You’re One AI Idea Away From Changing Your Life

- March 17, 2025 (about 1 year ago) • 01:11:37

Transcript

Start Time	Speaker	Text
00:00	Sam Parr	By the way, it's noon on a Monday. Where are you right now?
00:05	Zach Yadegari	I actually skipped class to do this podcast.
00:08	Shaan Puri	Let's go. Sorry, Miss Bickerstaff—the boys are calling. Okay, this kid right here on the screen is making $20,000,000 as a high schooler. The high schooler that's making $20,000,000 a year in revenue—that is absurd. Zach, welcome to the show, man. I think this is actually the "make everybody else feel bad" moment when you find out that a 17- to 18-year-old kid's making $20,000,000 in high school. I think a lot of people's initial reaction is "wow," and another group is like, "oh man."
00:48	Sam Parr	"What—how much of that per year is profit, Zach?"
00:51	Zach Yadegari	It's more than 30%.</FormattedResponse>
00:54	Sam Parr	Alright, it's impressive. Very good.
00:56	Shaan Puri	"Falling. We're gonna tell the story, figure out how it's going, Sam. Do we need to address your letterman jacket? Are you just in the high-school mood? What's going on?"
01:03	Sam Parr	Look, I found out that Zach was coming on, and I wanted to look the part. You know, what's that movie, Sean? Is it like "Never Been Kissed," where they pretended that they're in high school?
01:13	Shaan Puri	"Yeah — or 21 Jump Street. Yeah, that's us."
01:17	Sam Parr	This is actually the second group of high schoolers that we spoke with over the last two weeks.
01:22	Shaan Puri	I'm Jonah Hill. Alright, Zach—dude, welcome to the show. You've... you've listened to the podcast before, I understand.
01:30	Zach Yadegari	Yeah, the last two years.</FormattedResponse>
01:32	Shaan Puri	Would you say we maybe inspired you, or were we the sole cause of your success? </FormattedResponse>
01:36	Zach Yadegari	Yeah, I'd say this is the sole reason for any of it.
01:40	Shaan Puri	Kevin—alright. So let's explain: start with what your app does, because it's like, "what app is making $20,000,000 for a high schooler?" So let's explain: what is your app? Yes, and when did you start it? Let's start with that.
01:51	Zach Yadegari	Calai is the app. It lets you take a picture of any meal and get back the calories, proteins, fats, and carbs to track it. Think of any other calorie-tracking app, but with heavy AI features involved.
02:08	Sam Parr	Does it work really well? That sounds like a really hard thing. We're literally 12 years old—or maybe eight years old—when Silicon Valley, the TV show, came out. The joke was, "Is this a hotdog or not?" Now the app says a lot more... Does that work really well, or is it mostly right?
02:29	Zach Yadegari	The scanning is about 90% accurate on average, which is really good. When you look at the data for FDA nutrition labels, they can be up to 20% inaccurate, so it's actually really good there. But we only recommend that you use it… well, if you're training for Mr. Olympia, let's say—we don't recommend you use our AI calorie tracker. You could use the food database and weigh your food on a scale.
02:53	Sam Parr	Well, and the scale stuff—like, I... I, you know, I'm a weirdo. I've actually used MyFitnessPal for probably five years, almost every day now.
03:01	Zach Yadegari	Yeah.
03:01	Sam Parr	"What a lot of people don't realize is when they eyeball their calories, they're probably always off by about 30% to 40%. Have you ever tried tracking your food, Sean?"
03:09	Shaan Puri	Yeah. Actually, I think I came on this podcast a while back and I said this exact problem was MyFitnessPal. It's so slow and annoying to type in every single thing and estimate the weight of it. So, "I'm eating this—how many grams is it?" I don't really know; I didn't weigh it out. Then you get this calorie thing, but also they have, like, five entries for whatever...
03:29	Sam Parr	"Chicken breast even has..."
03:30	Shaan Puri	Like chicken breast—tons of you don't know which one. And, too, I remember even saying, I think on this podcast, "I wish somebody just had it where you could just take a picture and computer vision would just know," and I can't wait for that to happen. It sounds like it's kind of happened. So, you started this how long ago?
03:48	Zach Yadegari	Ten months ago.
03:50	Shaan Puri	"Ten months. Okay, so ten months ago you started this as a 17-year-old. Can you give us a sense of the growth? So in ten months you started, obviously with zero. First month—roughly where were you at?"
04:03	Zach Yadegari	By the second month, we had done $30,000 in revenue. The first month was a little slow to pick up. We were testing the waters: do people actually want a calorie-tracking app? The hypothesis was that, yes, it would make people's lives easier. We were hitting an interesting intersection. On one end, people are very hardcore about tracking their calories—weighing their food on a scale and needing decimal precision. On the other end are people who don't track their calories at all. Our hypothesis was that there was a middle ground, and that's where we threw the capital to test. It worked. So then the next month, which was June, we did our first six-figure month.
04:53	Shaan Puri	So, okay. Amazing.
04:57	Sam Parr	Yeah, I mean...
04:57	Shaan Puri	"You're saying we..."
04:58	Sam Parr	Does he talk like every 16-year-old—"you, you"? That's you. You sounded like this, right, Sean?
05:03	Shaan Puri	He sounds more mature than us. So, you're saying "we" — is there a "we"? Who's the "we"? Is it a royal "we"? Like, is "we" kinda me? And then, did you start this with somebody?
05:13	Zach Yadegari	Yes, I have three cofounders. To give you a breakdown: one is also in high school. He's our CTO, Henry Leignmack — a killer engineer.
05:24	Shaan Puri	"Child Technology Officer. Yes—go kill." [Note: "child" may have been intended as "chief" (i.e., "Chief Technology Officer") based on context.]
05:26	Zach Yadegari	Him — Blake Anderson, who I think you guys actually did an episode about: one of his apps, Umax. He had previously found two other apps that had gotten a few million downloads, so we partnered up.
05:39	Shaan Puri	How'd you guys meet each other? You're not in the same high school — how did you find these other young builders?
05:44	Zach Yadegari	Yeah, so Henry and I met at a coding camp when we were both 10 years old. He lived in Long Island initially, but then he moved to New Jersey, so we stayed in touch. I actually found Blake on Twitter. </FormattedResponse>
05:57	Shaan Puri	Gotcha. So you guys get together — who has the idea for the app?
06:01	Zach Yadegari	So it was a mix of Blake and myself. I was tracking my calories two years before starting Kalei [app] on MyFitnessPal, or at least trying to. I was really skinny growing up and I wanted to put on weight — put on muscle — honestly to impress girls in my high school. It was super tedious, so I just gave up. But I knew there had to be a better solution. The coder in me, the engineer in me, knew that there must be an easier way. Over the following two years, all of these AI models started being released. After jumping into the app space and talking to Blake, who had a very similar path with these AI apps, we came to this idea.
06:43	Sam Parr	And having a $20 million-a-year business is a lot cooler, I bet, than having muscles when it comes to impressing girls.
06:49	Shaan Puri	Yeah, which one works better?
06:51	Zach Yadegari	"Honestly, I thought... I always had this vision as a kid: that I just needed to be successful and all the girls would be on top of me all the time. But nothing really changed."
07:01	Shaan Puri	"It's just dudes like us."
07:03	Zach Yadegari	Yeah, exactly.
07:04	Sam Parr	Dude, having big muscles is also just dudes admiring you, so... </FormattedResponse>
07:11	Shaan Puri	"We're actually still not sure. Yes — what gets the women to like you? We're still trying to figure that out."
07:17	Sam Parr	Alright, so a lot of people watch and listen to the show because they want to hear us tell them exactly what to do when it comes to starting or growing a business. A lot of people listening have a full-time job and want to start something on the side—a side hustle. Many people message Sean and me and say, "Alright, I want to start something on the side. Is this a good idea?" What they're really saying is, "Just give me the ideas." Well, my friends, you're in luck. My old company, The Hustle, put together 100 different side-hustle ideas, and they've appropriately called it the "Side Hustle Idea Database." It's a list of 100 pretty good ideas, frankly. I went through them—they're awesome. It tells you how to start them, how to grow them, and gives you a little bit of inspiration. Check it out. It's called the Side Hustle Idea Database—it's in the description below. You'll see the link. Click it, check it out, and let me know in the comments what you think.
08:09	Shaan Puri	"Can we pull up the video you posted back when you were—how old was he in this video?"
08:15	Sam Parr	That was three years ago, I think. </FormattedResponse>
08:17	Shaan Puri	Three years ago. So you're, like—what, 14 or 15 years old? The video is titled "How I'm Gonna Make $1,000,000 in High School." Pull this up because I want to get your reaction to this. It starts, by the way... it just starts with, like...
08:30	Sam Parr	Great video.
08:31	Shaan Puri	It's an amazing video. How many views does this video have? I can't see from, like... </FormattedResponse>
08:33	Sam Parr	8,000
08:34	Shaan Puri	Okay — 7,000 views. Three years ago you posted this. You only have 1,000 subscribers on YouTube. I say "only" — I mean, I just mean this video is criminally underrated.
08:44	Zach Yadegari	At the time, I had 20 subscribers when I posted this.
08:47	Shaan Puri	So, you could play—you could play this. I don't know if the audio will come through.
08:53	Zach Yadegari	"I'm going to make $1,000,000 before graduating high school, and this YouTube channel is going to document the whole process."
09:00	Shaan Puri	Here comes the best part: the mic, the alignment of the text. Then, watch the microwave.
09:07	Zach Yadegari	What is $1,000,000? It's enough cash to give you a luxury lifestyle. It makes life more enjoyable and stress-free. It's every kid's dream. Wow.
09:17	Shaan Puri	Director's Cut </FormattedResponse>
09:19	Zach Yadegari	Making $1,000,000 can be broken down. For example, if you're trying to make it in a year, it's just $80,000 a month, or $20,000 a week, or $3,000 a day. All I would need to do is sell $3,100 in items every single day. Seems easy — I'm really making it more simple than it seems, but whatever.
09:41	Shaan Puri	I love this video. I love this video on so many levels — it's insane. I love that you're shooting your shot; you're calling your shot. You should say, "This is Babe Ruth pointing at center field." I love that you called your shot. I love that you were just having fun with it. You obviously weren't super polished or going back and editing this to make it fancy. I love that your mindset was, "I want to do this," and that you broke it down into smaller, more digestible chunks. You can't just make a million dollars in a second. You're like, "I need to make $20,000 a week. I need to make $3,000 in a day to do that. I gotta sell thirty $100 items." That seems achievable. Can you just tell us what — why'd you decide to make that video?
10:21	Zach Yadegari	Well, from such a young age—and I'm not entirely sure where I could pinpoint this—but I've always wanted to make a massive impact on the world. Usually that desire runs parallel with having a lot of monetary success. So my goal was always to make a million dollars while in high school. Part of that was because I was really stressed out about school. My parents were super strict about my grades, and social studies was the one class I hated. I hated having to memorize flashcards. I vividly remember one night sitting there trying to memorize flashcards about explorers who came to the Americas. I was so frustrated. I broke down the problem and realized that I'm studying to get a good grade. But why? "Why do I want a good grade?" It's to get into a good college so that I could get a good job, make money, and then live a happy life. So if I could skip all those steps, it would remove the stress I'm feeling right now. If I could make money right now, I wouldn't need to worry about a job or be so stressed. And then I set out the goal to do so.
11:32	Sam Parr	You're... you're... you're not wrong.
11:34	Shaan Puri	It's the intelligent man's procrastination. It's like, "Should I study these 15 flashcards or make a million dollars?" I think I'll make a million dollars instead.
11:41	Sam Parr	Are your parents entrepreneurs, or are they just normal?
11:44	Shaan Puri	The house was nice. That's a nice house.
11:47	Zach Yadegari	So, my parents have both been lawyers for their careers. Then, recently—two years ago—my dad left his job at a company to start a financial consulting firm. I always worry people are going to think, "Oh, because he started a business, that's where all of this came from." But I was entrepreneurial and doing things long before he actually left his company to start his firm.
12:12	Sam Parr	Do you give him tips sometimes?
12:16	Zach Yadegari	I don't.
12:16	Shaan Puri	He should offer to angel-invest in his company and be his mentor. Alright, so you, Sam, any thoughts on that video before we move on from the video?
12:27	Sam Parr	It's the best, you know, Sean. We brought this up maybe six months ago on a podcast—I don't know if you remember that. At the time it was still like: "Is this kid... is this a joke? Does he actually have it? How real is this?" We brought that up saying, "This is amazing if it turns out to be true." And it is true—times 20. Whoa. It's like absolutely amazing that you've been able to... it's...
12:53	Shaan Puri	I think it’s grown a lot. At that time, it was, like, a million-dollar ARR app. So I think you were probably at something like $80,000 a month. Now, how much revenue are you doing? </FormattedResponse>
13:05	Zach Yadegari	Well, last month we just did our first $2,000,000. </FormattedResponse>
13:10	Sam Parr	So, wow.
13:11	Shaan Puri	"You're on a $24,000,000 pace."
13:14	Sam Parr	And what will your revenue be for the first 12 months of full business?
13:20	Zach Yadegari	For the full business, the revenue would have exceeded $10,000,000 from launching in May to this coming month. </FormattedResponse>
13:27	Sam Parr	"And is it entirely bootstrapped? Have you had any outside financing?"
13:32	Zach Yadegari	All bootstrapped.
13:33	Sam Parr	Wow. How many employees? I'm just going to—like, I'm going to... I need to ask a bunch of questions so I understand all the info. How many employees?
13:40	Zach Yadegari	Totally. Right now, we have 15 employees full‑time. </FormattedResponse>
13:43	Sam Parr	Wow. Okay. That's... wow.
13:45	Shaan Puri	"That's a lot. So, how did you get it to work? Okay, so you made an app — you're a coder; you started coding when you were seven years old or something like that, so I believe that you could make an app. Yeah, it seems like. Let's just do a quick summary on making the app. How did you actually build this thing? Are you basically taking a bunch of AI tools and then sort of... I'm not saying you're just a wrapper, but are you custom-building this for the use case of tracking calories in an app? Can you just quickly describe making the app and how long that took you?"
14:16	Zach Yadegari	Totally. A lot of people do look down on apps like Calai; they'll summarize them as just an AI wrapper and think that we aren't providing any value. It's true that we started as an AI wrapper, and I think that's something all apps should do. Just like in e-commerce, it's very common to start as a drop-shipper — drop-ship a product — and then, once you find success, actually manufacture it yourself, store it yourself, and create your own brand out of that. So the proof of concept is the drop-shipping for us. The proof of concept was using ChatGPT and other AI tools kind of as a wrapper app, frankly. But then, after finding initial success — the first app, the first version, very, very bare-bones, very, very basic — you were able to take a picture of your food; it would tell you the calories, it would have the daily breakdown. That was it: one feature. And then, after we saw that people liked it, we started adding more features. We had...
15:22	Sam Parr	How many people did you have using it to determine that they like it?
15:26	Zach Yadegari	We had—so, this is important to note—we've grown all through influencer marketing, which is how we've achieved our rapid growth. After working with two influencers and having them post on their stories talking about the app, that's when we received the initial feedback and saw that people actually liked it.
15:45	Shaan Puri	So, let's go step by step. You make the app — the app exists. Who are the first ten people that see it? Family and friends? Is that where you started, or...? </FormattedResponse>
15:51	Zach Yadegari	Family and friends. Although we just disregarded anything from them because I always think it's biased.
15:57	Sam Parr	Okay, smart.
15:58	Shaan Puri	So you send it to them. They're kind of— they say, "Oh, it's great." You're like, "Alright, cool," but we don't really know what's next. What did you do? What did you do next?
16:05	Zach Yadegari	So, next we started contacting influencers—fitness influencers—on Instagram and TikTok.
16:11	Sam Parr	Did my DM get lost in the mail? Why did I... Is this a— is this in my other inbox? What's going on?
16:20	Zach Yadegari	Yeah, we'll need to get you on it. So, we reached out, and most people just don't respond. It took me over two weeks to get my first response from an influencer.
16:32	Shaan Puri	Give us a sense of the pitch. What's the... what's the DM say?
16:35	Zach Yadegari	So, basically, you always want to start—at least from what we've tested. We've run a lot of A/B tests on this. Use the paid promo first, then jump into the app. For example: > "Paid promo: putting that first. And then jumping into our app—'Our app lets you track calories just by taking a picture of your food. We think it would fit your audience and would love to work with you. If you're interested, let us know and we can hop on a quick call.'" This works really well because it optimizes for the preview message the influencer will see in their inbox. They only see the first line or two, so the paid promo is what sticks out.
17:08	Sam Parr	And which influencer took what? Was your— who... who was it?
17:12	Shaan Puri	"And where'd you get the money? Right. So you're saying paid promo—put your kids... Are you, like, 'Hey Dad, can we get $5 as seed money to try this?' Like, where'd the money come from to start?"
17:22	Zach Yadegari	Sure. Before building CalAI, I actually built an unblocked gaming website my freshman year of high school. This website let students play games in class while their teacher was teaching, bypassing website-blocking protocols. I grew that to 5 million users through TikTok. It was generating revenue by displaying ads on the site, and then I sold it. That's where most of the money came from that we put into CalAI [the current project].
17:48	Shaan Puri	By the way, Sam, that's now the third or fourth person that's come on this podcast who has that same origin story: "I was in school; they blocked games on our school [devices]. I'm guessing you guys had, like, Chromebooks or something like that."
18:00	Sam Parr	Some of it was school, you know. Very, very oddly — Sean... it was Val, my friend Val, who came on and said his...
18:06	Shaan Puri	So, who’s doing that now?
18:08	Sam Parr	Well, they went to the same high school.
18:09	Shaan Puri	Oh, really. Syed Balkhi said that that was his "origin story" too: he wanted to find a way to play games while at school. Because of that, he learned all these different parts of coding and technology to make that happen. That was their first taste of money. But Jess Ma had the same thing with gaming servers at school. So you had this—you figured out, "All right, we have these school laptops, people want to play games, they're blocked. How'd you get around the block?" And what was this thing called?
18:37	Zach Yadegari	The website was called totallyscience.co, and that's how it got categorized as educational. That was the main thing. We also had several features on the site. For example, if you pressed the tilde key (~) on the keyboard, it would redirect to Google Classroom, so if the teacher was coming you could quickly hide it.
18:56	Shaan Puri	Oh, nice. Nice — that's crazy. Hey, how can you play? This is science. Not only science... this is totally science. This is only science. Alright, so you did that company — you sold it. You were making how much, and you sold that for how much?
19:12	Zach Yadegari	"It made $60,000 for two years, and then I sold it for $100,000 when I was 16."
19:19	Sam Parr	So this is like the first sign, you know — to have a kid, to have your son, from your parents' perspective, do $60 in revenue or profit. Something like that when they're 14. That's like asking, "Are you a drug dealer? What's going on? How are you doing this?" Did that take convincing on your end to let them know what you were doing was totally legal? At any point, were your parents or lawyers like, "Are you breaking any laws, man? Are you sure you're on top of all this?"
19:47	Zach Yadegari	I definitely got questioned about breaking laws by my dad a bunch of times. He actually made me put up a Terms of Service that, in all caps, said: "YOU CANNOT USE THIS WHILE IN SCHOOL. THIS IS ONLY FOR BREAKS OR AT HOME." My mom was always shocked every time I actually got a payout from Google. I think maybe it was that it didn't sound like a real business—an unblocked games website—how could that make money? But I actually had money coming into my bank account that was under her name because I was too young to open one. She was shocked every...
20:18	Shaan Puri	Did you do anything cool with it—the money?
20:21	Zach Yadegari	Well, not really. Honestly, I put all of it into CalAI when we launched it...
20:28	Sam Parr	Pretty cool thing.
20:29	Zach Yadegari	The only thing I actually spent the money I made on—and this was recent—was my eighteenth birthday party. I flew my friends out to Miami for a weekend trip from high school.
20:40	Shaan Puri	That's awesome. Alright, sweet. So you put the money in the Kali, you got the money, you reach out to the influencers — as you said, two influencers start posting. What are they posting? Is there some science to it? We just had, you know, Rob the Bank on talking about TikTok as a distribution strategy, about what makes great TikTok hooks and videos and how that game is being played. Do you know Rob? And I guess, how have you guys played that game of short-form content to grow your apps?
21:07	Zach Yadegari	So Totally Science and Calai were a little different. For Totally Science, I was the one making the videos myself. I was recording my screen in class, saying, "Hey, if you want to play unblocked games, go to this website." Then I would put a little caption that said, "Comment what game to add next," and that would gather a ton of comments, making the video go viral. For Calai, I'm not the one making videos—no one on the team is. It's all influencers. We still use the knowledge from, well, what I learned from Totally Science to help these influencers make videos and make them go viral, to give ideas. But for the most part we just pay the influencer that fits our niche, and then they're the professionals; they know what goes viral. As long as we can predict the ROI—which we have a ton of factors and variables we look at—then we let them run with it.
22:05	Shaan Puri	"Do you pay them on CPM, or how do you pay them?" [CPM = cost per thousand impressions]
22:08	Zach Yadegari	So, CPM would be a blessing — that's the dream for everyone. If you could do that, you guarantee profitability. But these influencers usually need to be paid in advance; otherwise they won't do it. They'll take another brand that's willing to work with them. So you have to predict, before they make any video, how many views they're going to get. You have to look at their previous videos. Also, not all views are worth the same. You have to analyze the comment section to see how strong their community is, and based on that, weigh how much you're actually going to pay them.
22:42	Shaan Puri	That's wild. So, is this thing pretty sticky, and where do you want to take this? So, you go viral, you get people to download. I'm assuming they hit some paywall in the app that says "Keep track of all your calories..." Is it kind of one of these churn-and-burn games where it's pretty profitable for the first couple months and then you lose people, or is it a sticky product?
23:03	Zach Yadegari	So it's sticky for the power users — they definitely stay around. I mean, apps like MyFitnessPal are doing over $100 million a year, so I know we could get there.
23:17	Sam Parr	You look at the reviews, Sean. He has 65,000 reviews and it's a 4.8 out of 5. So this isn't like an "arbitrage" or a "get-rich-quick" thing—people really love the product.
23:30	Shaan Puri	"Yeah, what's the churn on these subscriptions?"
23:33	Zach Yadegari	We actually don't know, because it hasn't been a year. More than 95% of our subscriptions are annual.
23:40	Shaan Puri	Gotcha. Okay, but they're still using it, presumably. So that means if they're using it, they'll stick with it. Wow — this is amazing. So, do you want to take this to be kind of like MyFitnessPal, or are you like, "Hey, if somebody offered us, you know, a buttload of cash..."? What's your mindset? I'm so curious, because if I was 18 years old I don't know what the hell I'd be thinking. Even now, at 36 years old, I still don't really know what I'd be thinking in this position. What's the mindset of an 18-year-old? You've got many hits in you, you know. This may not be the only one — the same way you did a similar thing with TotallyScience versus this — but this just had a much bigger market, much more market potential. You might be able to do even more things. Or is this something you want to do for a decade?
24:23	Sam Parr	Yeah. And does it feel like you're still breaking the law? Like, if you—if anyone... well, I don't mean he's...
24:30	Shaan Puri	Not breaking the law.
24:31	Sam Parr	He's talking. No — what I mean is, when you go from zero to $20 million in revenue in eight months, there's this giddiness, like: "I can't believe this is my life. I can't believe this is allowed." I don't know. There's something — a matrix-breaking idea — where you're questioning, "How is this possible?" Do you still have that mentality, or are you like, "Of course this is possible, and this is just step one"?
24:54	Zach Yadegari	I definitely have the mentality that it feels surreal. It feels nuts. I'm 18 years old, and the company's going to generate over $24,000,000 this year. That's crazy. The fact that I'm on your podcast, my first million—saying that, it's nuts. A year ago I wouldn't have believed it. I view this as a stepping stone. I want to build a company that touches the lives of billions of people—something as ubiquitous as the iPhone. And I think Calai—if we shifted the idea to maybe nutrition tracking in general, and we could link photos of what you're eating to your health—that could be something that touches the lives of billions. That could be something I could spend a decade on. But I probably don't want to. Instead, I would want this to be something that sets me financially free—where I don't need to think about money, where I'm not incentivized by generating revenue. Then I can start another company that is purely motivated by impact and scale of impact, something that I'm passionate about and can spend a couple decades on.
26:03	Shaan Puri	Sam, I saw a post today from his partner Blake. He posted something on Twitter and said, "I guess he's working on something called 10x." It sounds like it's an app for learning — you can learn anything: AI skills, languages, whatever. Sounds like a learning tool, which is more in the direction of being good for the world, good for humanity, an impact-style thing that he's building. So it sounds like he started with Umax, which was literally probably the most superficial thing — like, "How does my face look and what can I do to make my face look better?" Then it's Kalliei, and now he's going into a learning tool. It sounds like you might want to do the same. Was there something that triggered that in you? Did you watch a movie or have a conversation with a mentor when you were 12 years old? What made you think differently than the average high schooler who's hyper-focused on just their grades and making friends or whatever's in their little pond? </FormattedResponse>
27:03	Zach Yadegari	It's funny you say "The Social Network." It totally had a big impact on me. However, I did feel this way before that, so the film amplified it. It showed me it's possible—specifically through software—which made me super motivated to learn coding even faster. But I'm not sure where the initial seed was planted.
27:24	Sam Parr	"What do you think the app is worth right now?"
27:27	Zach Yadegari	Right now, I think the app—taking its growth into account—is close to a $100 million valuation.
27:39	Sam Parr	"Which means you are presumably worth in the ballpark of $30 million."
27:44	Zach Yadegari	I think "liquid" and "on paper" are really different.
27:47	Sam Parr	"Oh, I know. But you're totally right — 17–18 years old and worth tens of millions of dollars. I think that's a fair ballpark. Would you agree?"
27:59	Zach Yadegari	I would agree.
28:01	Shaan Puri	Yeah, that's amazing, man — congratulations. I'm really inspired by you. I'd say there's a handful of people I've discovered who are kind of like you: super young and basically AI-first. All the tools you're building, you build with AI. Why wouldn't you? You code them with AI, the app uses AI, and the users get an AI-type experience. You also figured out a growth channel that a bunch of older guys like us kind of suck at. You have what I call the "bear on a bicycle" phenomenon. My friend Chris Williamson put it well: > "You basically want to stack two skills that usually don't go together, and it creates something remarkable." So, you know, you see a bear — okay, that's a bear. You see a bicycle — okay, that's a bicycle. But you see a bear on a bicycle? Holy shit. Never seen that before. That's amazing. For you, it's that combination: you know how to code — plenty of kids know how to code — and you also have the other piece, which you mentioned in your video: video editing and making fun videos. That TikTok knowledge plus the ability to build apps that work is your bear-on-a-bicycle thing. I'm pretty inspired because there's a group of people who are just like you. Right now is a very golden window for that group to go build things. Hopefully, listening to this triggers another 20 to 100 people just like you who hear this story and start doing it. That set of skills is very, very valuable for this moment in time.
29:43	Zach Yadegari	"I totally agree, and that's honestly why I'm super motivated to go on podcasts like these. I was super motivated by others before me that I've watched on podcasts, and so this is almost a full-circle moment for me to come on here."
29:58	Shaan Puri	Yeah, that's interesting. Sam, would you be going on podcasts? Because, you know, while you're here I'm like, "Oh, this is great content — I'm excited." But then there's the fatherly part of me that's like...</FormattedResponse>
30:06	Sam Parr	"Like, shut up."
30:07	Shaan Puri	"Dude, just shut up. Why are you on the podcast? You shouldn't be saying any of this stuff — you have such a good thing going. You could always tell the story a little later. You don't need to invite... the other Zach Yatigaris of the world — who can code, can make TikToks, they've got cool haircuts like you — and they're just going to do the same thing, right? So why go on and spill your secrets? Why do that?"
30:33	Zach Yadegari	So, I've heard this before: usually people know what it takes to be successful, but they're looking for an easier way—something less burdensome, not as hard, that doesn't require as much sacrifice. I've been coding since I was seven. I'm 18 now, so that's eleven years of coding. I started Totally Science [unclear—name may be "Totally Science"], and before that I was tutoring kids in coding lessons. For almost a decade of my life I was in the entrepreneur game. I think that, yes, I can share all of this information publicly, but it's only a select few who will actually work toward it and put in the hours required to achieve the result. I want to help those people. I think helping them achieve the same success—especially if they were in a situation like mine, where they maybe weren't entirely sure where to go but knew there was a world out there where they could have massive impact at such a young age, even while balancing school—I completely support those people.
31:48	Sam Parr	You have a trait that—Sean and I's good buddy, Jack Smith, is the perfect embodiment of. A lot of entrepreneurs are this way: you're logical, which often comes off as awkward in day-to-day situations. For example, my friend Jack does things very differently from everyone because his way is actually better. But we've all done things the same way for 100+ years, so we're like, "I don't know—we just do it this way." For instance, he didn't name his daughter the first year because he said, "I have to get to know her before I can name her." I was like, "Yeah, that makes total sense; it's just strange to think about." You have that type of energy. You said, "Well, I'm worrying about grades so I can get a good job—or get into a good college to get a good job—and make good money. What if I just make money now?" That way of thinking is amazing, and it's really fun to be around people like you. So I want to hear your perspective on a few things—this fresh thinking on a few things. The first is: you have 15 employees. Do you have any employees who are in their thirties or forties? And what's it like having to go from being just you and your buddies in a room messing around to, at 15 people, actually running a real company?
33:01	Zach Yadegari	So, yes, we do have employees in their forties. To be honest with you, it's hard at times.
33:14	Shaan Puri	To make them call you "sir."
33:16	Zach Yadegari	Yeah, I do not make them call me "sir," but it is difficult—especially when I have to fire someone who has kids. I do have impostor syndrome at times, which is something I try not to let hold me back. Even if I think a certain way, I still act how I know I should. I'm reading a great book right now called "The Great CEO Within." I keep it on my desk as a reminder, and it helps me lead. I try to be an inspiring leader who helps people—not someone who leads by simply telling people what to do and saying "just do it." I try to inspire them to want to do the work.
33:59	Sam Parr	Do your staff—generally, are you guys a well-organized company, you think? Or is it a shit-show? </FormattedResponse>
34:06	Zach Yadegari	I think that we are pretty well organized. That's mainly credited to our COO and the third cofounder. I didn't mention Jake Castillo; he's really good at organization.
34:17	Shaan Puri	So one of the things we talked about was, “Why come and talk about this?” Part of you is like, “I want to inspire other people,” but we don't want to inspire just a bunch of copycats. So we asked you, “Hey, what are some other ideas that, if you weren't doing this, somebody could go do right now? How can the next you — how can the next high schooler get to where you're at: $20,000,000 a year in revenue as a 17- or 18‑year‑old?” So what ideas do you have for us?
34:42	Zach Yadegari	Sure. So, obviously, you could teach a man to fish or you could give a man a fish. Teaching is better. I have a few frameworks which I think will help even more, but I also will give some ideas.
34:52	Shaan Puri	Okay. Go for it.
34:53	Zach Yadegari	So, how I usually look at these AI problems—or not AI problems, but creating something new in general—is that AI has enabled people to basically build on top of and innovate on any tool or company that exists right now. The calendar was innovated on, and now there are AI calendar tools like Motion, which help you organize and structure your day a lot easier—your assistant. There are note-taking tools: people have always taken notes by hand and recorded lectures, but now there are AI platforms like TurboLearn AI where you can record your lecture and the AI will generate notes for you. Calorie tracking has always existed, but now with AI you can just take a picture of your food and it will tell you the calories. I try to look at everything that doesn't already use AI and think: can AI make this more efficient? Can it make this a better process? My perspective on coming up with new ideas is generally that I want to find something by looking at it from marketing first principles. I almost go backwards: I look for a moment that I could capture within some sort of experience and then wrap a whole app around that. For Calai, the moment is: take a picture of your food, get the calories. That's great for marketing material—the ad shows people doing that. But then there's a whole app around that to get them to stay. There's another app on the App Store right now called Fitness AI, and their ads recently have been around their AI body scanner: you take a picture of your body and it tells your body fat percentage and a ton of other useful information on your composition. That's what draws people into that AI tool—the moment—and then there's a whole fitness app around that where you stay to track your workouts. So that's the framework I generally like to use.
37:13	Shaan Puri	So, what do you think? You're saying work backwards from the magic moment where AI does a magic trick and you're like, "holy shit—that's cool," and then build something sticky. For you guys, just "take a picture, get the calories," then you have the tracking and the charts and the other stuff that's going to keep them—maybe the coaching tips or whatever—that's going to keep them around in the long term. Cool. Got it. And the other thing you're saying is take any app that's popular that we've already been doing and just ask, "what's the AI version of this?" Is that the brainstorming session you would do? It's basically like, "Alright, Evernote—what's the AI version of Evernote?"
37:47	Zach Yadegari	Yes.
37:48	Shaan Puri	You know, buddy in San Francisco—he had this company called StudySoup. StudySoup was literally for college kids. They would have paid note-takers who would take great notes in a lecture. Then you had basically the slackers and the kids that were on top of things. The kids on top of things were the supply side of the marketplace: they would give their notes and the slackers would buy them. So someone would say, "Oh, cool — I don't have to take notes in this class because I'm getting them done for me." And you're saying — you're basically saying that Terbalone has become an AI version of StudySoup, right? Where someone records it and now you have, well, well-taken AI notes for your class.
38:25	Zach Yadegari	Yeah, exactly.
38:26	Sam Parr	"So what are some examples?" </FormattedResponse>
38:28	Zach Yadegari	Yeah, so here's an idea. I've actually seen something like this — recently, on Twitter I saw something blow up. Maybe it was a couple months ago, not so recent, where someone put a bunch of their journal entries into ChatGPT and then asked, "What are some insights you could give me to make my life better?"
38:45	Sam Parr	"You got — they both do that."
38:47	Zach Yadegari	Yeah, well, that's great. I think there is the possibility — and this would be a great idea — to build a journal app. These journal apps already exist, so take an existing one and put your spin on it. You could make it voice notes or typed entries — whatever doesn't matter. But the key feature, the main AI feature you implement, is that periodically the AI will generate insights on how you can improve your life. For example: > "Hey, on Monday and Tuesday you hung out with Sally and you had a bad day. Maybe Sally is the cause of your bad days."
39:23	Shaan Puri	Gotcha. Okay, I like that. So, AI journal — I feel like, with the younger generation, therapy is a lot more normalized. Therapy's cool, basically. Whereas my generation, and my parents' generation, it was like: "therapy equals you're broken; you have a problem," and it was more taboo.
39:44	Sam Parr	The whole idea of The Sopranos was a guy who goes to therapy, and now his friends are going to murder him because he's so soft.
39:51	Shaan Puri	Yeah, exactly. Now I feel like, with the younger generation, it's almost like a cool thing to do. I don't know—maybe I'm speaking out my ass here; tell me if I'm wrong—but it's way more normalized. It's not a taboo thing anymore. In fact, probably being anti-therapy would be a little bit low-status now. Mhmm. But the problem with "therapy," of course, is that it's a little bit of a loaded word. And, you know, who's paying $100 a session for this type of stuff when you could have the AI therapist in your pocket—whether they're using your journal entries as the starting point, the "magic moment," or not? What do you think of that space? Do you think there's something interesting there?
40:28	Zach Yadegari	I think AI therapists are something that a lot of people have spoken about, and I haven't seen anyone do it well. There are definitely apps already where you can talk to chatbots, but I think they're all missing the feeling that you are actually being heard—the feeling you would get talking to a real therapist. So maybe it's the verbal aspect that's missing. Something like ChatGPT's voice mode—integrating that—can now actually make it a better session than just typing. But that is a good idea that uses the AI spin, for sure.
41:08	Shaan Puri	Gotcha. And what are some other ideas you have?
41:11	Sam Parr	"You have two more. It looks like you wrote on here, yeah."
41:14	Zach Yadegari	So, the first one is some kind of system or pipeline to convert an Android app or an iOS app to the other. This is something that would greatly help startups. When we started Calai, we built it on Swift. That's because, with Swift, you can usually make a much smoother user experience on iPhones. Using something like React Native, which can build to both iOS and Android, is more difficult because it doesn't actually use the native components to make something that feels super polished on an iPhone. After building the iOS app, we had all of this demand for an Android app, and it became problematic. We had to take away development time from the iOS app to build out the Android app, and we had to release it a few months later. It cost us thousands—tens of thousands—of dollars.
42:09	Shaan Puri	And every time you build a feature, you have to build it up twice. You have to build it on one, and then on the other.
42:13	Zach Yadegari	Yes, every single time — so it's annoying. I think with all these AI tools there is definitely the possibility to build something that lets you upload the codebase for one native project and then convert it to the other. Right now, I think AI can probably do 90% of the work, but there will need to be a tiny bit of human intervention. Maybe this would be best done as an agency that's very AI-powered at the moment. But very soon it's going to be something where an AI agent can do it all for you.
42:50	Shaan Puri	Yeah, that's a really good idea.
42:52	Sam Parr	We used to use something. I had an app years ago — a roommate app, a roommate-finding app. What was it called? We used something that turned a web app into an iPhone app.
43:02	Shaan Puri	I mean, there's been a lot of tools like that.
43:03	Sam Parr	And they were horrible. Like, it was really bad, but they were huge companies. </FormattedResponse>
43:09	Shaan Puri	Yeah, yeah, yeah—because this is a problem, right? You have to maintain two different features. You have to build twice. Every platform has its own bugs, and you basically have to hire double the number of people because the Android person focuses on Android and the iOS person focuses on iOS. So now you have more headcount. You always want this thing that's like, "but you need it." But still, you're right: having it be native actually results in a better user experience—more stickiness, more revenue, etc. If you try to do the web-app thing and you just put a web app and try to wrap it, it doesn't work as well as doing a native app. And so you're right that basically AI coding is getting so good that you could do 70–90% of the code transfer just through AI. Then maybe you do it as an agency, or you have one person doing that last-mile work to get it to work well. That's cool. What about this—remotely configurable onboarding flows? This sounds like using a framework. You know, it's a paper cut you have, right? So one of the best places to find startup ideas is: you're trying to do a startup, and in the process of trying to do it you run into something that's like, "God, I wish somebody had just built this." Maybe you build it in-house, or you just keep dealing with the pain. That's a very good source for startup ideas.
44:26	Zach Yadegari	I have heard that advice—to work at a startup to come up with new ideas—and it's 100% true. While working on Calai, and a few other apps before Calai, I was learning how the whole consumer app space works. Every app has to build out the onboarding flow. Every popular app on the App Store has one. It generally asks questions that are either required to set up your account, or simply to prime you for what's coming: to explain something that's going on in the app, or to ask questions that set your mind in the right direction to maybe help you convert when they actually hit you with a paywall. There is no good solution right now to build these. Everyone has to do it custom in their own codebase. But someone could really easily make a system where anyone can swap out the questions remotely and do A/B tests on them. Another problem is that anytime you want to test something new within your onboarding flow—or within your app in general—you have to submit an update to the App Store, which could take a few days. Building a system where you can construct the whole onboarding survey and change the screens remotely, then see how that affects conversion rates, completion rate, and drop-off rate, would be huge.
45:57	Sam Parr	"Are you the type of person who, even though you have a full-time gig, experiments with new ideas that are unrelated to CalAI?" </FormattedResponse>
46:06	Zach Yadegari	So, for the last few months we were briefly orienting ourselves as an app studio. The idea behind that was that our real sauce was in our marketing, not in our app development. We could build a bunch of these other AI apps, spin them up, apply the same marketing, and blow them up really fast. But at the scale Calai is at and the rate it's growing, we realized pretty quickly that it made more sense to stay full-time on Calai. In the same time it would take to build another app and scale it to six-figure revenue, we could have added an additional seven figures in revenue to Calai—just because everything boosts each other. Increasing retention will increase LTV, and as we increase retention we could increase the funnel. So one plus one can equal three instead of two.
47:03	Sam Parr	I think that is totally the right move. Is there anything, Zach — because, you know, Sean and I are parents, and there's a lot of people who listen to this who are parents — is there anything that you... You seem, traditionally, obviously you're traditionally successful, but you also seem like you're very thoughtful. I think you're...
47:20	Shaan Puri	"Well spoken."
47:21	Sam Parr	"You seem like you'd be a good son regardless." "Thank you." Regardless of who cares about this app, you have your shit together emotionally at a very young age. What do you think your parents did that set you up for this success? Or do you think — and this sounds like a douchey thing to say — were you just born interested in this stuff at a young age? There are a lot of self-directed people.
47:49	Zach Yadegari	I have four siblings. I am the second oldest, and from a young age I was very wired to want freedom. I think it comes from my siblings: if I wanted to buy something, my parents would have to buy it for all my siblings, so they wouldn't do it. I had to find a way to pay for it myself. That's what made me start teaching coding lessons at such a young age to earn money. Related to that, I actually have a story. When I was 10 years old, I wanted to cook scrambled eggs by myself. I don't know what it was, but I really wanted independence and freedom — the independence to just cook my own breakfast at ten. I could've burned the house down, so my mom didn't let me. I got so mad that she didn't trust me to cook eggs on my own because she was taking care of my other siblings and getting them ready for school. I actually ran away from my house. I ran, probably fifteen minutes, to a local soccer field. The police were called; I got picked up by them and brought back home. I was going to come home eventually, but I did run away. It has really been the yearning for freedom that has been the driving force behind everything.
49:24	Sam Parr	Well, but you have that now.
49:27	Zach Yadegari	Somewhat. I still feel confined, honestly, by being in high school. I haven't dropped out, and I want to go to college just for the social life—not, obviously, to get a job. I always feel almost trapped in situations where the outcome is determined by what someone else decides for me, not something I can control for myself. Someone has to accept me into college. If I let my grades drop in high school, they could rescind my acceptance even if I get into the school, and I hate that. But right now, for the next year at least, I think I have to make that sacrifice. Then, when I'm in college, I want to make a good group of friends, then drop out and be free.
50:14	Sam Parr	You're gonna go.
50:15	Shaan Puri	What's your GPA right now?
50:17	Zach Yadegari	My GPA is a 4.0. Oh, Pat, do you want to go? </FormattedResponse>
50:21	Shaan Puri	"What did you go to SATs?"
50:23	Sam Parr	Yeah, yeah.
50:24	Zach Yadegari	I took the ACT, and I got a 34.
50:29	Sam Parr	Okay, so that's very good.
50:30	Shaan Puri	I think, right?
50:31	Sam Parr	Yeah. It's like... that's two points away from "per" [unclear]. It's like a 90 — it's a 90th percentile, ninety-eighth percentile.
50:36	Shaan Puri	Okay, so... you haven't neglected school. You got a 4.0, and you didn't...
50:40	Zach Yadegari	Do it with ACT — doing this with school. I'm working hard in school... I'm not.
50:44	Sam Parr	By the way, it's... it's... it's noon on a Monday. Where—where—where are you right now?
50:50	Zach Yadegari	I actually skipped class to do this podcast.
50:53	Shaan Puri	Let's go. Sorry, Miss Bickerstaff — the boys are calling.
51:00	Sam Parr	Are you at school right now, or are you home?
51:02	Zach Yadegari	No, I left school. I'm home right now.
51:04	Sam Parr	And you told your parents, "It's because there's this podcast I want to go on, and it's going to be good for business." </FormattedResponse>
51:09	Zach Yadegari	Yeah.
51:10	Shaan Puri	Yeah. How many other people do you know who are like you? Is there a community of a hundred of you guys—high schoolers who actually build shit and want to do cool things?
51:17	Zach Yadegari	There's not that many high schoolers, but there are people who are slightly older — 19, 20. I...
51:23	Shaan Puri	Probably how he's already got the mastermind hand pose. He already has the visionary hand position naturally, dude—straight out of the box.
51:32	Zach Yadegari	I have a handful of people that I'm friends with, but not many—definitely not.
51:36	Sam Parr	Do guys have a club? Do you have a name? "Yeah—like The Grubs." </FormattedResponse>
51:39	Zach Yadegari	"Yeah, yeah. It's the cool kids club."
51:41	Sam Parr	That's it. You guys are pretty cool, so I've always wanted to be part of that. If you need another member, let me know. Have you considered moving to Palo Alto and just hanging out—like, you know, in the movie The Social Network? Sean Parker gets to act like a college kid without going to college. Or are you dead set on going that route?
52:08	Zach Yadegari	Well, over the summer, when things started taking off in June for Cali, Henry, and I, we decided, "let's go all in." We moved to San Francisco for the whole month of July. We lived in a hacker house and worked out of a coworking office with people years older than us. So we lived the San Francisco startup life. It was very productive, but at the same time pretty lonely. Although we could've talked to some people—we made friends and would get lunch with people—first of all, San Francisco is not the most fun city. Also, the fact that people were years older than us always made it difficult to relate to them.
52:56	Shaan Puri	Yeah, that makes sense.
52:58	Sam Parr	I have a friend who got accepted into a program where he went to college at the age of 14 or 15. He was telling me, "Man, I wanted to date girls and do that normal stuff, and it was weird." I started fooling around with one girl, and I eventually had to tell her that I was—like—16. I imagine it's strange being in situations where you're just as mature as, or more mature than, a lot of 21-year-olds or grown adults, but you feel trapped. You're in these weird spots at such a young age that you literally couldn't go and do some of the stuff in San Francisco that everyone else is doing because of your age. Still, it's pretty amazing. I hope you enjoy the time. I mean, being 18 and experiencing what you're doing—this is, you know, one out of a billion. This is a really special thing. How much are you paying yourself?
53:59	Zach Yadegari	So, we haven't paid ourselves anything — we are reinvesting it all. That's not to say that we won't. We do have profit every month. It's a difficult situation with the App Store because we get paid out two months after we earn the money. Our growth is so quick that the revenue we generated two months ago has to be put entirely into marketing to keep growing faster and faster. I think in a few months we may start having a surplus — where we can't spend it on growth even if we wanted to.
54:33	Shaan Puri	Yeah, that's great, dude. This is awesome — congratulations. I'm excited to see what happens. Who are, like... who do you admire? Who are you learning from and looking up to? Who's inspiring you? Are you just like, "Oh, Elon and Jeff Bezos — that's what I care about," or are there other people that you're more interested in personally?
54:54	Sam Parr	"Like you said, you used to listen to podcasts as inspiration. Who are some of those people that you like to listen to?" </FormattedResponse>
54:59	Zach Yadegari	"Totally. So, I love you guys' podcast. I'm more inspired by people who are dead than people who are alive. Maybe that's because I feel like they're not my competition anymore—or they are, but they're not progressing anymore, so I see exactly where they ended up. But psycho."
55:19	Shaan Puri	Love it.
55:20	Sam Parr	"Yeah, I get it — you sick fuck."
55:22	Shaan Puri	Yeah — since they're not my competition anymore, I've already finished them. </FormattedResponse>
55:28	Zach Yadegari	Yeah, people like Sam.
55:35	Shaan Puri	I think he just threatened those low keys. Yeah. Okay. So, you like learning from dead people? What does that mean — books? What do you... how do you learn from dead people?
55:43	Zach Yadegari	I like audiobooks, but I don't actually like reading physical books. I also like learning about them from podcasts.
55:49	Sam Parr	Which dead people also... like founders? You like the David Senrose podcast Founders? It's one of my favorites.
55:54	Zach Yadegari	I do listen to that. There's one I've listened to recently: "How to Take Over the World."
55:58	Shaan Puri	"Which goes into my book. Let's go. So let me ask you a question: what's a thing that people your age are doing that seems weird to us but is totally normal? Like, what's a phenomenon where you're like, 'yeah, kids love doing this—they spend all this time doing it or they spend their money on this,' or this is a new trend that seems weird to others but we get it; it's normal for us?"
56:20	Zach Yadegari	Yeah.
56:20	Sam Parr	He is, by the way, wearing Ralph Lauren—Ralph Lauren polo sweaters. Yeah. Is that a new trend that young people are doing?
56:26	Shaan Puri	Influenced Sam.
56:28	Zach Yadegari	Yeah, a great sweater.
56:30	Sam Parr	Yeah, sorry. Go ahead with what cool young people are doing.
56:34	Zach Yadegari	So there's something really interesting — a phenomenon I've seen recently. It's not a new software or a new social media platform. It's these little things you put on the back of your phone. It's called "Octobuddy." It has suction cups on it, so you can stick your phone to a wall or prop it up on a table and watch videos. I don't think people actually — I've never seen someone use the suction cups as they're designed. But it's a trend among all the girls in my high school. Over the last few months I've just seen more and more people have it. Now everyone does, and it's fascinating. [final phrase unclear: "something tv"]
57:22	Shaan Puri	"Mount—you mount your... You can mount your phone to any surface, basically. And what do you mean it's not used how it's supposed to be? Isn't that what it's supposed to be?"
57:28	Zach Yadegari	Well, I think it's more of something where, now, girls look at it like the color of their nails or having long nails—where girls get different colors and... </FormattedResponse>
57:38	Shaan Puri	Oh, it's scary.
57:39	Zach Yadegari	Stylistic accessory — more of a status thing than an actual function.
57:43	Sam Parr	Keep going. Tell me what young people like. Whenever I meet a young guy, I'm like, "Tell me everything."
57:49	Zach Yadegari	"Well, that's the main thing you wouldn't typically notice."
57:52	Sam Parr	Are your friends drinking?
57:55	Zach Yadegari	Yes, definitely—it's because...</FormattedResponse>
57:57	Sam Parr	"Do you like to party? Do you guys like to smoke weed?" </FormattedResponse>
57:59	Zach Yadegari	I'm someone who doesn't do any drugs. I'm pretty against them, and I don't drink either, but it's... I mean, everyone around me is... [thought unfinished]
58:07	Sam Parr	So, drinking's common.
58:08	Zach Yadegari	Very common. Very, very common.
58:10	Shaan Puri	You also mentioned this—this "Turbo Learn" thing, which sounds pretty awesome. What else is out there like it? Who else is doing what you do—who's basically scaling up to millions in revenue just off this kind of AI TikTok–type model? </FormattedResponse>
58:26	Zach Yadegari	So, there are a bunch of consumer apps that are coming out, or have come out. Honestly, I think a lot of it is attributed to Blake and I speaking publicly about this, showing that it's really possible in the app space. New apps like Quitter — which is an app designed to help men quit porn — use little social features, such as streaks, essentially to gamify the whole experience. That's a new one that just came out.
58:58	Sam Parr	"You inspired these guys."
59:00	Zach Yadegari	I'm friends with the founder, and he was inspired to get into the app space by seeing "Cali Eye" really take off. He was with me in the early days.
59:07	Shaan Puri	That's cool. It's got 5,005 reviews on the iPhone. That's pretty good.</FormattedResponse>
59:12	Zach Yadegari	Yeah, so they're on track to make over $1,000,000 this year. I think consumer apps right now are like the new drop-shipping.
59:19	Sam Parr	You know, Sean said this once. He was like, "I'm a content creator." He's got newsletters, Twitter, and podcasts. But these TikTok guys—it's as if I am really good at riding horses, and along comes Henry Ford. There's just no comparison. I can't—there's no way my horse and I are going to outrun even the crappiest car. This is one of those moments I'm having right now talking to you. For a long time, Sean and I—and our friends—did dropshipping when we were 25. That was the thing: create a dropshipping site. People still do things like that. Seeing what you're doing with tech and influencers is so much better. You even make MrBeast look old, you know what I mean? Like... "chocolate" — like, what? That's crazy. Make it, you know.
01:00:12	Shaan Puri	What I mean is... people used to look at Sam and me when we were—well, we met when I was probably 24 or 25 years old. We were the prodigies, and people would say, "Don't..." That's very generous. What I mean is, if there was something on the fringe or the edge about either growth hacking or, yeah, a clever way to make money, it was usually us who knew it, and people would ask us about it.
01:00:33	Sam Parr	Like, remember having The Atlantic [the publisher] come to my office? They're like, "Newsletters." And I'm like, "Yeah... it's a thing — that's old news now. These guys are so much better, and we are that person now." I'm going to go to his office and be like, "Just tell me everything."
01:00:46	Zach Yadegari	It's something that always happens—it's going to happen to me too. I know that, every year I age, I am becoming exponentially less impressive, and there's someone who's going to come and be the next big thing: the "growth hacker" who is at the front of everything. I think it's just about building momentum. I'm pretty obsessed with this idea of making sure that everything I work on will 10x the previous thing so that I'm always moving forward toward a bigger goal. You actually mentioned MrBeast—he's someone who greatly inspires me. I love the podcast that you guys had with him.
01:01:25	Shaan Puri	By the way, I've heard this now a couple times from people who are like 18, and they're fearful that when they're 22 their accomplishments are no longer cool. I just want to say: I get it — it makes total sense. It's also total nonsense. Not only is it still super impressive, but the real game is when you stop trying to impress people. What actually happens is you graduate out of the "I need to impress people" phase. The person who's 17 or 18 is still getting that high of being the impressive person — everyone kind of pats you on the back. The only way to win the game is not to continuously try to be the youngest, best-looking, richest person, because you'll never win that game of comparison. The real way to win is to realize, "I just need to be doing the things that are fun for me," and that the act of doing them is rewarding. Don't look for the rewards of impressing people — which is obviously easier said than done. That's the real thing to focus on, not the feeling of "I'm running on quicksand" because I'm getting older, or thinking I have to 10x my growth even though I'm already at $24,000,000 ARR. I'm not against growth, but somebody said this to us while we were hanging out with MrBeast. They said, "Be very careful, because growth for growth's sake is the ideology of a cancer cell." Growth for growth's sake is not where it's at. There's more to the game than that. I'll leave you with that to kind of figure out what the answer is. I'm not going to try to tell you what I think is right, but I'll...
01:03:04	Shaan Puri	That stood out because, for me when I was young—and I know for a lot of ambitious people—it just seems like grow, grow, grow, grow, grow is the only thing. And it comes from a little bit of, I don't know, a place of anxiety, I think.
01:03:18	Zach Yadegari	Right, yes. I've had a similar thought — I'm not sure if it's a good thing or a bad thing. I've thought, okay: once I find my success, and let's say I'm "quote-unquote" financially free, will I even want to start something new? Or will I not care anymore and just want to find happiness elsewhere? Maybe one of the tenets of happiness is that I'm financially taken care of, but then I want to prioritize relationships and happiness in other aspects. </FormattedResponse>
01:03:50	Sam Parr	So, you're always going to be making stuff. I'll predict the future: maybe you'll take the foot off the gas and want relationships, a family, and all that stuff. You are going to be creating stuff for a very, very long time.
01:04:02	Zach Yadegari	Well, that's why I'm going to college: it's almost to take my foot off the gas a little bit, build relationships, and then I want to drop out after a semester or two.
01:04:10	Shaan Puri	"I mean, I think that's really smart, because you have your whole life to make money. But you really only have these 4 years to make lifelong friends from college. So actually, the scarce thing is the friendships and that college experience, because there's a window of time that expires. So do that, because you still have 50 years to make money after what..." </FormattedResponse>
01:04:31	Sam Parr	School do you want to go to?
01:04:34	Zach Yadegari	If I got in, then Stanford is likely the top.
01:04:37	Sam Parr	Surely we have listeners. This is going to reach a lot of people. Surely there are some—some people, Dean. </FormattedResponse>
01:04:43	Shaan Puri	I know you're listening, Yadagari — spelled "y-a-d-a-d-a." Yeah. </FormattedResponse>
01:04:49	Sam Parr	You can find him on Twitter. DM him. Actually...
01:04:53	Shaan Puri	That's what they should do. For real—if I'm at a college right now, I'm DMing this kid an acceptance letter. That's how college needs to hustle. I'm tired of these colleges... [sentence trails off]
01:05:02	Sam Parr	Someone's gonna be like, "Sup — you're just gonna get a DM from... let me see — 'Sup, who's your favorite? Who are your most inspirational follows on Twitter? I wanna— I basically find you so fascinating. I wanna be inspired by the people you're... we want your info diet.'" "Yeah, yeah, yeah. I want your info diet. Who do you get inspired by? Try to make it people who you think I won't know."
01:05:24	Zach Yadegari	Okay, who do I follow? I actually don't usually use Twitter for people I'm inspired by.
01:05:32	Sam Parr	By — that's interesting.
01:05:34	Shaan Puri	"What—what's your main social network? What do you use when you're bored? What do you open up?"
01:05:38	Zach Yadegari	Twitter. Twitter is my main social network when I'm looking to be inspired. There are definitely a few people. David Goggins, for example—he just pumps me up. I'm completely inspired by his mindset. I used to be in a phase where I was addicted to motivational content. I curated my TikTok For You page—I only liked motivational videos. Anytime I lost motivation, I'd scroll for five minutes, then get back into it. So definitely those kinds of people, but it's mainly creators like MrBeast and Elon Musk. I follow both of them on Twitter. My cofounder, Blake Anderson, is a few years ahead of me in life and knowledge, so I definitely learn a lot from him. Cliff Weitzman is a recent friend of mine; I think one of you knows him.
01:06:34	Shaan Puri	Yeah, yeah. We know, Cliff.
01:06:35	Zach Yadegari	Yeah, so he's super inspiring to me as well.
01:06:40	Shaan Puri	"That's dope. Okay—amazing. Sam, anything else?" </FormattedResponse>
01:06:44	Sam Parr	Is there—don't ask me, Zach—anything else that you want to inspire me by? Like... you're... you're... you're amazing. Anything else that you want to tell us?
01:06:54	Shaan Puri	"Yeah, did we miss anything?"
01:06:55	Zach Yadegari	I appreciate that. I mean, it's always hard going on these podcasts. It's a whole, full-circle moment, and it almost feels bad speaking about all of this. I try to stay humble, but at the same time I know you have to "speak your way into the world." If I wasn't posting anything publicly—I’ve had a lot of debate over the personal brand—then I wouldn't have so many opportunities that I have had. </FormattedResponse>
01:07:24	Sam Parr	I saw one of my best buddies, Val. I think Zach asked him out to lunch the other day and was asking him for advice—maybe about coming on this podcast, but also for business advice—because Val's a great guy and really successful. I thought it was funny because you actually remind me of Val a lot, Zach. Apparently Val's kids were like, "Were you hanging out with our friend Zach at lunch the other day?" He said, "Yeah," but it was a very, you know, oddly business context. Anyway, Val called me and said, "This guy Zach is one of the most impressive people I've ever met." Val is a very hard person to impress; he's pretty low-key, and so...
01:08:07	Shaan Puri	Well, one of the funny things is you have this paradox. You want to keep your asset—your youth—and ignorance is bliss. You don't know how hard some things are. You don't know what's possible. You don't have a ceiling on anything because you don't know any better. That ignorance is a real tool: the naivete, the beginner's mind, and so you want to keep that. On the other side, you have this giant problem, which is this "three-known thing." It's like: there are the things you know you know, there are the things you know you don't know, and then the real one that matters is the things you don't know that you don't know. Talking to smarter people—people who have played the game for fifteen, twenty years—will help you surface that last one. That last area, the things you currently don't even know that you don't know, is the thing you should be worried about. But how do you worry about it if you don't even know where to look? It's by talking to other smart people that it gets revealed to you. So you have this paradox: you want to keep what you've got as your big asset—your naivete, your beginner's mind, your useful ignorance—but at the same time talk to some well-meaning people who are a little bit wiser to try to figure things out. A little push in one direction or the other will kind of nudge you, and that little nudge can totally change your trajectory. Imagine hitting a golf ball: even just changing the angle by two millimeters, the ball ends up in a totally different spot. You want to find those people who are your "two-millimeter people"—the people who will give you that slight angle adjustment. I don't know exactly how you keep both, but that's what I would do if I were you: try to find a way to keep both.
01:09:51	Zach Yadegari	I totally agree. I have heard that it's much easier to learn from someone 10 steps ahead of you than 100 steps ahead of you. With 100 steps, so much is missing, but with 10 you can piece things together. They can lift you up the extra steps and help you get from zero to 10. </FormattedResponse>
01:10:08	Shaan Puri	Yeah, and one other thing you're gonna figure out is that all successful people do not have equally valuable advice. You will meet a lot of people who are successful or sound interesting, but their advice is not great. The hard part is figuring out how to parse it and dissociate it slightly from the result, because their result might be totally dependent on context or luck. There are a whole bunch of different variables that can lead to that, or maybe it's just their understanding of your situation. So, trying to figure out how to parse advice is an underrated skill.
01:10:39	Sam Parr	And make sure that the people you take advice from are actually happy—people you admire. </FormattedResponse>
01:10:45	Shaan Puri	Or they're happy for themselves, and they're happy for you, you know.
01:10:47	Sam Parr	Yeah, like, you'd want their life.
01:10:49	Zach Yadegari	That's very good.</FormattedResponse>
01:10:51	Shaan Puri	Alright, well, on that—let's call it a day. I think you've got to go back to school now. </FormattedResponse>
01:10:57	Sam Parr	Yeah, lunch is over. Hey—thank you, Zach. You're the man. Anytime you want to come on, please let us know.
01:11:04	Shaan Puri	"Congrats, dude." "Thank you for having me."
01:11:06	Sam Parr	And I'm gonna... use the app, so I'm going to download your app.
01:11:09	Shaan Puri	"Right now, start tracking."
01:11:09	Sam Parr	Yeah, thank you — and that's it. That's the pod.</FormattedResponse>

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