This 20 Year Old makes $3.6M/Year interviewing strangers

- November 20, 2025 (4 months ago) • 53:43

Transcript

Start Time	Speaker	Text
00:00	Shaan Puri	Got the best opener: "May I meet you, Sam?"
00:03	Sam Parr	Oh my God.
00:13	Shaan Puri	Did you see—did you see the "May I meet you" thing?
00:16	Sam Parr	I didn't see the context, but I saw the quote. Bill Ackman said, "This is how you meet women: 'May I meet you?'" Is that right?
00:22	Shaan Puri	"Yeah. Oh, dude — this is, we're doing a deep dive. By the way, this is not a casual reference. I'm going all... this is my first topic."
00:28	Sam Parr	Okay, so tell me about it. What happened?
00:30	Shaan Puri	"The Great Bill Ackman." We won't just call him Bill Ackman; he's going to be called the great Bill Ackman. Not only has he proven to be a prolific billionaire investor, he's also just the best at Twitter because he uses it all wrong. It's like—have you seen how Magic Johnson uses Twitter?
00:48	Sam Parr	"No."
00:49	Shaan Puri	Alright, so Magic Johnson, the great basketball player, does not know how to use Twitter. If you go to his Twitter, he just tweets the most obvious things. For example, he'll tweet: > "Lakers playing the Celtics tonight. Whoever scores more points tonight's gonna take it home." He's like, "What? Yeah, that's how all games work—whoever scores more points wins." Or he'll tweet: > "They're losing now. If this stays this way they'll lose the game." He's not joking; he's been doing this for like seven years.
01:20	Sam Parr	And so, Bill Ackman, if you don't know, was originally famous for being a controversial and prolific investor, right?
01:26	Shaan Puri	Yeah. He basically owns this company called Pershing Square Management. He's an activist investor. What he would do is buy stakes in companies that he either really believed in or thought were undervalued. But he's also an activist in that if he sees corporate wrongdoing—or thinks a company has had some sort of malfeasance—then he will come out and talk about it while taking a big short position against it. He did that with Herbalife, because he said, "This is an MLM and this is not right—the way that they do their MLM." He got kind of burned on that one, but that's what he does. So he's a billionaire activist investor. Awesome—great story. I want to have him on the podcast. His life story and his approach to investing is pretty legendary.
02:09	Sam Parr	Yeah, he's got one of those stories, I think, where he was successful in his Harvard dorm investing—like that type of thing, I think.
02:15	Shaan Puri	He's also hit bottom many times and bounced back. Okay, so he said, "I hear from many young men that they find it difficult to meet young women in a public setting. In other words, online culture has destroyed their ability to spontaneously meet strangers." I'm reading this and I say, "Yeah, true. I'm glad you're speaking on this."
02:34	Sam Parr	[Nodding head.]
02:35	Shaan Puri	[nodding head] So he says, "As such, I thought I'd share a few words that I used in my youth to meet someone."
02:42	Sam Parr	Go there. That's when it stops. That's...</FormattedResponse>
02:43	Shaan Puri	What he's talking about now — that the head nod went from "put everything I was doing down" — what is he about to do? It's like when I saw the dude from Red Bull jump out of the space station and skydive. I was like, "Oh my God — he's talking about pickup lines he used in his youth. Let's hear this." > "I would ask, 'May I meet you?' Maybe I got to tell him that, 'May I meet you? I don't know, I don't know how you say this, but may I meet you before engaging further in conversation.' I almost never got a no. Oh my God, this evidently opened up the way for a further conversation. It got really... I got to meet a lot of really interesting people this way." He goes, "I think it's the effectiveness of proper grammar and politeness." "Oh, 'is my effectiveness' you might try." And yes, this will also work for women seeking men as well as same-sex interaction, so this is versatile. Just my 2¢ from a happily married guy about our next generation. So this thing goes wild.
03:41	Sam Parr	"May I meet you?" You know... you know what I told my wife when I saw her? I picked her up in real life. I said, "What's the difference between a chickpea and a lentil? I don't pay $500 to have a lentil on my face." I made a joke about peeing on my face, and it worked. I said, "Thank God I didn't say 'May I meet.'"
03:57	Shaan Puri	Yeah. Actually, I don't think we're allowed to make fun of this, given what you did to... [unintelligible].
04:03	Sam Parr	"If a girl will reply to 'May I?'"
04:07	Shaan Puri	Meet you. I think that she's...</FormattedResponse>
04:08	Sam Parr	Not someone I want to go out with — which I'm just joking about, by the way, a little bit. I do think that you can walk up to a girl and be like, "What's going on? You wanna hang out sometime?" I do think that being straightforward and casual can crush it, but...
04:22	Shaan Puri	Tinder — "May I meet you?" Tinder, with the "May I meet you" billboard. Love it. There are people who are just going around doing "May I meet you." </FormattedResponse>
04:31	Sam Parr	Dude — wait, wait, wait. That video... I already know. Let's just walk up to hot girls like, "Man..."
04:36	Shaan Puri	"May I meet you later?" People are just going crazy with this "meet you" thing, and it got me thinking: - Number one: Bill Ackman's the best. - Number two: You think that this actually would work. - Number three: This is totally improvised. Also: the top five MFM formal pickup lines are included in addition to that. We're gonna go there in a second, but first — what do you think of this? </FormattedResponse>
05:00	Sam Parr	Okay. "May I meet you?" — I have a joke I say. Not really a joke. When it comes to flirting, I think as long as the girl laughs, you can pretty much say anything. You can get away with a lot if you say it the right way. So, if you phrase it a certain way, yeah, it could work. But "May I meet you?" is probably not the best line, right?
05:21	Shaan Puri	Do you think if you were 22 or 23 and you read this, you're a...
05:25	Sam Parr	Big Bill, acting guy—you're on Twitter all the time.
05:27	Shaan Puri	Do you think you would have laughed and then, secretly, that Friday gone out and done it?
05:33	Sam Parr	No, I would not have used this line. Would you have?
05:36	Shaan Puri	I probably would have. So—desperate; beggars can't be choosers: try everything. I read the book The Game, and then for like five years my opening line to anybody I saw at a party was, "Hey, I need you guys to help me settle this argument I'm having with my friend: how..."
05:51	Sam Parr	"How many oceans are there — five or seven?"
05:53	Shaan Puri	"Oh — that'd be better. We had this all elaborate story about an ex-girlfriend, and then it was like too much. If it was just loud—if it was loud in the bar or the club or whatever—they were just like, 'What?' And I was like, 'I'm telling a... give it the background of the story first.'"
06:11	Sam Parr	No, I'm just—I'm just peacocking. That's it. I'm just trying to attract you.
06:14	Shaan Puri	Alright, Sam. I'm going to take a second here. I'm going to write some of our own pickup lines, because why is Bill Ackerman the only one who can give young men this sort of advice? I think we, too, should steer the next generation. So, here we go. Do you want to take a second? Let's write down a few.
06:29	Sam Parr	Sean, I can't. There's not a chance I can come up with great pickup lines at all. No, they don't.
06:34	Shaan Puri	Even be great.
06:35	Sam Parr	That's... I've been married for like twelve years. So, alright.
06:39	Shaan Puri	"I will give you three, then if you can't give me any." Alright, ready? I just wrote one down. How about this? This is actually a close cousin to "May I take your jacket?" First, she's already undressing. Second, you're in—she's not going to say no. She's likely to think you're being kind or generous, or assume you work there and that you're on staff. Now you just have to bridge that gap. The hardest part is done: you're into the conversation. She's going to say yes and start what we call in sales the "yes ladder." I like that one — I think it's pretty good. Another one: "Are you cold?" I've found that women are always cold—there's a "cold species." I think you have a good chance they'll respond, "You know what? Yeah, I am cold." You see me, you understand me. From there, you can—maybe—you may have to take the jacket from the previous girl you talked to and give it to this girl.
07:32	Sam Parr	"I can't believe you have children. I can't believe that someone let you do that."
07:39	Shaan Puri	I had a big advantage, which was my wife was looking for a guy like me — you know, "win the lottery." She was. I was like, "What? Your type is me? That's insane. Are you crazy? Is there something wrong with you?"
07:55	Sam Parr	For some reason, at my company, Hampton, we have 20 or 25 employees. Twenty of them are women. The men are getting left behind, as Scott Galloway says — I don't know... something about it. I overhear all these conversations they have. They brag about their boyfriends being uglier than them. Did you know that women do this?
08:14	Shaan Puri	"They brag about it."
08:15	Sam Parr	"Like, they want to date someone who's uglier than them. Is that the craziest thing you've ever heard of?"
08:21	Shaan Puri	That doesn't even make sense. So what is it... because it implies something else? Or is there more to the story, or is that just the fact?
08:28	Sam Parr	Because they want to be the... they want to be the hot one in the relationship. But have you— you've never seen this, Sean? That women, like, they want...
08:34	Shaan Puri	No. "Be able," but "to wanna" explains so much.
08:37	Sam Parr	Yeah, same. What's your third one?</FormattedResponse>
08:41	Shaan Puri	Okay, my third one is: "Hey, I'm Bill Ackman. I'm the billionaire founder of Pershing Square. Nice to meet you." That one— that one can work too.
08:49	Sam Parr	"That one would've worked."
08:50	Shaan Puri	But it needs some.</FormattedResponse>
08:52	Sam Parr	Pre-work. That actually makes a ton of sense. I'm pretty sure he was worth $10 million when he was 27 years old. And so here — Bill Ackman. Also, he's like 6'9" [six-foot-nine], by the way. Do you know this about Bill Ackman?
09:02	Shaan Puri	Yeah, he's six-foot-three (6'3"). So they were like, "Oh, you're a handsome six-foot-three (6'3") rich guy, also."
09:08	Sam Parr	You may — you may see me again. So, yeah... this is not, like, the best person to get advice from.
09:16	Shaan Puri	He might be onto something, though. You know what show women love? Bridgerton. They love the formality of Bridgerton. So maybe he's tapped into this secret desire they have to be incredibly formal or to be treated like a princess.
09:30	Sam Parr	Dude, I used to think that as a kid. But I looked like Napoleon Dynamite whenever I tried to be proper. It was as if I was... it just never worked. Okay — when you have braces and an afro.
09:42	Shaan Puri	Flash the Sambar High School.
09:44	Sam Parr	Like "yearbook hello miss thing"… it never worked. Frankly, nothing really worked, so who am I to say — but no, that never worked. A lot of people will talk about how you need a million dollars and three years of experience to start a business. Nonsense. If you listen to at least one episode of this podcast, you know that is completely not true. My last company, The Hustle, we grew to something like $17 or $18 million in revenue. I started it with like $300. My current company, Hampton, does over $10,000,000 in revenue. I started it with actually no money — maybe $29 or something like that. So you don't actually need investors to start a company. You don't need a fancy business plan. What you do need is systems that actually work. At my old company, The Hustle, we put together five proven business models that you could start right now, today, with under $1,000. These are models that, if you do them correctly, can make money this week. You can get started right now — scan the QR code or click the link in the description. Now, back to the show. Let me tell you about something. I have two things I want your opinion on and just riff on. The first one — let's do it. Alright, this one's short. Okay, so have you heard of this thing called… [unclear transcription: "go to the203media.com"]?
11:07	Shaan Puri	Oh, oh — I've seen this.
11:09	Sam Parr	So it starts with—first of all, if you've ever been on TikTok you see these videos where a young guy interviews other good-looking people at Washington Square Park and asks them what they think of this deodorant, or to take a bite of some brand's chocolate and say what they think. It's like a review, but it's supposed to look organic. This guy named Josh started working with Oliver at Tabs Chocolate. Tabs Chocolate was a popular product. Oliver—who was around a 20–22-year-old entrepreneur at the time—hired Josh, who was only about 19. Oliver said, "Hey, I'm going to pay you to go to Washington Square Park [New York City] and interview people about my chocolate and get good clips that are testimonials for TikTok," and it worked. Josh killed it. Eventually Josh thought, "I should do this for other people." At around 19 or 20 he dropped out of Syracuse University and started doing it for other clients. Now he's making $300,000 a month in revenue. He has something like 46 employees—mostly freelancers—and he goes to parks in New York City, LA, and Miami, interviewing people. He tells a story about how he started. Actually, The Wall Street Journal wrote about him. He said: > "I would DM founders on Twitter constantly and show them the videos I was doing. I did free work just to get videos that maybe looked more legit." He started filming these videos and now he's building the business. I'm not sure if this business will be his big thing—who knows how huge it could be—but anyone bold enough to go to a park at age 20, walk up to someone, and build a company doing $3,000,000 a year in revenue—this kid's going to be it. We...
12:49	Shaan Puri	We talked about how door-to-door sales is this weird breeding ground for incredible entrepreneurs. One reason Mormons are so successful is their mission. For two years you block out the world: you wake up every day, go knock on doors, and try to spread the gospel about something you believe in. That also happens to be incredible training for entrepreneurship and sales. This is the same sort of thing. The agency works because he took a format that works on social — a street interview — but no founder really wants to go do this. It's extremely exhausting; you're basically putting yourself out there for rejection and humiliation. He just productized it — he productized this one ad format. That's kind of genius. When he does this, he basically walks 30,000 to 50,000 steps a day. He puts his Apple Health tracker on or whatever, and it's like he just walks around the entire day. I was walking like 10 miles a day doing these street interviews. It's pretty incredible hustle.
13:54	Sam Parr	So, first of all, just being a college kid doing this — I bet, I don't know what the numbers were, but he could have potentially been making $300,000 a year doing this. There's a skill here, but it's honestly mostly boldness. It's mostly about getting after it. Pretty much anyone could do this, but no one will. Someone's paying him the money because they're like, "I'm too embarrassed to go talk to a stranger in the park and film this — this feels stupid." But he's operationalized it. In fact, I originally heard about him because our friend Ramon said, "I'm in New York City because I paid this kid some — an absurd amount of money — to do these things." I was like, "What?" He goes, "Yes, man. I just gave this kid tens of thousands of dollars and he's just walking up to strangers." And I'm like, "That's so interesting — that's how scared we are." (Which — me too; I don't want to do it, dude...)
14:39	Shaan Puri	I saw this guy's Twitter feed and I DM'd him. I was like, "Wow — I just DM'd him. What's your number?" So I called him, because I was like, "May..."
14:46	Sam Parr	Meet you.
14:46	Shaan Puri	Yeah — it totally worked, by the way. I think he listens to the pod, so I'm glad we get to shout him out. He's a real hustler, man. I think this is such a cool thing. I have this phrase that sounds a little condescending, and I don't mean it that way at all. In fact, I think this is one of the best things you could do, which is what I call a "white belt business" — like a starter business. It's basically: what's a great first business to start? Your first business is probably going to be one of your worst. You're going to be at your worst because you're just getting into the game. You're not your best yet, and you maybe don't have the network, the capital, the skills, or the knowledge of the big things you want to go do in life. That's fine — just get in the game. This is one of the best examples of a "just getting in the game" business that he's doing. This is cool in New York. Guess what? After listening to this podcast, if you're, I don't know, between the ages of 18 and 25 and you're like, "Oh man, I just want to be successful so bad — I'm willing to work, I'm a hard worker," and nothing's working for you yet: if you listen to this and you don't go do this, you're basically — I'm calling your bluff. This is a business that's available to anybody. You could be in Miami doing this, you could be in Los Angeles doing this, you could be in pretty much any city doing this. Hell, you could be in the burbs doing this — it doesn't really matter. In fact, that could be your shtick: it looks like you go to Costco and you talk to ordinary people — type of deal.
16:10	Sam Parr	Do you see this kid who has this page called "The School of Hard Knocks"?
16:14	Shaan Puri	"Oh, this podcaster who's getting 5,000 times more views than us. Yeah, I saw that kid."
16:19	Sam Parr	He's not a podcaster. Well, it started as man-on-the-street, short Instagram clips. Now he's turned it into a real thing.
16:26	Shaan Puri	The funny thing is, it is a podcast — it's just so short, right?
16:29	Sam Parr	"Like he..."</FormattedResponse>
16:30	Shaan Puri	"Does the same thing. He's like, 'Oh, I talk to successful people. I hold the mic, then I ask a question, then they answer.' It's an interview — it's a pod; it could be considered a podcast. But you're right. What he did was he shrunk it into..."
16:42	Sam Parr	A more.
16:42	Shaan Puri	Authentic format: catching, bumping—bumping into somebody on the street. But at this... he's not bumping into Shaq, and...
16:48	Sam Parr	Dude, he had Tom Cruise on.
16:49	Shaan Puri	Tom Cruise — on this, it's like those guys see his content and they follow. He sets it up so he can bump into them, but he's really young. I think that guy's... I don't know, like, he's got the "f-boy" look; he's got the "broccoli" haircut. He looks... he's gotta be, like, by law under the age of 27. But if you have that, I think it's kind of amazing what he does. It's this one-minute compilation where he just cuts up a quick question-and-answer with a star on the street, and it just works great.
17:14	Sam Parr	Alright, I wanted to show you one more thing. I sent you the article in the Wall Street Journal—check this out. In 1981, Warner was the big cable/entertainment company and they decided to create a music channel that would basically be music videos. It was going to be called MTV. They had a group of four or five basically punk-rock/hippie guys and they told them, "You're in charge. Figure this out." One of the guys was Tom Freston. There was an amazing article about him in the Wall Street Journal the other day and I want to get your take on it. Basically, he tells the story of founding MTV. MTV—you and I were raised with it—but the people who are 18, 19, 21 years old now, the MTV they know is not what it used to be. What it used to be was basically music—music videos—and then also cartoons and some TV shows. </FormattedResponse>
18:14	Shaan Puri	Real world and things like that, yeah.
18:16	Sam Parr	Yeah, but eventually MTV — they became... they owned Nickelodeon and Comedy Central. So listen to the things that this guy Tom — he was ahead of the pro [unclear]. He was in charge of programming. Listen to some of the shows... [unclear: "billion of"]. </FormattedResponse>
18:29	Shaan Puri	The week, right?
18:30	Sam Parr	Yeah, listen. I think he's a billionaire — I don't know. But listen to some of the shows that came because of him: - Blue's Clues - Beavis and Butt-Head - The Adventures of Pete & Pete - SpongeBob SquarePants - Daria - The Daily Show - Jackass - South Park - Cranky Anchors - The Fairly OddParents - Chappelle's Show - The Last Airbender - The Colbert Report - Ren & Stimpy - The Real World - Dora the Explorer - Rugrats
18:51	Shaan Puri	I'm gonna have a nostalgia seizure over here. You're just saying those names — names I haven't heard, thoughts I haven't had...
18:56	Sam Parr	And so, this article goes really in depth, but there was one thing that really stuck out to me. Listen to this quote. Tom tells a story and has all these hilarious bits. He basically said, "We were the rejects. The receptionist sold cocaine, and the office had one clothing rule: no frontal nudity." These guys were the real deal, man. He has this amazing line. He says: > "I had this idea. I said, 'Let's find the type of pot-smoking guys in high school who sat in the back of the class, who could draw well and have some character living inside their heads — like this crazy guy named Steve who made up SpongeBob. Let's get these guys who don't know anything about how to make a TV show or a series, school them, and we're gonna crank these things out.'"
19:44	Shaan Puri	Dude — so good.
19:45	Sam Parr	That's great. The reason I thought that was interesting is that, first of all, there were like four founders of MTV and they are now a little bit like the mafia. One of them was Bob Pittman, who is the CEO of iHeartMedia. Another runs the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. They're all big shots. I thought this line was interesting because, in business, you and I have fallen into this trap at times. I think a lot of our listeners do it too: they come up with an idea and iterate their way to it, instead of taking a stance and saying, “This is the bet we're making.” For example, I think Barstool has done an excellent job of planting their flag. I don't particularly love Barstool's content, but they've made a clear statement: this is who we are and this is our bet. Vice did a good job too — they said, “We're youth culture,” and they gave inexperienced guys cameras and sent them to Africa. Maybe they get something; maybe they don't, but that's the approach. Pixar is another example: “We think that computers and animation can tell stories just as well, if not better, than real-life actors.” The idea of saying, “This is the bet we're taking,” even if it's a silly bet — for instance, saying “we're going to give potheads jobs and let them create content” — I look back at that and think it's actually brilliant, very romantic, and very cool to take a stance. </FormattedResponse>
21:00	Shaan Puri	Yeah — I feel like you did this with the hustle. I gotta give you some props here. When I think about who in my kind of group did this, I would say there are really two groups of people. One is Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith, and they were doing Calm. From the beginning they had a clear idea: meditation is incredibly good for you, and so few people do it. Even when the initial results were somewhat lukewarm, when it was unclear what to do, and investors didn't want to fund it, they did not iterate and pivot wildly into other ideas — like, "oh, today we're a messaging app," and "tomorrow we're gonna do delivery of weed," or whatever else. They were like, "no — we're going to do 50 different attempts to make meditation a thing, because that's the thing we think is important and that's what we believe in. So that's what we're gonna do." So they did. They launched an app called "Do Nothing for Two Minutes." It's like meditation in disguise — almost a gimmick. It was an app where if you touched your phone in a two-minute... [sentence trails off]
22:07	Shaan Puri	It would start over by "try again," and it was just calming music — waves crashing on a beach. For two minutes you couldn't touch your phone; you couldn't use it for anything. The next one they did was an app called Checky [app]. It was a viral app about: how many times a day do you check your phone? We've heard of this idea of screen time — people would say, "Oh, I can go to the Settings app and find this." Checky would be like, "Hey, you've checked your phone — you've unlocked the lock screen 398 times today." You are the little rat in the maze who's addicted to the pellets — the cocaine pellets. You're pushing the button over and over, trying to see if you can get the prize out. They did many different versions of this. Ultimately, Sleep Stories was the thing that worked for them and helped them really accelerate growth. It was the same idea: meditation at night instead of just during the day, and they pulled it off. I just remember when it was so uncool — a lack of momentum, lack of investment traction, lack of sex appeal. There was no other comparable product in the market that was like, "We're doing what they're doing but in our category," which is what entrepreneurs use to validate themselves. They kept going. So I thought that was a "plant your flag" moment. I thought you did too, where you were like, "I'm betting on email. We're going to be independent." And people would say, "Dude, Facebook videos are going viral right now; Snapchat just came out — you gotta start doing Snapchat." I tried to dangle every shiny...
23:27	Sam Parr	We didn't even have an Instagram handle. We didn't have an Instagram. I think when we sold—I don't think we had Instagram.
23:32	Shaan Puri	"You were just like, 'No—we're gonna be...' and you kept calling it a pirate ship. I was like, 'Brother, it's a newsletter.' And you're like, 'No, I'm building a pirate ship.'"
23:39	Sam Parr	I said, "I'm building a pirate ship, and every email subscriber I get is just a little bit more wind in my sails."
23:43	Shaan Puri	I was like, "Why is he reciting poetry?" And then I also kinda liked it. I was like, "Damn — I don't say cool stuff like that as a CEO. I should probably have lines like that." And then you had, like, a tattoo of a pirate ship on your thigh, and I was like, "I don't know what's going on, but this guy..."
23:57	Sam Parr	Bold, fast, fun, baby. That's the— that's the male version of "Live, Laugh, Love." You wearing shorts right now? Pop that sucker. </FormattedResponse>
24:05	Shaan Puri	Up, yeah.
24:06	Sam Parr	"Well, I wear pants all the time now because I don't want people to see it."
24:11	Shaan Puri	Sold the company — still got the tattoo, though. So yeah, I thought you did a great job of planting your flag in the ground.
24:18	Sam Parr	Let me tell you where I messed up. I messed up not believing a couple things. One, I messed up when I underestimated how hard it is at the beginning. When people start something, most things don't work right away—even if everything you see on our podcast makes it look easy. The question is: can you deal with the pushback and stay the same? That's really hard to do every day. It was really hard for me. The second thing was underestimating how big something can get. I drastically underestimated how big we could get. The year we sold, we did $12,000,000 in revenue, and I thought, "I can get this to $50, $60, $70 million." Looking back, that was foolish. Morning Brew—our competitors—only sold part of the business but were able to keep running it. They're at $90,000,000 in revenue. I could give you other examples of people doing hundreds of millions in revenue. Same with Barstool: if you looked at them in 2014, you'd think, "This company is never going to make hundreds of millions a year in revenue"—you'd say that's insane. Same with Calm, a meditation app: people thought it couldn't become a huge business, and now it's a multi-billion-dollar company. I think the issue is you underestimate how big something can get because you don't realize that the TAM [total addressable market], once you have a really cool product, can expand. That's really hard to see because the numbers don't say that—but you just have to have faith.
25:30	Shaan Puri	Right. Yeah, everything takes longer than you think, but it can be bigger than you think. That's kind of the weird rule of thumb for an entrepreneur: you think it's going to happen faster — it's not. Sorry. It's going to take way longer than you want, and then way longer than you think, way longer than you expect. But on the upside, you've probably underestimated yourself, even though you think you're being Mr. Ambitious. </FormattedResponse>
25:52	Sam Parr	Yeah, exactly. I want to hear about your mistake, but let me tell you one quick thing. Before my company The Hustle was an email newsletter, we were an events business. We had Tim Westergren — this guy who founded Pandora. Pandora doesn't get talked about enough nowadays, but I'm pretty sure it's still a multibillion-dollar business. At its heyday it was worth, I think, tens of billions of dollars. He was one of the early pioneers of apps on the iPhone. Tim Westergren has this amazing story. He told the story at my event and then I wrote about it on The Hustle. It was the very first article we ever published and it went viral. The title of the article was: "Here's how Pandora's founder convinced 50 early employees to work for two years without pay." Basically, the company started the Music Genome. What he did was he raised $5 million and he convinced 50 to 100 struggling musicians to come work for him. He basically had — I think legitimately — an Excel spreadsheet. He created 50 attributes for a song. They would sit all day listening to music and write the attributes in the spreadsheet. After doing this for years, they had this massive database. But unfortunately it didn't find product-market fit. They just had this database and were like, "What do we do with it?" Originally they put it in Best Buy, where you could listen to a CD and see "here's 10 other CDs you could potentially buy" that fit that song. It wasn't really working, and he ran out of money. But he believed the thing was magical and convinced his employees to continue working for, I think, eighteen months without pay. Someone in the crowd asked, "What speech did you give on a weekly basis to convince these people to work for you?" He said he remembered the exact quote. He said: > "Man, it's hard. If I close my eyes though, I think I could figure it out. We all know that what we have created here is very unique and it's solving a gigantic problem. No one on earth is going to do what we've done. When you use this product, we all know how magical it is. It will find its home. Everyone on the planet loves music, and there are millions of musicians who produce great music and can't find each other. When this thing finally finds its home, it's going to change culture. How many times in your life can you say that you've had a chance to do that? That's what this is about." Fucking right. How good is that?
28:04	Shaan Puri	Almost a separate skill, which is: you make everything bigger than it is. Elon is the master of this. He doesn't just say, "Hey, we're going to build a company that launches satellites." He's not even going to say, "We're going to build a company that launches the best reusable rockets." He's like, "We're going to take humans from being a single-planet species to a multiplanetary species," which is basically going to save the human race and all consciousness as we know it in the universe because something will happen to the Earth at some point. And there's no plan if we don't do something. So it creates this incredible, grand-scale vision, a sense of urgency, and purpose around what he does.
28:45	Sam Parr	But you can do that with anything.
28:46	Shaan Puri	Like, he did it when he got a coworker pregnant. He said, "The biggest risk to civilization is underpopulation — the population collapsed; we need to be having more children." I was like, "This is the Teflon Don... how is he—how is he?"
29:02	Sam Parr	Judo giraffe.
29:02	Shaan Puri	Neo in The Matrix, away from these bullets that are coming at [him]... </FormattedResponse>
29:05	Sam Parr	Him for.
29:06	Shaan Puri	"Impregnating this woman."
29:08	Sam Parr	He just rebranded "cheating"—like aioli—as "tomato."
29:12	Shaan Puri	Yeah, he was like, "It was the most noble cheat I'd ever heard of."
29:15	Sam Parr	I was.
29:15	Shaan Puri	Like, this is incredible. Why did he tie this to the collapse of population and civilization itself?
29:21	Sam Parr	It was amazing, but you could do this for anything. Have you read the biographies or listened to the Founders podcast episodes on Patagonia or Dyson? </FormattedResponse>
29:28	Shaan Puri	Sure, haven't.</FormattedResponse>
29:29	Sam Parr	"Okay, well, do you know anything about Dyson?"
29:32	Shaan Puri	I know that Dyson is so hot right now. It's like the cool thing for a successful CEO to be into. It's like, "You know who my hero is?" Not—it's not Musk and Jobs; it's Dyson. It's the cool thing to say.
29:45	Sam Parr	Dyson. Basically, I think they do three things: vacuums, hand dryers (in washrooms), and—blowing and sucking, basically. That's not inherently cool on its own. But why are they such a cool company? It's because the CEO has done such a good job of crafting a grand narrative. In my opinion, Dyson is the standard of excellence. So when I think—if I'm an employee wanting to work at Dyson—I think "vacuums," but really it's: excellence. "We are gonna make the best." There is something very appealing about that. You don't have to be going to Mars to give one of these speeches. By the way, anytime you have more than 15 employees, your job is basically like 40—this, like, right? So you have to get good at this. I don't think you need a world-changing product to say, "This is cool." I mean, we're talking about Rugrats and fucking SpongeBob, and we look back at them and they're dope, right? How cool would it be to be part of that and change culture?
30:43	Shaan Puri	Yeah. I've really come to appreciate this: everybody who's successful in life has just taken a simple idea very seriously — way more seriously than you would expect, way more seriously than it was necessary, way more seriously than everybody else. Whether that's bringing cartoons to TV sets around the country, or making a vacuum cleaner that's better than the last vacuum cleaner — better than any vacuum cleaner that sucks more than anyone else can suck in the world — if that's your thing, that's your thing. It kinda doesn't really matter what your thing is, because your experience of it is going to consume your world.
31:19	Sam Parr	Dude, our most beloved person is Nick Ray, who hosts cocktail parties.
31:24	Shaan Puri	Two-hour cocktail parties. Yeah — he took it very seriously. He said, "I'm going to write a book about how to host a dinner party." People were like, "Are you sure? You don't need to — it's not an email." He replied, "No, it's a book. It's a science and it's an art, and I'm going to master it." That's why he's fallen in love with it, and that's why he's done such a good job. It's really opened up all these doors. It became much bigger than someone would expect something like that to become. A lot of life is just about picking a simple idea and taking it seriously. Of course, some ideas are a little more impactful or fulfilling than others, but I think the key is to take it seriously. I've spent so much of my life focusing on the "pick an idea" part — pick a simple idea. Actually, it was the "take it seriously" muscle that needed to be built. That was the thing I was weak at, and it didn't really matter what simple idea I picked if I didn't learn how to take it seriously.
32:16	Sam Parr	So you're writing this book series. I'm trying to find the URL: 1hourbooks.co. Sean is writing a really cool series of books, so go to his website and set it up. Your first one is on creativity. You should really Google MTV, Comedy Central, and Nickelodeon in some of the early years. I started going down a rabbit hole and read about a guy named Steve—I forget his last name—Steve who started SpongeBob. This guy basically was a grade-school teacher in San Francisco, then he became a marine biologist. He quit that at the age of 28 or 29 and went to school for animation because he loved drawing comics in his free time. He eventually kind of worked his way up to Nickelodeon; he worked on Rocko's Modern Life, and from there he was able to pitch SpongeBob. SpongeBob was a silly show. It's almost the kind of show our parents didn't want us to watch a little bit because there was something weird about it—not inappropriate, just silly. His passion for marine biology and everything led to creating this, and I thought it was really beautiful. I don't know what's going on with the world of creators on YouTube—like, is this fiction-style content, or animation in particular, which I loved as a kid? I would love to see some of that stuff, because a lot of the stuff on YouTube now doesn't cover that. I mean, I don't think that's not really a thing, but do you think there's room for it? Do you know anything in that space, or does this interest you? I know our friend Dylan Jargon was trying to do something with comics, and I actually thought it was pretty awesome.
33:51	Shaan Puri	We met the guy who was doing this. Do you remember "The Amazing Digital Circus"? Go to YouTube and look up "The Amazing Digital Circus" — the pilot, the first episode. It currently has 398 million views on YouTube.
34:09	Sam Parr	Yes, yeah—okay. Of course.
34:11	Shaan Puri	You remember this?
34:12	Sam Parr	Yes
34:12	Shaan Puri	Kevin and his brother are based in Australia. They had a passion for animation but didn't really know what to do with it. They decided, "We're sitting in Australia — we're guys who've never done this before. The odds of getting a deal with Netflix or Hollywood are super low, but maybe we could just make something and put it on YouTube." So they worked on it. They basically used game engines — not what you use for normal TV shows or animation. They started using Unreal Engine (or maybe Unity; I don't remember which). Instead of making a video game, they animated this wild show with a bit of dark humor. It's basically like anime but done for the West. They remixed the idea, which is one of the core creative tools — finding new connections between old dots. They connected the dots of anime and sort of Pixar-style animation and created this show on YouTube, and it gets hundreds of millions of views.
35:10	Sam Parr	Every episode.
35:11	Shaan Puri	On every single episode.
35:13	Sam Parr	When we were there, I was sitting. I don't know Jimmy [MrBeast] that well, but I said hi to him and started talking to him. He said, "Do you want to meet the guy who inspires me — who I think is even better than me?" and then he deferred to this guy.
35:27	Shaan Puri	Yeah, yeah. Like with our group, we basically say, "Alright, Jimmy, do you have three or four people you want to invite who are not in our network? We're bringing a bunch of people from our network—who's in your network that you think is awesome?" This was one of the guys, and he was an awesome dude. They—you know, they're doing... and I was like, so wait, so you spend all this money and time, you make these crazy animated things. It's kind of like the SpongeBob guy, right? It was just a guy with an idea and a sketch, and then he turned it into a show. They were making tens of millions on merch drops. Fans buying the merch of their thing was the business model. It was literally selling T-shirts. And then I was like, "What?"
36:06	Sam Parr	I'm looking.
36:07	Shaan Puri	That doesn't—like, they got a...
36:08	Sam Parr	Sick merch.
36:09	Shaan Puri	I think they got a deal with either Amazon Prime or Netflix. Now Hollywood basically wants them, so they're taking their show to one of the big streaming platforms. They cut a very unique deal where they didn't have to take it off YouTube. They said, "No, no, no — we're keeping it on YouTube. YouTube's our place where we're building a giant fandom." I mean, how few videos get 400 million views? You literally have to have made "Despacito" or "Gangnam Style" to get 400 million views. This is not a number a normal YouTube video can get, and this is their own original content.
36:45	Sam Parr	There's also something interesting going on here: I'm romanticizing '80s MTV, and you're romanticizing this guy now. This guy, Kevin [Digital Circus], is only a handful of years into his journey. When we were with him, I thought that was neat, but it was just like, "Oh, that's cool." Now I'm looking back and I'm like, "That's very romantic. That's very badass." It's very interesting that you don't see that at the time when you're doing it. I do think that I have to work on—and I think everyone does have to work on—reframing things, because it would make it so much more fun to work on. You could keep going for a lot longer. Now I see this and I'm like, "Oh, this is amazing—keep going, keep, keep, keep doing this." But when I talked to him, he was one of twenty interesting people.
37:29	Shaan Puri	Mmm. Yeah—100%. What you just said is so true. I've noticed a few people who do this now. In fact, we just had Ben Horowitz on, and after we stopped recording he told us the story on the podcast about this incredible leader in Haiti. </FormattedResponse>
37:47	Sam Parr	I think this.
37:48	Shaan Puri	Guy who started.
37:49	Sam Parr	Off Toussaint Overture.
37:50	Shaan Puri	Yeah, Toussaint L'Ouverture. He's like, "I read this book about him"—or read multiple books about him. There's a book called Black Spartacus, and he told the story about how this guy, who I think was a slave, became the leader of a 500,000-person army. It was one of the few cases where slavery ended as a result of a successful revolution. They changed the norms, and, you know, it was just incredible. So, as a guy who's investing in world-changing leaders, I think he was just fascinated by how somebody pulled this off. So we were like...
38:18	Sam Parr	"How did you... That's a really good take. I didn't put that together. That's actually— that's a really good insight, actually: why he liked him."
38:25	Shaan Puri	I mean, I'm not sure if he consciously did it or not, but yeah—obviously there's an appeal to it. After the podcast was over, we were like, "On the podcast, what was your impression of Ben Horowitz?" Like, "Oh—cool. You did a podcast with Ben Horowitz. What's he like? What would you have said?"
38:43	Sam Parr	A top 10. So, we've done 750. He's in the top 10 of, like, "wisdom people."
38:49	Shaan Puri	"And would you say he's outlandish? Like outlandish in personality or outlandishly smart? Is he outlandish in any dimension? He's surprisingly good to hang with — well balanced, well balanced, well balanced. A good hang. He seemed like a more normal dude than your average tech‑billionaire type of guy, right?"
39:09	Sam Parr	He seemed like a really good father. I mean—he's probably 30 years older than us, so I can say that—but he seemed like someone who I could ask for advice and it wouldn't be extreme.</FormattedResponse>
39:17	Shaan Puri	Right. So I was thinking about that, and I was like, "Man, this was just a great hang with a great dude." It was more on the normal side of the spectrum than I would have expected. I've gotten used to—every time I meet these extreme outliers of performance, they often come with these kind of sharp edges.
39:33	Sam Parr	I think his partner, Mark, seems sharp—like, polarizing. </FormattedResponse>
39:38	Shaan Puri	Literally his head has, like, 30% extra headroom — you just hold more brain in there, dude. It's like... I mean, it's hard to explain. It's like seeing LeBron James: "Well, okay, I could see that we're different." We're both humans, but you're six-nine and you could fly and I can't. I get there's a difference. That happens to a lot of tech guys. You're like, "Oh, you're literally just super smart; you process information differently." He even said it. He was like, "People get confused because he knows Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel and all these guys." He goes, "People get confused; they think that those guys have, like, low EQ — they don't understand people because they kinda stutter and stammer and they're a little awkward." He's like, "No — they actually have a pretty deep understanding of people. You wouldn't be who they are if you didn't actually understand people. But they are processing data at such a high rate that it's a little bit awkward when you hear them try to talk and reply, because they're processing... they're just literally processing so much information." I was like, "Oh, that's an amazing way of putting it." Anyway, back to what I was saying. At the end of the podcast we stopped recording and we asked him, "How did you get into that Toussaint guy? Like, that's crazy — where'd you hear about this?" And he said something. He goes, "I was thinking about why slavery ended." I was like, "Oh God — I'm glad we stopped recording, because you get canceled for saying something like that." Like, "This is, you know, rich white billionaire wonders why slavery ended — he's like, 'That's bad PR for you.'"
41:06	Sam Parr	No, but then he had a really good answer.</FormattedResponse>
41:08	Shaan Puri	I wouldn't even say anything, but he's like: "Because, you know, slavery was not just a human rights issue; it was actually also the economic model of the times. Slavery had been around for a long time and in many different places. It sprung up organically — it's not like one system that was ported everywhere. Different countries each came to the same... I think."
41:28	Sam Parr	He said, he goes, "The aqueducts in Rome were built by slaves."
41:31	Shaan Puri	Yeah, pyramids were built by slaves. The aqueducts were built by slaves. He's like, "It was the—it was the functioning economic model." So it got me curious: why did it ever end? Yeah... and, uh, but he didn't mean to—I'll just be super, super clear: he was not saying it's a good thing. He was...
41:47	Sam Parr	Of course.
41:47	Shaan Puri	Literally thinking from first principles... Isn't that interesting that this thing that was working?
41:54	Sam Parr	Thousands of years, and then all of a sudden...</FormattedResponse>
41:56	Shaan Puri	Thousands of years and suddenly it stops. You'd be kind of curious: what stopped it? He said, "Haiti was the only place where it was a bottoms-up successful revolution, where they just decided to change the rules." I don't know exactly how he put it, but it was different than the Civil War, for example. He said, "That's what got me curious," and I thought, there it is — there's your weird bone. You know, you have your funny bone in your elbow. I found it. I found your special sauce. You asked a question that the rest of us would have never asked. You leaned in and got curious about something we would have all just accepted at face value. There are so many of these in life. You realize this when you have kids and they're like, "How does this building get built? Where do people come from?" You're like, "Oh my God — people come from this." It's like, why didn't this just happen? You realize how shallow your knowledge of the world actually is, not just scientific, by the way. My son was like, "Why can boys show their nipples and not girls? We're going to the pool." And I'm like, telling my daughter, "No, no, you need to wear your swimsuit." </FormattedResponse>
43:03	Sam Parr	You're my son. You're soccer chief, man.
43:04	Shaan Puri	"Couldn't find his, and I was like, 'It's fine—just go in.' And he's like, 'But why?' I was like, 'Honestly, I have no idea. Why would that be horrible if she did it? It's totally fine if you do it. I have no clue—do you know?' 'I don't know.' Yeah. So there are all these things we just sort of accept. We just take them because it's too much mental energy to try to answer every question. The great ones get curious about obvious things. They see things on the floor that the rest of us aren't looking at, and they just pick them up. That's where they become great.
43:35	Sam Parr	I love this topic because Eddie Murphy has a documentary on Netflix. It's so good. It's a two-hour [documentary].
43:43	Shaan Puri	Oh, I gotta watch this.
43:43	Sam Parr	It's two hours. People forget — we grew up listening to him or watching him. People forget how impactful he was, I mean.
43:51	Shaan Puri	Turn this podcast off. If you're on YouTube, go to the search bar, type "Eddie Murphy Raw," and watch it.
43:57	Sam Parr	And so we're talking about that. Basically, Eddie Murphy was famous starting at the age of 18. Eddie Murphy was on SNL at 18, and there's a whole documentary about his creative process. It's really interesting: he was famous in New York City. When he was 25—or actually 22, I think—he was the star of that Beverly Hills police movie, and he was the most famous guy on Earth. He hung out with all the craziest people: Prince, Rick James—these guys are now dead because they were drug addicts. He said, "I was sober the whole time. I don't drink. I don't do drugs." They talked about that. Anyway, he talks about being funny and says, "I don't really think of myself as a comedian. I'm an artist, and I express myself via comedy, but I could do anything." He said, "I've done serious movies. I've done everything. I've done action movies." It's very inspiring. He has one line that has stuck with me. He said, "The thing about comedians, I think, what makes us special is that we're actually more sensitive to everything." And then he gives an example: "So the best comedian, you know, if I buy a new car and the car gets... and the car comes home and the dealer is standing right in front of me and I can, like..." [sentence trails off]
44:59	Sam Parr	Scratch that—no one noticed because I just noticed it first, and that becomes the comedy; that becomes the bit. Or if I walk into a house and there's just one little tiny smell, I'm going to be the first person to say it because I'm the most sensitive. What you're describing with Ben—I've always noticed this with good comedians. Like Shane Gillis does this: he'll read history and retell a very funny bit about George Washington. It's that one little thing that, even though I've read tons of history, I would have skipped over—that three-sentence story. I think what separates these really insightful people, like Ben, who ask the right questions, is that they're very sensitive. They find one or two lines and they're like, "That is very interesting to me; that is the truth; that is the right question." I think Eddie Murphy did the exact same thing when he said, "We are just more sensitive to everyone... and so our threshold for something that grabs us is lower."
45:49	Shaan Puri	It's a great observation: they notice what the rest of us ignore. Exactly. If you think about great investors, what do they do? They notice that a company is not being understood properly — it's mispriced, misunderstood. They often bet against consensus. Why do they do that? You first have to notice, in this pile of stocks, which one is mispriced. There are great stories about Buffett. He read the Moody's Manual front to back. He'd read company profiles — 2,000 pages or so — like a bible. It's all company financials and prospectuses, and he would read the whole thing. All he's trying to do is notice something that makes him curious: "That's weird — it has this much earnings but the price is only this. I wonder why. Oh, it's because this is believed. Is that true? How does that work? What if this happens?"
46:48	Sam Parr	That's very hard.
46:49	Shaan Puri	And so you see it in investing; you see it in comedy. Comedy is the art of noticing. I have this running doc on my phone called "Seinfeld Premises." It's basically: what would be the premise of a Seinfeld joke? Seinfeld's the master of observational humor. When you turn this part of your brain on — the part that notices the hilarity of human life — you start to notice things that don't make any sense. For example, when Seinfeld talks about the power of observation, he says: > "You know when you're on the phone with somebody and the call drops and they call you back and they're like, 'Hey, sorry, I don't know what happened'?" > "Of course you don't know what happened. You don't even know how this is happening. Does any of us even know how a phone works?" What a hilarious, ridiculous thing to say. He builds off that premise: we all say this thing, and what nonsense. Of course you don't know what happened — you don't know how a microwave works, you don't know how anything works — and then he turns that into a joke. I started doing this myself. I have a list of things I've noticed over the past three years. I've never done stand-up comedy, but I always secretly want to.
48:01	Sam Parr	Dude, you've been talking about it for years. You just gotta pick a date.
48:04	Shaan Puri	But like, I'll give you one that's on this list that I just had. I took a flight, and right before boarding they're like, "you know, Platinum, American, Global Elite, whatever," right? They asked if there were any military vets. A soldier basically walked up and got to board the plane thirty seconds before us. I looked around and thought, "That's it? That was the perk he got?" This guy fought the war. He still had to go through TSA — like, security. We were like, "This guy should be getting, like, a blowjob on the plane." This is insane that all he got to do was board after Global Elite but before Group One. I was like, what a shame.
48:49	Sam Parr	I always thought that way about medals. When they give you a medal, I'm like, "All that for a medal?"
48:55	Shaan Puri	The same thing my son got after soccer this year...
48:59	Sam Parr	Medal, so... </FormattedResponse>
49:01	Shaan Puri	It's just like this art of noticing — the sorts of things that are just taken at face value. I think, as an entrepreneur you want to be doing this. As a technologist you want to be doing this. A big part of technology right now is AI. The funny thing about AI is that all the big companies, all the companies that were winning in AI, and all the people who are leading those companies were not the OGs of AI. AI has been around and talked about for 50 years. The study of neural networks and all the underlying technology had experts, but none of those experts were the ones who started these companies. So why is that? It's because they were so far in it they actually didn't notice that something changed. They were so lost in the sauce that they did not realize "this time it's different." Even the core thing that changed was this Transformers paper, which was written by Google — Google, which had been pouring billions into machine learning, neural networks, and all this stuff. Who are you?
50:03	Sam Parr	Real guy, Sam.
50:05	Shaan Puri	No, Sam was an outsider to this whole thing. That paper at Google was written by, like, seven or eight guys. That's the seminal paper called "Attention Is All You Need." "Attention Is All You Need" was this breakthrough — this realization that, wait a minute, all you need is this. Then suddenly the outputs changed. This was written inside Google, which had spent billions of dollars on this, and Google wasn't the one to use it. They just released the paper and did nothing. Then others out in the field said, "That's actually pretty interesting — that's new, that's novel." So that meant, if that's true, we could try this and maybe get a new result. Suddenly the computer could figure out what's a cat and what's a hot dog, and all these things that were previously kinda hard were now actually very doable. That's where this wave happened. Now all eight of those people from Google have since left, and they're part of the big AI companies now. It's amazing that Google itself — which was looking for the treasure, you know, the metal detector started beeping — just kept walking down the beach. They didn't stop and dig. It takes a beginner's mind to be able to stop and dig, right? To answer your question of who noticed first: I would say it was DeepMind. So this guy Dennis — I don't know how he says his last name, Habibi.
51:22	Sam Parr	He's — that's a Google company, right?
51:24	Shaan Puri	So, Google ended up having to buy that company. DeepMind was doing really interesting work. Google bought it for half a billion dollars ($500,000,000) or something like that — I want to say many years ago. Then Elon notices. He's like, "Wow — what DeepMind can do is like what they've been talking about with AI for forty years, but nobody's freaking out about this." And Elon is like, "I shall freak out about this." He starts realizing that Google has — Google has a monopoly on AI. He viewed AI as an existential threat, and he viewed Larry Page, who was his friend at the time, as somebody who does not care about AI safety. When he would talk to Larry about AI safety, Larry would brush it off. Larry basically viewed it as: "This is the evolution of man. We're going to go from Homo sapiens to this kind of new species — AI + human, whatever. It'll be a new thing; that's what's going to happen." Elon was like, "This is crazy." So he decided to help create OpenAI, which is a counterweight to Google, which had a monopoly on AI talent and research. He was like, "We will get researchers and we will open-source the material, because Google would never do that, and that will be a good counterweight." So he noticed that difference there, which is kind of crazy.
52:37	Sam Parr	I don't know what we're going to call this episode, but this is one of the most interesting ones we've ever had. You had a really good thing in your Five Tweet Tuesday email—you included a Jerry Seinfeld quote. You said the context of this quote is that Jerry Seinfeld sold or turned down the most money ever in TV history. Apparently he turned down $110,000,000 for one more season of Seinfeld. The reporter asked him, "Why? Why not do one more season?" And Jerry says: > "This is so good. The most important word in art is proportion. How much, how many words, how many minutes. Too much cake—too much of anything—changes the whole feeling of it. Getting proportion right is what makes it art or makes it mediocre."
53:18	Shaan Puri	So good, right?
53:19	Sam Parr	So good, so good. We should end there — that's beautiful. That's that. That's it. That's just the best.

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This 20 Year Old makes $3.6M/Year interviewing strangers

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