Dude, that's crazy that that that mistake. That's a $10 million mistake.

• 0:04Andrew Wilkinson?

  Yeah.

• 0:16Sam Parr?

  Um, Andrew, what's going on, dude? I'm, are you pumped to do that?

• 0:19Andrew Wilkinson?

  I'm really, yeah, I'm excited. I worked out this morning and feel feel good. It's a nice sunny day. We had a big dump of snow here, which is actually incredibly rare. Usually it like never goes below freezing. So, uh, yeah, it's nice.

• 0:31Sam Parr?

  What'd you do?

• 0:32Andrew Wilkinson?

  Uh, no, I actually went on my treadmill. I started, I, it's weird. I was kind of feeling like a little low energy over Christmas. And I realized this hadn't worked out. And so I was like, oh, I'll take, you know, am I eating the right thing? Am I doing the right routines? Am I doing my gratitude journal?

• 0:45Sam Parr?

  Sam can't relate.

• 0:46Andrew Wilkinson?

  Uh, you know, what supplements am I taking?

• 0:48Sam Parr?

  He's never had.

• 0:48Andrew Wilkinson?

  And then I just worked out. Yeah. I just, I just realized like working out is all you need to do.

• 0:55Sam Parr?

  There's a, there's a great quote. It's in, um, this book I was reading called The Body and it basically said like, if we could put in pill form, all the benefits that exercise gives you, you, it'll be the, it would be the most successful medicine of all time.

• 1:10Andrew Wilkinson?

  Right.

• 1:10Sam Parr?

  And the whole point of the book was, um, it was called The Body by Bill Burson, or by.

• 1:15Andrew Wilkinson?

  Bill Bryson. I love that book.

• 1:17Sam Parr?

  And, uh, he's just, he's like, basically like sleep and exercise are the cure to most every.

• 1:22Andrew Wilkinson?

  Yeah, it's crazy. I love his writing. He's, uh, he's great.

• 1:27Sam Parr?

  Do we want to get into this, Sean?

• 1:28Andrew Wilkinson?

  Yeah, let's do it. Uh, we did this last year. And, uh, I think it was probably my favorite episode last year. We called it the Millie Awards. We did an awards ceremony at the end of the year. Andrew came on. And we did it in 2020 at the end of the year. And I actually went back and I listened to it, which is, you know, it's cringy to listen to your own voice recorded, but it was a really entertaining episode and we made a bunch of predictions. I actually even kind of noted some of them down. I don't know if you guys saw that, like some of the, um,

• 1:56Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 1:57Andrew Wilkinson?

  Some of the things that we had said last year.

• 1:59Shaan Puri?

  And so we're going to do it again and we're going to try to make this an annual tradition. We'll see how it goes. And all right. So without further ado, here we are, the 2021 Milli Awards. We are back and we got a bunch, the way it works, we've got a bunch of different categories. The three of us did our research, did our thinking about who we think is the winner for each. We did not tell each other, did not show each other. So if we have the same answer, it's just coincidence. Great minds think alike and we're going to react to kind of how each one goes. And I have a little side game here, which I'm going to play. I have this little notepad. I'm just going to kind of take notes of who I think wins each category in terms of their answer. So we'll see, we'll see who brings the heat during this thing. I got Sam, I got Sean, I got Andrew.

• 2:44Shaan Puri?

  And I'll put a little tally for, and I'm the only judge or you guys can chime in on that. But I'm just going to keep note of how we do for, for this whole episode. All right. So did I miss anything, Sam? Are we good to go?

• 2:53Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And we, all right. So I have up, I have two documents. I have one document with like my answers and then I've got the other document that have last year's answers. And so I think what we should do is you can lead and you could say like the category. And then you could say, here's what last year's are.

• 3:10Shaan Puri?

  Right. Okay. So we'll, all right. So we'll, we'll start with, we'll start with breakout company. So this is the 2021 breakout company. It's a company that kind of like exploded.

• 3:22Sam Parr?

  Wait, no, Billy of the year is first, Sean.

• 3:24Shaan Puri?

  Okay. You want to go in the actual, or we can go to the actual order. All right. So Billy of the year is number one, then. We do Billy of the week sometimes on the pod. So this is Billy of the year. It doesn't have to be somebody who's a new billionaire, but it's just a billionaire who had a hell of a year. Last year, Sam said Chuck Feeney, who is, who's Chuck Feeney? He's the guy from Blockbuster and all that stuff? Or that's somebody else?

• 3:46Sam Parr?

  No, he's just a, he was, he started a business where they sell shit at airports, but he gave away like,

• 3:53Sam Parr?

  yeah, duty free, but he gave away all of it. We gave away like $10 billion.

• 3:57Shaan Puri?

  Andrew had Mark Leonard, who's I think the CEO of Constellation Software. Is that right? Who's, you know, maybe, yeah, you know, somebody you respect who runs a similar playbook to you, buys great companies, owns them for a long time, very stealthy secretive guy. You shared a bunch of cool stories about how he keeps a low profile. And then I had Eric Yuan, who was the CEO of Zoom, because I thought Zoom sort of saved the world during the pandemic and let the world continue to run. And, and so I had Eric, Eric Yuan. So who do we have for this year? We'll start with Sam, Billy of the year. Who you got?

• 4:28Sam Parr?

  Dharmesh, the CTO and co-founder of HubSpot. He came on our pod.

• 4:33Shaan Puri?

  Just sucking up to your boss.

• 4:36Sam Parr?

  Well, yeah, I mean, I guess, but he, he just had the idea of outlook on life. And I think he had an amazing job. Like, he basically said, no one reports to him and he doesn't report to anyone. I think he, I don't know what, what's he worth? Like $2 billion, whatever HubSpot stock is worth. I thought he was pretty amazing. He had a good outlook.

• 4:52Shaan Puri?

  And what was the outlook that you liked?

• 4:53Andrew Wilkinson?

  I thought the, the most interesting thing with Dharmesh is exactly what you said, that instead of, I think so many entrepreneurs are like, okay, I'm either all in or I'm all out. And he kind of said, you know what? I'm just going to do the stuff I like. And he's kind of a floater, like he just kind of floats around within the company. And I thought that was really cool.

• 5:10Sam Parr?

  And he was nice. The thing about Dharmesh is that he's nice and he's friendly and he's calm. And I really enjoyed that about him. He's not a type A, or he is type A in that he's competitive, but he's not like trying to out alpha people. He's very comfortable and is.

• 5:23Shaan Puri?

  All right, Andrew, who you got? Billy of the year?

• 5:25Andrew Wilkinson?

  So mine, it was actually a guy I randomly met. So I was at this cocktail party at a, just a house in my neighborhood. And I was talking to this guy and I started asking him what he did. And he said he was in the, the kind of beverage space. And he started saying names that I kind of knew, like Mission Hill Winery, which is like a big winery up here. And anyway, it turns out this guy's worth $8 billion and he owns a beverage focused holding company called Mark Anthony Group. This guy named Anthony Von Mandl. And his story is pretty crazy. So he started a little like wine importing business in Vancouver. And made enough money to buy a winery called Mission Hill, took on a ton of debt.

• 6:07Andrew Wilkinson?

  The, it was like dirt floors, had only a few barrels of wine, turned it around, turned it into a real solid business. And then he hit it big when he was trying to diversify and he started a company called Mike's Hard Lemonade, which I'm sure you guys have heard of. And this is like an insane story. Like in the nineties, people would have fights in the liquor store over the last couple of bottles of Mike's Hard. It went into the States and sold.

• 6:33Sam Parr?

  By the way, in, in, in America, we like make fun of people who drinks, like, it's like a joke, like Mike's Hard.

• 6:39Andrew Wilkinson?

  Well, the idea, the idea they had was like men are too embarrassed to drink coolers. So like, let's make a cooler. They can kind of not be too embarrassed to drink. But anyway, he ended up building that into a massive business. He ended up also starting White Claw a couple of years ago, which is like the same idea, but healthy. And now they do 1.4 or sorry, $4 billion of revenue last year in 2020. And the craziest thing about this guy is he owns, I believe, 100% of the business and he has no debt because he'd been almost in bankruptcy multiple times. So it was just totally crazy local entrepreneur who just knocked it out of the park. And I'm obsessed with these guys who have just like taken a risk.

• 7:21Andrew Wilkinson?

  They've done it 100% themselves. They didn't have VCs, didn't have investors. So just an amazing story.

• 7:28Shaan Puri?

  Wow, that's a good one. That's a good, I didn't realize the Mike's Hard, the company has Mike's Hard also does White Claw, which is amazing. It's basically a reboot of the similar concept.

• 7:37Andrew Wilkinson?

  Totally.

• 7:38Shaan Puri?

  Okay. All right, what about you? My Billy of the year. So I had two. All right. So I have, I have the eye roll one, which was Elon Musk, but it's not for the reason that most people would think. As you know, one of the maybe top three slogans of this podcast is bet on yourself. And Elon, several years ago, did a bet on yourself compensation plan that you guys probably remember. I don't know if everybody knows about this. I'll summarize it and I'm kind of hand waving through some of the details just to be quicker about it. But basically Tesla at the time, I think it was five years ago, was at about a $50 billion market cap. And people, the rumor was Elon's gonna leave and he might, you know, go just focus on SpaceX full time.

• 8:19Shaan Puri?

  And he had a negotiation with the board and basically said, okay, I'll stay, but here's the compensation plan I want. And he sketched out a plan. He said, look, you only pay me if I increase shareholder value. No guaranteed money. And he basically did it where in rough strokes, every 50 billion in market cap they added, he would get another 1% of the company. And so it was at 50 billion. So he'd have to get it to 100 billion to get anything. If it got to 99, he got nothing. And so he had to get it to 100 to get any more for all his hard work. And I remember there's a great clip. If you go to YouTube and you just go, you just, you just search for Elon Musk compensation plan. You know, CNBC, there's this clip of the anchors making fun of them because they're like, oh yeah. And like, you know, this plan is, is unprecedented.

• 9:04Shaan Puri?

  And it has this far fetched idea that if he could get over 600 billion, you know, Elon would get this huge unlock if he gets to that reward. But you know, I think we could safely say like, you know, it's never going to happen. Like, you know, why even include that in there? And sure enough, this year Tesla crosses all that. He hits every single part of the compensation plan. I think it's a, it's now a trillion dollar company. And basically the guy called a shot, he bet on himself and, and hit all of it. So I really like that, like the betting on yourself aspect of it. So that's why I give it to Elon. But what was the second one? The second one, again, a little bit of a, of a expected answer, but not, not for the reason you think.

• 9:44Shaan Puri?

  So Vitalik Buterin, who's the co creator of Ethereum, he's worth himself probably 1.6 billion, I think, as of the, based on the, like, the value of Ethereum today, something like that, one or $2 billion. But he was one of the, like, there's all these new projects constantly launching. And one of the ways that projects were trying to get hype in marketing is that they would just send some of their project into Vitalik's wallet, his public wallet. And they would say, look, Vitalik holds our coin, so you should too. And then the other thing that they would say, that was the first marketing scheme people do, like, and then people fell for it. They're like, oh, if Vitalik's investing in this, I'll invest in it too. But like, he didn't actually invest in it. They just sent it for free, just shoved it in his wallet.

• 10:25Shaan Puri?

  The second thing that people were doing was they were using Vitalik as sort of like a lockup. They were like, look, we sent, so one, one coin that came out, the Shiba Inu coin, which is like a dog, another dog coin, like Dogecoin. They sent, I think, six, five or $6 billion worth of their coin to Vitalik's wallet to essentially lock it up. They're like, look, that's all there. It can't be sold. And so you're not, it can't be sold. Like it's there. So you don't have to worry about like, you know, who owns this thing? Vitalik owns this thing. And it was partly marketing and it's partly their, their way of like locking away some of the supply. And what Vitalik did was pretty awesome. India was going through a really tough patch in COVID.

• 11:06Shaan Puri?

  So he got this thing and what he did was he donated a billion dollars of it immediately to India. And then he dumped the other five billion and just burned it and just said, uh, you know, so, so that like it would, so that the price, if he, if he sold it all on the open market, it would, um, it would crash the price. So instead he took five billion and just eliminated it from the pool and gave a billion dollars to India, kept none of it for himself and helped a lot of people in India out. And he did this like overnight as soon as he got it. And I just thought that that was like, you know, a pretty remarkable thing from a pretty, you know, remarkable guy who,

• 11:40Sam Parr?

  He's, that guy's amazing.

• 11:42Andrew Wilkinson?

  It's really cool.

• 11:42Sam Parr?

  That guy and the Sam Bankman guy are some, probably the two most interesting people, I think in the world at the moment.

• 11:50Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. The cool thing about this, for, for those who don't remember the Sam Bankman Freed guy, he's currently the wealthiest person, person from crypto, um, wealthiest known person from crypto. So, you know, nobody knows who Satoshi is, but Sam Bankman Freed is the next one. He's got like 15 or $20 billion net worth from crypto, including the exchange he created. And, um, he, if you talk, if you listen to interviews, he's like, not like any other crypto zealot. He just is like, uh, he's like, yeah, I don't care about crypto. Like I don't, I don't, I don't believe in it, not believe in it. People want this, so I made a product and like, that's his whole mindset. And he also is like, uh, obsessed with this idea of like, I forgot what it's called. There's some like a philanthropic thing he's really into, like, uh, Sam, do you remember the name of this? It's like charitable ambition or some shit like that. It's like,

• 12:34Sam Parr?

  Yeah. He basically, he was basically, uh, it, the basically the idea is like, I'm just going to get as wealthy as possible and give it all away to different stuff. And it's okay for me to be incredibly ambitious and do this thing, these things I don't really care about because I'm just giving it away anyway.

• 12:49Shaan Puri?

  And he's giving it away like during his lifetime.

• 12:50Sam Parr?

  Said last year's, all right, breakout company, you go first.

• 12:53Shaan Puri?

  All right, breakout company. I have, um, I have OpenSea. So just to give you a sense of OpenSea's crazy growth.

• 13:01Sam Parr?

  I had that too, by the way.

• 13:02Shaan Puri?

  Started in 2017 and the, the bear market hit like pretty much immediately. And I know people who were building like their competitors and they ended up folding because it was just like, there was no interest. And these guys were like, you know, the cockroaches that just stayed alive. And in 20, uh, basically they, in 2020, so last year they did $24 million in GMV. Pretty small overall.

• 13:28Sam Parr?

  And they get 10% of that?

• 13:31Shaan Puri?

  They have, I don't know what their take rate is, something like, I think it's even lower than that. I think it's 5% or something.

• 13:35Sam Parr?

  Okay, but in that range?

• 13:36Shaan Puri?

  So it was very small, 24 million in gross sales across the platform. That's not their sales, that's people buying from each other. So they just get a small take. This year, 15 billion. So going from 24 million to 15 billion in one year, that's 650X. To me, that's a breakout company. I know we've talked about them before, so it's not a big surprise, but I had to give it to them.

• 13:57Sam Parr?

  So I had that as well, but I came with the backup because I actually thought that you were gonna pick that. So I had OpenSea as well. I think it's amazing that they basically just kind of created a market and I think that's pretty badass. Or at least they're part of a market that was non-existent a couple of years ago. All right, so my second one is someone who we talked about. I'm gonna botch his first name, but his last name is Levels. What's his first name?

• 14:18Shaan Puri?

  Peter Levels.

• 14:19Andrew Wilkinson?

  Peter.

• 14:20Sam Parr?

  Is it Peter? Is it just Peter? Okay.

• 14:22Andrew Wilkinson?

  I think it's Peter.

• 14:23Sam Parr?

  I thought it was a weird pronunciation.

• 14:25Andrew Wilkinson?

  Let's call him Peter, just to bother him.

• 14:26Sam Parr?

  I thought it was Peter, to be honest, but I'm gonna call him Peter. All right, so this guy-

• 14:30Andrew Wilkinson?

  It's Peter, like theater. That's how we're gonna call him.

• 14:32Sam Parr?

  That's what I thought it was. I thought there was an I in there in some weird area. All right, we talked about this guy a couple of episodes ago, but I've actually been paying attention to him for like three years. And as far as I can tell, it's a one-person business. And for the longest time, he would reveal all of his revenue. And for years, it was like $200,000 or $300,000 a year in revenue. And he has a bunch of different products. He's got nomadlist.com, remotok.com, workers.co. He even has a cool website called Rebase, which is all about going to Portugal, moving to Portugal. So he's got like eight different websites. For the longest time, only like $300,000, $500,000 a year in revenue. Like neat, but not that cool. This year, he got close to $5 million in revenue. And for a one-person internet business, that's pretty phenomenal.

• 15:17Sam Parr?

  And the remote thing has basically kind of caught up with him and he's crushing it. And this guy's an artist. I love him. I think so. He's kind of his own entity and I think that he, for me, was the breakout person of the year behind Open-

• 15:30Andrew Wilkinson?

  Yeah, I think like that guy kind of has my dream life, which is funny that I say that because I do own similar businesses. But I've always, I've always like fetishized the idea of being a one-person entrepreneur and being able to do that level of revenue. I just kind of got ahead of myself. And it's so interesting, I think I have a lot of respect for him because I think he still shares his numbers. Most of the guys that get to this scale, they almost always stop sharing because everyone realizes how much money they're making.

• 15:57Sam Parr?

  I have a story of a guy who's going to come on the pod soon and he, I've been talking to him and he made 10 million a year in profit in the early 2000s from a lyric website.

• 16:13Sam Parr?

  That was around for years. So I have a one person.

• 16:15Andrew Wilkinson?

  Was it Maloon, Maloon Tessavich?

• 16:17Sam Parr?

  No, but he is.

• 16:19Andrew Wilkinson?

  A similar, similar story.

• 16:20Sam Parr?

  He's a, he's a Russian Jewish guy. Is that guy a Russian Jewish guy?

• 16:23Shaan Puri?

  Didn't, didn't that guy also make like a drink company or something?

• 16:27Sam Parr?

  Not a drink company.

• 16:28Andrew Wilkinson?

  Eastern European.

• 16:29Sam Parr?

  Oh, my guy. No.

• 16:30Shaan Puri?

  Okay. That guy Maloon, didn't he do something else that's really remarkable now? Like he did the lyrics thing and isn't he doing some other interesting stuff?

• 16:37Andrew Wilkinson?

  He works at Expa. He's a partner at Expa.

• 16:40Shaan Puri?

  Gotcha. All right, Andrew, who do you have? Sam has this like weird indie breakout company. That's not a company. It's just.

• 16:45Sam Parr?

  Bro, I chose OBC. That's, that's the most obvious one. I chose that. I chose that one too. So I had to get unique.

• 16:52Shaan Puri?

  So far, I'm Mr. Obvious. Sam's Mr. Suck Up and let's see if Andrew's got something good here.

• 16:56Andrew Wilkinson?

  So.

• 16:57Sam Parr?

  I wasn't trying to be better. I was just trying to be different.

• 17:00Andrew Wilkinson?

  So, so if there's one thing I really, really don't like, it's middlemen, realtors, investment bankers, that kind of stuff. So I love this company, MicroAcquire. For a long time, if you wanted to buy a tech business, you were going to these crappy listing websites with really low, like really sketchy sites with really low quality businesses. And this guy, Andrew, basically came along and started this company called MicroAcquire. And it's for generally like profitable SaaS businesses on the web. And he's just done a really, really nice job of doing it. I'd say it's kind of like Zillow for buying a tech business. And I, you know, he kind of replaced Flippa and all these other kind of crappy websites. So I'm a big fan of what he's doing.

• 17:44Sam Parr?

  And he's picking fights with people.

• 17:45Andrew Wilkinson?

  Just raised like 10 million bucks or something like that.

• 17:47Shaan Puri?

  We're all investors, I think, right?

• 17:49Sam Parr?

  I am.

• 17:51Shaan Puri?

  I didn't invest, but, but I think it's a good one.

• 17:54Sam Parr?

  Well, I invested a small, a very small amount, like $5,000 or $1,000 or something like tiny. But he, uh, he's picking fights with people online too. He's kind of making himself to be a kind of a villain to a certain group of people, which we'll see if that ends up being a good idea.

• 18:09Shaan Puri?

  Who's he going after?

• 18:10Sam Parr?

  I forget.

• 18:11Shaan Puri?

  The funny thing is, I think he was going after like, uh, he's basically saying like, he, he went after two groups. So he's like, first like bootstrappers need like some love, like, you know, if you're a profitable company, like, why is that getting no attention? And then the second thing is he's going after TechCrunch because they don't cover those types of companies. They just, they're basically work for the VCs. It's kind of like his angle. It's like, it's a good angle. He created a rival publication, I think called The Bootstrappers to just take a shot at TechCrunch. Um, of like, I will cover these companies if you guys aren't going to. But then the only hypocrisy is that he's raising a bunch of venture capital. So I think, you know, that part, you know, breaks down a little bit. Uh, but I think he's doing a good job of picking a fight. And this is general's Twitter strategy, which is if you like, totally sell out to your mission, which is like both a good and a bad thing.

• 18:56Shaan Puri?

  You could just like, there's a guy who, um, uh, I was friendly with Chris Hurd. He created a company that's around remote work and they help basically like manage companies like laptops and desks. Their desk setup, uh, when you work from home, they'll help you as a company, manage your workers' desk setups. And, uh, so he just, every tweet is just about how remote work is taking over and how everything else is going to die. And it'll just be, he's just, that's the propaganda machine. And you just keep beating that drum every day, every day. He just keeps talking about how the office is dead, remote work is going up.

• 19:28Sam Parr?

  But he cannot be wrong.

• 19:29Shaan Puri?

  And yeah, and it's just like, you know, a total like brainwashing of content. But you know, it's, it's pretty effective when people do do that. I, I can't really bring myself to do that exactly, but it works.

• 19:40Sam Parr?

  Okay. So who, um, I would give it to OpenSea.

• 19:44Shaan Puri?

  Oh, I'm getting it. Okay. Great. I love it.

• 19:47Sam Parr?

  Right?

• 19:47Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, great.

• 19:48Sam Parr?

  Microacquire is cool, but OpenSea is just, there's levels.

• 19:52Shaan Puri?

  And Microacquire.

• 19:52Andrew Wilkinson?

  Honestly, I would do yours, man. I think yours is the most unique, right? I think OpenSea had a big win, but it's like, you know, I think venture backed, kind of like of the moment crypto stuff. Mine, I think everyone knows about, but I think what Peter's doing is very unique. And it's just, when you think about lifestyle, I think he has the best possible lifestyle of any of the people you mentioned.

• 20:15Shaan Puri?

  What's that story where a guy goes to a party hosted by whoever, like, you know, some Rockefeller type, it's like, you know, and his friend is saying, this guy's the richest man in the world. He's got everything. He's got this, he's got that, he's got cars, he's got servants, he's got everything. And then the guy who was the guest goes, yeah, but I have something he'll never have. Enough.

• 20:32Sam Parr?

  Enough.

• 20:33Shaan Puri?

  And, um, yeah, that's the.

• 20:35Andrew Wilkinson?

  Kurt Vonnegut.

• 20:36Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it was Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller, I think, right?

• 20:40Shaan Puri?

  So that's the, the version of, you know, Andrew, you had Peter levels, but you, you didn't have enough. And so you kept going. And there's a part of you that envies that lifestyle still. All right, we're giving it to Sam.

• 20:50Andrew Wilkinson?

  And once you start, once you start, once you get an office, once you have employees, you have this beast to feed. Whereas Peter could just check out.

• 20:57Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 20:58Sam Parr?

  I, one of these days, we should do a story of someone who has done that, who went one way and then just said, ah, fuck it, we're gonna go the opposite. And went back.

• 21:06Andrew Wilkinson?

  I love those stories.

• 21:07Sam Parr?

  All right, I get this one. All right. So the unsexy, simple business that you saw this year, I'll go first. We talked about it, this guy named Quinn, I think his name is Quinn Emmett? Is that the guy's name?

• 21:18Shaan Puri?

  Snyder, right?

• 21:19Sam Parr?

  Is it Snyder? I don't remember what it was. But he had a vent, he had a vending machine business. And he started, he was just worked in sales at like some tech company. And I did like a little checkup on him. He's doing like $30,000 a month in revenue and half of that is profit. And he basically started with $1,500. He's got some vending machines throughout his city. I forget where he is, California, I think. Started with $1,500. Now he has software that tells him when the things need to get refilled. And he says he only works 10 hours a week on it. I think that's pretty cool. I think that's pretty awesome.

• 21:53Andrew Wilkinson?

  I love that.

• 21:53Shaan Puri?

  By the way, Quinn Snyder is a basketball coach. So definitely, he's definitely not Quinn Snyder, he's something else.

• 21:59Sam Parr?

  I think it was Emmett, Quinn Emmett.

• 22:01Shaan Puri?

  Andrew, who you got for best unsexy or simple business that you saw this year? I feel like you see a ton of these. So this is probably the easiest category for you.

• 22:09Andrew Wilkinson?

  I see a lot and I looked, I looked at a bunch of ones that people had brought us and I just, I can't really share, but this is one I came across recently that I think is genius. So some guy, um, he went and he basically built a fake interior of a private jet in Los Angeles. Like they used like a movie set or whatever, and then they just rent it out to influencers so that they can take photos where it looks like they're on a private jet, but they're not. And they charged 70 bucks an hour. I think it's booked out like 12 hours a day, probably doing like 20 to 40 K a month. And I can't imagine the margins would be less than 80%. And I was like, that's fucking amazing. You could just build this thing, hire a bunch of people in the movie business to build it over a weekend. And then, you know, you can own that for like years.

• 22:51Sam Parr?

  What was it called?

• 22:52Andrew Wilkinson?

  Uh, it's LA Private Jet Studio. It's on Pure Space, which is like a, um, a photo, photo shoot, like a studio listing.

• 23:01Sam Parr?

  That's awesome. That is so.

• 23:02Shaan Puri?

  That's a great one. Um, all right. I have one. I'm going to steal this from our friend of the pod, Codie Sanchez. Uh, Sam, you sent this link earlier and I think this is a great one.

• 23:11Sam Parr?

  Did you take the one that I sent you? Cause she has a bunch of good ones.

• 23:14Shaan Puri?

  That's what I'm, I'm taking. It was better than the one I had. So I was like, oh, this is, we'll use this one instead. So she, by the way, her Tik Tok is blown up. So she's always on my.

• 23:22Sam Parr?

  I know. She's crazy dude. Her last one just got 10 million views.

• 23:25Shaan Puri?

  That's insane. Like her, she has half a million followers now on Tik Tok. I always see them when I'm, because I use Tik Tok a bunch and I'm always like, oh, like I was, in my head, I would just see like, I don't know, 30 comments. I'd be like, ah, you know, Tik Tok's so hard. And like, when I saw that, it actually has added up. It's just, you know, yet another reminder of the value of just keep going, compound the, the winds over time. So she was doing this thing. She goes, here's a boring business that, um, that, that you love. And, um, it's called American striping. And all it is, is this woman owns this business and it just paints the, the white line that you need for like a road, like lane, basically, or like a parking spot. You know, it's like, oh, I need

• 24:08Shaan Puri?

  to paint these white, straight lines. And so she has this company, American striping. They can start about three years ago. And, you know, $400,000 the first year, 7 million the second year, 15 million almost the third year, and just crushing it, just absolutely crushing it.

• 24:24Sam Parr?

  And according to Cody, 70% profit.

• 24:26Shaan Puri?

  Yes, exactly. Some of the 60, 70% profit margins. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know much about it because again, my research was watching this TikTok five minutes before this pod, but what a beautiful business and what a, you know, what a great reminder that like, you know, you, you read about Elon Musk and you're like, oh, I have to like send rockets to Mars. And then you read about the girl who's like, I draw straight white lines and I can make millions of dollars a year. And it just reminds you, you know, you can win the game any, anyway. So she's my pick.

• 24:54Sam Parr?

  I love that. I, um, I'd vote for that one.

• 24:57Shaan Puri?

  Okay, I'm going to take that in honor of Cody. So we are at 111 right now. So we're one each. By the way, I have a little honorable mention here, an unsexy business that's done extremely well. Have you guys looked at Crocs stock?

• 25:11Sam Parr?

  Yeah, crushing it. Thanks to Post Malone.

• 25:14Shaan Puri?

  Dude, 2020, when the pandemic happened, so March 2020, you could, you could have bought a pair of Crocs for, I don't know how much Crocs go for, let's call it a hundred bucks, maybe there's a little less. You could buy a pair of Crocs and you could buy the stock for $10 a share. It's now up 13X in one year. Just during the pandemic was good to Crocs. And I just thought that was like an amazing winner out of this like pandemic time. Is it Post Malone? Is that who's driving it?

• 25:40Sam Parr?

  He was, he kind of hopped on that trend really early and then they created this new thing called like Crocs. I forget what they're called, but they're like charms that you put on your Crocs. And if you drive around the Midwest or in the South.

• 25:52Shaan Puri?

  Like, how do we make it uglier? What could we do? Ah, let's dangle charms off of them.

• 25:57Sam Parr?

  Do you know what I'm talking about?

• 25:57Shaan Puri?

  My, my wife is obsessed with these and she buys them for our kids and puts them on their Crocs.

• 26:02Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's like, like a, you get like a soccer ball, like pin or like a football pin or like some cartoon. And the kids are obsessed with it and they're crushing it right now. Post Malone started making them popular and a lot of country, um, music people like Luke Combs, who you probably have no idea who that is, started wearing camouflage Crocs.

• 26:22Shaan Puri?

  Gotcha. Yeah. Who knew? Uh, who knew? By the way, Sam, I got another real quick pop quiz for you. Hands up. So I see you're not, and you're not looking it up. I want you to guess the monthly visitors to onlyfans.com.

• 26:36Sam Parr?

  20 million a month?

• 26:38Shaan Puri?

  Okay, you're close. It's 250 million. You're off by 10x in order of magnitude.

• 26:42Sam Parr?

  Is it really?

• 26:43Shaan Puri?

  That was gonna be my other unsexy business was actually the business of sexy. Which was like, I had no idea they they get 250 million visitors per month. That's insane.

• 26:52Sam Parr?

  That'd be one of the top websites in the world.

• 26:54Shaan Puri?

  Then there's another one called Chatterbait. That's, you know, a broke man's version of OnlyFans. I think it's 300 million. Oh, my God, it's insane. So, you know.

• 27:03Sam Parr?

  But didn't, didn't OnlyFans, did they say that they're no longer allowing nudity?

• 27:07Shaan Puri?

  They did for a second and then they reversed course on that.

• 27:09Sam Parr?

  That's stupid. That's like Pornhub saying like, no more porn.

• 27:12Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, Facebook's like, no more photos. You know, it doesn't work.

• 27:15Sam Parr?

  That's so stupid.

• 27:17Shaan Puri?

  By the way, average visit duration, four minutes.

• 27:22Shaan Puri?

  All right, we'll go to the next category. Your best investment. Okay, so what was your best investment of 2021? Let's kick it off with Andrew.

• 27:31Andrew Wilkinson?

  So I would, the boring answer is Aeropress, but I've already talked about that on the pod. We bought that maybe four or five months ago and that's been awesome so far, but that story hasn't played out yet. So the one, and we haven't really done that much in the last year. So the best one thing that I've been buying myself is actually a company called Pershing Square Holdings. I don't think I've talked about it. So I have about 95% of my net worth in Tiny and our kind of core businesses. But I've been quietly building kind of a backup forever rich retirement portfolio of stocks, real estate, brick and mortar businesses. We own a chain of restaurants, we own a hotel.

• 28:12Shaan Puri?

  Wait, what restaurants?

• 28:12Andrew Wilkinson?

  A bunch of conventional stuff. I just own a bunch of restaurants in Victoria.

• 28:17Sam Parr?

  What does that mean?

• 28:18Andrew Wilkinson?

  We own a hotel in St. Louis.

• 28:20Sam Parr?

  Oh, with Marshall?

• 28:22Andrew Wilkinson?

  Yeah, yeah, with Marshall, exactly.

• 28:24Sam Parr?

  Is the hotel business cool?

• 28:26Andrew Wilkinson?

  It's amazing. Basically, we bought this, that we bought like a apartment building and converted it into all Airbnb. And we took it from, we bought it super cheap and now it's yielding really nicely.

• 28:37Shaan Puri?

  Are you a billionaire? Maybe you're my Billy of the year.

• 28:40Andrew Wilkinson?

  I don't think not yet. Working on it.

• 28:43Shaan Puri?

  It sounds like, uh, it sounds like you had to think about it. That means you might be round upping to it.

• 28:49Andrew Wilkinson?

  No, I don't think I am. I don't really, I don't really have like a good picture on that stuff.

• 28:55Sam Parr?

  That's a good answer, though.

• 28:56Andrew Wilkinson?

  To be honest, a lot of our businesses.

• 28:57Sam Parr?

  If the answer is, I don't think I am, then the answer, then that's a good sign.

• 29:02Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, what's that? People say that a lot.

• 29:03Andrew Wilkinson?

  I don't, I don't spend a lot of, I don't spend a lot of time on that stuff because, you know, a lot of people who are billionaires on paper, like, you know, it doesn't really matter, right? You could invest in some startup, it could get valued at $20 billion. You can own 1%, whatever. Like, I just don't, I don't spend too much time on that. So, anyway, I've been thinking about this and I go, if everything goes pear-shaped, I want to still be rich and I want to have enough money to live a great life. And so-

• 29:30Sam Parr?

  And that's by that guy you like, right?

• 29:31Shaan Puri?

  Bill Ackman.

• 29:33Andrew Wilkinson?

  Yeah, yeah. So, I've been following Bill for five or six years and I found that he had this holding company called Pershing Square Holdings. And what he did is really smart. So, he, he had a hedge fund and when you have a hedge fund, you have a whole bunch of investors and they, they give you cash to invest. But at any given time, they can freak out and they can take their money back. So, you could be in a down, you know, you could own an amazing business and you could be forced to sell at the wrong time because an investor redeems. And so, he created this holding company in Amsterdam. I think he raised $4 billion and he called it Pershing Square Holdings. And it's basically a public holding company that just owns a bunch of stocks.

• 30:12Andrew Wilkinson?

  And it owns really great stuff. It owns Chipotle, Domino's, Hilton, Lowe's, restaurant brands international, so like Burger King, Popeyes, that kind of stuff, and Universal Music. And so, it's this really diversified, blue-chip stock portfolio. And as I dug into it, I realized that it perpetually trades at a discount to the net assets there. So, if there's $100 worth of stocks, it trades at about $70, meaning that the market could go down 30% before you've lost any money in the, in the portfolio. And then on top of that, you have Bill Ackman managing your money and he does crazy shit. Like, he, last year, he turned $25 million into $2.7 billion and I got to ride along with him on that.

• 30:55Andrew Wilkinson?

  So, anyway, I've been buying that almost exclusively. I've got probably like 60% of my portfolio in this and I just keep buying more and more every month. And I've quadrupled my money, I think, over the last couple of years.

• 31:08Shaan Puri?

  Did he do the, that, that crazy trade that he made last year, the COVID trade? Was that out of these vehicles or that was out of a separate vehicle?

• 31:16Andrew Wilkinson?

  Yeah, that was in this vehicle and anyone could have bought that.

• 31:19Shaan Puri?

  You told me about this and I did buy it actually last, last year, something like that.

• 31:23Sam Parr?

  Yeah, you've talked about this. You like.

• 31:26Shaan Puri?

  Okay, great. So that's a good one. Sam, what you got? Your best investment?

• 31:30Sam Parr?

  I bought a, I bought a, a big lot in Austin, kind of boring, but I bought a big lot in Austin. I used an asset backed loan. So I used cash to buy it. Like I told them I bought it in cash. In reality, it was a loan at a 1% interest rate. And I, it's not, the story again, hasn't played out, but it's already appreciated because I've gotten offers on it. But I'll make about $500,000 in tax-free profit with very little work. And the work that I've been doing on it is fun. I'm learning a skill. I'm learning how to develop a home profitably. So that, that's going to be my, it's probably not my best, just like investing in the S and P 500. That's up 30%. That, I mean, that's, but that's not much of an investment. I didn't do anything. And so the, uh, my, my Austin real estate

• 32:14Sam Parr?

  project will be the most like actively, think, active thing that I'm managing and make the most.

• 32:21Shaan Puri?

  That's a good one. By the way, the YouTube video on your personal YouTube channel, the Sampar or the Sampar is great.

• 32:27Sam Parr?

  Yeah, just my name.

• 32:27Shaan Puri?

  You, you show the, the lot, the, the kind of like the rundown shack that's there today. It's great.

• 32:32Sam Parr?

  It's fun, right?

• 32:34Shaan Puri?

  It's way more, and it, watch that. And what you just said will be way more entertaining. It's great.

• 32:39Andrew Wilkinson?

  But I also, I feel like you might make 500 grand, but if you'd made 5 million passively, it wouldn't feel as good as.

• 32:45Sam Parr?

  Exactly. That's why I'm saying it's my, it's bad because it's fun. Like it's, I'm basically developing a skill. And, and it's been quite fun and the tax implications are quite nice.

• 32:56Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's great. Okay, good. My, my best investment, I'm going to go with this startup that I invested in. So last year, I think it was last year. Yeah, last year I created a rolling fund and it's basically said, hey, if anybody wants to invest in startups alongside me, you know, you don't have to have the network. You don't have to have the knowledge. Uh, all you gotta have is the cash. You could do this. And I was like, okay. I wanted to start it. I was like, I want to start this off. I want to make it enticing for somebody to join because you could invest in a, a number of people who are. Professional full-time investors who've been doing this for a decade. So I was kind of thinking like, why would somebody invest in me? And so I said, let me juice it up a little bit. Let me put three of my personal angel investments into this deal, into this like fund.

• 33:39Shaan Puri?

  And so they'll be able to say, look, I get to sort of like, I get grandfathered into these deals that you've already done. That's very kind of you and stupid. It was self-serving. Like I wanted my fund to get subscribers quickly. So I was like, how do I provide more value here? Here's, here's some free value. Now, looking back, it actually has turned out to be very kind because the very first deal that I put in is a company called Deal, D E E L. And what Deal does is it's the easiest way to hire a contractor. So like I was paying, I wanted to hire this guy in Australia, the guy who actually first was editing our podcast. It's like, how do I pay this podcast editor in Australia? And so I was like, oh, um, you know, do I need to go get a lawyer to make a contract? And how do I pay them in his local currency? And then what are the compliance rules around that?

• 34:24Shaan Puri?

  How much taxes do I need to pay? Like, I don't, I don't understand all this. So I went to Deal and literally in five minutes, I was like, here's the guy's name, here's his email address, here's where he lives. It's like, here's a contract. It's like, would you like to add a confidentiality clause? Yeah, yeah, toss that in. It's like guac on my burrito. Like, you know, I'll go for that. And then it was like, great, it's sent for signature and the payments will come out of your bank account and it'll pay him in Australian dollars automatically every month. And I was like, wow, that was like, kind of magical. It basically replaced, you know, what a bunch of humans would have to do. So I loved it. So I ended up chasing down the founder and I was like, yo, your product is amazing. How do I invest in this? And he was like, oh, you know, I'd love to have you.

• 35:05Shaan Puri?

  And I didn't invest right then and then, you know, when I followed up, he was like, oh dude, we just closed a thing. Sorry, I forgot. Like, you know, you didn't follow up. So, so I missed the first round. And then I almost missed the second round. What was the valuation of the first one? First one might've been, I don't remember exactly, but it's like a startup, you know, like maybe 12 million cap or 20 million cap, something like that. And so he's like, don't worry, I'll get you into the next round. I was like, okay, great. So he messages me one day, he says, brother, like, you know, I got your spot for you. Next round's coming together. Let me know. I'm like, oh, I'm in 25K, no questions asked. He's like, great, got you in. And I was like, I was like, actually, you know, one question, I guess. What is the valuation actually? What does it happen to be? And he's like, you know, I don't know if I can say this, probably I can say this, it was like.

• 35:50Shaan Puri?

  Million and I was like, what? And I was like, uh, and I was like, okay. And I didn't want to go back on my work because I, I like the product. I like the founder a lot. And I was like, I'd said I'm in, so I'm in. And I was like, ah, shit. Okay, whatever. And then I was like, you know, do you have like crazy traction? Like, how are you getting this, this thing? And he's like, you know, we're doing well, but like, you know, he told me the number and I was like, that's an absurd valuation for this thing. I was like, who's doing this deal? And it was Andreessen was doing the deal. I was like, these guys are nuts. Uh, well, I don't know why they're doing this, but whatever. I wrote the check, did it anyways. It was valued this year at five and a half billion. Um, like, you know, two years later, they said he,

• 36:31Shaan Puri?

  and the founder tweeted this out, so I can share this. They ramped up revenue from four million to 50 million in ARR in one year. And, um, they went from 50 employees to 550 employees in one year. And so this is just like an insane amount of traction. That's like, you know, actually Andreessen knew what they were doing. They, you know, they, they bet on this before because I think the, the revenue was definitely less than four million at the time is, it was valued at 200 million. And so, you know, the value investor in Andrew would have been dying in that moment. It just didn't make any sense. It didn't make sense to me even, but this has turned out to be a pretty amazing deal, uh, you know.

• 37:04Sam Parr?

  So if not including dilution, which is a big factor here, so take that for what it's worth. So 12 million into five and a half billion is 458. So your $25,000 in that 12 round would have been worth over $11 million.

• 37:20Shaan Puri?

  Yes, exactly. And my buddy, my buddy Ryan did that deal at that, at that round and reminded me as such about like the crazy markup. And so, you know, the 25 K has turned into half a million, but man, that, that's the difference between half a million and 12 million was following up.

• 37:36Sam Parr?

  Oh, my God. All right.

• 37:40Shaan Puri?

  So wait, is this my best investment or worst investment? Maybe this is my worst investment, actually.

• 37:43Sam Parr?

  I mean, 25 K to half a million is good.

• 37:46Shaan Puri?

  By the way, well, it would have been good. And then I put it in the, the rolling fund. So now, you know, most of the economics went to my investors.

• 37:51Sam Parr?

  Dude, that's crazy. That, that, that mistake, that's a $10 million mistake.

• 37:55Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. And it was, uh, by the way, this was a period of like, I don't know, less than a year between the, between like when, when one round happened and the next round happened. So, you know, could have, uh, Could have, would have, should have. All right. So who are we giving this round to? Best investment? Me? Okay. For my sob story, at least I have, at least I have this to lean back on. All right, let's go to worst investment. What was your worst investment of 2021?

• 38:19Sam Parr?

  I'll go first. Mine's easy. Zillow. I bought Zillow.

• 38:23Shaan Puri?

  I'm with you on that one.

• 38:24Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I, I, I only bought three stocks, individual stocks this year. One was Playboy. And Playboy kind of makes sense because only a billion dollar valuation, 200 million in revenue. And I thought the brand was easily worth that. I'm actually thinking about buying Aston Martin stock. Aston Martin is only valued at like one or $2 billion. It's like the cheapest car maker. But I think they're going to have a resurgence. So I'm thinking about doing that. But I bought Playboy thinking that was my logic and I was wrong. But then Zillow was way wrong. Zillow was wrong because I bought at its most expensive point.

• 38:56Shaan Puri?

  Tell people why we bought this stock.

• 38:57Sam Parr?

  We bought it because we're in this chat group and our friend Nikita and Austin Reef were like, Zillow's the greatest thing ever. And so I bought like 25 or 50 grand worth of Zillow. And I agreed with them. I thought, yeah, you know, you're right. Like whenever I go to a fancy neighborhood, I just pull up Zillow and I like browse it all the time. It's kind of a category definer, like defining company. Like I'm on board with Zillow. I thought, well, how much were they worth when we bought like 15 or 20?

• 39:21Shaan Puri?

  I don't know. It's down 56%. So I bought 100K and now my 100K is 44K left.

• 39:27Sam Parr?

  It made sense. Like I don't regret it. I like, I'm on board with it. But the problem was is that it went down just because like we were wrong. Then it went down because they fucked it up with buying all those houses and it went down even more. Yeah. So we were wrong like twice.

• 39:41Shaan Puri?

  And by the way, they, they, they lost 56% of their value in a year where the housing market went like bananas. So, you know, it's not like there was something out of their control and their industry that was doing poorly. You know?

• 39:53Andrew Wilkinson?

  Didn't, didn't Rich Barton come back or something? Was he the guy? He's the original founder and a really great investor.

• 40:00Shaan Puri?

  And a great CEO, a great entrepreneur.

• 40:02Andrew Wilkinson?

  Yeah. And, and he came back and he tried to do the house buying stuff. I would still, I would honestly

• 40:08Sam Parr?

  Now it's a buy on that.

• 40:09Andrew Wilkinson?

  I think he'll probably, he'll probably pull a rabbit out of his hat.

• 40:12Sam Parr?

  I think it's a great company. It's awesome. I think basically what happened was a bunch of bad stuff happened, including one TikTok went really viral explaining how like they're evil because they're like big corporations buying hundreds of homes and that totally fucked them. If anyone's, TikTok is the winner here.

• 40:29Andrew Wilkinson?

  The fact that they haven't disintermediated real, realtors though, like the fact you can't, or maybe you can, and I'm just not aware, but I just want to be able to list my house on Zillow and then have an open outcry auction one day, like where you say like, on this day, I want to have an auction, everyone's going to bid and then we'll get the maximum price and they do all the paperwork. Like that would be amazing.

• 40:47Sam Parr?

  I invested in a, I invested in a company that does that. They were called Rumor. It's kind of a silly name, but they rechange it to also a silly name. It's called Dorsey. So yeah, I gotta. Dorsey's not bad. I like Dorsey. So Dor.

• 41:01Andrew Wilkinson?

  Dorsey's fine.

• 41:01Sam Parr?

  It's like the word door and then S E Y. And it's a live home auction and it started by the guy who started Hello, Alfred. Kind of a cool company. I just sent it to you in the chat. Yeah. So Zillow was your worst investment.

• 41:16Andrew Wilkinson?

  Hey, just before we jump, I want to know about Playboy. So what's the, what's the thesis there? Like they still have the magazine. Obviously it's kind of a, you know, there's a lot of legacy.

• 41:25Sam Parr?

  Is it 200 million from licensing? Because it can't be the magazine. Like where's the money coming from? Yeah. Merchandise, basically. And so they own the, they, they own the Playboy mansion, which is worth nine figures, I believe. And they recently did a SPAC in 2020. And so they reported $200 million in revenue in 2021, or that's what the forecast is going to be. When I invested, I think their market cap was just a hair above one billion. And basically my, my logic, right now it's one, exactly one billion. My logic was basically like, I'm pretty sure that brand is worth more than that. Like if they just like put their logo on stuff. I was like, I know young people don't really care about it as much, but I think that brand's pretty valuable. And I couldn't

• 42:09Sam Parr?

  put a value on it, but I thought it was above what they were trading for. So it was kind of, I kind of just made a kind of a gut call, but it's down half.

• 42:18Andrew Wilkinson?

  Wasn't it, it was a guy, the guy who bought that was the guy who bought Twinkies or Hostess or something random?

• 42:23Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Yeah. Like, um.

• 42:26Andrew Wilkinson?

  Yeah. He was the guy who bought Twinkies, made a ton of money on it, then he bought Playboy.

• 42:30Sam Parr?

  I think.

• 42:31Andrew Wilkinson?

  It is a, I mean, it's a very iconic, it's a really iconic brand.

• 42:34Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and I know that like they tried, I had a friend that tried, that almost bought, uh, this guy, the guys at the Chive almost sold to Playboy and they told me about going to the mansion and they told me that they, Playboy was thinking about selling the mansion and they told me like how much it was worth. And it was, it's like a crazy high number. And I thought, well, fuck, just with this stuff, like this is worth more than the.

• 42:54Shaan Puri?

  If you're OnlyFans, why would you not just buy Playboy?

• 42:57Sam Parr?

  I think it's really interesting.

• 42:58Andrew Wilkinson?

  You don't need it.

• 42:59Shaan Puri?

  That, that brand, I mean, what's it worth that, you know, I don't know, 500 million people know your name and associate it like? That's gotta be worth to, to a company that has a money printer, you know, if you are a money printer, what, what does it take to accelerate your brand like that? That, I don't know, that's.

• 43:16Andrew Wilkinson?

  Well, let's be, let's be real. I mean, Tai Lopez is gonna buy it. Turn it into some sort of crypto thing.

• 43:21Shaan Puri?

  Tai Lopez.

• 43:22Sam Parr?

  All right, where are you? What's yours, Andrew?

• 43:24Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 43:26Andrew Wilkinson?

  So mine, I can't say what it is. We didn't actually announce the business, but so the mistake we made is we bought an Ember. What I mean by that is it's like this little tiny Ember and it could turn into a bonfire if you blow on it a lot, but you have to be very attentive. And we're not set up to be attentive. We're kind of management by neglect. We buy these businesses, we plug in CEOs and then they go on to do great. And the problem is when you have this little tiny startup, this is a business, it was a real business with real revenue and profits, but it was very small and we liked what we saw, but the problem is we couldn't attract someone great to run it. And so the business, the Ember just kind of burnt out over time and we ended up spending like a million bucks.

• 44:09Andrew Wilkinson?

  So it was just a total money bonfire and pointless and unsatisfying. And so the lesson for us is just board a cruise ship, you know, don't, don't try and build your own boat.

• 44:20Sam Parr?

  That's a good analogy, two good analogies, Ember and cruise ship.

• 44:22Shaan Puri?

  Um, all right, my worst investment.

• 44:26Shaan Puri?

  I'm going to give you the fast answer because I think we're going to run short on time. All right. Mine is holding COVID winners for too long. So I had this amazing run up on Zoom stock, Fastly, which is a like, you know, like a cloud, what's it called, a CDN, and Agora, which does like, you know, voice and video SDKs. So they power Clubhouse and things like that. And I own these stocks. They ran up like crazy, you know, 2X, 3X, or whatever, in like, a very short amount of time. And then they've all come crashing back down to earth, you know, in the last six months or so. And so I lost money just by holding on to the COVID winners for too long, even when, like, for example, with

• 45:07Shaan Puri?

  Agora, I got in because I knew Clubhouse was growing, but then I was the one who kind of almost like famously called that Clubhouse is going to fail and is going to tank. And yet I still held my Agora, I forgot to sell my Agora stock and it's cut in half. You know, so that that sort of thing. So I would say my, I lost a nice chunk of change, holding my COVID winners for too long.

• 45:28Andrew Wilkinson?

  How awesome would it be if you could short private companies? Like, imagine if you saw Clubhouse and you could go and short it. And maybe, maybe there is a way to do it. If anyone has any ideas, I'd love to hear them. But

• 45:39Shaan Puri?

  There's a crypto way to do these. Stuff like that's quite obvious. Have you ever used Polymarket? It's basically like a crypto betting, like a bookie, basically. But you could bet on anything. You could bet on sports games. You could bet, will Joe Biden get COVID? You could bet whatever. And it's only a yes or no. So there's, so, and the market sets the line. So basically, if everybody thinks yes, then proportionately, no will be rewarded. Like, if you bet no, but 2/3 of people bet yes, you're going to get a payout more than 1 to 1 on your money, because you're taking the underdog side of things. And, and so there's a, so this idea of prediction markets works really well in crypto. And so there's, there's a few of these that are out there. I love betting on Polymarket.

• 46:23Andrew Wilkinson?

  Dude, we should do, we should do an annual betting episode where we all make predictions and bets, and then we put it on Polymarket, and we have to put our own money up.

• 46:31Shaan Puri?

  I'm down. Do you still stand by that? What's the update on Clubhouse?

• 46:36Sam Parr?

  Are you gonna be right?

• 46:37Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it looks like it. The charts all, you know, it's a, it looks like Mount Everest, right? It goes up and then it goes straight down.

• 46:45Sam Parr?

  There's not a world where like, it's just like, maybe not growing a ton, but they still have like a million people a day using it or something like that.

• 46:52Shaan Puri?

  Well, look, you never count out an entrepreneur. Those guys are really talented entrepreneurs. They can always pivot. It's that, you know, the product as it is today did not become what people bet on it to become, right? Andreessen Bet put it a $4 billion price tag on it, basically betting that it's going to become like a Twitter, it's going to become a Facebook or a Snap. And it's not happening. That hasn't happened. The one good thing is that they, they have the same kind of like hype cycle or not hype, I shouldn't say that, but like a trend fad cycle in different countries. So like in India, they'll get like, it happened in America, they got super popular and then usage faded, it wasn't super sticky. And then the same thing will happen in India. It'll get super popular and then it'll start to fade in popularity. And so the overall numbers aren't like totally zero, but it's

• 47:37Shaan Puri?

  the problem is if you're a leaky bucket, you're a leaky bucket. It's just a matter of time till the water's gone and that's, I don't know, I think, I think I'm right, but I don't, honestly, I don't pay too much attention to it, but people will often tweet at me charts of their downloads going down to be like, you were right. So that's all I know is basically people cherry picking evidence.

• 47:53Sam Parr?

  Andrew, Andrew Chen's got to come on the pod, you know that, right?

• 47:56Shaan Puri?

  Oh, is he? Yeah. Will he be able to talk to me or am I blocked from the pod too?

• 47:59Sam Parr?

  We'll see.

• 48:00Shaan Puri?

  He'll block you, he'll mute you.

• 48:02Sam Parr?

  Who's the winner on that one?

• 48:04Shaan Puri?

  Um, I'm gonna go, I like, I think Andrew had a good lesson in there.

• 48:09Sam Parr?

  All right, we'll go with that.

• 48:10Shaan Puri?

  Oh, that's, we're gonna go Andrew there.

• 48:12Sam Parr?

  All right, let me, I'm gonna, I'm gonna combine the next one. Can I do that?

• 48:16Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 48:17Sam Parr?

  Okay, so I'm gonna combine it with favorite digital tool, favorite physical tool, and best product under 100 and above 1,000. And I'll, and I'll go first. So favorite digital is True Bill. Andrew, you should use True Bill. You said that you forget subscriptions. True Bill is awesome. Like just today, I didn't realize that me and my wife both had an Amazon Prime membership. True Bill, I paid like 50 bucks. Oh no, or $10. It's like really cheap. And it's a sick app that syncs your bank account and tells you the subscriptions that you have and it makes it easy to cancel it. Have you heard of that?

• 48:51Andrew Wilkinson?

  Sweet.

• 48:51Sam Parr?

  They just got acquired.

• 48:52Andrew Wilkinson?

  I don't, I don't know if it works in Canada, but it looks awesome.

• 48:55Sam Parr?

  For $1.3 billion by Rocket Mortgages, your guy Dan Gilbert. So pretty awesome. Favorite physical tool is, this is kind of physical, is a $50 app called Camo. That's let you use your iPhone for like high def video calls. Pretty amazing. And then favorite product that was above, uh, that was under a hundred was lock a box. It's a $38 box that I keep in my pantry that my wife knows the code of. And she puts things that I don't want to have, that I don't have self-control. So she'll put like sweets in there. And sometimes if I want to lock my phone for the weekend, she'll put it in there. So that's awesome.

• 49:36Sam Parr?

  And then above a thousand, I bought a fancy car, a Mercedes, that AMG station wagon that I love.

• 49:42Shaan Puri?

  Dude, that was great. Okay, Andrew, so, so we're doing digital product, physical product, or kind of like a, a, a cheap or expensive thing you liked?

• 49:50Andrew Wilkinson?

  Okay, so digital product, consumerlab.com. So it's like 49 bucks a year and it's basically wire cutter, but for food and supplements. So everything from like vitamin D to seaweed snacks to baby food. They buy every single brand, they test it and it's pretty shocking. Like I just today learned that the seaweed snacks that I've been giving my kids, you know, have like a bunch of arsenic in them. Right? So it's just crazy stuff that could affect your life. My favorite physical tool is this amazing thing that my wife gifted for me randomly that I never thought I would use. It's basically this game called the loser game and you play it with friends and you basically all draw a card. And on each card is a really kind of fucked up, deep question.

• 50:35Andrew Wilkinson?

  So, um, for example, um, how have you blamed someone for an issue that was, if you're truly honest, largely your fault? Or name a surprising, basic, embarrassing gap in your knowledge? Or anyway, you go around in a circle, you answer this. I did this on a retreat with a couple of friends I did, and these were all guys I know really, really well. And I left going, holy shit, there's just so many cool stories and interesting. Facts that we don't know about one another and this game kind of elicits it. So that's been awesome. And then physical thing that I bought this year, I bought a house up at the lake, about 40 minutes out of town here. And it's been the best thing I could ever do. Just great place to go and hang out with family

• 51:18Andrew Wilkinson?

  and check out of work. And even though it's close, it feels like a whole other world away.

• 51:23Sam Parr?

  That's great. And I've seen the house. It's awesome.

• 51:25Shaan Puri?

  But I got a quick story on that thing you just said. My first business, I started with my two best friends from college. And this is a sushi business or whatever. We, we met the chef and the chef goes, he goes, he goes, you guys are, he goes, man, I love your guys is kind of like vibe. Like you guys are, I could tell you guys really like each other. He goes, how long you guys known each other? Like, did you just meet or? For a while, we're like, no, we've, and we were just saying, no, we're thick as thieves. We've known each other for years. And he goes, he goes, so you know, you guys know each other pretty well, huh? And we're like, yeah, like, why, why? He goes, he goes, Sean, what's, uh, what's the hardest thing Trevor's ever been through? I was like, uh, I have no idea. He's like, you know, like just name something maybe. And I was like, I honestly have no clue.

• 52:05Shaan Puri?

  And we did it. And all three of us had no idea of just what's the hardest thing that your, your best friend has been through. And, um, and he's like, oh, he goes, he goes, he goes, yeah, I kind of noticed this. He goes, y'all talk, but you don't have conversations. And I was like, oh shit, mic drop. And he goes, he goes, so you know, you don't need to do this now, but he's like, but try it like, go, go a little deeper. Just ask yourself these questions. And we did it that night. We kind of asked each other that question. And then by the end, we're all like, dude, I didn't know that about you. Like, I feel like I knew you way better, you know, like I really, I really know you now. And so that was a great reminder of like, sometimes these questions can, can take you, you know, further with your friends.

• 52:44Andrew Wilkinson?

  Totally. It's a superpower. One of the questions I ask people when I have lunch, I'll have like a small talk, you know, first time lunch with someone. And I'll just randomly try and ask them, are you happy? Or are you happy with where your life is right now? And it's weird. They will just go down a rabbit trail and tell you all sorts of crazy stuff you wouldn't normally tell somebody.

• 53:02Shaan Puri?

  Just mind fucking people throughout Victoria. All right. So I'll, it will, it just builds, builds connection, right? I'll do mine. Okay. So favorite. Digital thing, this app called Othership. It's a breathwork app. I do it every morning. I love it. It wakes me up. It makes me feel good. It slows me down and it speeds me up at the same time. It slows me down from just rushing into my day, feeling behind. And then it speeds me up because when I come out of it, I'm like, I feel just like electric. I feel like I'm on fire. I could do whatever I want now. So Othership is the name of that app. I love that app.

• 53:36Shaan Puri?

  Favorite, what is it?

• 53:38Sam Parr?

  Physical.

• 53:40Shaan Puri?

  Okay, my favorite physical tool is, this is gonna sound stupid. Alright, so I grew out my hair and, you know, I grew out my hair just to like do it, just to kind of have a like, I don't know, just have a change, do something different. But I don't know anything about how to take care of hair and I'm like a really messy, disorganized person who doesn't like, I don't look in the mirror till 7pm that night. I'm like, oh, I haven't even looked at myself today. And that doesn't really work when you got long hair, like high maintenance hair. So I went to a stylist and I was like, you know, can I get a little trim? And she was like, what do you want? And I was like, I have no idea. I have no idea what I want. And also, what I really want is like, can you just like cut the haircut like half an hour short?

• 54:22Shaan Puri?

  And just tell me what I should be doing like with my hair. And she's like, what do you mean? I was like, I was like, so like I get in the shower. If I want to do shampoo, like here's how I do it. You tell me if that's correct. And I went through like these ultra basics with her. And she was like, what do you mean? And then she was laughing, but then through that conversation, she's like, oh, like, no, no, when you shampooed, like, don't be doing it on the roots because you're gonna end up stripping away all your natural oils. Like, just do your conditioner and shampoo like from the middle to the end. And like, oh, you're, you know, your hair is really frizzy and you probably don't know why, but like, do you sleep on a cotton pillowcase? And I was like, yeah, of course. And she's like, you need to switch that for silk? Because imagine you're spending eight hours a night rubbing your hair into this thing. So she gave me these like three little things, like a silk pillowcase, this like curling cream.

• 55:06Shaan Puri?

  She's like, just use this because your hair won't look like shit.

• 55:09Sam Parr?

  Is this lady black or white?

• 55:10Shaan Puri?

  White.

• 55:11Sam Parr?

  Dude, we have silk things in our, in our house all over.

• 55:14Shaan Puri?

  Well, yeah, because if you have curly hair. Yeah, you know, it is. There's like this whole thing, the curly girl method and shit like that. So anyways, I learned so much about hair in like half an hour. It was amazing. And I felt so relieved. I was like, ah, this is like this class of life school I just missed. And like, I'm too embarrassed or too like, kind of. Busy to like, think about it, but like, taking the time to think about it was awesome. And so, you know, the little silk pillow and a couple of other things were, were great little wins for me.

• 55:40Sam Parr?

  When, when you go to restaurants, what I do all the time is I just say, they'll say, what do you want? And I'll say, I just want meat and vegetables. Give me whatever's popular or whatever's best. Do you ever do that?

• 55:49Shaan Puri?

  No, but I, well, I'll often ask what's best or I'll say, the, the best question is, uh, you know, what, uh, like, what do you eat after work? Like, what's the best thing that you like to eat?

• 55:58Sam Parr?

  It makes them so uncomfortable though. I ask that all the, whenever I order, I almost always do that. It makes them very uncomfortable and they freak out, just like you do it. Like when I get a haircut, I'm like, what do you want? I'm like, just make me look sexy, you know, just like, maybe like hot. Yeah, whatever.

• 56:12Shaan Puri?

  Chef's choice is a hella underrated way to live life.

• 56:14Sam Parr?

  So is, but it makes them so uncomfortable.

• 56:17Shaan Puri?

  Nah, you might, you might be putting them on the, put too much pressure on them. I tell them, I say, look, this is where I am. It can't get worse than this. Uh, don't worry. I trust you. And then I tell every haircut, I said, don't worry what you do. My hair grows fast. I take a lot of pressure off them. Same thing with the food, you know, tell me what you eat after work. By the way, I'm not picky and I'm already in a good mood, so I'm going to love whatever you give me. And then, you know, take the pressure off.

• 56:37Sam Parr?

  That's a good one. I'm going to say that. All right. And then your last, uh, you're, you're over a hundred and under a hundred.

• 56:43Shaan Puri?

  The, uh, what's, let's see the over a hundred, uh, oh, I hired a chef. So I don't know why more people don't do this, like.

• 56:51Sam Parr?

  Dude, that's such a conceited thing to say.

• 56:54Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, no, no, you cancel me and be like, yeah, cause I can't afford it. No, what I mean is if you can buy a nice car or, you know, like, I would never buy a nice car before a chef. Like my order of operations would be.

• 57:05Sam Parr?

  Bitch, you drive a BMW.

• 57:07Andrew Wilkinson?

  No, no, no, no. I, I don't even think that's the right comparison. I think it's a lot of people who are middle class or upper middle class have a cleaner. A chef is just slightly more expensive than that. It's not crazy expensive.

• 57:20Shaan Puri?

  It's not crazy expensive to have somebody who, who preps meals and I don't do it every day. So, you know, you could do three days a week or you can do, you know, whatever. Um, it is the biggest life quality change because you get your time back. Plus you eat healthier, plus it's actually tasty because you probably aren't a great cook, uh, or I'm not at least. Uh, plus like, you know, they prep little things for like my dog or my, my baby. Baby who's like a picky eater and like it just saves so much time, energy and mental like kind of like mind space, I guess, to do this. So for me, I'm like, I would cut 10 other things before this. So like, if you've got some money, right? You can't do this. You got no money, but you got some money. You got some money to play with. Like, don't angel invest. Hire a chef. You

• 58:02Shaan Puri?

  know, don't, don't buy like a, go buy like a used kind of like middle road car. Don't buy like a nice car. If you're buying a Tesla, get a chef. That's why, that's my like, you know, if you're in that, those are the kind of trade offs you can make.

• 58:15Sam Parr?

  And above, uh, below a thousand?

• 58:18Shaan Puri?

  Oh, jammies. I think I've talked about this before.

• 58:20Sam Parr?

  Oh, my God.

• 58:22Shaan Puri?

  I love these things. You don't like it? You don't like jammies?

• 58:25Sam Parr?

  They're just boxers with pockets.

• 58:27Shaan Puri?

  Very soft boxers with pockets and no hole.

• 58:31Andrew Wilkinson?

  Do you wear them? Do you wear them though? Day to day or only when you're at home?

• 58:34Shaan Puri?

  Well, I'm at home every day. What do you mean?

• 58:37Andrew Wilkinson?

  Well, I mean, like, no, if there's no, if there's no hole and you put them on under jeans.

• 58:44Andrew Wilkinson?

  Just a shitty version of boxers.

• 58:46Shaan Puri?

  Replacement for sure. So I like to just walk around in my boxers all day. That's like when I'm most comfortable. So this is the socially acceptable, more comfortable. They're like a little longer. So you're not showing too much thigh. There's no hole. They got pockets. So you can carry your phone around. So it's like the best way to just wear your boxers at home.

• 59:00Andrew Wilkinson?

  So you're saying like, you're saying like your mother in law, your mother in laws over and you're gonna wear boxers around the house? Cause if you just wear shorts, they're just as comfortable and you'd look.

• 59:09Sam Parr?

  In Sean's defense, he's been talking about these things for like three years now.

• 59:13Andrew Wilkinson?

  I, I've worn them. They're very, very comfortable. I have a pair. I like them, but I wouldn't wear them. Like if there are people in my house, I wouldn't wear them.

• 59:19Sam Parr?

  Lululemon shorts instead that have like the underwear in the, as the liner.

• 59:22Andrew Wilkinson?

  They're so comfortable.

• 59:23Shaan Puri?

  We're not all trillionaires, so we can't all get Lululemon. We can get jammies, right?

• 59:27Sam Parr?

  All right. Can I, can I batch the next one again?

• 59:30Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 59:31Sam Parr?

  All right. So check this out. So.

• 59:33Shaan Puri?

  I'm giving that round to Sam.

• 59:34Sam Parr?

  All right, I'll take that. A thing you learned about yourself this year and best relationship hack. I'll go first because mine are going to be really fast. Best relationship hack this year. I do weekly meetings with my wife using this best self journal. And it's just like a prompt. It's an hour long prompt of questions and you get to know each other better. Exactly what you talked about with your buddy. It's been awesome. That's the best hack I've had. And the one thing I learned this year, I'll say two things.

• 1:00:00Shaan Puri?

  I'll ask you a question about the relationship one.

• 1:00:02Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:02Shaan Puri?

  Are you both equally into it? Or is one of you like more into doing it than the other?

• 1:00:06Sam Parr?

  We're both equally into it.

• 1:00:08Shaan Puri?

  Okay, I think that's.

• 1:00:08Sam Parr?

  And so like, I've always been a fan of therapy. Like I've gone to therapy, like regardless if I'm healthy or unhealthy. It's just like going to the gym. And so I was like, we should do couples counseling, even though everything's great. And but I didn't really jive, we didn't jive with anyone. And so I thought this one is actually better.

• 1:00:22Shaan Puri?

  It works, yeah.

• 1:00:23Sam Parr?

  And it's like $25 for one time. And then.

• 1:00:26Andrew Wilkinson?

  So Sean, I mean, I totally relate to what you said, though. Like if she's not into it. And I tried to do this with my wife, do like, you almost want to do like a weekly board meeting? Like, hey, let's talk about our relationship. My wife's not down with that.

• 1:00:37Sam Parr?

  It's not run like a business meeting exactly, but like, it just has like, like, like, you know, like the five languages of love. Like, that's like one, that's like a one conversation. That's like, you'll have that one week. And the next conversation will be, uh, uh, tell me about your childhood.

• 1:00:50Andrew Wilkinson?

  Right. I think, I think someone needs to build like an operating system, kind of like how you would have board meetings and all this stuff for marriage and family. EOS, right? Like, what does our family stand for? Yeah, exactly.

• 1:01:02Sam Parr?

  That's a good idea.

• 1:01:03Shaan Puri?

  That's a great idea.

• 1:01:03Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And then one thing I learned about myself, which is I actually don't like owning as fancy stuff. It kind of stresses me out. So I like bought a fancy watch and I was like, oh my God, this is horrible. It's freaking me out. And but what I learned this year is I had a number of net worth in my head. And I was like, if I hit this number, I'm never going to worry again. And I'm not going to chase money. I hit that number, I still worry and I still chase. It's never enough.

• 1:01:25Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:26Andrew Wilkinson?

  And now, now it's.

• 1:01:27Sam Parr?

  It's always 2X, you know? And there's a, the New Yorker did a, did a study where they like asked a bunch of wealthy people. And like, it doesn't matter if the person had 1 million, 100,000 or 50 million. They always said they'd be more comfortable if they had 2X.

• 1:01:42Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:43Sam Parr?

  All right. You want to go, Sean?

• 1:01:44Shaan Puri?

  Uh, yeah. Okay. So best relationship hack. I literally just wrote this as soon as I read it. I go, shut the fuck up. I learned this year how to really just shut the fuck up in a relationship, meaning like not everything needs to be talked about. Not everything needs to be said. Not every like, you know, pot needs to be stirred. Not every issue needs to be discussed. Not every like worry needs to be a thing. Like just shut up and like, just shut up and enjoy it. Just shut up and listen more. And just shut up and like, don't complain. Don't, don't talk about like constantly improving and changing it. Like just shut up a little bit. And so that was my relationship hack with there's

• 1:02:25Shaan Puri?

  many times where you've, you probably know this because you know me pretty well, Sam. I'm kind of a pot stirrer. And I like to like, I don't feel alive till somebody's like, you know, laughing or angry or whatever in a conversation. I'm like, yeah, now we're doing it. That's really not how everybody is.

• 1:02:42Sam Parr?

  But your intentions are mostly always good, which most, your, your intentions are mostly always good. If it's, if you just want to cause shit, it's just because you feel like laughing.

• 1:02:50Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So I'm trying to amuse myself.

• 1:02:52Andrew Wilkinson?

  The difference is are your, were your parents debaters? And that was kind of how your family functioned. Cause in my household, my, my dad's a pot stirrer. So my dad would say some outlandish thing. We start yelling and that was like almost his love language. And my problem is I've applied that into all my relationships and most people find that horrible.

• 1:03:09Shaan Puri?

  You just said it perfectly. So that was the lesson. That was my relationship hack this year was the lesson learned was, was what if I didn't try that? What if I did something different? The thing I learned about myself, I'm going to do one that's not, um, not good. So, you know, there's a lot of lessons that were like, oh yeah, I learned this and now I'm better for it. This is one that like, I just learned was kind of like a shitty thing about me. So I've now had several friends that, um,

• 1:03:35Shaan Puri?

  I've considered to be my close friends or like they worked for me or whatever like I kind of mentored them in some way and then they go on to do like really great things. But like, you know, they called everybody except for me to like, kind of like, share the wins that they were having or, or let them on board to invest in it or like, you know, just, I wasn't in the loop beyond, once our, once our kind of relationship, once our like, once the transaction was done, like, once we stopped working together, in my head, I'm like, oh yeah, we're super tight. And in their head, they're like, they had a different opinion because I had lunch with a buddy and I said, he was telling me about like this crazy journey he's been on, like, dude, can I ask you something kind of weird? I was like, I've noticed this happening a bunch of times, like you had this crazy journey and I feel

• 1:04:17Shaan Puri?

  like, I thought we were super close and we're just now talking about it. Like, I wasn't, I wasn't in the loop. Like, you didn't let me know. Like, you didn't share these awesome things that were happening or the crazy bad things and like, you took other investors. I feel like I could have been like your first check into your thing. Like, I was like, is there something I do that makes you feel that way? And he's like, can I guess, can I guess what he said?

• 1:04:36Sam Parr?

  Yeah, go ahead. I just thought that you were too busy.

• 1:04:40Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that, but like, a less generous version of that is, you, you blew me off, basically. It's like, it's like, yeah, like I messaged you a bunch of times and like you didn't really respond in a big way. So I just figured like, okay, he's like, he said it perfectly. He goes, I, he goes, I felt like I figured out what I am to you. And like, I thought we were close and you thought we were, you're saying you thought we were close, but like, you made me feel like we're not that close. And like, once our engagement was over, you know, it seemed like you put me in some place that like, you know, you didn't want to engage as much as I wanted to. And I was like, why are we talking about? Not me? Good old Sean? No way. This is whatever. And, and then sure enough, I scrolled back in our DMs and it's like, him saying something, him saying something, him saying something,

• 1:05:22Shaan Puri?

  me saying one line, him saying something and like asking something and me never responding, never getting back to him.

• 1:05:28Sam Parr?

  How do you combat, combat that? Because like, you've gotten very popular.

• 1:05:32Shaan Puri?

  It's not that it's like.

• 1:05:34Andrew Wilkinson?

  Well, this is, this is the problem. This is the problem is like so much of becoming friends with someone is where you're at in your life and how much time you have for the other person and whether you're in sync or not. So some of my best friends, they were, you know, we're both single, we're both drinking and partying. You're super, super close. And then you have kids and life's different and you kind of drift apart. And the same thing can happen with texting. If they're texting you all the time and they want you to engage, and then you send a one liner back, they immediately take offense. They don't realize that you've got 300 other people texting you and you just want to be friends with everybody. And it's funny you mentioned this because I wrote my worst habit of the year is writing blunt, one line responses to DMs and text messages because

• 1:06:16Andrew Wilkinson?

  I'm busy, right? I'm just trying to rip through them all and I'm tired, but it's way, it's way better to not respond. At least then you're mysterious and oh, maybe you didn't see it.

• 1:06:24Shaan Puri?

  Trust me, it's not that much better.

• 1:06:26Andrew Wilkinson?

  So much.

• 1:06:29Andrew Wilkinson?

  It's a little, it's a little better. It's shockingly better.

• 1:06:31Sam Parr?

  If it makes you feel better, Sean, I perceive you as a person who's in the loop of everything, though.

• 1:06:36Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I don't know. I basically, I realize my self perception of kind of where these relationships were at and how good of a friend I was being back. I realized like, oh no, I'm actually, I'm kind of a shitty friend back. I, I can make people feel bad when, without really realizing it. And, and also that that costs me, like that I don't get to share in the wins and know the stories and be kind of friends and, and get these opportunities that like, you know, would otherwise have come from this. And so that's, once I have it like five times, I'm like, okay, the problem is me. I'm the common denominator here.

• 1:07:12Andrew Wilkinson?

  One of the habits that I've realized, there's two things. One, one is like using a smiley when you say something.

• 1:07:18Shaan Puri?

  Takes the edge off.

• 1:07:18Andrew Wilkinson?

  Just immediately, even if it's a one liner, takes the edge off. The other thing is a friend of mine does this. He's very, very busy, super spread thin, big personality, lots of friends. And he will just every once in a while, text me and say, hey, man, I was just thinking of you. Or, you know, or, you know, let's say it's New Year's. He'll say, hey, thanks for your friendship this year. Here's something I really appreciated or took from you. And it's Comes across as very authentic and I've looked at that and gone, okay, I need to really learn how to do that because I'm like you exactly. As you're saying this, I'm just nodding along. I think I come across as distant and cold and too busy and I don't want to, and I just want to make everyone happy. It's so sad.

• 1:08:00Shaan Puri?

  Bracket first name. I was really thinking about you. That's what's going to come out from us this year.

• 1:08:05Andrew Wilkinson?

  Yeah, someone go listen up, please.

• 1:08:07Sam Parr?

  Relationships and learnings.

• 1:08:12Andrew Wilkinson?

  Yeah. Okay. So my biggest relationship hack, honestly, my wife, her love language is acts of service. And it's really interesting. Like often she'll start picking at me about some other thing I'm doing that pisses her off and we'll have a fight about something. And it ultimately came down to the fact that I left towels on the floor, or I left the kitchen dirty. And so now I'm just trying to, whenever I have that moment where I'm like, I see the kitchen's dirty, I'm just unloading the dishwasher and trying to enjoy it and get it done. The other thing, no, no, no, no, no, I'm not a slob, but I always say to her, I'm like, what's the point of making money if you use your time doing things you don't want to do? Right? Whereas my wife is much more like, I don't want our kids to grow up without

• 1:08:57Andrew Wilkinson?

  them seeing us work and, you know, doing stuff. So, so we don't really have any help around the house. We have a nanny, but you know, we have a cleaner who does all this stuff. We don't want to do.

• 1:09:07Shaan Puri?

  Besides the butler, the chauffeur, the nanny and the cleaner. It's all us.

• 1:09:11Andrew Wilkinson?

  No, we don't, we don't, we don't have any of that. We don't have, we're not fancy like you. And then the school of life, which they make that card game I mentioned before, I love that so much that I bought this one called the connect card game and it's for couples. And my wife and I have been doing it and it's basically five stacks and each stack is like, you know, one is sex, one is like general relationship, one is personal, whatever. And so you roll a dice and you go through these questions. And again, it's just this great way to penetrate through, you know, you might be in a bad spot, but when you answer these questions, it kind of unlocks everything and builds connection between the two of you. And that's been really, really good for us because my wife doesn't like doing the meetings or couples counseling even a lot of the time, but that's been a great thing for

• 1:09:56Andrew Wilkinson?

  us.

• 1:09:57Sam Parr?

  That's baller. Yeah, ours are, me and you are, we have the same thing.

• 1:10:01Andrew Wilkinson?

  Dude, I totally, I really, that's cool. You said that about the people thinking you're a dick or checked out because I have that exact thing and you, you said it really nicely.

• 1:10:11Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's kind of it's hard.

• 1:10:13Andrew Wilkinson?

  It's hard. It's hard. And you know, I've even experienced that with you and I've probably done it to you as well. But it's like, you know, you and I, we've texted and we've had these long exchanges. And then there's other times where you text me and I'm like one line or vice versa. And it's, it's crazy.

• 1:10:27Shaan Puri?

  Things where like, I would, I maybe I do take offense, I don't know. But like, in my head, it's like, I'm so, I have so much faith in the, in the relationship that I'm like, there's not like, it's not gonna like affect my score, you know, in a way. Um, yeah. Also, like, I hate the kind of excuse of I'm busy because basically to me, when the phrase I'm busy means I'm poor. It's like, if I think wealth is freedom of time and to be able to spend it how you want, then saying I don't have time means I'm poor. And so I'm like, I don't want to accept that that's also a reality. So, you know, I'm trying to figure it out.

• 1:10:59Andrew Wilkinson?

  Well, it's also, there's two, I what I've noticed is when I don't work with somebody, I text them differently when when we do work together. When we work together, it's like, there's total filter. I'm not gonna be nice. I'm just gonna be super blunt and we're just gonna grind it out. And that's just business and whatever. And not, I'm not being an asshole. I'm just being very to the point. But I think that can come across the wrong way. And I think people sense a shift. They start working with me and I suddenly become this like, super blunt person.

• 1:11:27Shaan Puri?

  What happened? All right. So I was back. Okay, so I got, I got the categories here. Okay, so let's keep rolling. We have, I think, three big buckets left. All right. So we're gonna do these together. So, book of the year, and or, and then that's the first one. And then the second one to do is, you know, a podcast newsletter, or a person you started following, you start subscribing to. So a book, and something you started subscribing to that you really loved. Let's do, let's do Andrew first.

• 1:11:53Andrew Wilkinson?

  Okay, so I read this really great book that Sam, I think you'd love, called Clash of the Titans. It's from the late 90s. And it's two parallel stories. One is Ted Turner and one is Rupert Murdoch, right from the beginning. And the stories are kind of interwoven. And at various times, they clash and, you know, try and buy the same businesses and stuff. But it's two different wacko billionaires. So these guys are both insane in their own ways. You know, Murdoch is like, quiet, calculating, 100% focused on profit, but very slick and smooth. Ted Turner's like insane, unpredictable, emotional, all about building a brand name and making an impact. But it's really about him and his ego.

• 1:12:36Shaan Puri?

  Only five stars, only five reviews on Amazon.

• 1:12:40Andrew Wilkinson?

  Yeah, it's like totally weird. Weird. I had to buy it in print, although I found it on Audible. But anyway, it was a really, really great read. And I didn't know that much about Rupert Murdoch before this. And I gotta say, he's obviously evil, but really amazing billionaire business person. And he's been going since 1957. And he's somehow only now, this is a huge number. He's only to us, he's only worth eight billion. And you see these other people who are worth like 30, who have been going for like five years. So it's, it's, it's pretty wild. But anyway, great, great book.

• 1:13:16Shaan Puri?

  I met Rupert Murdoch once. Have you met him, Andrew?

• 1:13:19Andrew Wilkinson?

  Yeah, you told this story. You went to some symposium or something.

• 1:13:23Sam Parr?

  He was sharp, right?

• 1:13:24Shaan Puri?

  Amazing. Basically, what he does is they own all these properties. They own like whatever Wall Street Journal, Fox, and like a whole bunch of other things. I don't know what they own exactly. But it's like a bunch of huge media publications. And there are all these different businesses. They're all spread around the world. And he, he gets everybody together once a year. And he rented out the top floor or top two floors of the Wynn in Vegas. And he puts all of the CEOs of all the execs of basically all the, all of his different properties, puts them all up. It was during CES, but they didn't attend CES. They were not down at the conference floor shaking hands or anything like that. They were in his room, which is like the presidential suite or whatever. And they would just start at 8am and they would go from 8am to like 6pm or something like that.

• 1:14:09Shaan Puri?

  And it would be back to back talks, 30 minute talks. They would just bring in some, some, somebody from some other field to give us, to give a talk and they would grill them with questions. And they'd be like, thank you so much for coming next. And it would be like, you know, the, the number two guy at Facebook would go.

• 1:14:25Sam Parr?

  Yeah, you went with like the skim.

• 1:14:27Shaan Puri?

  This game was, then they have like three or four startups as well. Cause it's like before, before us, or you know, it was like CEO of Slack, Stuart Butterfield went and gave his talk. And by the way, talk is like, you know, there's 30 people in the room or something like that. So it's not like a presentation. It's like just someone kind of spitballing about what they're, what they do and their view of the world. And, and then they get asked a bunch of questions. And so this goes like eight or nine hours. Straight. And if you look around the room, because I, I, I got there early and I just stayed. We were talking at the end, but I just sat in and sat in on the whole thing. It was amazing. And I looked around the room and people, you know, oh, there's the president of Fox and he's, his attention's drifting. And this person's, you know, they own the New York Post and they're, they're on their phone. And Rupert Murdoch is like the star pupil. He's front, he's in the first row.

• 1:15:12Shaan Puri?

  He's, you know, sitting in the first row. He's, doesn't look at his phone. He's attentive the whole time. He's taking notes. He asked the best questions and he had the most energy. Like this guy went eight hours straight and he's, he was like 87 years old at the time. He's 90 now, I think. And, um, he's the oldest guy from no bathroom breaks. This guy, I don't know what this guy's got.

• 1:15:31Sam Parr?

  Have you seen succession?

• 1:15:33Shaan Puri?

  I've seen the season one and it's like loosely.

• 1:15:35Andrew Wilkinson?

  It's like, it's amazing.

• 1:15:36Sam Parr?

  Kinda, yeah. And they like this old guy in succession. He grinds, man. He's, they're, they're like working like 24 hours a day. And it's always serious shit.

• 1:15:47Shaan Puri?

  And.

• 1:15:47Sam Parr?

  And Rupert is just like that. And when I hear that, I'm like, this seems miserable. How are they on all the time? They have so much energy.

• 1:15:57Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:15:59Andrew Wilkinson?

  Well, not only that, but Rupert Murdoch, he's brought all of his kids. The reason succession is based on him is that he's brought all of his kids in to the business. And then his kids have one by one failed to become the heir apparent and fought each other. And they all hate each other and leaks stuff to the press and it's, it's really horrible. I think Rupert Murdoch is a great, uh, he's a great way to invert, you know, what do we not want? I don't want to become Rupert Murdoch because it doesn't seem like fun to me, although maybe his personality, uh, maybe that works.

• 1:16:28Shaan Puri?

  I really respect him. Uh, okay. So then you're, uh, you subscribe to Andrew. So, uh, podcast newsletter, whatever.

• 1:16:35Andrew Wilkinson?

  So, uh, yeah, and there's not really, I, I kind of got off Twitter, although I've been kind of getting back into it a little bit. And I haven't subscribed to any newsletters at all this year. I've just, I OD'd last year. The person I used, um, I really have been enjoying their tweets is, uh, your friend Nikita, Nikita, uh, buyer. He had a really great tweet recently where, so, you know, all these people, they do aqua hires to Facebook and Facebook. Book basically just buys companies to shut them down, right? They find promising social networks that might compete with them. They go buy them for tens of millions of dollars before they turn into anything. And they bought his company and it's kind of like a prison for entrepreneurs. They make you sit around for three to five years and vest your stock. And a lot of people hate it.

• 1:17:18Andrew Wilkinson?

  And he had this great tweet where he says, I'm leaving Facebook after three years. Here's a thread of everything I learned, points down.

• 1:17:28Andrew Wilkinson?

  I thought that was awesome.

• 1:17:29Shaan Puri?

  You know, he was sitting on that one for, for four years as he vested out. He's like, here's how I'm going to go out.

• 1:17:35Shaan Puri?

  Okay, great. Sam, what you got? Book and podcast newsletter, whatever.

• 1:17:39Sam Parr?

  Book, I'm going to go with endurance. Story about a shipwreck. And then I'll also go with Empire of the Summer Moon. It's about the Comanche Indians. They're just, and, and the Texas Rangers and how they fought. And they're all just fucking savages, right?

• 1:17:53Andrew Wilkinson?

  Dude.

• 1:17:53Sam Parr?

  Endurance is so good. And by the way, when I said savages, I mean the Native Americans and also the Texas Rangers. They're all, they treat each other horribly. Endurance is amazing. It makes me feel like my life is meaningless and soft. And then things that I followed this year. Okay, the first Laird Hamilton. I learned all about him this year. That guy has the ideal life, in my opinion. He's surfer, businessman, pretty amazing, cool dude. The second is how to take over the world. Ben Wilson's podcast, one of the best things I've subscribed to. And I'm going to suck up even further. Sean, the, the five bullet for, or the five tweet.

• 1:18:28Shaan Puri?

  Tuesday, baby.

• 1:18:29Sam Parr?

  That's freaking awesome. I like that too. So those are the things I started following this year.

• 1:18:32Shaan Puri?

  All right, love it. Okay, so mine, uh, book. Okay, I just started reading this book. So this is going to sound a little silly because I'm 10 pages in.

• 1:18:40Sam Parr?

  Do you read?

• 1:18:42Shaan Puri?

  Thank you.

• 1:18:43Sam Parr?

  Do you read?

• 1:18:46Shaan Puri?

  I, I dabble. I basically have like, you know, I'll buy 50 books in a year and I'll read, you know, 10 to 30% of 10 to 30% of them. It's like I read one book at the end of the year. So this one, I've read 10 pages so far. And in the first 10 pages, this book has more wisdom than anything I've ever read. And I'm not saying I read a bunch of wisdom, so that's the caveat. But, uh, it's this book called Think on These Things. It's by this philosopher guy named Krishnamurti and.

• 1:19:18Shaan Puri?

  I don't know where, I think in Evol maybe mentioned this guy's name as Christian Murthy and I went and bought this book. I sat on my couch for like, you know, a year and didn't look at it. And then I just picked it up one day and 10 pages in, I literally, I've reread the first 10 pages three times. And I like, I just don't even want to go on. I'm like, oh, this one principle, these two principles that are in this first 10 pages are so good that if I internalize these, you know, my life changes and it's just amazing.

• 1:19:42Sam Parr?

  I just, I'm looking at it now.

• 1:19:44Andrew Wilkinson?

  Sounds awesome. I just.

• 1:19:45Sam Parr?

  You just bought it?

• 1:19:47Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I mean, I sold it pretty hard. Yeah. All right. So that's, that's the first book. Second, the thing I subscribe to, this is kind of a, again, a little bit of an expected one, but I listened to the All In Podcast. I don't know if you guys listen, Sam, I don't think you like it, right? Or you don't listen?

• 1:20:00Sam Parr?

  I don't listen to any business podcasts.

• 1:20:02Shaan Puri?

  Andrew, do you listen? I feel like this might be up your alley.

• 1:20:04Andrew Wilkinson?

  Yeah, I find I, I love, I love all in, but I found it was like, um, it's too stressful. The time I listen to podcasts in the evening and the last thing I want to do is get pumped up on deals and what's going on in tax. So.

• 1:20:16Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I listened to it and specifically, I would actually say David Friedberg on the podcast. I actually find the rest of them to be very smart and very entertaining, but very obnoxious to me personally. Um, like, you know, like, I'm sure these are, they're obviously successful. They're obviously, you know, probably fun to hang out with and things like that.

• 1:20:36Sam Parr?

  Well, David's like the real nerd.

• 1:20:37Shaan Puri?

  But he's the real nerd and he's the only one I feel like is never, is never presenting a face. He's never virtue signaling or like building their brand by saying certain shit. Like, I think Chamath is amazing, but also I think he virtue signals a bunch. Um, you know, I think that, uh, you know, Jason kind of says he's a man of the people, but, uh, like, I think he's kind of likes being high class and likes hanging out with high class people and doing high class shit.

• 1:21:01Andrew Wilkinson?

  But that's what, that's what makes it good is they're all, they're, they're all like best friends, but they're horrible to each other and they're all ripping on one another. And they're all, they're all very, they're very complicated personalities, every single one of them. And I think that's.

• 1:21:15Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. It's like a great TV show where the characters have flaws. Um, and, uh, yeah, David Sacks is super smart, but then like super fucking political and to an annoying extent. And is always just looking for some story that like supports his. Point of view. And usually that point of view is that everybody else is biased, but like, you know, clearly just constantly searching for information about how other people are biased. So anyways, I think that there's, I love the show. I enjoy the show a lot and those characters. But I think David Friedberg is actually the one who is kind of like a star discovery for me this year of like, super smart, gives great information about science and stuff like that, is very balanced and fair in his like POV, while still being saying interesting things. And is, I feel like

• 1:21:59Shaan Puri?

  he's not trying to build his personal brand and popularity through the, through the show. So,

• 1:22:06Shaan Puri?

  you know, to the extent that everybody is, when you create content, like, I think he does a good job of not. And one of the reasons, by the way, I criticize those other guys for doing that sometimes is I do it, right? You spot it because you got it. It's like, I sometimes will say something that like, I know makes me look good, or, you know, presents me in a certain, myself in a certain way. So you know, I see it when other people do it too. So anyways, All In is like, you know, maybe the thing I enjoyed, new thing, a new show I've enjoyed subscribing to.

• 1:22:31Sam Parr?

  That's great. All right. Do we want to, what was the last one?

• 1:22:34Shaan Puri?

  Okay, I got, I got two more. So there's, this is a quick one. MFM Guest of the Year. So who was the best guest that came on the pod? And then your Person of the Year, somebody you really enjoyed getting to know, hanging out with, working.

• 1:22:46Sam Parr?

  But what about Industry and Company?

• 1:22:48Shaan Puri?

  That's gonna be the last one.

• 1:22:50Sam Parr?

  All right, I'll go first. Rob Dierdick and Ariel Hawani for Guest of the Year. Rob Dierdick blew my mind. Ariel, he was the biggest fan, I'm the biggest fan. That was like, I'm the biggest fan of his, of everyone we did. And then what was the second question?

• 1:23:02Shaan Puri?

  Someone, Person of the Year, just your Person of the Year, Sam's Person of the Year, who?

• 1:23:05Sam Parr?

  Dude, I'm gonna suck up again. I gotta say, Ben and Sean. I've been, I'm like, so we just crossed like 2 million listens per 30 days. I think we hit 2.1 or something like that. I'm very, very, this is the thing I'm most proud of that we've done. And so I would say, and with Ben, I think we found the perfect third man.

• 1:23:29Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. And shout out to the, were you tearing up just a little bit there? It seemed like you.

• 1:23:34Sam Parr?

  I've been very kind to Sean and like all the people involved in this podcast where they were like, why are you being so nice? I'm just really proud of what we've done. It's something I've been very proud of.

• 1:23:45Shaan Puri?

  Dude, when we went to Miami for the live show, so the other Ben, the Ben that works with me, my partner, he, he came with and he's like, oh, I'm finally getting to meet Sam. I've heard him on the pod for hours and hours. I've never met him. And I was like, yeah, he's great. And I was like, you know, but like, hey, if Sam like gets like impatient with you or like anything like that, don't take it personally. Like, you know, it's just kind of his style. Like, you know, when he, we're doing a live show, he's going to want it to go well. It might be high, you know, high pressure. And I've seen him kind of like go off on people sometimes if like, you know, whatever. And we get there and Sam was zen Sam. He was so kind, so thoughtful, so nice, so happy. And Ben was like, what the fuck were you talking about, dude? I was like, I don't know where this came from, this hundred percent happy Sam, but like this is amazing.

• 1:24:27Shaan Puri?

  And I feel like the, I don't know if it's the acquisition or it's, you know, whatever, the working out. I don't know what you're doing, but dude, you've been so much happier this year. It's amazing.

• 1:24:36Sam Parr?

  It's part acquisition and, and we're getting the results. We're finally getting, we're, we're finally becoming as popular as I thought we should.

• 1:24:45Shaan Puri?

  You're, you're not, you're not threatened anymore, right? Like before, if the hustle failed or anything went bad, that directly hurts you and you're.

• 1:24:54Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I have safety.

• 1:24:55Shaan Puri?

  Nest egg, right? So you're not, you're like a dog, you're like a dog, you have ample food now.

• 1:24:59Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And it's just like, it's, it's been two years. It hasn't been that long since we've been doing this, maybe two and a half years. I forget. And it's finally like coming to fruition and it's the hardest thing. Growing the, growing the hustle wasn't that hard. Growing this has been very hard.

• 1:25:13Shaan Puri?

  Dude, I just want to say, I'm so, I'm so happy for you because I thought you were going to sell the hub spot and be out of there in like three months, be bitter, upset you sold your baby. And it's so cool to see the podcast going so well, the hustle going so well, trends going so well. All the people still there and you actually like the guy you sold to.

• 1:25:31Sam Parr?

  Yeah. I mean, I think I undersold, so I've definitely have some regrets, but I don't regret it at all. And I'm, I'm happy. I enjoy, I intend to do this podcast for a very long time.

• 1:25:41Shaan Puri?

  Testing is a hell of a drug.

• 1:25:43Andrew Wilkinson?

  Wait, did I go off script? The thing you paid me to say earlier.

• 1:25:49Shaan Puri?

  I have to say about Durman? Andrew, guest of the year and you're just your favorite person you got to hang out and interact with.

• 1:25:55Andrew Wilkinson?

  So my favorite guest was Steph Smith is always amazing. Like I tweeted this out, but I think it's like, she just drops thousand dollar bills on the ground for amazing entrepreneurs to pick up. There's just so many great ideas. Uh, and I think for you guys, the best format is a shitload of quick hits and ideas. And I think she really always delivers on that. I don't really always love it when you guys just interview someone about what they're doing. Um, the other one I loved was Huberman for that exact same reason, just like.

• 1:26:23Sam Parr?

  You know, I got him on your thread, right? You tweeted that you love him and I also like him. And I just said, Hey, Andrew, DM me, come on the pod. It was on your thread. Yeah.

• 1:26:34Andrew Wilkinson?

  No way. Oh, that's amazing. Yeah, he's, he's amazing. He's been my, actually I should have said before, he's probably my favorite podcast subscription. I just love his stuff. It's so in-depth. Uh, and then what was the other question?

• 1:26:46Shaan Puri?

  Person in your life, your favorite person of the year, non-family.

• 1:26:52Andrew Wilkinson?

  So I would say, well, I may have talked about him before, but this guy Kimia, who, uh, we started a business with, uh, last year. We started this negotiation business called buyer with him. And I just freaking, so I'll just share basically what happened. So basically he met this guy, super scrappy entrepreneur, told me he wanted to start something. And he told me he loved negotiating randomly and like some conversation. And so I started testing him. I'd be like, Hey, I'm going to, you know, I'm buying a nice car. Can you negotiate it for me? Or, uh, hey, we're buying a bunch of desks for the office, right? And the guy would just save me like 40% on everything and hustle. And he's awesome. And so I was like, okay, dude, this should be a business, like negotiation as a service.

• 1:27:36Andrew Wilkinson?

  You need, you know, a lease negotiation, SaaS software, whatever. So we start this business called buyer. We go 50 50 on it. I promote it and talk about it, give them the rails and accounting and stuff. And we literally, I think we started it for like 50 or a hundred grand. And we sold it to Ramp about maybe six months ago now for single digit millions. And so we went from like 50K to, you know, single digit millions in a year. Amazing exit for him. I would have loved to keep owning the business, but this is what he wanted to do. And it was just so cool watching somebody actually take the baton and then run the marathon.

• 1:28:13Sam Parr?

  How much you think buyer could have been worth?

• 1:28:14Andrew Wilkinson?

  And the guy's just freaking awesome. You know, I don't know. I mean, we were, we were already profitable. I think we could have made a couple hundred thousand dollars of profit in the first year. I told him, I was like, look like I think we should hold this, but for him, you know, it was a, it was the first time he was ever going to have a big win like that. And you can't undervalue. He's, he's working at Ramp. So you, and you just can't undervalue, you know, getting a couple, a couple million bucks in your jeans, right?

• 1:28:43Andrew Wilkinson?

  I think it's still.

• 1:28:44Sam Parr?

  I think that's a great, I think that's a.

• 1:28:46Andrew Wilkinson?

  I think they've rolled it in.

• 1:28:47Sam Parr?

  Someone should just copy that.

• 1:28:49Andrew Wilkinson?

  Yeah. Yeah. It says right here. Yeah. They've like integrated it into Ramp. Buyer.com or no buyer.com.

• 1:28:56Sam Parr?

  Someone should just do that again. I thought that that one had legs.

• 1:29:00Andrew Wilkinson?

  If anyone's listening and wants to restart that business with me, cause like, I don't think Ramp would care. Like we would even say like, we won't do SaaS or something, but just, I want someone to negotiate a car or a lease or, you know, these big ticket things.

• 1:29:13Sam Parr?

  Your, your turn.

• 1:29:14Shaan Puri?

  Mine. Okay. So guest of the year, I had Hasan Minhaj. I thought he brought it. And what I loved about it was I thought the episode was good, but I love that he genuinely listens to the pod and like, it was a conversation. It wasn't an interview. Almost every guest is like, they show up cold. They usually have never, they've heard about the show, but they never listened to it or listened to one episode just to prep for it. And, um, and the ones who do like Dharmesh, he listens to every episode. When he came on, guess what? He's fired, right? Steph listens to the episodes. So she knows the vibe. This was the same. Now he's not like a business idea machine, but, um, man, the feedback I got from that episode of people just being like, dude,

• 1:29:56Shaan Puri?

  that conversation, it literally felt like I was in the room. I thought that was something cool. That was something very, very different.

• 1:30:01Sam Parr?

  Are you guys like homies now?

• 1:30:03Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, we text all the time and

• 1:30:05Sam Parr?

  Isn't that funny?

• 1:30:06Andrew Wilkinson?

  What's the, what's the story? So he listened and then messaged you or how did you guys?

• 1:30:11Shaan Puri?

  Crazy connect the dot story. Actually, so there's another guy who's a comedy writer for a TV show. His name's Azar and he writes the show Remy on Hulu.

• 1:30:22Shaan Puri?

  And so he listens to the show. I don't know how he discovered it. He listens and he was like, dude, this is great. Now his network is people in kind of like Hollywood and like specifically maybe like brown Hollywood. And so he tipped a few people off to it and I took like a random meeting with him. You know, I have this one block every week just for random spontaneous meetings with cool people that are like in my orbit. And so I took the meeting with him. We had great vibes. We connected great. And I think he then told Hussain, dude, you gotta listen to this show. And so then he started listening from there and then he reached out, he DM'd and was like, my, a couple of my Twitter threads went viral, like the clubhouse one, and then this other one, the metaverse one. And after each one, he would reach out and be like, dude, that was like, that was so good. And one time he just called me and at the end of that, I was like, dude, he's like, we, he's like, we gotta meet.

• 1:31:06Shaan Puri?

  He's like, I'm doing a show in San Francisco. Let's come. And I go, great. Can you stay an extra day and let's record the pod?

• 1:31:12Sam Parr?

  Oh, really?

• 1:31:13Shaan Puri?

  So that's what he, that's what he did. And he's like, yeah, he's like, as long as it's in person, I'll do it. I said, great. Can you extend your trip one day? And that's what he did. He did eight shows over a weekend and he stayed an extra Monday and then we recorded it.

• 1:31:24Sam Parr?

  God, that's pretty badass. Isn't that awesome? That's one of the greatest perks about this.

• 1:31:28Shaan Puri?

  Another example.

• 1:31:30Andrew Wilkinson?

  See, this is, this is why I don't understand why anyone does public speaking. Like you look, you look at this and you're literally reaching millions of people and it's all these random people you'd never expect to meet.

• 1:31:40Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. And when this episode is over, I'm gonna like click close and then I'm gonna go like feed my daughter lunch and like, you know, not have to be on a flight somewhere, you know, Albuquerque to, because I gave a talk.

• 1:31:50Andrew Wilkinson?

  Well, one of the, one of the things I thought was weird, so you, you talked about this on one of the episodes where you said, you know, you brainstormed with him, business ideas or whatever. Why, why would you, if he doesn't like touring, like you were like, oh yeah, you could tour and make all this money. But dude, like, I think that seems miserable, flying from city to city to city, staying in hotels.

• 1:32:10Shaan Puri?

  I would say it's a, it's a good and bad. I talked to him about it. He's like, well, obviously the feeling of like a live crowd is a thrill and exhilaration, like musicians, comedians, athletes are really the only ones who get that like insane love from thousands of people while you perform your best work. Like that's a pretty good feeling. So that's addictive.

• 1:32:30Sam Parr?

  It is definitely cool when you're single too.

• 1:32:32Shaan Puri?

  And then the other upside is you make a shit ton of money off of it. So touring is a great business model. It's basically the music industry makes all its money off touring now, live shows. So touring is where you can make substantial amount of money compared to online stuff. The, the bad, the downside is he just had, you know, his second kid and you're out of the home for like a significant period of time and, you know, bring on the road can get really tiring and your health, blah, blah, blah.

• 1:32:59Andrew Wilkinson?

  Well, it's also linear. You know, you're limited to the number of people that can fit in this.

• 1:33:03Shaan Puri?

  So I don't know if you, did you hear the idea I gave them, which was to create, you know, Hamilton for brown people?

• 1:33:08Andrew Wilkinson?

  Yeah, the Hamilton. I thought I liked that.

• 1:33:10Shaan Puri?

  That's great. This is a winner.

• 1:33:11Sam Parr?

  All right, let's do the last two, right?

• 1:33:13Shaan Puri?

  Last two. So the last two is company to watch and, and or like a prediction, a crazy prediction for 2022. So company to watch for 2022 or crazy prediction and or?

• 1:33:24Sam Parr?

  No. So then it's, sorry, you, you're missing one. So it's company to watch, industry you got your eye on next year, and then prediction.

• 1:33:33Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, something like that. Yeah. You could do those three.

• 1:33:36Sam Parr?

  All right, let me go first. Prediction, I think San Francisco is going to be cool again.

• 1:33:40Shaan Puri?

  By the way, can I read out our predictions from last year?

• 1:33:43Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:44Shaan Puri?

  Cause I think we got some wrong. So our prediction for last year, you said San Francisco will bounce back, continue to be the center of tech for decades.

• 1:33:50Sam Parr?

  I said that?

• 1:33:51Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you said that. You go, you said, and then your second one was that Pornhub and large companies will, it'll be normal to pay, pay subscription for porn. Okay, I think San Francisco went down the drain this year so far and I don't, I don't know anybody paying for porn really, except for, I guess, OnlyFans. You got that part right. That's huge.

• 1:34:11Andrew Wilkinson?

  Yeah, OnlyFans, that's literally subscription porn.

• 1:34:14Shaan Puri?

  Just not Pornhub then.

• 1:34:15Sam Parr?

  San Francisco is still going to come back. I still believe it.

• 1:34:17Shaan Puri?

  Andrew, you said, you said, no one's going to give a shit about COVID in a year or it's going to bounce back much faster than people think and they're going to forget about it. And I was like, yeah, me too. I agree with you, Andrew. That was mine as well.

• 1:34:27Sam Parr?

  I think you're wrong.

• 1:34:28Shaan Puri?

  We were both.

• 1:34:29Andrew Wilkinson?

  That's, I think it's true. If you go to the States right now, I mean, no, it's like, everything's open. Nobody cares about it. It's totally normal.

• 1:34:37Sam Parr?

  Not this week.

• 1:34:38Andrew Wilkinson?

  The fact that we've done an entire episode, we're living in a pandemic and nobody's mentioned anything about it in an hour and a half, right?

• 1:34:45Sam Parr?

  I think an argument could be made both, both ways, both, both ways. And then what was the other one?

• 1:34:51Shaan Puri?

  That was it. So mine was, mine was a cop.

• 1:34:53Sam Parr?

  All right. So I said my prediction. All right. Company to watch. This YouTuber named Meet Kevin. I've been watching this guy. He has a $51 million portfolio and he reveals the whole thing. And now his business is making $30 million a year with four employees. I think that Sean said one day, there's going to be a billionaire YouTuber. I think Meet Kevin is the guy who potentially could do it. And then industry that I got my eye on, at home diagnostics. I'm incredibly fascinated with at home diagnostics. I've been, I've tried all of them. I think a lot of them are really cool and I think it's going to continue to boom. And I think it should continue to boom because we need it.

• 1:35:30Shaan Puri?

  Okay, great. Andrew, what are yours? Company to watch? Crazy prediction? And what was the other one? What industry to watch? Yeah, industry.

• 1:35:39Andrew Wilkinson?

  Yeah. So company to watch. I mean, it's exciting to talk about all these new, new businesses. But what I'm actually interested in is all these companies that were incredibly hot, like three or four years ago, that raised a ton of money and they've been kind of quietly building. So for example, superhuman, you know, everyone was talking about it two years ago. I haven't heard anyone talking about it, but I know they're doing very well. I can't wait to see what they do with all that money. And then same thing with Pitch. Pitch was like, you know, huge two years ago. And I think they're in a building phase. So I'm excited to see what they do when they come out of that. Pitch, pitch.com. It's basically replacing PowerPoint. It's like a good version of PowerPoint. It's awesome.

• 1:36:23Shaan Puri?

  Oh, superhuman.com and pitch and crazy. Any predictions for 2022? Yeah. Bold predictions.

• 1:36:30Andrew Wilkinson?

  Well, you guys put down prediction or opinion. Oh, oh, this is prediction. Oh, yeah, here we go. I think that this high salary inflation is not here to stay. I think what's happened is all these companies down in San Francisco are going, oh, crazy. We can hire cheap people in Canada, but they're not yet going, oh, hey, we can hire people in India and the Philippines. And one of the things I've realized is that people in India and the Philippines are obviously just as smart, but they're far more motivated and the cost is like a fifth or a sixth of what a North American employee is. And they really want the job and they care. So you can either give, you know, you can pay an entitled millennial 150 grand or you

• 1:37:14Andrew Wilkinson?

  can pay someone 30 grand in India and they'll do a better job and the money means more to them. So I think over time, I think the work will be democratized across the world and that salaries will come back.

• 1:37:27Sam Parr?

  I agree with you. I just don't think it's going to happen next year.

• 1:37:29Shaan Puri?

  By the way, I forgot one, one category. That's a great one. Well, I mean, overrated thing, thing you are betting against that other people seem to be into. Do you guys have one there?

• 1:37:38Sam Parr?

  Mine was the creator economy.

• 1:37:41Sam Parr?

  I had NFTs in the creator economy and, and, and web three.

• 1:37:45Shaan Puri?

  Image, image. Give us your quick why NFTs, why you're saying it's the, the one you think is overrated, most overrated trend right now.

• 1:37:53Andrew Wilkinson?

  Well, I think it's, it's, obviously the technology is fascinating, right? So that's amazing. But I think it's kind of like digital beanie babies that are easily replicatable. At least a beanie baby is kind of hard to replicate. These are just like images that you can download that anyone can use. And I think that over the long term, they'll be really cool. Once there's a standard. So if every metaverse or every app uses one API and everyone agrees that this is the way to access images or whatever, and it's verifiable, I think that'll be incredibly cool and powerful. And I love the idea of like Taylor Swift saying like, hey, I'm selling, you know, my song rights to my, my fans.

• 1:38:36Andrew Wilkinson?

  And whenever anyone transacts, I get 10, 10% or whatever. That's amazing. But I just, I just think right now it's all half baked and all the protocols are all made up and won't exist in five years. And I think I'm going to win our bet.

• 1:38:50Shaan Puri?

  Okay. Remind, remind people.

• 1:38:52Andrew Wilkinson?

  It was 10 years, right? Five years or 10 years?

• 1:38:55Shaan Puri?

  Uh, what was the exact bet?

• 1:38:56Andrew Wilkinson?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:58Andrew Wilkinson?

  We, we have a bet, I believe you chose a piece of digital art and you said it would be worth more in the future and I said it would be less. Yes.

• 1:39:06Shaan Puri?

  Great. Okay. So I have, uh, our company to watch. Uh, I have a company called, um,

• 1:39:14Shaan Puri?

  Terra, which is Terraform Labs. They've created something called Luna. So one of the biggest challenges in crypto is that people are like, oh, Bitcoin, it's cool, but like it can't be used as a currency because it's too volatile. And the solution that the crypto community came up with was something called stable coins. And so stable coins are super important. They're, you know, billions and billions of dollars are transacted every day. Uh, you know, whatever, I don't know about day, maybe it's month, uh, using stable coins with significant volume. And there's a stable coin called Luna that I think is, um, the stable coins called US, uh, UST, uh, but Luna is the, the token that backs it. And I think Luna has been on this tear. It started the year at, you know, maybe a dollar. It's at currently, you know, a hundred dollars. So it's about a hundred X in a year. Uh, it's been a great

• 1:39:59Shaan Puri?

  investment for me and I continue to believe that, that it's going to work. Interestingly, it's actually being used in the real world, which is one of the other criticisms of crypto. So in Korea, in Mongolia, in a bunch of different places, um, people use, uh, this stable coin without even knowing that they use it. So they just use their mobile app to pay. They don't realize that in the background, it's being done on these, uh, crypto rails. And so there's an app in Korea called Chai, I think it is, that has like a few million users, payments app that uses, um, uses this stable coin, uh, as the, as the thing underneath it. So it's, it's the company to watch, I think, in the next year. Cause if you can actually crack the stable coin use case, uh, you know, Bitcoin cracked the store of

• 1:40:42Shaan Puri?

  value use case became, you know, $50,000 a coin right now and going up. Ethereum is the, uh, you know, programmable network. Uh, it's the, it's the compute layer. It cracked that and, uh, you know, $4,000 a token. Last year it was at like 200. So that's been an amazing investment and Luna is.

• 1:41:00Shaan Puri?

  The number one contender right now, I think, for stable coins. And so I'm keeping an eye on that.

• 1:41:05Sam Parr?

  Okay. And what are the others?

• 1:41:06Shaan Puri?

  Industry I got my eye on is actually VR. So most people think VR is just dead or doesn't work. But I don't know if you guys know this, but Oculus outsold Xbox this year. So Oculus sold 10 million units, which is about 4 billion in revenue for Facebook. On just the hardware, forgetting the games and the app store that they have. Now Xbox had some production shortages, so probably would have been more, but like, just to round it up. Oculus did about 10 billion, sorry, 10 million units and PlayStation did 14 million. So it's like, it's not that far behind.

• 1:41:40Andrew Wilkinson?

  Do you, do you remember when Oculus, or sorry, when Xbox had that like weird little bar? That you could put over your TV and you could like move your hands, connect, right? That was a huge best seller, right? But it was still gimmick. Like I bought one, everyone thought it was cool. And the exact same, I remember I played it for like a day and then I was like, whatever, this isn't ready. And I did the same thing. I've bought an Oculus every single year for the last three or four years. And every single time I feel sick and uncomfortable.

• 1:42:07Sam Parr?

  No, every time, every time I use it.

• 1:42:09Andrew Wilkinson?

  This sucks.

• 1:42:10Sam Parr?

  It's cool.

• 1:42:12Sam Parr?

  Every time I use it, I say to myself. It's not there yet, but I, I buy it. I buy into it.

• 1:42:17Andrew Wilkinson?

  I think Apple, I think Apple's gonna dominate. I think Apple is secretly working on this.

• 1:42:22Shaan Puri?

  There's a couple of signs I think are really promising. One is that over 60 games made over a million dollars on the platform, which I think is pretty impressive. And six games made over 10 million dollars. So I think that's also pretty impressive. Growth there. So I think VR is just something that most people are thinking is it's not happening and it's growing like rapidly. So I thought that was pretty good. And then, um, let's see, what's it crazy predictions? Okay. My craziest prediction is that the Winklevi. The Winklevoss end up richer than Zuck. So here's the case of how the Winklevoss get their revenge in the end. Oh my god. They own about 1% of all Bitcoin in circulation. They also own Gemini and exchange is probably valued at somewhere between 20 and 30 billion dollars. They own 1% of Bitcoin?

• 1:43:08Shaan Puri?

  They own 1% of all the Bitcoin. They also own a substantial amount of ETH. They haven't announced how much. And if crypto actually like has its like, you know, its heyday and Bitcoin goes up to this. So here's the, here's what you need to believe. I don't think this is a 2022 bet at all. This is more of like a five year bet. But if you think that Facebook has peaked and Facebook, you know, doesn't grow or even maybe drops, you know, 15, 20% in value. And because they're priced at a very, as a growth stock. And if you think that Bitcoin gets to 500K, ETH gets to 50K, Gemini ends up going public. They will actually be worth more than Zuck who's worth 130 billion dollars today. And I think that that is just a crazy.

• 1:43:51Shaan Puri?

  You know, the sequel to the social network movie is that these guys actually end up, you know, wealthier than, than Zuck in the end. So that's my crazy prediction. That'd be hilarious. All right. That's good. Oh, my, my overrated trend, by the way, my overrated trend is SPACs. So, uh, you know, the last 10 years, 10 years before, you know, the SPAC trend, there was like, I don't know. I think it was like 40 billion, 45 billion of SPACs total in like 10 years. Then last year there was 80 billion, so doubled, it doubled. And this year there was 160 billions, it doubled again. And if you just look at SPAC performance, like, um, just if you just take Chamath's SPACs, Chamath who I think, you know, really started this trend. Year to date, I think his average is he's down 30% year to date. And did he make money off that? Yes, he made a ton of money.

• 1:44:36Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's guaranteed money. This is why it's messed up. They all, you make, you make the money no matter what. There's a, you know, heads I win, tails you lose, uh, setup. Uh, I don't really like it. And that's what happened here is that the sponsor, the promoter makes money either way. And, uh, you know, his stocks are down, his, his SPACs are all down 30%. And the, the overall SP500 is up, up 30%. So, you know, it's a massive, you know, massive delta there.

• 1:45:06Shaan Puri?

  So I think that's, you know, I think SPACs are the overrated, uh, trend or the thing to, uh, the bandwagon I don't want to be on. If you're not the promoter, I don't think it's a great place to be right now. How does that make you feel, Andrew, as a SPACer?

• 1:45:18Andrew Wilkinson?

  Well, I'm not a SPACer. I don't know.

• 1:45:20Sam Parr?

  Wait, WeCommerce wasn't a SPAC?

• 1:45:23Andrew Wilkinson?

  No, no, no. Bloomberg misreported us as a SPAC. We did something called a reverse takeover, which is kind of like a SPAC, but instead of having a SPAC where the sponsor gets 20%, they're getting like 0.01% of your business. There's just these little shell companies. So, no, we're not.

• 1:45:42Shaan Puri?

  How much does a promoter make on a typical SPAC? It's like $100 million, right?

• 1:45:48Andrew Wilkinson?

  20%, 20% of whatever they raise. So, I don't know, 20% of the future company. So, if you have a billion dollar company, you're literally saying, "I'll give you $200 million to take me public." And the math on it is with a SPAC, you can show projections, which is really, really valuable for a growth company, and it's a little more flexible, and the timing is a little shorter.

• 1:46:10Shaan Puri?

  When you go public, normally you don't do projections. You only do historicals. With a SPAC, you get to show your fancy projections about whatever you think the future looks like. And I think you only have to buy in for 2% or 3%, but you get 20%. So, that's your spread as the promoter. You pay 2% of the price, and you get 20%. I don't know how SPACs work exactly, but it's something like that.

• 1:46:31Sam Parr?

  All right. This was a good episode, I think. Ben, what do we think? This is, it was a long one, but I think it's going to end up being a hit. Was last year's a hit?

• 1:46:40Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, last year's was a hit.

• 1:46:42Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I wasn't here for last year, but I thought this was really great. What was that? You mentioned this really cool podcast, Sam. What was that one called again? How to Take Over the World, baby.

• 1:46:51Shaan Puri?

  How to Take Over the World.

• 1:46:53Sam Parr?

  If anything, it's the best intro music I've ever heard.

• 1:46:58Sam Parr?

  Yeah, there you go.

• 1:47:00Sam Parr?

  No, it was a great episode. My first time attending it, but Andrew brought the fire. And the predictions were like a little, a little predictable, I will say that. But other than, but the recommendations, the companies, the products were all good.