How Nick Saban’s Side Hustle Might Make Him a Billionaire

- April 28, 2025 (12 months ago) • 52:41

Transcript

Start Time	Speaker	Text
00:00	Sam Parr	"Were you, when you were thinking about this?"
00:01	Shaan Puri	I have this room in my house where I have the best ideas. It's a cool room because if you need a shower, you're already there — it's just the bathroom. Okay, so I'm in the bath. Alright. I got a business I can tell you a little bit about. It kinda blew my mind. I was on TBPN with our good buddy John Kugen. I went on there and they asked me a question. They said, "So you're a creator and you've got this kind of cool business underneath yourself as a creator. Are you bullish on investing in creators right now?" I said, "No, but I'm bullish on creators investing in businesses." They asked, "What do you mean?" I explained that it's not that somebody invested in me — I'm investing. I'm buying pieces of businesses that I think should exist or that I can accelerate in some way. That's going really, really well for me, so I think that's going to be a model people follow. I started thinking about this and I saw an example today that kinda blew my mind. Do you know who Nick Saban is?
01:07	Sam Parr	"I smell what you're stepping in." </FormattedResponse>
01:09	Shaan Puri	Great — not a friend.
01:11	Sam Parr	Yes, I love where you're going with this. Yes, I do know who he is.
01:15	Shaan Puri	"You toot my horn, yeah?"
01:17	Sam Parr	Beep, beep. My friend, I like Nick Saban.
01:19	Shaan Puri	Alright, so Nick Saban — he was the football coach at Alabama and LSU, and he's probably the most successful modern-day college football coach. The guy made, probably, $150,000,000 as a coach. Amazing money.
01:35	Sam Parr	Is that real? A 150 as a college football coach?
01:39	Shaan Puri	Yeah, he's in his fifties, so he's been doing it for a long time. But his last contract was crazy: it was basically a ten-year, $100 million contract. He's making $10 to $12 million a year on that contract.
01:49	Sam Parr	Wow.
01:50	Shaan Puri	But Nick Saban is actually going to be a billionaire, and he's going to be a billionaire because of car dealerships. I found this pretty fascinating — I couldn't believe what I was reading. The story is pretty cool. Here's how it goes. Nick Saban has partnered up with this guy I think his name is John Agresti. The headline of the article was "The Man Who Will Make Nick Saban a Billionaire." It talks about how Saban, while he was coaching, was deciding, "You know what? I think I might go into car dealerships." Car dealerships have had an interesting history with athletes. I remember growing up in Colorado: John Elway — all the car dealerships had John Elway's name on them. He was our active quarterback at the Broncos. I didn't really know this because I was just a kid at the time, but I went back and looked at what happened with John Elway's car dealerships. It turns out Elway basically had this insane story. While he was a player, he started this car dealership brand selling Toyotas and Chevys or something like that. Before he retired, he sold his car dealership group to AutoNation for $87,000,000, mostly stock. He got paid out about $90,000,000, which was more than he was making as a professional quarterback in the NFL. He then also licensed them his face and his name so that they could continue using his brand for another 10 years. Anybody had a noncompete during that time. Two crazy things happened because of that deal structure. John both made a big bag and he lost a huge bag at the same time. He made $87,000,000, but then when he retired it turns out the owner of the Broncos offered him an incredible deal. He basically told him, "You can buy 10% of the team for $15,000,000 today." Actually, "I owe you this deferred salary because you're going to retire earlier or something like that" — he owed him $21,000,000 of deferred salary — so he said, "You know what? I'll let you buy another 10% for that $21,000,000." John Elway was like, "I don't know, that's a lot of money." And the guy goes, "I'll make it even more of a no-brainer for you. If you change your mind, if you don't like it, if you want to sell the team within the next five years, I will pay you back everything you put in + $5,000,000 and 8% annual interest." So you literally can't lose money in this deal — you can only make money.
04:15	Sam Parr	Who owned the Broncos at the time, Bernie Madoff? Because this sounds like...
04:18	MFM	A deal, too, could be true.
04:20	Shaan Puri	Pat Bolan wanted John Elway to be part of the team, and he also wanted him to work as an executive with the team.
04:27	Sam Parr	Got it, and I guess...
04:28	Shaan Puri	He was like, "I'm going to pay you this money either way. How about, instead, I trade you stock for the team?" </FormattedResponse>
04:32	Sam Parr	Okay.
04:33	Shaan Puri	So Elway actually turns the deal down. He turns it down for two reasons. First, he's illiquid. He'd sold for $87,000,000, but it was Auto Trader stock, and he didn't have the liquidity at the time — maybe he couldn't sell right away. He didn't have the $15,000,000 cash on hand because he'd also just made a $15,000,000 investment in some guy named Sean Mueller, who was actually running a Ponzi scheme that ended up failing. He got half of it back and lost half, so he didn't have the cash. He's like, "Ah, I can't do it." And then he's like, "No, also..."
05:04	MFM	Dude, he listened to the wrong—the wrong "Ponzi Team" guy. I thought it was the Bronco guy. Turns out it was this other guy.
05:09	Shaan Puri	Exactly. By the way, that 20% stake—that's about a billion-dollar stake today in the team. The team just sold for $5,000,000,000, so Eloy missed out on that. After the noncompete ended, he went back into the car-dealership business and built it back up. Now, with that car-dealership business, he does over $1,000,000,000 in sales again, and he's worth a few hundred million dollars from his second rodeo on the car-dealership side. So, I... I don't really know. I didn't put enough respect on the car-dealership name. Let me tell you about the Nick Saban one. What caught my eye is that a story came out saying that they bought two car dealerships in Miami. Guess the price.
05:50	Sam Parr	"$20,000,000. I don't know — ten."
05:52	Shaan Puri	You're only off by 680,000,000.
05:55	Sam Parr	Wait, what?
05:55	Shaan Puri	They bought two dealerships for a reported $700 million in Miami.
06:01	Sam Parr	Oh my God. Oh, and they're Mercedes I'm looking at.
06:03	Shaan Puri	The article says they’re Mercedes dealerships. I think they have, like, an exclusive and are in the prime, ultra‑rich area of Miami. But dude—I actually spent 30 minutes this morning trying to figure out if this is a typo. I was like, there’s no way individual dealerships could be worth $350,000,000. In fact, I’m still about 25% convinced that might be a typo and it might be $70,000,000. After 30 minutes of digging I couldn’t find confirmation. It’s pretty insane. Their dealership group now owns, like, I don’t know, 10 to 15 dealerships across Alabama—where he was the coach—up to Miami now. He says the guy said they sell 22,000 cars a year (about 20,000 Mercedes a year), and they do about $2,000,000,000 in revenue on that. That’s insane. The partner is now worth $1 billion on paper, and Saban will probably be worth $1 billion after these deals. Isn’t that wild?
06:57	Sam Parr	It's crazy. Didn't I bring this up a while ago? I thought—because I think I read something—I didn't know that he was a billionaire, but I read a stat about car dealerships. It's crazy. You told me you wanted to cover car dealers. Interestingly, recently Forbes did an article with another beautiful title: "The Car Dealership Billionaire No One Knows." It's about a guy named Terry Taylor who owns, I think, 120 car dealerships and who also lives in Florida. They came across him because he's extremely private: he doesn't do interviews, we've never seen a photo of him, and we don't know anything about him. What they did find was that someone recently bought Tommy Hilfiger's $30,000,000 mansion in New York City, and it turns out the same LLC owns $250,000,000 worth of real estate. Who is behind this? They find out it's this auto-dealership owner who owns practically the whole thing. He owns a bunch of dealerships and is making a lot of money. They eventually get a hold of him and he says, "I heard you've talked to all my associates. Fine, I will answer just a few questions for you." The whole story is about how he purposely tries to be low-key and under the radar, but they uncover that he owns an $80,000,000 jet and all this amazing stuff. It turns out car dealerships are, shockingly, amazing companies.
08:20	Shaan Puri	You're shockingly amazing. Yeah, I think they get little local monopolies because you get a territory. You might become the only dealer for that brand in that area. Then people tend to buy from, you know, a local radius if they're not buying online. I think the way they work is the car manufacturers basically do floor financing or something like that. They basically lend you — they basically finance you to own the inventory, so I think you're not out of pocket as much as it...
08:47	Sam Parr	It would sound very bank-friendly. In the article, they were talking about how once you've proven to Mercedes—or whoever—that you're a decent operator, they, you know, will say, "Yeah, we'd love to expand; you're trustworthy—let's go." Then the banks will be like, "Yeah, this is a very predictable business. We've seen this for a hundred years. We will loan you money once you prove it to be successful." So it's a very loanable business.
09:14	Shaan Puri	Hey — let's take a quick break to talk about our sponsor today. HubSpot has put together a list of 200 AI business ideas. These are business ideas you could create using AI; it's a list of 200 generated from a huge brainstorm. You can get access to the list by clicking the link below [link below]. I'll give you a couple of examples. One is an AI dressing room: say you visit an e‑commerce site and want to see what something would look like on you. AI can take a picture of you and show what the clothes or makeup would look like on your face. Pretty cool, right? Another example is AI tools for real estate brokers — tools that take listings and make them more polished and attractive to buyers. Again, check it out: it's a brainstorm of 200 possible AI ideas brought to you by HubSpot. You can get it free via the link below. The way this happened was: Saban was sponsored by Mercedes. He had just finished an event and goes to these Mercedes events. He thought Mercedes was great, so he talked to them and said he might be interested in doing a dealership. They told him, essentially: “You’re not going to want to operate these things. You keep being Nick Saban — God‑tier football coach. Go obsess over that. We’ll introduce you to four or five of our favorite franchisees who we think kick ass. We have all the data; we know who kicks ass, and you might be able to partner with one of them.” So he did a four‑hour meeting with the first guy they introduced him to — this guy John — and he took no more meetings. After the four hours he agreed: “I’m going to partner with this guy.” He said it’s like interviewing an offensive coordinator: when you know, you know. (Funny — you’d expect a love analogy, but he used “offensive coordinator.”) This guy John is a hustler. In addition to the car dealerships, they started a bourbon company — Kentucky Bourbon Company. Then, during COVID‑19, they created a medical supplies business called Dream Medical Group. So they have Dream Auto Group and Dream Medical Group, and they sold over $100 million of PPE during COVID‑19.
11:17	Sam Parr	This guy's doing shit. By the way, whenever I hear that story of someone doing PPE during COVID, I always think "hustler."
11:24	MFM	Well, it can go one.
11:25	Sam Parr	Of two ways: you're always a hustler. You're in that circle, but it's like you're either full of it or...
11:30	Shaan Puri	"Good hustle or bad hustle?"
11:31	Sam Parr	Yeah—there's something about it... how fascinating. I did not realize it was that big. It seems like the key to this is two things: partnering with the right dealer beforehand and picking the right cities. I own a Mercedes, and it seems like Mercedes has been booming for the last ten years. They're cool now; they were always cool, but now they have some accessible models that many people can buy. I imagine they're selling a lot. But also, he picked the right cities. He picked Nashville in 2016 or so—picking the right geos [geographic areas] that are growing with richer people to be able to support a dealership.
12:07	Shaan Puri	And where your name—if you're an athlete or a coach—carries weight. It's kinda silly, but the point is clear. What is the Elway one called? I think it's called John Elway Chevrolet. It's the number one Chevy dealer in the country because, guess what, we like our hometown kid. We like the local hero—the local quarterback who brought us to the Super Bowl. That's a heroic guy. John Elway Chevrolet does $50 to $100 million a year in revenue just from that one dealership. That's pretty crazy. I think these guys have done a good job. By the way, here's a quote from this dude—tell me what you think of this: > "He's even more obsessed with the financial details. He's a former accountant and he compiles his own monthly statement for every single store. > > 'If you say to me, "How's March going?" I can look and say Cutler-based store sold 13 cars last night—eight new, five pre-owned. I can tell you who the salespeople were. I could tell you that Evelyn bought one. I know every name, every car we sold, how much money we made, and I track them on parabolic curves to make sure we're not overcharging or undercharging anybody.'"
13:13	Sam Parr	What a beast, man.
13:14	Shaan Puri	The only thing is: what is he talking about—parabolic curves for what? What could that even mean? I tracked them on parabolic curves.
13:20	Sam Parr	Is it a parabolic curve, like at the beginning when exponential growth happens?
13:25	MFM	Yeah, but what does that mean?</FormattedResponse>
13:26	Shaan Puri	I tracked them on parabolic curves. </FormattedResponse>
13:27	MFM	What does that even mean?
13:29	Sam Parr	Patrick Collison tweeted this thing the other day, and he used the phrase "local maxima." Did you see, love?
13:35	Shaan Puri	That love, love breaking through a local maxima.
13:38	Sam Parr	I had to go and figure out what all this meant. He said, "I think worry about local maxima comes from imagining the 3D world, where it is in fact easier to get trapped." I didn't know what that meant; I had to go figure it out.
13:52	Shaan Puri	Each word had to be individually looked up.
13:54	Sam Parr	I did not know what that sentence — what that sentence meant at all. And then he goes, "But company space has many more dimensions, so most critical points are, as you say, just saddles. There's almost always a positive gradient you can trundle along." I did not know what any of that — any of those senses.
14:10	Shaan Puri	Or do not.
14:12	Sam Parr	I did not, so I had to... I shared and said, "Could somebody explain this to me?" They did — he explained what it said. It's actually brilliant, and I totally got into this.
14:20	MFM	What does...
14:21	Sam Parr	It means people often worry that they're going to grow their company a bit and hit a ceiling and get stuck—reaching a small success and thinking that's as far as it can go. But the original quote says that business isn't like climbing a simple hill where you can easily get trapped on a small peak. Business has many moving parts: product, team, market, pricing, strategy, etc., and that creates lots of directions to explore. So even if growth stalls or slows, it's rarely the true limit. There's almost always another path forward—something you could tweak, improve, or change to unlock more growth. Most stuck points in business are just temporary plateaus, not dead ends. And the "saddle" thing kind of blew my mind—it's a mathematical... it's like a mathematical thing.
15:01	Shaan Puri	"Oh, I see the picture of a saddle. You see the photo?" "Yeah."
15:04	Sam Parr	It's kind of mind-blowing, actually, when I saw this photo. It's hard to explain to the listener — we'll put the photo up [photo will be shown] — but it's basically looking at a normal X and Y axis and then there's a third axis: it's 3D. It shows that you can go forward or back, up or down. It was actually kind of mind-blowing. I felt like Tom Haverford on the show Parks and Recreation, where he sees a piece of art and says, "This makes me feel something." Someone explains to him, "Yeah, that's what art does — it makes you feel something." I remember seeing this this weekend and just sitting there thinking, "I feel... I feel special after reading this. I've just learned." It was kind of cool.
15:43	Shaan Puri	"I think you've got a reality distortion field, my friend."
15:47	Sam Parr	"I—I... he just rd'd my ass hard." [unclear transcription: "rd'd" preserved from the original; meaning could not be confidently determined.]
15:51	Shaan Puri	Telling somebody they're at a local maxima is always one of those "pat on the head" moments. It's like, "Wait—are you patting me, or are you telling me I'm a little boy?" Right? If you ever use that on somebody, it's a great backhanded diss. It just says, "You're doing great, but you don't realize you're still at the kid's table right now, and there's this other game that's the global maxima."
16:11	Sam Parr	You gotta throw in a "but" there. You're like, "local maxima — but local maxima." </FormattedResponse>
16:15	Shaan Puri	In fact, there's this article with the car-dealership guy. There's an article in Forbes, and at the end of it they write: > "Joe—Joe loves deal-making so much he... in the middle of our interview I had to apologize: 'Sorry, pal, don't mean to be rude, I just really gotta close this deal.'" I was like, "Oh damn, he just pals you," and you put that in—you put that in the article.
16:35	Sam Parr	Joe—Joe sounds cool, but also like a douche. He's got into the whiskey business too. Check, check, check. </FormattedResponse>
16:47	Shaan Puri	Did you call him "Joe"? His name's John, also.
16:50	MFM	Well, I was just at a local maxima, bud. I don't remember for... </FormattedResponse>
16:53	Sam Parr	"I don't remember. I don't remember names."
16:57	Shaan Puri	"That's weird."
16:59	Sam Parr	That was the virtual version of slapping someone on the ass and saying, "Go get them." We're calling them by the wrong name.
17:05	Shaan Puri	Alright, what else we got? I have some other stuff. In AI there's been these waves where four or five of the same company will get started and they'll all get an incredible amount of traction. A few years ago—this was when ChatGPT 3 or 3.5 was out—it was copywriting services. Companies like Jasper, Copy.ai, and a whole bunch of others exploded past $10 million in revenue very quickly with the same idea: “we'll help you write blog posts and marketing copy.” That was one idea. Then ChatGPT just became good enough that you could do all those things without a separate tool, so they ran into headwinds. I shouldn't say they got wrecked, but the explosive growth didn't last forever. The current batch of AI companies doing this is these website builders. Examples are Lovable, Replit, and Bolt. It's similar to the way you had Squarespace and Wix—drag-and-drop site builders to make a website without code. Now you don't even have to drag and drop. You just say what you want. For example: “Hey, I want a website for a law firm,” and it gives you a beautiful site. You can say, “make the hero thing a carousel,” and it makes it a carousel. You don't have to code. These businesses have now exploded. They're some of the fastest-growing companies. Is Cursor one of them? No—Cursor is a little different. Cursor is a tool for existing developers. But, for example, Lovable hit $4,000,000. It was doing basically $1,000,000 of ARR every week for the first four weeks, and it's now at $20,000,000+.
18:55	Sam Parr	"That's insane."
18:56	Shaan Puri	Bolt is at 20 million. Level is at 20 million. It's crazy, right? They're growing really, really fast, so those are there now. But I also kinda predict that that's going to be a very shaky space to build on. I don't know.
19:09	Sam Parr	"How much is it gonna be—like Groupon, you know?"
19:12	Shaan Puri	Could be... it might be that they're the next Squarespace. Squarespace, you know, eventually became a public company. But I don't personally think so. I think that's going to be just a feature inside of ChatGPT — it's like, "make me a website," and I think they'll be able to do that. Something like Replit is a little different because they have a whole backend or whatever. Anyways, that's all nuance. What I'm trying to get to is: it got me thinking, what would be a more defensible AI business? So what's a simple business that's about AI but not going to get just wrecked by the next ChatGPT update? I started thinking: okay, well, some of the most defensible businesses are marketplaces, and nobody's really built a good AI marketplace yet. What would that even be? Why not? We all know that marketplaces are super, super valuable when they get built — eBay, Amazon, Airbnb, Uber. These are all marketplaces: supply and demand.
20:03	Sam Parr	"Where were you when you were thinking about this? Tell me—walk me through: when you're having these very strange conversations with you, where?" </FormattedResponse>
20:11	Shaan Puri	I have this room in my house where I have the best ideas. We have tile on the floor. It's a cool room because if you need to poop or pee, you're already there. If you need to shower, you're already there. It's just the bathroom.
20:30	MFM	Okay, so you're just sitting in the bathroom thinking about defensible defensible AI companies.
20:36	Sam Parr	Okay, as one does.
20:37	Shaan Puri	As one does, I was thinking: why isn't there a high-end marketplace for AI talent? One of the hardest things about AI right now is just keeping up with the tools and being able to actually do something with them. Somebody should make an Upwork- or Fiverr-like platform that is just for highly skilled AI doers. A place where I can post a task and someone with AI expertise can either build it for me or show me how to do it on a recurring basis. Make a very skilled marketplace where people can earn a lot of money for their AI enthusiasm. I know a bunch of people who are really enthusiastic about this stuff. They build pet projects and try every new tool that comes out, but they don't necessarily have businesses where they need to use them. They're just AI enthusiasts — kind of bored on Twitter all day. If you had, say, 150 people on the supply side, a lot of businesses would know they could benefit from AI. If you could state your problem and have people explain what they could do with AI to solve it — then pay them to do that — you could build a marketplace around skilled AI practitioners. Think of it as the upscale version: the top 1% level of quality on Upwork, Fiverr, or 99designs.
22:02	Sam Parr	Dude, I always thought that somewhere—your company or something like this—should just make it so I can hire an expert. They could come and spend three or four weeks looking at my company and say, "I can make this better, this better, and this better." That's what I want. I see online that everyone's like, you know, I think Shopify made this announcement. They say, "Instead of hiring you, first ask: 'Can I hire AI?' And if you can't, then you can hire a human being." I see things like that and I'm like, "Oh man, I feel left out. I don't know how to do any of this." I want to automate all this. When you say AI to me, I'm still on level one—it's just me talking to ChatGPT. But then I hear about all these other things: vectors and all this stuff. I'm like, I know it's important, but I don't know how to do any of it. Do you know what I mean? It's like saying, "Do you want the V6 or the V8?" and you're like, "I don't know what any of that means, but I know the V8 is better." That's how I am with AI, and I wish I could pay someone to just come and do this. I think this is an excellent idea, by the way.
23:06	Shaan Puri	So, there are consultants that will do this. They'll shadow your work, come into your company, and do a discovery phase. I mean, all the way up to Accenture — I think it's going to do a billion dollars this year in AI consulting. Big companies are hiring McKinsey and Accenture to do it. Small companies can hire these indie shops to basically say, "Alright, I'll pay $5k to $10k to come do a six-week program where you kind of figure out where you can optimize and then optimize." But a lot of that's speculative. Like, what if you don't find anything that sounds like work on my end? "Here's kinda how I want it to work."
23:40	Sam Parr	So, what would you call this? What would I call it? I'd call it...
23:45	Shaan Puri	"Cute name." Mhmm. "Cute name — Upslice, Top Slice. I call it Top Slice."
23:50	Sam Parr	Do you remember? That's not bad. Do you remember—that's actually kinda cool. Do you remember when we talked about a team? I thought that name was so good.
23:56	Shaan Puri	A team is fantastic.
23:57	Sam Parr	"It was a fantastic name."
23:58	MFM	"I mean, I went to that dude for everything."
24:00	Shaan Puri	Let me just give out some marketing—some absolute marketing gold here. Have you ever heard this phrase? I'm almost scared to say this because I love…the marketing genius of this phrase is so good. Nobody ever talks about it, and I really want to use the same principle on something. But I'll give it away here: have you ever heard of "Marry Me Chicken"?
24:20	Sam Parr	No, I don't know what that is. Is that a nursery rhyme?
24:23	Shaan Puri	No, it's a chicken recipe. It's called "Marry Me Chicken." The joke is: if you make it for a man, he'll be like, "Marry me," right away. It's a phrase women use to describe the recipe. If you just think about that, there are a thousand ways they could have described this creamy chicken recipe. It could have been called "Creamy Chicken." It could have been named after an ingredient or the cooking process. Instead: "Marry Me Chicken." I love that phrase. I love the idea of "Marry Me Chicken." I think for any business you should come up with a "Marry Me Chicken"-level description of what the person really wants — how good must it be that they say "marry me" at the end of it. I would love to come up with something like that for this. I think there's an opportunity to create something like this. Here's how I would want it to work. I have a buddy who invests in an e‑commerce company. I asked him, "Why'd you invest in that?" He said, "He's doing really interesting stuff with AI." Honestly, I wanted to invest just so I could see what he's trying to build. The whole company is AI‑first — he's trying not to hire anybody. He's trying to use AI for pretty much every job.
25:30	Sam Parr	"It's e-commerce in the sense that they make a product and sell it, or it's like Amazon—it's a platform, no?"
25:35	MFM	They make.
25:35	Shaan Puri	A product—it's like a brand. You buy the supplement, and they sell it on Shopify. I was like, "Oh, fascinating." So, what's he doing? I really want to know. I got an e-commerce brand, and I think that's a good hook. Instead of saying, "Let me study your business"—or having you come in and describe the problem that you know AI can solve, because that already presupposes quite a bit about what AI could or couldn't do for you—what if I just subscribed and someone said: > "Hey, I want you to tell me once a week what somebody paid somebody to build for their e-commerce brand, and show me kind of how it works." As an e-commerce store owner, I would think, "Oh—I don't have to do product photography anymore. I could just use this thing to do all my photography. It actually works. Wow, that's great; I didn't even realize that." Then the next thing: "Oh, they set up this agent that manages the supply chain. It takes every freight-forwarder invoice, puts it into a sheet, checks that sheet to make sure there are no overages, and then posts it in Slack." That's great—I have a person doing that today. That's awesome. Well, you know, I would like to take that task and sell it to AI instead. I think the problem with most businesses adopting AI is a problem of imagination, not capability. You could sit down and figure it out, or you could hire somebody to do any of these things. For most people, it's an imagination problem—they don't even really realize where they could be doing things. For you with Hampton, for example, it could be as granular as memberships or paid communities, or it might just be "somebody who's doing sales." Like: you subscribe to the sales feed. Anytime somebody comes in and pays for an AI job that improves their sales process, I want to know what they did. I'll give you an example. In one of my companies—this company is growing really fast; it's so fast that we literally can't get enough proposals out the door. Customers want to pay, but the sales guys have too many proposals to create. So our CTO created this little agent that listens to the sales call. It knows what our capabilities are, so it auto-generates a draft invoice of what services we should package for this customer.
27:49	Sam Parr	"And there probably wasn't a good plugin, so he just customized it for you."
27:54	Shaan Puri	Yeah, that didn't exist. In fact, I think there's a whole startup idea somebody should build. But he built that internally. Our sales guys — as soon as they get off the call — the draft proposal is ready; they just need to tweak three things. I was like, "Wow, this is genius." Again, I think that should be a startup idea altogether. It's a tool for salespeople that, by the time they get off the call, the AI agent has already figured out the follow-up email, the draft proposal, the CRM entries it needs to input, etc.
28:21	Sam Parr	This is kind of a 10 out of 10 idea. Yeah — I think so. I think this might be a 10 out of 10. I don't know if it's...
28:27	Shaan Puri	The AI marketplace or the sales thing I just mentioned — they're both kind of dope.
28:30	Sam Parr	Well, I don't know anything about the second one, but yeah—that's cool. For the first one, I'm thinking... I guess I would easily give money to someone right now if they could. A lot of times AI feels like, "I don't know what I don't know," but I know it's important. It's like, just give me all the examples of how this is helpful for me and just do it right. You know what I mean?
28:52	Shaan Puri	Like now, the hard part about a business like this is, of course, marketplaces are incredibly difficult to spin up. It's a chicken-and-egg problem: how do you get supply when there's no demand? How do you get demand when there's no supply? How do you figure out whether you are supply-constrained or demand-constrained? That initial cranking is really hard. This is not something that, I would say, a B- entrepreneur can do. I think you basically have to be an A+ entrepreneur to do marketplaces. That's just maybe a personal belief, because the initial cranking is so difficult and takes so much skill and hustle. But I think it's a great opportunity, because when you build them they're very valuable. If anybody wants to work on this, feel free to email me: seanashalpuri.com, or DM me. I want to hear if anybody tries this or is interested in trying it.
29:42	Sam Parr	Well, how is Fiverr taking advantage of the AI stuff? Have you seen anything, dude? I used to use Fiverr so much. I don't use it at all anymore.
29:50	Shaan Puri	"We'll know from the homepage — it's still the same old junk."
29:55	Sam Parr	And I feel like—I bet, if I had to imagine—a lot of their business was graphic design. Now it's basically just taking advantage of people who don't know that ChatGPT exists. They're like, "Hey, can you..." and then, "Oh, I could just paint this kind of big image." He gets back to me so fast.
30:10	Shaan Puri	It takes a lot of iteration, though. But you know what? One thing I heard people do—there are people who are rolling up the top Fiverr accounts because they're like, "Cool, you have top real estate under Graphic Design on Fiverr, so you're automatically getting hundreds of jobs a week sent to you." So they're buying them, and then they're just replacing the creator with AI, and, like, an AI-managed service underneath it. I thought that was pretty fascinating. It's like buying, you know, beachfront property on the world.
30:38	Sam Parr	"Sounds like a horrible idea."
30:39	Shaan Puri	"Shittiest island."
30:41	Sam Parr	But this is... this sounds like a horrible idea, because that's what happened to the Thrasios.</FormattedResponse>
30:48	Shaan Puri	Property, like, right where the hurricanes keep hitting. And look...
30:53	Sam Parr	"Yeah, I mean, this sounds horrible."
30:55	Shaan Puri	So, you know, the key with any roll-up is: either you're going to get extreme durability — in which case you pay a higher multiple — or you get unknown durability. But if you're buying at a low multiple, like 1x, 1.5x, or 2x, you can make it work. You can end up looking like a genius if you buy at a low enough multiple. In something like this, I bet these people have never been offered anything before. It's like, "Oh, you'll pay me like a year of earnings or two years of earnings if I just walk away right now." Then I know that I can increase the earnings or the cost potential — the cost savings — by about 30%. As long as this holds for two years, and Fiverr doesn't just go under in the next two years, every year after that is profit. So you could make it work. It's not a horrible idea, is what I'm saying.
31:44	Sam Parr	My mother-in-law has this pillow business, and it does many, many hundreds—close to seven figures a year in revenue. It's quite profitable; she's paying herself a good salary. Now that she's got a bunch of grandkids, she's like, "I guess I'm just gonna shut this down." I said, "I don't know anything about e‑commerce, but you could sell a business." She asked, "What do you mean?" I replied, "Well, someone will pay you something. It could be one times; it could be eight times. I'm not sure. They'll pay you your salary—like they'll pay your owner's earnings—to buy your business." It blew her mind. She was like, "Someone will buy this." It was amazing to hear this woman who's killing it just on Etsy realize that someone will pay her money to own this thing. I don't—I have no idea what it's worth. I don't know if it's one times or five times what it's worth, but it was pretty cool to see her go through this exercise. Are you doing—are you actually using AI in a meaningful way in anything in your company? Or I'll ask differently: are your employees using it? I'm sure you use it as a thought partner. Are your staff using it on a daily basis such that your company has gotten significantly more productive?
33:00	Shaan Puri	Well, the example I just gave you on the sales side — that's probably...
33:03	Sam Parr	That was one great example.
33:04	Shaan Puri	The most impressive example, I would say—other than that—it's like more ChatGPT. You know what I mean? It's kinda like...
33:15	Sam Parr	Oh, review this email.
33:17	Shaan Puri	It's like, "Hey, we need to write this thing, we need to research this thing, we need to draft something." Stuff like that — that's the daily stuff. I don't... we haven't replaced job functions yet with AI. That's what I'm waiting for. It's basically like, "Oh, we don't need to hire this person because an AI agent, or this person with AI, is better than this person with another person."
33:42	Sam Parr	But that's where something like this service actually plays an interesting part. It's important, but for a variety of reasons you haven't implemented it. Then there's—well...
33:53	Shaan Puri	I don't operate them anymore. So, you know, I'm not the CEO of any of these businesses. The people who run these businesses are heads-down in the business; they're not as AI-curious as I am.
34:05	Sam Parr	Yeah, but they have the same mindset, which is: either "I'm too busy right now," or "I don't exactly know how to do this," or "this sounds like a project that I'm a little bit ignorant about, but I know that it's interesting." And then you have all these guys who, in the past three years, have been raised on this stuff, and they're like, "Are you a fool? Why aren't you doing it this way, this way, this way?" You know what I mean. That connection would be very valuable.
34:27	Shaan Puri	I remember. So, we both did the newsletter business, and the workflow for The Hustle was probably similar to that of the workflow for the...
34:35	Sam Parr	Dude, it was so janky.
34:37	Shaan Puri	So, like, what's the output? The output is: we have to write an email. We have to write an email that's going to go to, you know, hundreds of thousands—or millions—of people tomorrow morning. It basically has to say: "Here are the most important stories you should care about; here's what happened; here's our quick commentary on what it means." And let's make you laugh, right? Let's entertain you along the way, and let's put in the sponsorships and all that.
35:03	Sam Parr	And there needs to be the right ads. The right ads need to be in the email. I had a full-time person whose job was to do that.
35:09	Shaan Puri	"And when you say 'the right ads', what do you mean by 'the right ads'? Just explain the complexity for somebody who's like, 'Why do you need a full‑time person to make—what do you mean, the right ads? Just put the ad in.'"
35:16	Sam Parr	Because if you're sending an email to, let's say, 3,000,000 people and you make $100,000 every time you hit send... Sometimes, like, Target will say, "I want to spend $1,000,000 with you over the course of the next three months," and then Warby Parker will say, "I want to spend $20,000 with you over the next three weeks." You have to figure out how to mix and match. So today's email to 3,000,000 people: 500,000 are going to see the Warby Parker ad, 2,500,000 are going to see the Target ad. Next week it's swapped, and you have to make sure that the same people aren't seeing the same ad. No technology—at least from when I started—did any of that, so I had one person manually do all of this. It's not crazy complicated, but when the stakes are high and it's like my whole business... and you have to give you...
36:05	Shaan Puri	Ad Ops was kind of the name of the job, right? You're not the salesperson, but you're the Ad Ops person in between. So, okay—great. So I met a guy who was doing an... and </FormattedResponse>
36:13	Sam Parr	There are multiple ads per email.
36:15	Shaan Puri	But even if you take the ads out for a second—if you just take the content itself, what do you need to do? That means every day somebody's figuring out: What are all the top stories today? There's a search, and then there's a curation. You find all the top stories, make a judgment call on which ones are worth talking about, then you have to research those topics. After that, you have to write about them, summarize them, and maybe add some commentary—some value-add. We had to do that every day. We did it with one or two writers; I think we initially started with a few writers. So let's say the cost of production there was, on the low end, $250,000 a year if both of us weren't so scrappy—if another person were running that business. In fact, when we sold the business it became closer to $1,000,000 a year in editorial costs.
37:02	Sam Parr	Yeah, we were definitely spending seven figures.
37:04	Shaan Puri	And so I met a guy who's doing this entire workflow with AI. He just did that thing — he was like, "Cool, I'm gonna do this with AI." He was using AI to scan specific sources to figure out what stories are hot. Then he would use AI to summarize those articles. Next, he would use AI to check which influencers were reposting those articles on Twitter as a social signal for what's important and what's generating buzz. He would take that final thing and send it to a human — a guy living in Japan — who would proofread it overnight and be like, "Yep, this is legitimate; fact-check it, just make sure the AI didn't hallucinate." He's paying that guy, like, $50 an hour to spend two hours on it — you know, like $50 or $100 a day on the editing. And he never wrote it; he never had a writer. Then it auto-formatted the content for him, creating an HTML email, inserting the ad, sending it out, tracking the results, and sending him a report.
38:10	Sam Parr	To take it even a step further—this might sound like I'm trying to one-up you—I know a guy who's doing the same thing, but for local newsletters. The thing about local newsletters is that they're a fantastic business. The problem is the profits are often destroyed because you have to handle local ad sales and hire local writers for every market. If you could have lots of newsletters for Raleigh, Nashville, Louisville, etc., without needing separate writers for each one, it would be a very strong business. He's doing what you're describing, but for local news. It very quickly spins up a newsletter that creates an ad and says something like: > "Hey Danville in California — do you want news just for Danville?" The ad points to a Danville.com (or whatever domain), and he's built this whole local newsletter empire, all automated.
39:00	Shaan Puri	How's it doing?
39:01	Sam Parr	It does six figures per month in revenue, and it's just him doing it. He buys ads on Facebook, targeting local people to get subscribers.
39:12	Shaan Puri	That's awesome. That's great. Very cool.
39:16	Sam Parr	Dude, our business is like—oh my God, thank God, right? Thank God we got out.
39:22	Shaan Puri	But why are you saying that? Are you saying "thank God" because it's just way different—it's way more competitive now? Or what's underneath that feeling? I have the same feeling, but I think maybe for a different reason.
39:33	Sam Parr	I think... okay. So when I started in 2016, people literally laughed at us. I know you hear that story a lot, but people were literally like, "You—you were that?" I laughed. </FormattedResponse>
39:43	MFM	You said, "Why are you doing this stupid drink?" She said, "People laughed." You were like, "Why are you doing this silly thing?"
39:52	Sam Parr	And I was like, no — if you read the math, it could be big now. I know these hipsters have newsletters; it's like everyone has a newsletter. It's way more complicated inside someone's inbox to stand out. I think I succeeded because it was a silly business that I took seriously, and there weren't that many serious operators in there. You could say I wasn't even that serious of an operator, but I still succeeded. Now there are actually really smart people trying to win the game, and it makes it much harder. It's just harder.
40:32	Shaan Puri	Let's say you were motivated to start the hustle this year. What do you think would be the outcome four years from now? The caveat is you're committed to doing it — you're going to work hard on it.
40:45	Sam Parr	"Does it have to be the same genre of content?"
40:47	Shaan Puri	No, it could be different.
40:49	Sam Parr	I think I could build a significantly larger business. I think it would look a lot closer to Industry Dive, where there would be lots of different newsletters built for job titles that are kind of forgotten and ignored. To monetize it, it would be newsletters; it would be advertisements, but then also it would be community peer groups—sort of like Hampton would be on the back end [unclear phrasing]. I think... I think it wouldn't grow as fast, and I could own it forever. I think it would be very, very hard to grow as fast as I grew it — The Hustle.
41:24	Shaan Puri	But what if you did the "hustle" idea again?
41:27	Sam Parr	I don't think it would succeed. I think that I would not succeed, dude. I got to 300,000 subscribers organically in two years. Looking back on it, it was so easy — that would never happen again. There's too much noise. I think that to buy subscribers on Facebook is, in fact, shockingly the same price. I don't know if you know anything about the market — I don't — but I hear it's still like $1.50. We grew organically because we got popular on Reddit, on Hacker News, places like that. It was considered outlandish and silly and remarkable what we were doing; it was noteworthy. It's not noteworthy anymore, so it's too hard to have something spread virally now. Do you agree?
42:08	Shaan Puri	Yeah, I think—all the things you said are true. But I do think you could do it again and win, because you're good at that type of content and that type of business. I think you would figure it out again, and you'd have other advantages, which is that newsletter advertising is a lot more sophisticated and available than it was back then.
42:32	Sam Parr	So, it's also cheaper now. We used to charge — I forget what we charged — but I think it was $25 to $40 per 1,000. I'm hearing now it's much cheaper because there are so many options.
42:43	Shaan Puri	Interesting. I didn't know that. When we were doing Milk Road, I think we were charging that or more, and that was only two or three years ago. So maybe it's changed, or maybe it was crypto, so it was like financial newsletters. I think financial newsletters definitely command a premium. I'm not sure, but I would never do it again.
43:06	Sam Parr	It's hard. It's a way harder business than people realize — it's fucking hard. Can we wrap up with me telling you something funny? </FormattedResponse>
43:13	Shaan Puri	Okay, let's do it.
43:14	Sam Parr	Go to this. Go to spermracing.com. Have you seen Sperm Racing? What do you mean? Go to it. </FormattedResponse>
43:20	Shaan Puri	"If it's my homepage."
43:22	MFM	"Yeah, I mean, you've seen a sperm."
43:24	Shaan Puri	"Afford a sperm racing tab." </FormattedResponse>
43:26	Sam Parr	It's there. Yeah, they probably— they were trying to figure out who to send the sponsorship to. That guy. They're like, "Sean seems like a 'sperm guy'." "Like, 'guys' — two words." [Note: "sperm guy" may be a transcription error; original audio unclear.]
43:37	Shaan Puri	"Blank Check." Alright, so the world's—I go there: the world's first sperm race, and one of the most epic little videos behind it. Okay, so what—what is this?
43:50	Sam Parr	So, click "Manifesto" and just read the first couple lines. </FormattedResponse>
43:53	Shaan Puri	Alright, so sperm racing. When people hear it, they ask me the same thing every time: "Wait — is this really happening?" The answer is always "hell yeah it is." But here's the thing: sperm racing is not just a joke. It's not just some viral idea for the internet to laugh at. It's something much bigger. Alright, let's see if they can pay off that promise. Male fertility is declining — like, a lot. It's happening quietly, steadily, and nobody's talking about it. There's a diagram of the average sperm count in a man from the 1970s to today, and it's basically cut in half. So we have half as much sperm per milliliter of semen. Wow — a metric I didn't even know existed. TIL. And "sperm ability," which is how fast it moves (a massive factor in fertility and getting pregnant), is a measurable, trackable thing — just like running a race or lifting weights. It's something you can actually improve, and nobody cared about it until now. So we're turning health into a sport. They built a racetrack for sperm: two competitors, two samples, one microscopic finish line. Then they have an MS Paint diagram of the track. Is this a real thing or is it...? </FormattedResponse>
45:05	MFM	A joke.
45:06	Sam Parr	"It's 100% real."
45:07	Shaan Puri	And can I watch this live? Can I pay-per-view this?
45:10	Sam Parr	So listen to what they're doing. This is from an article on The Times (thetimes.com). Once the samples are taken — which I assume means they have to go backstage because it's gotta be ready to roll right away — the sample is placed into the middle of the stadium. A live video feed, magnified 40 times to display the sperm, will track the sample's progress. The sperm typically swim 5 millimeters per minute, meaning this race is gonna take 40 minutes because they're gonna have them swim through this course. The event will run over three races in front of a crowd of 4,000 spectators and feature play-by-play commentary, instant replays, and leaderboards. According to the article, this company is run by three 17-year-olds and they've raised $1,500,000. This is incredible. Is anyone else out there who is working on a product that isn't working? Take notes.
46:13	Shaan Puri	Alright, the Hyde video was amazing. I genuinely think we should be sponsoring this, and/or we should be the presenting sponsor—presenting podcast of the...
46:23	MFM	Chorus bias, baby. So... okay—so, but.
46:28	Shaan Puri	What are they really trying to do? Okay. So they're going to sell out this venue — 5,000 attendees — to watch this, which is hilarious. They're trying to raise awareness, but is this just awareness? Is this an offshoot of a bigger brand, or do they want to make this a sport?
46:45	Sam Parr	"I don't know—it's hard."
46:47	MFM	They haven't.
46:48	Shaan Puri	Like... questions? Okay.
46:49	Sam Parr	They've done the right thing so far, which is that they haven't relieved the tension from the joke. Like, you know—that's, I think, the way to go about it. But look at the photo that I posted on here where this guy...
47:00	MFM	Wrote Eric a photo of... </FormattedResponse>
47:02	Sam Parr	And it says, "The future of technology — how beautiful is this." So I assume that this is all about content marketing for some type of male fertility startup. But they've done the best thing ever, which is they've not acknowledged that it's a joke. And apparently the founder is Eric Zhu (Z‑H‑U), but that's a pretty common name, so you probably know, no?
47:25	Shaan Puri	I know this guy. I did a phone call with this kid. He was doing a different startup before this that I didn't think was that, like... </FormattedResponse>
47:31	Sam Parr	Did you, you know, was the one?
47:32	MFM	"Advise him? Did you advise him? You're like, 'I—I got an idea. Hear me out.'"
47:37	Shaan Puri	I said, "Just dream about the future you want to build." This is what he came up with.
47:44	Sam Parr	"What's the secret, Eric, that..."
47:45	MFM	You know that no one else knows.
47:49	Sam Parr	We wanted flying cars, and we instead got sperm racing—yeah.
47:54	Shaan Puri	Wow, this is a crazy fun project. You know, I've talked about this before, but I think that silly projects like this—and not to be insulting, because this is actually great—are amazing starter businesses. One mistake a lot of people make when they're early as founders is trying to do what they think will work. They end up doing some boring business they don't really understand well, but it sounds good on paper. Or they "shoot for the moon" but don't have a rocket—you don't have the skills, the capability, the network, whatever. Of course those could work, and I'm not saying don't do them. But I think another path is what I did. My first business was a sushi restaurant chain—probably the most outlandish idea. Yours—you were doing, I don't know, a hot dog stand; you worked for the American Pickers guy, right? You did a bunch of random things. The businesses themselves weren't great—opportunities maybe three out of ten, four out of ten—but at the time you don't know any better. The important thing is that you're going to build a bunch of random skills. For example, with our sushi restaurant, because we were trying to make stuff, I learned how to pitch investors. I learned Photoshop, a little After Effects, and how to use iMovie. We created a YouTube channel. We learned door-to-door sales. We gained a bunch of random experiences that I wouldn't have gotten had I either a) had a traditional job or b) done a startup that was just serious in nature. Because the startup was a little fun, I was willing to do things that felt normal once the first idea is a little fun. Then your marketing ideas can be a little out there, and your hiring practices can be a little fun and out there. You can just sort of stack on from there when you have what feels more like a sandbox where you can be creative, versus when you feel like you're on tight rails about what you're supposed to do. I don't know if that makes a lot of sense.
50:09	Sam Parr	But that makes a lot of sense, and I agree with it.
50:11	Shaan Puri	And I also think—it reminds me of me. We didn't do anything anywhere near as interesting or cool as this. But we've talked about Henry and Dylan, those guys who were doing "Clip." They were making content; they have this little animation—what's it called—like a service business.
50:28	Sam Parr	Like a... yeah.
50:30	Shaan Puri	In a funny newsletter, they'll do things like: "They came to our house and built our podcast studios." They were just doing a bunch of random stuff that built little skills for them. They weren't experts in any of those things, but they became expert-level at doing them. They're pivoting from one idea to the next. To others, it might look like they're sort of lost, but I've seen it work out very well for myself and my friends I was doing it with. So I don't know if you could advise people to do that, but if you're already doing it, I would say don't sweat it — that can actually pay off.
50:57	Sam Parr	Eric Zu is listening to this podcast right now, and he's saying, "I need to clip this and send this to my Chinese immigrant parents, who are — like — they're still, you know, not on board with sperm racing." Imagine being 17 years old and selling out a 4,000-person stadium. I mean, that's pretty — it's pretty baller.
51:17	Shaan Puri	Yeah. Although they're just saying "it's sold out," is it actually sold out?
51:21	Sam Parr	When you go to Ticketmaster to buy a...
51:25	MFM	Ticket — there's a lot of blue. You know, there are a lot of open seats.
51:28	Sam Parr	So... I don't know. I'm not exactly sure, but I could see this being a pretty fun thing for a bunch of college kids. Like, "Are you gonna go watch the sperm event? The sperm race?"
51:40	Shaan Puri	Even the logo is so good. Everything about the branding is extremely well done. "Oh no — event canceled? What? Oh no." Alright, update from the sperm guy. He's like, I go, "Is the event canceled? I don't see it on Ticketmaster." He goes, "No, we got f'd over by the Palladium, I guess — the venue. They weren't happy with the TMZ interview and some other stuff." Then he goes, "It's still the same day, but we moved it to LA Center Studios. Tickets will redrop Tuesday."
52:10	Sam Parr	Oh my God. What is... what is "ask me what the other stuff is"? Sounds like a sticky situation.
52:15	Shaan Puri	I... don't think I want to know.
52:16	Sam Parr	Yeah, all right. That's it — that's the pod.

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How Nick Saban’s Side Hustle Might Make Him a Billionaire

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