These old school businesses are making millions

- September 3, 2025 (7 months ago) • 01:10:34

Transcript

Start Time	Speaker	Text
00:00	Shaan Puri	And so it's like, "Damn — you have written off the most obvious growth channel with this internal narrative of 'we tried that; it didn't work.'" "It didn't work" is a sentence I'm very skeptical of now. Here's what I have for you today in this podcast. I have a story about two blue-collar founders who just got their business off the ground. I met up with them, and they asked me questions that revealed a set of mistakes I think everybody makes, so I think it's worth talking about. I want to talk about the three things these guys said. Then I want to tell you about a business that's really fascinating — a small business. After that, there's a huge business that's currently fascinating me. It's so new and interesting that I just want to talk about it with you. Lastly, I have a marketing principle — a little framework — and a great example I want to share as well. So I've got three things for you.
01:02	Sam Parr	Alright, I have a couple things for you as well. Maybe we'll go back and forth. Do you want to start with your favorite one? </FormattedResponse>
01:07	Shaan Puri	Yeah, alright. So I went to Utah last week to do a podcast with this guy, Ryan Smith. He owns the Utah Jazz and he started Qualtrics. Anyways, that's gonna come out — it's a good episode. He's a crazy dude. One of the reasons that happened was Ryan plays pickup basketball at 6 AM. There's a guy who's in his regular run; he's been doing that for like 16 years with the same group of guys in Utah. Very, like, honestly aspirational thing. I was like, "Oh man, I kinda want that. That sounds kinda great." One of the guys in the run had DM'd me like two years ago and he was like, "Hey, I play pickup basketball with this guy Ryan Smith. I told him the podcast is great and he should come on." He was like, "If you guys come to morning basketball I'll do the podcast." We're like, "Done. We'll be there." We play basketball, we do the podcast, all this good stuff. He tours us around the stadium and all this crazy stuff. We're just hanging out; we're just getting a meal before we head to the airport. So I invite those guys — the guy who put in the good word. I was like, "Hey, you know, we should come hang out. You kinda made this whole thing happen in a way. He probably wouldn't have done it had you not told him, 'Hey, this is something worth doing—come hang out.'" So he comes and he starts telling me about his business. He's got this business called Mobile Emissions. The idea is, you know how you have to get your smog check, your emissions check for your car every year...
02:29	Sam Parr	They do it at your house.
02:31	Shaan Puri	"They'll come to you." That's the idea. Okay—great. Normally you go to some dump of a mechanic, wait in line, or book an appointment. These guys will come to you for $50–$60. So I'm like, "How's the business going?" He tells me it's going great—blah, blah, blah. Then he basically says three things that I thought were such typical traps that every founder falls into, myself included. That's the "if you spot it, you got it" thing. That's how I even noticed: "Oh, that's that trap I've been in before." I've got some scars on my ankles from stepping into that one. So the first one is—he's asking about growth. And naturally, Sam, when somebody asks you, "What do you think we should do to grow this thing?" what's your first question? I'm just curious if you have the same first question I do.
03:17	Sam Parr	"What have you tried? What's worked? What's the one thing that's actually going well? And what are the ten other things you've tried that aren't going well? Stop doing them and start doing the one thing."
03:25	Shaan Puri	Exactly. So it was basically: "Where are the customers coming from today? Let's start with that." I asked, "Okay, so how do you get customers today?" They said, "Oh, you know, Google search results." I was like, "Oh—so Google Ads?" He said, "No, no, no — just Google search results." I replied, "Oh, why aren't you doing Google Ads for when somebody searches 'smog check near me' or 'emissions testing near me'?" He said, "Oh, we tried that; it didn't work." So they're really thinking about, you know, this and this and this and this — like fancy new cool things.
03:55	Sam Parr	And you're like, "Well, tell me about the try."
03:57	Shaan Puri	Exactly. So I'm like, "Tell me," and I was like, "That's interesting — it didn't work. What part didn't work? Tell me more. What was the data?" Then suddenly the cat's got the tongue: "Don't know the data, don't know what happened." Oh — it turns out what actually happened was Google gives you a couple hundred dollars of free Google ad credits.
04:15	Sam Parr	Yeah, yeah.
04:16	Shaan Puri	They had spent it; they didn't have tracking set up. Anecdotally, they said, "I think we have lower-quality leads." Some people said the price was too expensive. So, you know, it didn't really work. "What was the ROAS on it?" I don't really know. We— I mean, we didn't have it set up properly. So it's like, damn, you have written off what's probably the most obvious growth channel with this internal narrative of, "We tried that; it didn't work." That "it didn't work" line makes me very skeptical now. I think so few people truly try things enough to get a definitive answer—the answer that's clear because they iterated on it and tried it enough times to really know. That's, let's say, trap number one: looking for the new, fancy whatever when the obvious thing hasn't been done properly yet.
05:06	Sam Parr	I make that mistake all the time. I've made it previously — like with The Hustle. We grew via Facebook ads and I got really lucky on the very first... The Hustle was my daily newsletter. In year one it went from zero to 100,000. Year two, 100,000 to 500,000. Year three, about 500,000 to a million. At the end of year one we hit a little plateau and I said, "Let's try Facebook ads. We know how much we make per subscriber — let's just spend a little bit of money." The first ad I made on Facebook... we ended up spending collectively something like $8–$10 million over the lifetime of the company. That trained my brain. I still struggle to break the belief that if it doesn't work in the first couple tries, it won't work. The reality — and I've since seen examples where this is true — is that you really need to do potentially 50 to 100 reps. If you're talking about an ad, it could literally be your hundredth ad that changes everything. For example, one ad we ran converted much better: I think we acquired a customer for $1.50, while everything else was $3.00. It was literally two times better, which is a big deal — it changes the business. So I understand exactly what you're saying.
06:18	Shaan Puri	And by the way, there's a fix for this trap of thinking: you also can't just stubbornly do things forever either, right? So that's not the answer. Write everything down. When you write down what actually happened, you'll realize how flimsy your grasp was or how flimsy the attempt was. The way I do it is almost like the Socratic method. I literally do this—it's not a metaphor. I open up a Google Doc and it's basically me and a smarter, wiser, older me. The smarter, wiser, older me basically asks a question. I put that in bold, and then my answer I unbold and type right underneath. I just advise myself because I have the full context—I'm sitting right here and I have infinite time to do this for myself. So I go ahead and ask myself a question. For example, I might ask: > "What's already working?" > > "Cool—can you do more of that?" > > "What would it mean if you did more of that?" > > "Is there a way to double by doing just the same—without finding a new thing? Do you think you could double with just that?" > > "Okay, what's the next most likely thing to work?" Then you answer, "Oh, maybe it's Google Ads." Cool. "Did you try them?" "Yeah, we did." "Was it a real try? What happened?" You have to write it down, look up the data, and do the work. Writing is sort of an exposing function.
07:35	Sam Parr	Writing forces clear thinking.
07:37	Shaan Puri	It forces clear thinking and it just highlights sloppy thinking because you can't fill in the gaps. You can't just say, "It didn't really work." If you just sit there, you're like, "Well, if I read this I'd—what does that mean? Is, you know..." Just provide the actual answer instead of this hand‑wavy way of saying it. And so, anyways, that's the force of it. Alright, so that's trap number one. Trap number two: I was like, "Okay, so what's next for you guys?" which, by the way, was a trick question, because already we'd figured out what's next for them is to do Google Ads properly.
08:06	Sam Parr	Alright, so 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–$18 million in revenue. I started it with like $300. My current company, Hampton, does over $10 million 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, they 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 it right now—scan the QR code or click the link in the description. Now, back to the show.
09:00	Shaan Puri	Second trap was not dogfooding your own product. One of the great, simple tests with any founder is: instead of spending 45 minutes talking about the business, take out your phone or laptop and mystery-shop the product right then. I said, "You guys should do Google Ads," and checked whether anyone was running Google Ads for that same search. Nobody was running it. Then I told them, "You said all your traffic comes from organic, but you're not even on the first page—you’re not even in the top section of Google; you're in the middle." I explained that this top section isn't SEO—it's the Google Business results (usually a map and a phone number to call), which are the business listings you're trying to appear in.
09:45	Sam Parr	To, I see them there. I see them there.
09:47	Shaan Puri	I was like, "But they were— even there, they were lower and they didn't have as many reviews." I also said, "It seems like your value prop is that you save people a bunch of time, and you don't really communicate that there." Then I went to your website, saw this, and thought, "You gotta walk through your product from the eyes of a user and face the pain." We used to use usertesting.com for this, but there are a bunch of different ways to do it.
10:13	Sam Parr	"Love UserTesting.com."
10:15	Shaan Puri	You basically pay... I don't know what it is now, but let's say it's $10 to $20 a test. Basically, it sends a user to your site, it screen-records what they're doing, and they have to talk out loud while using it.
10:27	Sam Parr	"Didn't your mom do that for a long time, and they gave her stock in the company when it went public?"
10:31	Shaan Puri	Yeah, that's my mom at this company. She started as a tester, then became a monitor of the testers—like quality control. She got a stock grant, and the company ended up going public.
10:45	Sam Parr	"That's awesome."
10:45	Shaan Puri	It's kind of amazing. I got my parents on it — I got my mom on it and got my dad to Airbnb his house. That's become the last fifteen years of their retirement: doing this.
10:54	Sam Parr	"That's awesome. You know, that's—so, I love that story."
10:57	Shaan Puri	So, anyways — face the pain. I think most entrepreneurs don't actually face the pain. They think the problem is elsewhere. The problem is most likely right there on your site, in the core flow that users go through, where you're just not clear enough, not compelling enough, or not visible enough. It's one of those three problems. If you just ask, "How do I become more visible? How do I make my proposition more compelling—more juicy? And how do I make it more clear?" then you can start to diagnose the issue. That was, like, thing one. Thing two and thing three were: they were asking, "Should we expand? We're only in two counties right now. Should we expand to a third or a fourth? Can we get into this one? Or should we focus on fixing the funnel—the core—first?" I think this is the constant debate people have. My advice was: make the system work and then replicate it. That will almost always work better than spreading yourself out, making the system more complex, and not having it work efficiently. There are so many fork-in-the-road decisions in entrepreneurship—do we go left or right? I think there's a simple heuristic: choose the option that seems easier to you, meaning the one with a lower perceived pain or difficulty. But be careful: if two options seem equal and one feels less painful, that option might actually be worse—it could just be appealing because you're trying to avoid pain. So it can appear fifty-fifty when it's not truly fifty-fifty. </FormattedResponse>
12:31	Sam Parr	One of my favorite quotes — which I heard when Charlie Munger died — led me to research a bunch of his work. He had a quote that I actually think about almost all the time: > "A smart man does first what a dumb man does last." I've made that decision incorrectly so many times. I'll do it the easy way this one time, and then eventually I'll do it properly. I tell myself, "I can't start this way because you need scale, you need this, you need that." An example would be: had I known what I know now about Hampton, I would only have done New York in real life and then very slowly scaled from city to city. But that's not fun — I can't scale quickly that way; that's very slow. There have been so many examples where I've taken the easy route first when I should have taken the hard route first. One of my favorite books from high school changed my life. I ran cross country and track and field in high school and in college, and I was pretty decent. The book was called Train Hard, Win Easy. That's the same phrase I think about all the time: train hard, win easy.
13:40	Shaan Puri	Yes — exactly. I think, you know, most people will realize that your judgment — ultimately your personal judgment, the judge in your head with the gavel — is who's deciding: go left or go right, go up or go down, start or continue, start or stop. All those micro-decisions obviously become your destiny. The question is: how do you make that decision-making function better? I don't think most people will invest in improving their decision-making. They'll invest in a lot of other things, but they don't invest much in that. I think there's a short list of tools and exercises you should be doing regularly to work out that decision-making muscle. One of them is basically the thing we talked about earlier: writing. Another is understanding your biases. For example, I bias toward things that sound easy, sound fun, or sound cool to others; therefore, those get overweighted in my decision-making versus other things. There are just a few ways you can make better decisions. Another one, by the way — if you can't tell, I'm a little bit under the weather [I've been sick for about a week now] — is that making decisions when you're sick is really hard. My entire thought process when I'm sick is probably, I don't know, five times worse than my thought process when I'm healthy and feeling active and energized. When I'm healthy, anything is possible. I'm the same guy — I didn't read any new books, nothing changed except my energy and fatigue levels — and I'm a totally different person. So I literally abstained from making any decisions... [sentence unfinished]
15:23	Sam Parr	"Like, you can't— you can't text your ex when you're drunk." "Exactly. Exactly." "It's like, 'I can't make any decisions while I'm sick.' I do that all the time." </FormattedResponse>
15:32	Shaan Puri	It makes cowards of us all. It's like—you know what they say in fighting. I think there's that. That's another one where I had the realization: "Man, okay, today I'm on the extreme end of the spectrum." It's very obvious. If I'm this sick, my mind—my mood, my mindset—is in such a shitty state that this is not a good time to be making good decisions. This is not a time when I'm going to be super creative or productive or any of those things. Okay, that's extreme. But on a day-to-day basis, I don't do as good a job as I should of first getting into a great state of mind before then going and trying to perform—whether that's being a good dad, being a good CEO, or being good at anything. And I'm probably in the top 1% of people who think about this. Most people don't even have the word "state" in their vocabulary. I've practiced this for years with the Tony Robbins stuff, that sort of thing. For me, I still am, like... I don't know—pretty average at it.
16:30	Sam Parr	No, I don't think you're average at it. I definitely don't think you're average. I actually think you're great at it. There's a book called The Triple Package, and the author claims to have analyzed incredibly successful groups of people—ultra-successful people—and she narrows it down to three things they all have in common. The first is the superiority complex: they feel they are born to be better. A lot of people listening to this podcast look around at the job they hate and think, "I was destined to do something greater than this. I have it inside of me. I'm special. I can do it." That's trait one. The second trait is, conversely—and very interestingly—an inferiority complex: the sense of "I am not good enough. I'm not where I need to be. I am shit. I need to improve." That creates urgency and a fear that is actually quite useful: "I have to work to be better in order to get to where I think I'm destined to go." The third is impulse control: can you control your urges and impulses? An example is when you wake up at 6 a.m. and you said you're going to go to the gym. The story you have to tell yourself is, "My emotions don't dictate whether I go or not; the alarm dictates whether I go or not." It's the same thing with making business decisions. I've made so many decisions impulsively. It sounds like you're trying to prevent yourself from making a decision while being emotional, and that ability to put the gas pedal on and off—to control your impulses a bit—is incredibly valuable.
17:59	Shaan Puri	I would agree with all three of those. I would just say—even, I don't know, the bigger-picture takeaway for me is: man, this seems like an underinvested area for myself. But generally, at large, it is one of the most important things that doesn't seem to be talked about or taught anywhere.
18:18	Sam Parr	"Yeah, just a reflection. I think... what's Chris Spalling?"
18:22	Shaan Puri	Spalling
18:22	Sam Parr	Yeah. Spalling said something to you about what you told me, which was amazing. Someone was telling him a story and he's like, "Well, but at least I learned X, Y, and Z about my company going out of business." Chris looks at him very sternly and says, "Are you sure that's the right lesson that you should take away from this situation? Did you learn the right thing?" And so, constantly: "What did I learn? What's the right thing that I learned here?"
18:44	Shaan Puri	"I learned so much." "Okay, what'd you learn?" "Well... it didn't seem like you actually had any clarity of thought around that. And then, what hit, in a lot of cases, was the thing they learned: "I learned, you know, you really can't trust people." It's like, whoa—that's the takeaway you had of this whole thing?"
19:02	Sam Parr	Yeah, that's a wrong takeaway.</FormattedResponse>
19:03	Shaan Puri	You know, how many times do people actually have the right takeaway? They become very skeptical of something that we all nod and agree with — like, "yeah, well, you learned, you know." It's like — no, you probably didn't learn. Actually, in my experience, most people who think they learned at the end of something didn't really learn. Or if they did learn, they learned the wrong lesson — a lesson that's probably not even going to help them. They did not actually have the right takeaway from the situation. Once you realize that, it's sort of a red pill moment.
19:30	Sam Parr	Can I tell you a couple of businesses that are fascinating to me right now? I think you're going to get a kick out of the first one.
19:37	Shaan Puri	Alright, let's...
19:38	Sam Parr	Go. So I'm interested. So you actually posted something — you said, "I don't like running."
19:43	Shaan Puri	I don't care about running — don't follow running — but there's a story right here in this picture that I want to talk about.
19:48	Sam Parr	And what was it? It was Cameron Haynes. His son, Tanner Truett, is a beast right now. He basically is running marathons at a wicked fast pace — about 2 hours and 30 minutes. For anyone who runs a marathon, that is very fast. Also: a) he's about 220 pounds — he's huge; and b) he's doing it in blue jeans. Is that right?
20:06	Shaan Puri	That's exactly right. There's a guy who's running long races—marathons, ultramarathons. He's running them fast, and he's running them wearing jeans. Not shorts. Not jean shorts—full jeans.
20:19	Sam Parr	And so the — and you're like, that right there is a Purple Cow. Purple Cow is a book by Seth Godin, and it's one of many books that basically say the same thing, which is: it's better to be different than it is to be better. I've been thinking about that a lot lately. We had a guest on and he said something like, "If you split-test everything, you're just gonna have porn." It was basic. I think it was George Mac, and it was like this idea that...
20:45	Shaan Puri	Like, don't even know if he said that, but that's great.
20:47	Sam Parr	I think he'd either tweeted it, or he said it to us. </FormattedResponse>
20:50	Shaan Puri	If you just start A/B testing your website, and you run an infinite number of A/B tests, you end up with Pornhub. That's gotta be it. Actually, that's so true.
21:00	Sam Parr	Yeah. If you split-test everything, it just ends up in porn. You need to take a stand. You want to be different and you have to stand out. It might not make sense why you're doing that, but it's just cool, and the market tends to adjust and recognize that that is badass. There are a billion examples we could go on about what that means, but let me give you two that interest me right now. First — so, you're familiar with "The Onion," right? The comedy news website.
21:25	Shaan Puri	Oh, yeah—yeah, of course.
21:26	Sam Parr	Okay, so The Onion was founded in 1988. It's kind of funny — it's gone through so many different owners. I think it was started at the University of Wisconsin as just a newsletter. It was originally founded as a funny newsletter that made fun of campus life. Over the years it became a popular magazine and now a digital magazine where they make fun of stuff, and it's hilarious. It's kind of interesting that it's been owned by a variety of people. I think in 2003 some rich hedge‑fund guy bought it. Then it was sold and bought again in 2013. I think a company called Geomedia bought it — they owned sites like Gawker — and it wasn't working out. Eventually, in 2024, Jeff Lawson, the founder of Twilio, bought it. It's been one of those things where wealthy people feel like they need to be the patron or steward of making fun of stuff that deserves to be made fun of. That's pretty cool. Last year they did something very interesting — "very purple cali" [phrase unclear] — they brought back the print magazine and went really hard on the print edition. Within a year they already have 53,000 paying subscribers. I think it costs $10 a month, and they're expecting something like $6,000,000 in revenue this year. Last year they did less than $2,000,000 in revenue. So a print magazine tripled their revenue, and I think that is so cool. I've talked about magazines on this podcast a couple times. I think magazines are incredibly interesting. Do you subscribe to any?
23:05	Shaan Puri	You know, I've been playing with this. There are a couple of people doing it, so I currently have an Arena subscription — Colossus.
23:13	Sam Parr	Awesome, Patrick O'Shaughnessy. Awesome.
23:16	Shaan Puri	Who has a podcast, basically sort of expanding his media empire—whatever you want to call it—with long-form journalism, like an old-school print magazine, you know?
23:30	Sam Parr	"It's really good."
23:31	Shaan Puri	Feature story on this person, and it's, like, beautiful photography—really long-form stuff. It's good. I like... I like the quality of the product on that side, but I don't subscribe to the physical thing. I think they have one.
23:43	Sam Parr	Yes, they do. It's new. I think it's only on edition number three, but it's new. So you just subscribe to it—Is that right? [final phrase unclear]
23:48	Shaan Puri	I mean, that's a lot. Two—two is way over the... Oh, the Vegas overline of what they thought I had here for a magazine subscription.
23:55	Sam Parr	I subscribed to two, actually. Popeye magazine, which is a Japanese magazine. It's called—it's like, I think the tagline is—it's kind of a quirky translation: "City Boy Life." It's sort of like GQ for Japan, where they talk about clothing, coffee, and urban culture. I love it. Interestingly, I don't know if all Japanese magazines are like this, but it reads backwards. You don't fold it like a typical magazine; it's upside down, so you go to the left. That's kind of interesting. The second one is Thrasher magazine, which is a skateboard magazine I had when I was a kid and loved. I just think magazines are so interesting. Can I tell you what I would do? I thought about doing this. I read the biography of JFK Jr.—John F. Kennedy's son—and he actually had a magazine in the eighties. I went and bought the first edition. This is what Sidney Crawford... it was a very—it's a very famous magazine cover. It's what Sidney Crawford dresses George Washington, and it was cool and everything. But what I would do: I would call it a newsletter, not a magazine. I would literally do it on white paper, stapled together with 10 or 20 sheets, and put it into an envelope. I think someone could create some type of publication for high-net-worth people or for tech companies and sell it for around $1,000 a year, producing only four to eight editions per year. If I did it on wealthy people, it would be full of tips, tactics, strategies, and stories about what high-net-worth people are doing. If I did it on tech companies, I would sell it to the tech community and list as many tech company names as possible, explaining what they're doing in a particular industry—a roundup, sort of like a high-school newspaper.
25:41	Shaan Puri	Yeah, that's interesting. So you're just saying physical sort of takes you into a new category.
25:46	Sam Parr	Physical. So, yeah — I guess I didn't fully round that out, but the "purple cow" here is: no digital-only—physical. I think nostalgia is a thing. You and I have talked about our own habits and how we're getting sick of digital. I think everyone is experiencing that, and someone could actually build a great business around it. What a lot of people do, though, is they tend to go flashy, shiny, premium. I would argue you should go the opposite. You should go homemade, mom-and-pop — almost like a punk‑rock zine, the way it used to be. Exactly what you're pulling out right there, if you put it in a folder like that.
26:22	Shaan Puri	So, I think I've shown you this before, but my guy Diego basically delivers these to me. I don't know — you can see there's tabs on the side, right? He basically prints out a collection of the best things to read. It might be like, "Oh yeah, Howard Marks put out a new memo this week." The note would say we should read that; we should really digest it, slow down and read it — don't make it just a Chrome tab number 93 that's open alongside Twitter and a bunch of other dopamine, fast-food dispensers. Chrome is basically like that "Coca‑Cola Freestyle" machine — that's basically what my internet browser is. [This is from a phone-ish format.]
27:02	Sam Parr	Unlimited options. It's...
27:03	Shaan Puri	Unlimited options of syrup and water — you know, like syrup, water, and bubbles — and that's not really what I want to be having. This is like when somebody gets a coconut, chops off the top, puts a straw in it, and says, "Here you go," and you're drinking out of a coconut. So he delivers these to me basically once a month. For example, the last one was Brett B. Shore had written an annual letter about his private equity fund. It was basically about the performance of the fund, so he knew I'd find that interesting: "Oh, what have they invested in? How's that fund actually doing? Are they doing really well? Are they okay? What's going on?" He also, like, gets his Warren Buffett on in that — where he's very philosophical about life or the markets or whatever — so he knows I enjoy reading that. [“Warren Buffett” inferred from context]
27:48	Sam Parr	"I think you can charge a lot for that."
27:51	Shaan Puri	He'll put in, like, a science thing, so it'll be like, "Oh yeah, these guys are working on..." There are a number of people out there trying to study the genes for short sleep. So there are some people—like Trump, and I think Clinton before this—who genetically only need five to six hours of sleep. What an advantage: basically to have three extra hours a day but still be at full energy. There are people actually trying to figure out, like the way we did Ozempic—we were able to limit your need for food, maybe make you not need as much food—could we make you not need as much sleep if we study this? That's fascinating. So I'm reading... you know, there's like a science thing in there [science article].
28:30	Sam Parr	A briefing. It's a brief... and so.
28:32	Shaan Puri	If I just productize that thing he's already giving me, it's basically what you're talking about, right? It's all in the curation. It would have to be somebody I trust or who knows my taste, or who is genuinely curating for me. Because if the first thing I open is "meh," I'm out—I'm out on this altogether. </FormattedResponse>
28:51	Sam Parr	You know, but you can tell a story as to why something should be important. For example, the sleep thing—it's not inherently important, but you think it's important because of X, Y, and Z. You tell the story about why it's important. What I would do is, on the first page, put directions on how to read. If you have children: after your kids go to bed at 8:00 p.m., don't turn the TV on—sit and read this in your living room. If you don't have kids: don't go out on a Thursday—read this for one hour and your life will be better. You give these really intimate instructions to make someone feel good. I think this could be a hit. I sent you a link to my friend—I think I've talked about this before—Nev Box. My friend Neville Medora did this thing years ago where he sent people three boxes and he called them "Three Important Copywriting Lessons You Need to Know." It was literally just a UPS box with three envelopes in there that had printed paper, and it was awesome. So should...
29:50	Shaan Puri	"We should—should we just do this as MFM? Basically, you and I curate two to three things each that we think are noteworthy, with a little editorial note on top—like a sticky note—explaining why I think each item is worth paying attention to."
30:04	Sam Parr	It could be awesome.
30:05	Shaan Puri	So now, if a thousand fans are willing to pay $1,000 a year to have a proper "info diet", right? You know, I pay a lot of money to have a proper diet for what food goes in my body. I know people who go to an extreme: they'll go straight farm-to-table, have their favorite ranches they source meat from, and get vegetables from certain areas at certain seasons. People have realized it matters what you put in; it changes what happens inside your body. But our minds are just like, "No, no—go ahead, pour social media sludge right on top." Yep, go ahead, just top me off. It's okay if it overflows. I'll just—...
30:40	Sam Parr	These are good analogies for how to sell it. There's a lot of ammo here to sell this.
30:45	Shaan Puri	Oh no — I don't know. This would actually be kind of fun to do. I think this would be fun. This is the only... I get these binders every month. One of the best things in my life is getting that. So I guess, why would I not just share a version of that with other people? It doesn't hurt me to share it. In fact, it would help me, I think, because these are cool ideas — cool things worth sharing.
31:08	Sam Parr	So, let me tell you—the second one: you're the son of immigrants, so I don't know if this experience is going to hit the same. But in the Midwest, in Missouri, where I was raised, one of the greatest things I got to experience as a kid was getting milk delivered to my home once a week in a glass bottle. Did you ever experience this as a kid?
31:29	Shaan Puri	Never, never.
31:30	Sam Parr	Okay, so there's this company called Oberweis Dairy. Oberweis was started as a dairy farm in 1915, I think in Missouri or Indiana, but it was very Midwestern. They eventually started selling their own milk to their little small town and it expanded and expanded. It's mostly regional in Missouri and Illinois — I think they have locations in Chicago and St. Louis. As a kid, this is where we would get our milk. We would also get our lemonade from there and our ice cream. That was their thing, and it felt amazing. The company kept growing. Started in 1915, it was on its fourth generation of family ownership. Peak revenue, I think in 2020 or 2021, was $120,000,000, so it was good top-line revenue. But it's a hard business — low margin — and because of a bunch of silly decisions that management had made in 2024, it went bankrupt. A guy we talked about on the podcast, his name was Hoffman — in fact, on one of the early podcasts (pre-pandemic, back when we were in the office) — he ended up buying the company. I think he bought it for $21,000,000, and I think he said he was going to invest another $15,000,000 into it.
32:48	Shaan Puri	"Who's Hoffman? Who's this guy—Dave? David Hoffman, maybe."
32:51	Sam Parr	Is it David? Yeah, I think it's David. He started a recruitment agency that, after twenty years, was making so much money that he started buying businesses. He bought a boat-cruise business — basically the kind of tour boats you see in San Francisco, not a real cruise but a bay tour. Then he bought blue-collar businesses, I believe, and he eventually bought Oberweis. David Hoffman — he's based in St. Louis, so for all St. Louis folks this is an interesting brand. I saw that they went bankrupt and then he bought it, and I thought that was fascinating. The reason I think it's fascinating is I think Oberweis milk delivery could be a thing. You could absolutely make this a wonderful business for people our age — in our thirties and forties. People who have children grew up with something like this, and it's not part of the experience that you and I have anymore. We probably just go to Costco or get something delivered via Instacart. I actually think oat milk and almond milk — those nondairy milks — are trending downward right now, and dairy is up. Dairy took a hit over the last decade, but glass and nostalgia could be powerful. I would have an entire campaign around making it "like it used to be made" — like it used to be made way back when, when it was made better. I would lean super hard into that. Then I would upsell better eggs and other "better-for-you" products — eggs, whatever — hopefully higher-margin items. But I think the milk-delivery business, and the nostalgia angle, could be really fascinating. Where does that land with you?
34:38	Shaan Puri	Less good, partially because when I'm looking at their offering, they have dairy delivery but also breakfast, snacks, dinner, desserts, and juices. </FormattedResponse>
34:51	Sam Parr	No, that's not what you do.
34:52	Shaan Puri	It's not that you're into everything, but I can see why you would need to, right? Like, how much money could you really make just delivering only milk? Or only core dairy — milk and eggs? It just doesn't seem... doesn't seem like it's big enough. Doesn't seem like there's enough average order value to make the whole logistics worth it. I do think that just building a premier dairy brand makes sense — so not the home delivery part, but being like, "Yo, okay, all of you guys went anti-dairy, got it. But if you like rich, good dairy, we got you." And so when I go to the grocery store there's these brands I don't even know if they do anything differently. Like Alexander — they're like, "Oh, we have 6% milk." I'm like, I don't even know what 6% is, but give me that. What is that?
35:41	Sam Parr	Three times better than 2%.
35:42	Shaan Puri	And then they put it in a different-shaped bottle. Then there's, like, what's the other one—like Strauss Farms or whatever. There's these... hey, it's just, you know, like every category: packaging. But I think just tripling down on rich dairy and actual high-quality dairy—I feel like grocery stores still have shelves that need that sort of product. The trick is, if you actually operate a farm, it's very different than those kind of D2C (direct-to-consumer) repackagers of stuff, you know what I mean? If you actually have a story about your farm—where you're at and why it's better and all that stuff—whether it's for beef or for chicken or dairy, that matters. Someone came on the podcast and pitched us for chicken. They said: > "You should just make— the world needs a better chicken brand. What is the 'Snake River Farms' for chicken type of thing?" I think there's that opportunity for dairy, for chicken, for beef—for all these staples.
36:42	Sam Parr	"Did you see what Cracker Barrel did?"
36:44	Shaan Puri	"So they changed their logo, right? Is that the..."
36:46	Sam Parr	More than that—more than that. They made the inside look like a Chipotle.
36:51	Shaan Puri	But, like... overnight? Or they've been doing that for a long time, and people just started paying attention.
36:54	Sam Parr	You know, I haven't been to a Cracker Barrel in a very long time, but it...
36:59	Shaan Puri	Honestly, I didn't even— is Cracker Barrel a restaurant? I thought it might be like HomeGoods...
37:04	Sam Parr	No. Is it like a hybrid Cracker Barrel? It's like—when we take road trips, Dustin, it's where we stop. But basically it's a huge chain, publicly traded and worth billions of dollars. It's a restaurant whose famous dish is chicken and dumplings, but it's definitely disgusting.
37:23	Shaan Puri	"Chicken and dumplings—like Asian dumplings? Or what do you mean by 'chicken and dumplings'?"
37:26	Sam Parr	Brother, no. It's like—what, Bisquick? You know, remember Bisquick? Yeah. Okay, chicken—basically biscuits and gravy, sort of. It's sort of like biscuits. And they have a huge store where you can buy crap you don't need—just junk. You can even buy suckers there.
37:43	Shaan Puri	It is part store, part restaurant.
37:45	Sam Parr	Yeah, it's like half—more like a gift shop. It's borderline a gift shop on the edge of a store, but also a restaurant. That's what it is. The idea is they always have a wait because they're crowded, and you just go in there and buy tchotchkes, basically. The optics—I'm not saying what the reality is—are that this young, 30- or 40-year-old woman who's now the CEO appears to be a yuppie New Yorker, which is the exact opposite of the Cracker Barrel clientele. It looks like she just kind of came in and behaved in such a way that she's out of touch with the average Cracker Barrel customer, the average person who goes, "yeah."
38:34	Shaan Puri	It's a lot of barrel, no cracker.
38:36	Sam Parr	Yeah, she does not own, like, one pair of overalls. So... I'm not—again, I don't know the reality; I'm just saying that's what it looks like. Then the stock just crashed after she made this announcement. But there is something about that where it's like, "Dude, don't—don't fix this stuff." It's supposed to look disgusting—a feature. That's not a bug; it's supposed to look like a filthy restaurant.
38:59	Shaan Puri	Right, right — worse is better here.
39:02	Sam Parr	Alright... what do
39:03	Shaan Puri	Alright, so before this podcast I spent probably the last hour reading a profile on Alpha School. What's the name of Joe Lamont? </FormattedResponse>
39:13	Sam Parr	Dude, we were on that early, but we didn't have a lot of information on them. They explained why Joe Lamont hadn't done an interview in 25 years.
39:20	Shaan Puri	So, there's more info out now about Alpha. Basically, we're now treading in the waters of the unknown a little bit because it's a little mysterious. It's new, you haven't been there in person, and who knows.
39:36	Sam Parr	"Well, say who Joe is."
39:38	Shaan Puri	Alright, so Joe Lamont is basically like a software entrepreneur who's super, super successful — like $10,000,000,000 net worth type of situation. He dropped out of college his senior year at Stanford, I believe. He started Trilogy Software. Trilogy Software was basically like an enterprise sales system of some kind.
39:56	Sam Parr	I still don't entirely know what they did after all... no, yeah.
39:59	Shaan Puri	It's like before my time. It's like, "Alright, cool."
40:02	Sam Parr	Like the analogy I think I heard: if you're an airplane company and you need to buy lots of parts to build your airplane, it would help you decide which components to purchase. That's the best I could tell. But it became huge. It was basically him, Microsoft, and Dell recruiting the best talent. He was the type of guy who, when he was 28, was on the "Forbes list of richest Americans."
40:25	Shaan Puri	Exactly. So he was the youngest guy on the Forbes 400 list. He was worth about $500 million at that stage. He then also created a private equity firm called, I think, ESW Capital or something like that, and basically started buying small, cash-flowy software companies. Similar to Constellation Software, he basically bought hundreds of these companies, and that's now a big deal.
40:53	Sam Parr	Which I think — I think — I think he's... He has a lot of mystery because, allegedly, one of the tactics is that he would buy dying software companies, fire everyone, outsource it to India, and just acknowledge that it was dying, not invest in it, and hire the cheapest people.
41:07	Shaan Puri	Which, right?
41:08	Sam Parr	It's not inherently wrong, but it's maybe not something you want to brag about all the time. [Unclear phrase in original: "when software win hospice"]
41:13	Shaan Puri	Yeah, so okay. So, whatever—he's obviously mega, mega successful. Again, worth sort of like tens of billions of dollars, one of the richest guys in the world. He recently... his thing that he got obsessed with is called Alpha School. The story here, from what I can understand, is that there’s a woman who used to work for Trilogy Software. She and her husband—I think her name is Mackenzie Price—they created a school first for their own kids. They’re kind of motivated because of the following problem, which I agree with the problem statement entirely. If you look at the world’s greatest people—the greatest people who have accomplished things—whether it’s Mozart or Beethoven, they’re composing symphonies at age five. Or it’s Alexander the Great: he conquered most of the world by the time he was 22, having started at 16. There are many examples of people who, at a very young age, were capable of doing a lot. So there was a central question: why don’t we have more Alexanders—not like conquerors per se, but people who, at a young age, are able to do a lot? If you look at Einstein, Alexander, Marcus Aurelius, one of the things about many of these great achievers is that the way they learned was not in a traditional school but through direct one-on-one tutoring from a sort of wise mentor—Socrates, Plato, that sort of lineage of one-on-one tutoring.
42:49	Sam Parr	Like... an apprenticeship.
42:51	Shaan Puri	A little bit like apprenticeship, but they're not working for the person. They're just daily study—daily tutoring, one-on-one with a master. There are all these studies over the years about what is the best way to teach. I think we would all agree we would love education to be more effective. We'd all love to improve education. It's super high leverage: if you can educate people better, the world prospers. So how do you do it? For a long time there's been this thing called the "Two Sigma Problem"—Bloom's "Two Sigma Problem" [Benjamin Bloom]. Have you seen it?
43:21	Sam Parr	According to Wikipedia, it's the "two sigma problem." In one-on-one mentorship, about 90% of tutored students attained a level of achievement reached by only the highest 20%. So, basically, you are almost guaranteed to be in the top 20% if you use this one-on-one tutoring methodology.
43:40	Shaan Puri	Correct. For a long time, it's been the case... alright, now what's changed? AI has changed things. Now, with AI, the idea is any kid with a tablet—an iPad or whatever—can have a tutor that is fully designing custom lesson plans on the fly for each student, perfectly tailored to their current level of expertise. There are other parts of learning science to consider. For example, you don't want to pass people until they have mastery of a concept, because otherwise they have a shaky foundation. The problem with traditional school is you pass if you get a C. A C is about 70% or better. What they've shown is that if you get a person to 70% (or 72%), their rate of learning as they progress will always decrease. Seventy percent was actually a bit of a shaky foundation—they didn't actually understand it. So when they try to learn the next thing, the foundation is too wobbly and it collapses. Whereas if you get them to 90% mastery of a subject, they'll do really well. One thing about classrooms today is they're taught to get everybody to 70%—at least 70%—to move forward. But the problem is you actually want people at 90% to move forward. The second part is that you want people to be tested at a level that is not so easy that it's boring, but not so challenging that it's overwhelming: "I don't even understand, I'm drowning." Finding that peak middle zone—where I'm being tested enough but not pushed so far that I'm going over the cliff—would be great. But you can't do that in a classroom because every kid's at a different spot. So you just sort of keep everybody comfortable. That means the smartest kids are not challenged, and the kids who are furthest behind are utterly confused. You're kind of teaching to the average, the lowest common denominator. I'm oversimplifying, but this is the complaint about normal school. So what is Alpha School doing? Basically, it's a school in Austin for K through 8. You go and you do two hours on an iPad, and the idea is that your two hours on an iPad with your AI tutor will teach you not only everything you need to know for whatever grade level you're in, but you'll learn double that. You basically learn double, but in only two hours. That's the promise. What do you do the rest of the day? They basically just have random life-skill workshops: go rock climbing, build a piece of IKEA furniture, etc.
46:17	Sam Parr	So, they say life skill means: public speaking, entrepreneurship, and outdoor education. These experiences build grit, creativity, and adaptability.
46:26	Shaan Puri	Yeah. So, for example, they did this thing where they called the teachers guides. The guides had a group of second graders and they said, "Alright, let's come up with five impossible things — impossible for a second grader to do." The first one was to run a five-kilometer (5K) in under 35 minutes. It was like, "I'll run a 5K in under 35 minutes." But can a second grader even run a 5K? Most second graders could not even run a 5K — that's a pretty long run for a second grader. A second grader, you know, is a seven-year-old. They asked all the students, "Do you think you could do it?" Nobody raised their hand. They asked all the parents, "Do you think your kid could do it?" Nobody raised their hand. So that became one of the missions — one of the workshops, one of the impossible missions.
47:14	Sam Parr	"We're going to train, like, a seven-year-old how to run a 5K. That was it."
47:19	Shaan Puri	So what they did was: on the first day they just walked the 5K. They said, "Alright, you've completed it—you at least know that you can go the distance. The distance is a manageable distance." They did that for a couple days. Then they said, "Alright, cool—we're going to try to run the first quarter of it and then we'll walk the rest." They did that for a couple days. After that they ran half of it and walked the rest. Then they ran three quarters of it and walked the rest, until they could run the whole thing. By the end of a couple months, not only did one second grader do it—every single second grader did it. Some of them did it in under 30 minutes. They basically had these five "impossible" challenges and they made the kids want to do them. The reason they were able to do this is because they completed all their learning in just a two-hour window, so they could spend the rest of their time doing things that are interesting—life-type stuff—for themselves.
48:13	Sam Parr	Well, they're teaching them how to break down a problem—35 minutes. We'll start small and build up confidence. Yeah, I mean, I see... that's amazing. I totally see the value.
48:21	Shaan Puri	Seems kind of amazing right now. Here's some more—things that are just fascinating about this. So, Joe Lamont pulled out a billion dollars.
48:30	Sam Parr	I saw that.
48:31	Shaan Puri	From his companies to invest in Alpha School, he then said, "This is the best product I've ever built by far—better than anything I ever did at Trilogy, better than anything I've ever done since." This is so much, and it's this app that he's building called Time Back. It's basically a custom AI tool. You are on your iPad, or your tablet or laptop—you are learning—and it is doing two things. One, there's a little waste meter in the corner, because the camera is watching you and recording the screen at all times. So it sees if the kid just leaves... just like, "dude, which"
49:08	Sam Parr	Is what he used at his companies.
49:10	Shaan Puri	He's what he used at Trilogy, right? Or when he would buy these companies, he was known for having pretty extreme...
49:16	Sam Parr	"Like key lighters."
49:16	Shaan Puri	Monitoring productivity. Monitoring stuff like, controversially, the extreme right. </FormattedResponse>
49:21	Sam Parr	That's awesome. This is so cool. I didn't realize— I saw the article and I started reading about him. I wanted to know about the business stuff, and the article was like: > "Joe's not gonna talk to you about business stuff. He doesn't wanna talk about [unclear: 'trilogy ews']; he doesn't wanna talk about any of that, but he will talk about Alpha School." I was like, "Well, shit — that's what I wanna know." So when it started getting into school stuff, I thought, I don't know how I want to read that, but this sounds so much cooler than I thought. I didn't realize how big this was going to be. I'm on their website, and my kid isn't school-aged yet, but I'm thinking I would absolutely want them to go to this. Would you send yours?
49:58	Shaan Puri	Dude, I wish this had been around for us. I'll give you some side stories — personal life experiences. My kids were home this summer. It was our first summer break together. My daughter just finished what they call TK (transitional kindergarten, like pre-K), so she's going to be a kindergartner this year. My son was about to be a pre-K student, and we have a baby who's small. I had this mission for the summer: three things I wanted to do. - Take two epic trips with their cousins, because that was always a "core memory" for me. - Teach them to swim, since they love the water and it's a good life skill. - Teach them to read. I realized we hadn't taken the time to actually teach them to swim or read, so I planned to do both. I also noticed that the schools we send them to — and "school" is a very generous word for what's actually happening — are, by and large, babysitting/daycare. I think that's generally true for most schools, even through high school and college: a big aspect of what school is involves supervision and non-academic activities. When they're little, it's very much babysitting. If I ask them what they've learned, they say they mostly just played and maybe learned one thing. They can't do math or read. They're not being taught those skills; they're just doing letters at a slow pace. My kids already know the letters and can write them, but school moves at that pace. If I want them to learn anything, I have to do it outside of school. So I discovered an app called Mentava.
51:31	Sam Parr	"Mentava"
51:32	Shaan Puri	Go to Mentava.com now. This is a learning app that was so expensive I was actually offended by the price when I saw it. I don't know if you've ever downloaded apps for iPad for kids' stuff, but it's usually, I don't know, $5 to unlock the thing—maybe $7 a month if it's really good.
51:51	Sam Parr	My gosh — I just saw it.
51:52	Shaan Puri	This is a $500-a-month, per‑kid... so it's something like $1,000 a month for this app. And with this, the app has a very simple promise, which is: > "We could teach any 3- to 5-year-old to read if they just spend, I don't know, 15 minutes a day doing this thing for a couple months."
52:11	Sam Parr	"Dude, talking about value pricing. Your old boss, Emmett Scheer—he's an investor. Emmett is... you gotta ask for that discount code."
52:17	Shaan Puri	So I was like, wow—this is incredibly expensive, but I'm incredibly intrigued. I put my kids on it; they've been doing it all summer. Sure enough, it actually is pretty effective. The app itself is incredibly janky. The polish is rough, the animations are janky—everything is janky. It's not the best app, but the core idea is strong: a simple value proposition. "I can teach your kids how to read if they do this thing for 10 to 15 minutes a day." They break down reading. If you think about what reading is, there are about 45 different sounds you need to be able to make—45 sound combinations. First they teach all the building blocks, then they show how those blocks work when they're put together in words. For example, "a" is "ah" and "b" is "ba," and you learn that "c/k" go together. Sure enough, both my kids are starting to read now. My rule is: you don't get cartoons or anything else until you do your reading today. It's a very simple trade. They like doing it; it's kind of a game, and they enjoy it.
53:20	Sam Parr	And by the way, the investors—if you go to their investor page—it's literally everyone who's been on this pod. Every investor has been on our podcast.
53:28	Shaan Puri	Yeah, I know, but it's $500 because he's comparing... I don't know. They wanted it to be, is the real answer. It doesn't need to be $500, but they're comparing it to human tutoring, so they're like, "Oh, it's five times cheaper than a human tutor." I was like, "Okay, cool." But it's also 500 times more than, you know, a normal learning app on the iPad, which is my frame of reference coming into this. I've now seen the value of this type of personalized learning because, let's say they're playing this game: if they don't understand the "sh" sound—if they get it wrong three times—they lose that little game level. The system knows, "Okay, you just don't understand 'sh,'" so you don't just replay that level. You hop back three levels and it'll reteach you that building block to make sure you understand it, and it's going to get you to repeat it. In these, it's going to use five different games as spaced repetition to teach you the same few concepts.
54:23	Sam Parr	But it makes me nervous to have my kid on an iPad.
54:27	Shaan Puri	Not — I mean, sure, maybe it's a personal thing, but my kids are on devices all the time. I've... I've let go of that rope. That rope is like, you know, the horse is already out of the barn. So now it's just a question of how bad it is — you know, what are you doing with your time there?
54:46	Sam Parr	And so what? Okay—bring it back to Alpha School. What are you saying?
54:49	Shaan Puri	I believe that they're going to be able to do this. I believe they're going to be able to if somebody actually—like the guy who took a billion dollars out—and he has, I think, a 300-person AI lab that he's building, his own little OpenAI, that he's building to basically custom-train these models and build applications on top of them. I think this is an insane thing that's going to happen, and I think it's going to take over. My—my unhedged, my unhedged true belief is that something like this is going to exist, and this is the best bet I've seen so far.
55:23	Sam Parr	I don't think it's going to take over. I think it's going to be a massive success. I see so many reasons why someone would protest this. We've talked about people going the opposite of AI and technology—there's a massive contingency who will fall into that category. One of our good friends sends their kids to a new thing I've never heard of called "nature school." Have you heard of nature school?
55:45	Shaan Puri	My sister runs a nature school.
55:47	Sam Parr	And I don't entirely know what it means, other than you're outside and it involves nature. I guess that's it. But there's an entire contingency of people who want to go that route. I do think that Alpha School will be a massive hit, and I am interested. When I was reading it while we've been talking, I'm like—I am open to this; this sounds very intriguing. Does it help you get into college, or are they anti-college? Or they haven't gotten to that yet? </FormattedResponse>
56:11	Shaan Puri	They go all the way up through high school. Their high school students "crush" the SAT and ACT compared to [other schools]. They use a pretty standardized metric called MAP, which measures how much you learn. For example, let's say you take a test and the average third grader has a score of 100 in math. By the end of a normal semester, they would go up seven points. But with Alpha School, they go up 15 points. Of course that compounds because they improved by that amount in a shorter period of time. When they enter the next level, they'll grow again—so they're growing by a bigger amount and at a faster rate. Obviously, that compounds the longer you do it.
56:55	Sam Parr	"Dude — I don't know if this is true, but the story is that Magic Johnson became a billionaire not through basketball, but through franchising McDonald's. You said you wanted to open up a school. You could be the biggest franchise."
57:06	Shaan Puri	Well, I don't even know if you have to franchise it. I think you just literally license the technology, yeah.
57:11	Sam Parr	Similar.
57:12	Shaan Puri	Yeah, it's just... do I want to do it for young kids versus college? I'm more interested in college, but young kids have their own set of problems.
57:19	Sam Parr	You know, it's really complicated. Well, yeah, but it's also super rewarding — that's a life well lived. What's sort of scary is that you and I — we're both in our mid-thirties — and it feels like one of the last eras in which high school was the same as it had been for the preceding fifty years. Now, current high school is radically different. I remember I was a sophomore in high school when the iPhone came out. Teachers didn't even know to ban it because no one had one. Facebook came out when I was in high school, or maybe in eighth grade. So many of these problems — like online bullying — simply weren't really a thing yet. When I see what high schoolers are like now, I do not envy them. The way children are being raised from about five to eighteen years old is significantly different from how kids were raised over the past sixty or seventy years. We don't give them enough credit, because the systems they have to go through now are significantly more difficult. I'm very eager to see how — like, if [someone] told me about schools twelve years ago, we would have said, "You're insane. What are you talking about?" So I'm very eager to see how parents are going to deal with not being able to empathize with what their children are going through. Do you know what I mean? We all had the same experience going to high school. Our parents — well, being an immigrant, maybe it was slightly different — but your parents could kind of guide you on how to act. Now, it's way different.
59:03	Shaan Puri	I think, for me, it already was different. My parents had an arranged marriage. Imagine their relatability to the dating scene in high school — do they understand any of that stuff? Not really. They grew up in India, so everything was different compared to how we were growing up. I guess that is just sort of the immigrant experience. I don't know — you just do your best to hang on. Check out these two pictures I just texted you. I want to tell you about one more example of this alternative schooling. </FormattedResponse>
59:31	Sam Parr	Okay, so you just sent me a photo of... It looks like a warehouse—someone's building something—and then there's a bunch of kids just hanging out on a field, right?
59:40	Shaan Puri	Yeah, so the first picture is of the warehouse. This is basically my brother-in-law, Sanjeev, who was on the podcast recently. When I went to visit him in Las Vegas this summer, I'm like, "Okay, great." He's been in commercial real estate for a long time; he's a builder and was tremendously successful. He said, "I did something that's kinda crazy." He goes, "So I just bought this building in downtown Las Vegas, like a $10,000,000 building, and I'm gonna..." He was talking about an experience with his oldest son: his son is really smart but bored at school because he already knows the stuff they're teaching, so he disengages. He really loves baseball — he got picked for the national team for his age group — but because he's at school for eight hours a day, by the time he gets off school and it's time for baseball practice he's tired. He'd do practice for an hour or two, then come home, want to chill, eat, play video games, and go to sleep. So he said, "We are gonna homeschool him this year." But instead of homeschooling where the kid just rolls out of bed and says, "Hey, I'm at school now," and the parents have to figure out how to teach, he basically created a WeWork for kids to homeschool. Check this out: what he's doing is called the Grind Academy [in Las Vegas] — basically a sports prep school where you homeschool your kids. The idea is that the kids go to the school and spend two to four hours a day on education using an Alpha School–type software. They're doing their curriculum on a computer or an iPad. There's a teacher there to help if you don't understand something and tutors available to help you get unstuck. When you start your day, you go there, do a morning conditioning workout, then do your school work. You can grab a smoothie or protein shake, go upstairs, finish your school stuff, and then have afternoon, skill-specific, sports-specific training. They offer two-a-day sessions with pro coaches and top-level strength and conditioning coaches.
01:01:59	Sam Parr	"That's crazy."
01:01:59	Shaan Puri	"Doing this for kids."
01:02:00	Sam Parr	It's like IMG. Is that what it's called?
01:02:01	Shaan Puri	Yeah. So he's basically building IMG, but as a private school for middle schoolers — youth sports, youth athletes. I thought, "This is a crazy move." He said, "I would never do this," because he'd actually been in the gym business. He had built an 82-store chain, so he's already been in the gym business and has done well, but he also knows all the pains of scaling a gym. He said, "I didn't just want to create a gym for kids—or a gym at all. For my kids, I got tired of the stuff they're learning in school: it's too slow, too boring, and not relevant to what's going on in the world today." "I'd rather them come in here, learn their math, reading, or writing, and then take a workshop on starting a YouTube channel or a podcast. Learn what's going on with AI, drone tech—what is that stuff? How do you learn about it? Where is the future going? Marketing classes, business classes, even how to open up a lemonade stand." He said, "There are other ways you can learn outside the traditional school model. I think that model's dead." So he created his own private school. The two photos I sent you — that's in 30 days. I went there and I was like, "Oh wow, this is kind of a raw building." He said, "Yeah, I'm opening up in 30 days." I said, "What?"
01:03:16	Sam Parr	Does he have anyone who's enrolled?</FormattedResponse>
01:03:18	Shaan Puri	Yes. So, 40 kids are enrolled right now.
01:03:20	Sam Parr	How much does it cost?
01:03:23	Shaan Puri	I don't know how much it costs exactly. I think the first cohort is, you know, more like $5,000 to $7,000 a year, but it'll get up to—when he has the full school built out and rolling and he's kind of proven his model—it'll be closer to a $20,000-a-year basic prep program.
01:03:42	Sam Parr	This is crazy. This is crazy.
01:03:44	Shaan Puri	Is that... is that insane?
01:03:45	Sam Parr	My kids aren't there yet. This is overwhelming—the whole idea of guides. I've heard this so many times. Ramon sent his kid to a school where they had a guide.
01:03:56	Shaan Puri	Right.
01:03:57	Sam Parr	And I found it very—I'm not open to things very easily. But there could be a better way, because the current way isn't great. This is a very scary thing, because it's your children. It's very overwhelming to learn about all of this, and I don't know what the right way is, but there has to be a better way to do it.
01:04:15	Shaan Puri	"This is visibly stressed out right now."
01:04:17	Sam Parr	Yeah, I'm stressed out about art. Does this stress you out? Because I'm just saying—you care about this like you're A/B testing. You should send one kid one way and one kid the other way. Just test it.
01:04:27	Shaan Puri	"Especially yours — yes, it's a super important thing. But first of all, none of these things are permanent. Our friend who sent their kid to one of these alternatives just took them out after a semester when he didn't feel like it was working for him. It's not the end of the world."
01:04:44	Sam Parr	Dude — one, we have a kid. We have a buddy who went to one of these schools, and I asked him. I go, "Hey, are you..." He was in eighth grade. "Are you gonna ask any girls out?" He's like, "They're all non-binary, so they're not." And I was like, "Oh my God, man — I'm so happy I don't have to deal with this." This is a very stressful... a very stressful situation. I found it very stressful. I was like, "Oh, well, I don't have any advice. I'm sorry... I don't know what to tell you."
01:05:10	Shaan Puri	Dude, the bar is so low. Once you realize—like, once you just go sit in the current status quo—you're like, "Okay, what's my real risk here?" My real risk is so low because this current experience... it's not like I'm trading something that's really good for something that might be better. It's something that's pretty dissatisfying. So it's like, "Well, do you want to try something that could be better?" That sort of logically makes more sense.
01:05:38	Sam Parr	Dude, I went to a do [a party]. Have you—have you ever been around Catholic stuff? Have you, like, hung out with a nun?
01:05:44	Shaan Puri	"No, dude — by the..."
01:05:46	Sam Parr	I went. I went to Catholic.
01:05:47	Shaan Puri	Do school if they're not... Catholic?
01:05:49	Sam Parr	I went to—well, you don't even see them anymore. They're rare. I went to Catholic school. I had nuns teaching me, and they wore the habit [religious clothing]. It was Sister Mary—yeah. They're all like Sister Mary, Sister Theresa, Sister Catherine, and they would hit me if I misbehaved.
01:06:06	Shaan Puri	Yeah, that's pretty... that's a much more radical experiment. It's like, "Oh, we're gonna..."
01:06:11	Sam Parr	Be radical. That's just how it's been done. It's... it's... it's not radical in the sense that it's not new.
01:06:16	Shaan Puri	Yeah, it's not that it's new. I guess what I'm saying is... like.</FormattedResponse>
01:06:19	Sam Parr	Dude, I loved it. I went to an all-boys...
01:06:21	Shaan Puri	Acceptable. Then, I think this should be acceptable, you know.
01:06:23	Sam Parr	I went, "Oh, I agree — I went to an all-boys, college-prep Catholic high school." It sounds fancier than it is. It was very blue-collar.
01:06:31	Shaan Puri	"Was it called Exeter, or something like that?"
01:06:32	Sam Parr	No, no, no. It was called Saint Louis University High School. It was an all-boys school, and it was fantastic. I loved it. I can't say enough good things — I enjoyed my experience so much. I was a jerk in high school, and I would have a teacher kind of get in my face and yell at me if I did something wrong. That was exactly what I needed. I loved that strict disciplinary experience, and it had a big impact on me. The reason I don't have too much empathy for wanting to change is because I enjoyed my experience. Had I gone to a public school, I think it would have been a lot different. I can't imagine a public school with five or six thousand kids — I feel like I would be so intimidated by that idea.
01:07:13	Shaan Puri	Right. I mean, I went to a high school in Houston, Texas that was like that—about 4,000 kids. I remember if you just walked into the bathroom, there was basically an ear-piercing parlor in there. They would just give piercings in the bathroom; it was insane.
01:07:27	Sam Parr	"Dude, it sounds like prison."
01:07:29	Shaan Puri	There were scheduled fights—basically just scheduled fights. It was like, "Oh, these guys are going to fight these guys today," and it felt pretty weak. Then it was like UFC 202 [spoken: "two hundred two zero two"]—"Alright, it's happening this week."
01:07:40	Sam Parr	"Dude, my experience was so harmonious."
01:07:42	Shaan Puri	Halfway through high school, my parents shipped me off to China. We all moved to Beijing, and I finished high school at the International School of Beijing. Now I'm in a 150-person, expat-only international school. Did they do that so I could have, like, two totally different experiences, you know?
01:08:00	Sam Parr	"Was the second one good?"
01:08:01	Shaan Puri	Oh, it was amazing. The best thing that happened to me was to have that. Yeah. Why? Well... first, I needed a fresh start.
01:08:08	Sam Parr	Was it Chinese kids or Americans?</FormattedResponse>
01:08:09	Shaan Puri	No, it was mostly a mix, because you had to have a foreign passport to attend.
01:08:15	Sam Parr	Got it.
01:08:15	Shaan Puri	You couldn't be a Chinese local and attend, no matter how much money you had. You had to have enough money—or dual [citizenship]—you had to have a passport from Singapore or somewhere else to come. A lot of the kids were Asian because maybe they were from Korea, Japan, etc. There were also many Australians, Europeans, Americans, and so on. I mean, it was great for me only because it was a change of environment. Even if the environment is not better, it's great because it gives you a blank—a clean slate.
01:08:42	Sam Parr	It's also probably intimidating, you know.</FormattedResponse>
01:08:44	Shaan Puri	To just be like, "Oh, okay, cool" — socially I was like this before, but now I could be different. Sports-wise, here's what I was doing before and here's what I'm doing now. Whatever — you could do it all there. I don't know... it was just a better school overall. There was just no— I don't know how to explain it. It was like everything was higher quality: the food was higher quality, the teachers were higher quality, the classes were higher quality.
01:09:09	Sam Parr	Oh yeah, you're with a bunch of it. It was a rich kid's.
01:09:11	Shaan Puri	School was a rich kids' school. Like—what do you want? It's gonna be that, you know. And all the companies pay for it, so the parents don't usually pay. When the company moves you, they're like, "Alright, we're taking your kids out of, you know, an American public school or whatever. We'll have to give you an equivalent English schooling experience over there." So the companies pay for it.
01:09:31	Sam Parr	"That's pretty sick. I would — I've dreamed of moving away for a year or two with my children. I think that would be awesome. That's pretty badass."
01:09:39	Shaan Puri	I would highly, highly, highly recommend it. I think it's one of the best things anybody could do: go...
01:09:43	Sam Parr	China's not on the list. China's not on the—China's not on the... that's not on the list. But, you know, Paris is pretty dope. Or, yeah, something like that. What Scott Galloway said: "America's the best place to make money; Europe's the best place to spend it." Yeah, so that sounds pretty good.
01:09:57	Shaan Puri	Exactly.
01:09:58	Sam Parr	Alright, that's it. That's it. Alright, that was a great pod. Someone in the comments said, "Sam and Sean — we're so... we like these guests and all that stuff, but we just want brainstorming. We just want old-school ideas, old-school episodes." That's what this episode was. Hope you enjoyed it. Alright, that's the pod.

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