The Man Who Makes $1M/Year Selling Christmas Trees
Health Trends, Startups, and Predictions - December 20, 2024 (over 1 year ago) • 32:36
Transcript
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Shaan Puri | So this *Christmas tree* thing is *kinda crazy*. The story is an article I read in *Curbed*. Basically, it's about the brutal, mafia-style business of Christmas tree sales in New York. I'm just going to read you a paragraph here that captures it:
> "Christmas trees are a big business in New York. A lot of people see the quaint little shacks that appear on the side of the road just before Thanksgiving with a bunch of trees, and you think, 'Oh, these are probably independently owned—maybe by jolly families of lumberjacks looking to make a few holiday bucks.' That's what I thought. Anyways, in reality a few eccentric, obsessed, and sometimes ruthless tycoons control the sale of almost every tree in the city. They call themselves 'tree men,' and they spend eleven months a year preparing for Christmas time, which to them is a thirty-day sprint to grab as much cash as they can." | |
Sam Parr | I'm in you're in right yeah yeah yeah | |
Shaan Puri | because this needs to be a netflix show right | |
Sam Parr | yeah and is this the one about this guy named Scott well there's a bunch of guys | |
Shaan Puri | So he talks about the different guys, because they basically carved up the territories: you got Harlem, this one guy gets Manhattan, this other guy's got the East Side. They all have different territories and they all have crazy names.
It's like **George Nash** and **Kevin Hammer**. Nash got Harlem — he's a smooth-talking hippie from Vermont. Hammer is a Brooklyn-born Scientologist. He was a powerful force in the business; he is the one who shaped it.
Hammer is rumored to own half the "tree stands" [unclear transcription], bringing in more than $1,000,000 every December. The lore is Hammer lives on a yacht somewhere in the Atlantic, and he visits New York only at Christmas time, when he holes up in a Midtown hotel room with a pile of cash on the bed and a pit bull squatting on either side of him.
Like, is this even real? What am I reading? It sounds fake. | |
Sam Parr | "Dude, if you sell **$1,000,000** of trees in one month, with all your expenses, that's like a **$150,000–$200,000** a year salary. Yeah — way more.
You might have a pitbull, but there aren't going to be piles of cash or a yacht... but you're definitely 50%." | |
Shaan Puri | I could see there's a world where there's like 50% margin all in | |
Sam Parr | well you ain't owning yachts in manhattan when it fits on $500 a year | |
Shaan Puri | You even for like 20 years — this is an old article. So, I think, yeah, it's pretty crazy.
This talks about, basically, the history of the *Christmas tree*. It says 200 years ago the idea of putting a tree inside your apartment would be a bizarre decision. It didn't make any sense. This is supposed to be shelter from the outside — why would you bring a tree in?
It also notes that Christmas trees themselves weren't even really associated with Christmas time. Then it says they started to change in 1851. There was a Dutchman named Mark Carr who said, "I think I can do this." | |
Sam Parr | what's doing this | |
Shaan Puri | He was basically selling trees to people just for the spirit of Christmas. He's considered the *father of Manhattan's Christmas tree business*. We don't know much about him, but the way it's described is: he was out of work and realized he could chop up a tree from the forest, bring it into the city, and try to sell it to people so they'd have a piece of nature with them.
He told his wife. She said, "That idea sucks." This is the great story of every entrepreneur: tell your wife an idea, she says it sucks, and you do it anyway. I think that's the *real American dream*.
He tried to associate these trees with the Christmas spirit—the jolly wintertime. He bought a permit for $1 to sell inside Washington Market, which was like their wholesale bazaar. He started explaining to people that these are trees you can stand upright in your house and that it signifies Christmas. He sold about a day [transcription unclear: "he sold about a day"].
That kind of started the trend of indoor Christmas trees—again, assuming this article is not completely fake in *The Onion*. | |
Sam Parr | my parents used to do this for a living they owned a fruit stand | |
Shaan Puri | "Oh my God, you're just sitting on that fact for five minutes while I'm making up shit about the Christmas trees." | |
Sam Parr | No. So, to this day I've told you my father's a **produce broker**. Basically, these are made-up numbers, but hypothetically he'll buy $1,000,000 of onions from a farmer, organize a truck to pick them up, then sell that load of onions to Walmart for $1,100,000 — hopefully making $100,000 of profit, of which 50 goes to the truck [unclear whether "50" means $50,000 or 50%], or whatever. You know, made-up numbers.
The way he got into that was my mom and dad owned a fruit stand on the side of the road. That fruit stand made a lot of money every October by selling pumpkins and every Christmas by selling Christmas trees. My mom would tell stories about getting up at 5 a.m. to flip the pumpkins — I guess they can't rest on one side for too long, otherwise they get lopsided — and they would package up these trees and just sell a shitload of Christmas trees. That would make their **Q4**. | |
Shaan Puri | I am fascinated by these kind of once-a-year businesses. Michael Girdley came on the podcast and he was talking about his fireworks business, where **99% of the revenue** happens the day before **July 4th**. July 3rd is 99% of the revenue. It's a make-or-break, high-stress, peak-season versus off-season style of business, and those kinds of businesses fascinate me.
We've talked before about side hustles. I think one of the great side hustles is going around the neighborhood and basically saying, "Hey, do you want us to put Christmas lights up for you?" We'll put Christmas lights up. I think you can make **tens of thousands of dollars** in a six-month sprint if you just go knock on doors and ask the same question over and over again.
There's a guy in our neighborhood who basically does that. He gets about 50 houses to say yes to this thing. Each one of us pays—I think I paid **$1,700** for a basic Christmas lights job that took them a short time. The guy who was knocking on the door wasn't even the guy who put the lights up, so I don't even know if he was just a lead-gen guy. I don't know who he was, but I respect the hustle. | |
Sam Parr | Alright, my friend. So, a lot of you who listen to the show listen because you want to start a company but you're not sure what idea to choose — or you may not even have an idea. You like our podcast **"My First Million"** because we've done a lot of the work for you researching these business ideas.
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Now, back to the show. What's this — health startups that have wild traction? | |
Shaan Puri | So, there's a couple of health startups that just caught my eye. Normally, there's a bunch of these ideas that sound really great and then they just never work.
A lot of them are — and they're all the things that, you know, basically a rich, smart San Francisco / LA / New York type of person does or wants in their life. They think that everybody does and wants that, and that it could be accessible to all of them, but actually it's *too expensive*, *too hard to do*, *too bespoke*, and all this stuff.
Ideas that fall into this category were like "music discovery" and then there's like...
</FormattedResponse> | |
Sam Parr | Let me give you a good example. This was a headline of *Business Insider*: "Billionaires plan to launch a media brand around the *zeitgeist of Brooklyn*."
Exactly — a billionaire launching a media company about how Brooklyn is where it's at. That's the worst. That—that—that I'll take: "How to lose $50,000,000,000 for a $100, Alex." | |
Shaan Puri | You know, the Instagram co‑founders—after Instagram—their *"revenge company"* was this news‑reading app. So basically they left Facebook and were complaining that Facebook was kind of *bastardizing* Instagram, just copying Snapchat and all this stuff. They were making low‑key, passive‑aggressive remarks, and then they said, "We're doing it again."
They even did a photo shoot in their vacation home—the place they go when they want to be creative—and said they were going to try to change the way we consume news: make it less biased, easier to consume, and all that. Of course, two years later they shut it down. That's, again, the model of a smart, wealthy, well‑meaning person trying to solve a problem they have, but that not a lot of people want.
It's not junk food. People want junk food. People want *Cheetos* and they want the Cheeto dust on their fingers. Anybody who's like, "I'm going to take the Cheeto dust off their fingers," they typically don't find much demand.
So this is one model of the world I have. But you always pay attention to what's going to break your frame: where am I too biased, where have I locked in, and maybe the world is changing underneath me?
There are two health startups, and then Daniel Ek—who is the founder of Spotify, an awesome guy—checks a bunch of the boxes: a billionaire coming off a huge, life‑altering win of a company. | |
Sam Parr | and he's been rich since he was 21 | |
Shaan Puri | He's been rich for a long time. Obviously he's at that *Huberman* phase where he's like, "You know what? I need to take care of my health. I need to get a protocol, and I'm going to start taking these—drugs that nobody can pronounce—and I'm going to do all these things."
Right? And that's a normal thing, like, "You know, I'm sort of *biohacking*." | |
Sam Parr | like protocol phase of life | |
Shaan Puri | Like, yeah — exactly. So he's in his protocol phase, and he launches this thing called **Necco Health**. It even had other kind of "uh-oh" warning signs: he's not really running it. He's part of it, but he's like, "Wait, you're running Spotify, so how are you going to do this?" "Oh, there's like a team that's running it." Okay, so maybe this operator model... who knows. We'll see what happens. So, you know, there were some warning signs.
Then there's this post that came up. He posts on **LinkedIn**, and Daniel posts:
> "Over 60,000 sign-ups in just 12 weeks. It's been only 3 months since we launched Necco Health in London. The response has been nothing short of incredible. Over 60,000 people have signed up for a scan, which reflects a growing shift towards preventative health care and early detection."
And I think it's sort of like, you know, maybe... | |
Sam Parr | dude that | |
Shaan Puri | by the | |
Sam Parr | No way — *I think that's bullshit*: getting 60,000 email subscribers. I don't think that's particularly impressive, maybe because, if you go to the website, it's the craziest, awesomest thing you could imagine.
</FormattedResponse> | |
Shaan Puri | It's a **$250 scan**, right? So let's just say the full value of this is a **$15,000,000 pipeline in three months**. Now you're saying, "Okay, some of you will just be *looky-loos*." Sure — of course not all these people are going to convert.
Even if it's 1/15th of that, if they booked **$1,000,000** in bookings for this thing in 12 weeks for a single geographic location in **London**, that's kind of interesting to me. That's not nothing, right? That's not like some pie-in-the-sky thing. | |
Sam Parr | what to do | |
Shaan Puri | I think what they're trying to do is scan your body: look for moles, examine your arteries and cholesterol levels, and so on. It's like a **"better health check."**
If it's **preventative**, it's different from the normal health-care model. Normally, you have symptoms and we tell you to take two Advil. You come back saying, "Hey, I still have the symptoms," and they check some basic things in the office. Then you insist something's really wrong and they tell you, "Alright, go get a scan." In other words, when you're broken, you get scanned.
The idea of where health care is going is that you get scanned *before* you're broken — to tell you where you might break or what's starting to break — so we can fix it earlier. Obviously, anyone can agree with that idea. But actually doing it and making it work — both technically, and in terms of building the brand, getting consumers excited, and getting enough funding or revenue for it to be a real business — is pretty impressive to me.
So that was the first thing that happened with that little post. The second thing: I'm an investor in this thing called **Superpower**. Have you—are you an investor in this? | |
Sam Parr | I think you told me about it, and it looks amazing: **Superpower.com**.
It says, "A new era of personal health — the world's most advanced digital clinic to help you live longer, prevent disease, and feel your best." | |
Shaan Puri | Okay — ignore all that, ignore all that. All it is is a **ten-times better version** of an annual physical. | |
Sam Parr | okay I like that | |
Shaan Puri | Okay. You're getting an annual physical anyway. If you're bought into the idea of "I should get an annual physical," here is a better annual physical.
They're like, "Okay, what's a **10x** experience of the annual physical?" By the way, I love that idea. The simplicity of that pitch — that mission — I think is really powerful.
And the thing costs, like, I don't know, $400 or $500, so I would be willing to pay easily. | |
Sam Parr | Dude, you're on their homepage — right below **Mark Zuckerberg's sister** and right next to the **Winklevoss twins**. | |
Shaan Puri | oh hold on mark zuckerberg's sister | |
Sam Parr | well | |
Shaan Puri | okay well still pretty cool my excitement went up and down | |
Sam Parr | you're right next to mark zuckerberg's sister | |
Shaan Puri | shout out to was it ariel | |
Sam Parr | yeah cool | |
Shaan Puri | Actually, I met her at a party. She was actually very cool.
Yeah — me and the **Winklevoss twins**, and then a bunch of MDs and **Balaji**.
Let me tell you a little about this. They sent this investor update — I think I'm allowed to share it. Jacob, one of the founders, sends us investor updates. I invested in this thing a little while back but didn't really hear about it; they were working on it. I honestly was like, "Alright, we'll see when this thing comes out."
Here's what they said:
> "The best doctors in the world already offer this today, but having a concierge doctor who does this type of work for you can cost like $100k+. It's only for rich people. So our job is to make that available to everybody."
So then... | |
Sam Parr | By the way, I'm going to my *concierge doctor* tomorrow for my checkup, and it's not a $100,000. | |
Shaan Puri | would it be 20 k a year | |
Sam Parr | No—maybe **$5,000 a year**. That's it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's okay. I... I don't want the facts to, Carol. Yeah, I find them in the Yellow Pages. No, I don't want—I do. | |
Shaan Puri | I have a friend who has **Peter Attia** as his doctor, and I think it's a quarter million dollars a year — about $250,000 a year. There's a range, and you're on one side of that range. | |
Sam Parr | you're not in the middle that's the | |
Shaan Puri | good news | |
Sam Parr | I'm definitely on one end of that bell curve it's not the good one | |
Shaan Puri | They wrote these stats and were like, "We had **3 million** hits to our site during launch week." I was like, "Wow — what?"
They said, "Our waitlist has grown to over **100,000** people." I was like, "What is going on?"
So I emailed them, and their product — the first product of the membership — is a **10x better** version of the annual physical. So basically it's like... | |
Sam Parr | Is that the language they use in their documentation, or are you just saying this is **10x better**? | |
Shaan Puri | and this is what they sent to me in an email | |
Sam Parr | got it | |
Shaan Puri | And they're like, "Basically you're gonna get **100+ lab tests**, a **full‑body report**, an **hour‑long consult with your doctor**, **unlimited Q&A** with your doctor throughout the year, additional health consults, and whatever — at insider prices for **$499**."
Okay, I was like, I kinda buy this *value proposition*, right? I think that's gonna work. So I was like, "Dude, that's pretty crazy — how can you even offer this for **$500**?"
Secondly, did you say you had **3,000,000 visits** during launch week and a **100,000‑person waitlist**? Like, how did you do that? Because yeah, I tweeted it out, but as much as I love to pat myself on the back, I don't think I can help anywhere near those kinds of numbers.
They were like, "Yeah, basically in the first three or four months, **100,000** people signed up for this thing." | |
Sam Parr | So, **superpower.com** [website] — their site is beautiful. But the way, too: you can click "Join." Did you say "thank you"? Yeah, yeah. That's, that's... | |
Shaan Puri | my thing that is I'm just I'm slipping in thank yous and your welcomes when people are not trying to give me compliments | |
Sam Parr | It's great. Or when you're *0.1%* of the reason why it looks good, you know. Like—you, we, we have a *100,000-person waitlist*.
"Yeah. Is it in person?" So, like, is the checkup done— or sorry, is the checkup done in person?
"No." So how do they, like, you know, do the thing where I, like, cough? [cough] | |
Shaan Puri | Or... I think — I don't know, because I haven't been a customer yet. I'm still on the **waitlist**. But I assumed it's like those other telemedicine services, where basically, let's say they send you to a diagnostic place, like, you know, a *Quest*-type [Quest Diagnostics] location to do the blood draw. Got it. OK — your labs, and then there's a **remote doctor** who analyzes your labs, who does the call with you, does the consult, talks to you... all that stuff. | |
Sam Parr | understood okay | |
Shaan Puri | Anyways, I thought that was pretty crazy traction because I was like, dude — let's just take the total potential value of the pipeline you're saying during launch week, or during this kind of first couple months after you announced the company: you have $49,000,000 of potential revenue in the list, which, of course, only a fraction of a fraction is going to convert. But it still is just really impressive.
A lot of these health startups that I thought were kind of wishful thinking — I think something has shifted in the culture where health startups are no longer wishful thinking and people are legitimately willing to pay. You see this with content: with Huberman, with Peter Attia, with Brian Johnson. I think there's a shift happening where *health is cool* — health is in.
Whatever that next layer of the market — that next segment of the bell curve that's interested in this, a big, sizable chunk — it feels like another part of the bell curve has gotten unlocked of people who are willing to spend. | |
Sam Parr | What's the **early adopter phase**? Is it like—freaks first, then early adopters, and then everyone? What is it; what's that phase like? | |
Shaan Puri | we should rename all the segments | |
Sam Parr | yeah yeah like fuck like fucking quacks of weirdos yeah | |
Shaan Puri | people you hate to talk to | |
Sam Parr | yeah like you know | |
Shaan Puri | innovators that's the one you're | |
Sam Parr | talking about freaks and geeks yeah | |
Shaan Puri | Alright. So the freaks and geeks, and then there's early adopters, which are wannabes. **That's us.** | |
Sam Parr | yeah | |
Shaan Puri | So we keep an eye on what the *freaks and geeks* are doing, and we start to, you know, half‑ass copy them.
Then there's the *early majority*—kind of like, "I'm the smart, reasonable person." After that you get the *late majority* and the *laggards*, which is like your mom who still has a newspaper subscription and an AOL email address. | |
Sam Parr | My mom does, actually. I would say I'm an *early adopter* — sometimes I'm the innovator for some of these things. Based on my pattern, I think a lot of these things are one-off.
I've tested so many different blood-work companies just because they're the latest and greatest. It's exciting to try something new. In general, I haven't had a huge amount of repeat purchases for many of them. For some, though, I become a **recurring customer**.
For example, do you remember Forward Health? I liked something like that — I was like, "Oh, I'm actually in." Or remember One Medical, which is popular now. I've been a paying customer of theirs for five years, so some of them I do keep coming back to.
I love trying new stuff. What I think is going to happen is it's shifting: the group past the early adopters are now open to trying this stuff. So I think getting a waitlist is actually less challenging than it appears. But making it so people come back every year is really, really hard. It'll be interesting to see who can pull that off.
I've done the Per Novos, I've done InsideTracker — I've done everything, and they're awesome. It's just a matter of which ones I rely on every quarter or every year, as opposed to, "I just found some new drug and I want to stick it in my body this one time to see what's up," and then never touch it again. There are a lot of people like me who do that, by the way. | |
Shaan Puri | yeah yeah you're in the on the fitness and health side I would say you're in the freaks and geeks | |
Sam Parr | category | |
Shaan Puri | Right — you were telling me about it. You were like, "Dude, I injected this stuff in my butt and I don't have cravings anymore."
Vince, you were talking about *Ozempic* before *Ozempic* had a brand name. You said, "I read about it on a forum and it's amazing. I don't eat candy anymore. This is gonna change the world."
</FormattedResponse> | |
Sam Parr | I think I told you about that in 2021—maybe the summer of 2021, or maybe 2022. I remember telling you that when I put this stuff in my body it felt like people with alcohol and addiction issues; I thought that was going to go away.
Then, actually, last week my friend Jason went to a conference and the CEO of Eli Lilly— I think— the maker of one of the *semaglutide* / *Ozempic* competitors, announced that it has been **officially approved for alcoholics**.
So I do put weird shit in my body just to see what's up. I actually texted you eight months ago, I think, and I said, "This new one... I forget what I called it—it was like 'trip,' it started with a T—and I was like, 'this one is gonna be the one.'" | |
Shaan Puri | I was thinking I should buy **Eli Lilly** stock when you told me that because I was like, "Who makes this? I'm in." I learned my lesson the first time — don't ignore or write off your weird health experiments — so I was like, "Okay, I'll just blindly follow this."
But Eli Lilly is already a $750 billion company, so I was like, "Okay, I don't know how much upside is left on that." Even if it became a $2 trillion company, it's like, what am I really thinking is going to happen here with this thing? So, you know, I think I missed that.
If you look at a five-year span, Eli Lilly is up, you know, almost 10x — so 8x.
</FormattedResponse> | |
Sam Parr | do you do any health stuff today that you think | |
Shaan Puri | doesn't it show | |
Sam Parr | Thank you. The sentence was not ending.
Do you do any health stuff? Do you do any health stuff today that you... [trails off] | |
Shaan Puri | trying to die | |
Sam Parr | Do you do any health stuff today that you think is considered a *freak* and will one day be the norm? | |
Shaan Puri | I do **two things**.
I don't think these are, like, "freak" — I guess they are. I guess if I took a population of one thousand people and asked how many people are doing this, I think the number would probably be zero. Even if I went to a CrossFit-type health community of one thousand people and asked who's doing what I'm doing, I think the number is zero.
You, I think, have done one of these things. But there's basically **two things** I do on a daily basis and have been doing for probably two years. The first is **breathwork every morning**. | |
Sam Parr | yeah that's awesome | |
Shaan Puri | So I do breathwork every morning. It only takes me *6 to 10 minutes*. I use the **Othership** app — it's the best breathwork app I think. I think you might have invested; I invested too. But this is not a shill. I don't even think the app is their product anymore; the app is like their side thing. They have physical locations in New York and stuff, but their app is so good for breathwork, so I do that.
The second thing I do is I work out, but I don't do what most people do when they work out. Conventional workouts are either cardio or weightlifting, and then some people will do yoga or Pilates — something that's flexibility/pliability-based.
My trainer got really into something, and I'm into whatever he's into because he's my trainer for life. He got really into something called *Functional Patterns*. It's basically a style of training that I think the way to describe it would be... | |
Sam Parr | like it helps you pick up a baby when you're old right where it's like | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, it's based around *core movements*.
So, if you like sports, this will make a lot of sense to you. If you don't like sports — if you're just used to going to the gym and trying to get a pump — this might not make a lot of sense.
But if you play any sport — baseball, tennis, basketball, whatever it is — the core movement in all of those sports is, let's say, throwing. It's a twist motion of your body. | |
Sam Parr | "Yeah. It's not like a squat or a bench press, where it's a linear lift—lifting the weight up. It's... yeah, I understand." | |
Shaan Puri | love the pronunciation of linear there that was awesome that was that was that was like european | |
Sam Parr | yeah that was like I also call it personal finance | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, exactly. So the idea of this is—alright—so, yeah. If you go to a gym, everything is usually static and rigid. Even if it’s a dynamic movement, it very rarely involves torque. If you do torque wrong, obviously you can get hurt, but doing it right matters.
Functional Patterns is based around moving in four core movements: run or sprint, throw (which is a twisting motion), jump, and—I think—just walking, like your gait.
So my workout when I go downstairs is not like—when I go to my gym it’s not like some Barry’s Bootcamp music blasting: “Go, go, go, push, push, push.” It’ll literally be like, “Alright, let’s practice our gait.” It’s like, are you putting the right amount of weight on your big toe? How’s your weight shift? Let’s look at your ankle mobility here. Let’s try to get strong in this position.
It’s things that don’t even look like you’re doing a workout—it looks like you’re rehabbing from an injury, but it’s an injury you never had. It’s to prevent all your injuries. I do it, my mom does it, and he trains NBA players with this. It’s that type of training: very much for sport, and it’s to prevent disease and breakages in your body. It’s a weird style of training, but that’s something that I do basically four times a week. | |
Sam Parr | Mine—mine are... I think that in 15 years we're going to look at Whole Foods sort of like a *discount grocer*. It's like, you know, however you look at Kroger or Safeway or wherever your regional "normie" brand is—that's what Whole Foods is going to be.
I think people are going to think it's nonsense, and instead they're going to want to buy their meat locally. So... I think. | |
Shaan Puri | That—because it's *marketing speak*—or it's just not the "top of the top," either. Are there no more levels above that? Which one is it? Is it that it's not what they say it is? It's kind of like it's just a *marketing shtick*, or... there's even better. | |
Sam Parr | It's not what they say it is. Also, because they were the first popular health food store, we still hold them in high prestige. But in reality, I don't think they're that prestigious. I think maybe it's a lot more expensive than other alternatives, but I'm not convinced that it's actually significantly different from anything else... and I... | |
Shaan Puri | what makes you say that | |
Sam Parr | Because if you go and look at the ingredients of the hot food bar, it's shit — it's not good. They have all types of crap in those ingredients.
To me, that is a signal; it's a **canary in a coal mine** type of vibe. | |
Shaan Puri | gotcha | |
Sam Parr | When you look at the meat... I tend to buy it during the summertime at the farmer's market across the street from my house. I usually buy my meat there.
The chickens are *bright yellow*. Have you ever seen a chicken from a farm that you get that's like... no? | |
Shaan Puri | well I've seen eggs eggs look different but | |
Sam Parr | They look way different. They look way different — it's like a **bright yellow**. Honestly, it's kind of gross if you're not used to seeing it. All the foods have way more color in them.
When you go to *Whole Foods*, it's kind of weird to think that a company as big as *Amazon* can somehow get lots and lots and lots of fresh, healthy stuff. Isn't it fucking insane that in Connecticut in December I can still get a strawberry? That's ridiculous when you think about the supply chain.
In my opinion, there's no way you could do that in any sort of safe way. It's better to do local, in-season stuff. I think **local meat** in particular is going to be a huge trend in the next 15 years.
You're seeing it a little bit already. There are a lot of people in Austin I know who were like yuppie types — not rednecks or farmers — and they would buy whole cows and store them in their freezers. I think that will be more common soon. Do you agree or disagree? | |
Shaan Puri | I do agree with that, because you're right. When I think about the *freaks and geeks* in my life, a lot of them already do that — it's like they have a *favorite ranch*, yeah. | |
Sam Parr | they're like where do you | |
Shaan Puri | They told me, "Get your meat," and I was like, "The store? What are you talking about?"
I don't have— I don't keep farms on speed dial. I don't have a personal relationship with a ranch, but they do. They'll open their freezer, and there are all these frozen steaks that they have. | |
Sam Parr | yeah you like spend a $1,000 and you get like a year's worth of beef | |
Shaan Puri | Right, so... I don't know. I also don't know if this is true or if it was just a one-off thing, but aren't farmers' markets... I've read something that farmers' markets got in trouble because they looked into where they were getting the stuff and it wasn't from a farm. It was like they were taking the Safeway rejects—stuff that was about to expire—and just selling it at the farmers' market.
I was like, "Oh, this is, you know, straight *farm-to-table*" or whatever. So I don't know how much I trust even my local farmers' market. That's a problem with all food. | |
Sam Parr | yeah and I agree with that | |
Shaan Puri | what do you trust you know | |
Sam Parr | Yeah — my sister one time went to Ghana for some trip and she came back with a souvenir that she bought from some kids on the street, thinking they'd made it. It said **"Made in China"** on the back. So that's basically what this little lady selling chicken at my farmers' market might be doing. That definitely could be a thing.
I think another thing is that, in the future, a lot more people are going to have plants in their homes than they do now. Plants will be more popular because they help keep the air clean. In 20–30 years we're going to look back and say, *"You had dirty-ass air in your house all the time — that's probably why you felt sick all the time."*
Here's another prediction: natural-fiber clothing is going to make a big comeback. There's one company called **Ryker (R Y K E R)** — I don't know these guys; I just think it's cool. They make all-cotton workout gear. Workout gear in particular often needs sweat-absorbing, stretchy material, which typically isn't made from natural fibers. So a lot of people are wearing shorts, shirts, and underwear that contain plastic and **forever chemicals**. I think natural-fiber clothing will become much more fashionable over the next 10–20 years as we learn more about forever chemicals and plastic in foods.
Finally, I think single-use plastics will decrease. It's weird how much bottled water we drink.
So those are some of my predictions: plants in homes, a return to cotton/ natural-fiber clothing, and a drop in single-use plastics — with the cotton clothing trend being a strong health trend over the next 10–20 years. | |
Shaan Puri | is there like a trade off like quality price like what what's the trade off here | |
Sam Parr | Yeah. Look, the reason why **Lululemon** is dope is because when you put on a Lululemon pair of shorts and it has that nice stretchy feel—when you stretch it, it goes right back to how it's supposed to be. That is man-made material, so it's good in that sense. It's probably cheaper as well; natural fibers are probably more expensive.
Have you ever had a sweater that you wear a bunch and it starts losing shape? That doesn't happen with what I call a "swishy" material. The rain- or water-resistant material used for rainwear—that shit doesn't happen with that, right?
So there is a trade-off. Some of this man-made stuff is definitely more convenient or better-performing. That's why they call it *performance*.
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Shaan Puri | wear or whatever | |
Sam Parr | Wear — yeah, it's because it has better performance, right? So there is... a trade-off. But I do think it's going to be more popular.
**Ryker** is actually the only company I found that is making somewhat interesting, **non-toxic** workout gear. That's an interesting angle for a company like that to get started in. | |
Shaan Puri | Right, right. Okay—*fascinating*. Do we want to wrap it there?
I feel inspired to be a healthier, better, local-eating man-machine. | |
Sam Parr | **Local eating is great, man.** I've got a nice, old Russian lady who makes great cheese. You need some cheese? I've got a lady—it's fantastic.
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Shaan Puri | "I kind of want to have a guy or a gal for every food that I eat. It's like I have a *hummus lady* and I got a *chicken guy*. That seems like my future—to have that." | |
Sam Parr | dude I'm down alright that's it that's the pod |