This guy made Millions by inventing the $1 Menu

- September 10, 2025 (6 months ago) • 55:54

Transcript

Start Time	Speaker	Text
00:00	Shaan Puri	Alright, Sam — I got a "billy of the week" for you. I'm excited about it. I got goosebumps thinking about this guy: Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Thomas Edison. Look, if those guys were going on a road trip but there's only one set of keys, they would toss it to this guy. He would get to drive. His name is Tom Ryan. Tom Ryan is basically the Leonardo da Vinci of calories.
00:29	Sam Parr	Okay.
00:30	Shaan Puri	This is a guy who has invented some of the most iconic foods in history. He invented the McGriddle. He invented stuffed-crust cheese pizza. He invented Smashburger (the chain). He invented the beef dip sandwich at Quiznos. This guy has just been inventing things in the food category—the McFlurry. He's been inventing things for decades, and he is like the godfather of food science. So I want to tell you a little bit about this guy.
00:58	Sam Parr	Okay, I'm interested because I didn't think that, like, dipping a sandwich in au jus — I didn't think that was, like, an invention. And so I'm...
01:04	Shaan Puri	Okay. So, some of these things I'm using the word invention a little liberally, right? Some of them he genuinely invented — meaning nobody had done that before. Some of it is that he created that product at that company, which was not previously a product. So sometimes it might be like, "Oh, well, somebody else had the idea of a sweet sandwich." Okay, but cool: he invented the McGriddle. It's a specific thing that he invented that made it work, and here's why.
01:31	Sam Parr	But can we—can we start by me asking, "How'd you even discover this? Were you... on the McGriddle Wikipedia page?"
01:38	Shaan Puri	Because, you know, when you're eating something and it's so good, you're like, "I'd like to pay homage. Who's the man who invented this? I'd like to put some flowers on his tombstone." That's not exactly what happened. I saw TikTok about this guy and I was like, "There's no way one guy did all this." </FormattedResponse>
01:51	Sam Parr	Okay.
01:51	Shaan Puri	Alright, so this guy basically goes to college. When he's there he has a girlfriend who has taken a food science class, so she convinces him to take it. He goes and immediately falls in love. He’s like, "Oh my God, I didn't even realize there's a whole science behind things like ketchup and ice cream." There's literally chemistry, but then there's also brain science — psychology — the tongue science of what flavors work. He not only studies food science, he then gets a master's in lipid toxicology. So this guy is just studying the science of fat. I would say he deserves — I don't know what the equivalent of the Nobel Prize is for obesity, but that's what this guy deserves. He goes and gets a job at Duncan Hines. He then works at Jif, where he pioneers a lot of their peanut butter work and does some really great peanut butter development.
02:46	Sam Parr	The best work.
02:47	Shaan Puri	Yeah. He's like one of those OpenAI researchers who get poached from lab to lab. That was him going from the Heinz food lab to the Jif food lab. Then he gets a call from Pizza Hut and they recruit him as Head of New Products because he had this reputation—he was launching new products at Jif, so he became known as this sort of mad genius. A friend tells him when he gets the job at Pizza Hut. He says, "Dude, I'm so sorry." Then: "That's a tough position, man. Everything's already been done in pizza—you're doomed. Pizza's a solved problem." The guy recalls, "That pissed me off." He says it didn't upset him because the friend doubted him, but because a lot of the world thinks like that: that the world is full of solved problems. He doesn't think like that. He thinks there's always an opportunity. So he goes into research and studies how people eat pizza. Two things are very clear to him after studying consumer behavior: - Cheese is the value driver: the more cheese, the better. There's really no limit to the amount of cheese people are willing to have on their pizza. - The dogs eat the crust: the crust is a necessary part because you need a handle to hold the pizza, but it's the worst part—people just give it to the dog. He decides, "I need to put cheese in the crust." He goes to his team and they suggest, "We'll just put some cheese on top of the crust—it's great." He replies, "No. That doesn't have the wow factor. It has to feel different. It can't just be that we've added cheese to the crust. It has to be something marketable." So they figure out how to put cheese inside the crust, which becomes a whole physics problem. The first one he made "tasted pretty good but looked like a bike tire"—he burned the outer crust; it was this fat, charred thing. He had to figure out how to cook the pizza so you can have gooey cheese in the crust without burning it. They do the work: special dough, a special pan, and they get it to work. It becomes a huge hit. He's also a marketing genius. He says, "You know what—we don't need to do something completely new; we need to market it right." Then he asks, "Have you ever seen this Malcolm Gladwell talk that he gives as his big TED talk about the perfect pastas?" Have you seen this?
05:05	Sam Parr	"No, that sounds great. What is it?"
05:07	Shaan Puri	So it's Malcolm Gladwell's famous TED talk from back in the day, when he was, you know, the man who wrote The Tipping Point and others. He basically talks about another food scientist who got hired by a pasta sauce company — Ragu (or a similar company). They asked him to figure out the "perfect pasta sauce." Should it have chunks or be smooth? Should it have herbs or be plain? Should it have cheese? What is the perfect pasta sauce? The big takeaway — the spoiler of the TED talk — is that the guy discovers there is no single perfect pasta sauce. There are only perfect pasta sauces for different people. Meaning, you cluster people into four or five categories. If you like chunks, give you way more chunks than you're currently getting — you actually want a lot more. If you like spice, make it much spicier — today's version is too mild. If you like cheese, put cheese on it. Basically, the middle ground they tried to serve everyone wasn't working. They needed to go to extremes. The same guy discovers the same thing in pizza: he creates a Meat Lovers pizza, a Pepperoni Lovers pizza, a Cheese Lovers pizza — the "Lovers" line of pizzas — and that becomes a huge success. He ends up crushing it at Pizza Hut.
06:16	Sam Parr	If all this sounds silly—like I'm laughing—this is not silly. This is great. This is actually... and this is really hard to do in a corporate setting: to convince someone is [incomplete thought]. </FormattedResponse>
06:25	Shaan Puri	True inventions, true innovations. I'm not—yeah, I'm laughing, but because legit, this is... this is moving billions of dollars of product, right? And it's hitting millions of customers. Also, by the way, we have friends that work at Facebook and Google, and they're like, "Yeah, I'm optimizing the marketplace banner ads to be, like, you know, whatever." It's like—you were talking about this with, I think, your wife.
06:47	Sam Parr	It was like this: my wife worked on the team trying to put stickers on photos, and she said, "If the dog's tongue is out of the mouth, the click-through rate is 5%; if it's in the mouth, it's only 1%."
07:01	Shaan Puri	Right, and there's definitely a cynical side to this, which is that our world's greatest minds are basically just fine-tuning knobs inside of giant slot machines. That's really what's happening inside most big tech companies and most big food companies. But hey — I'm not a hater. Let me just see some positive things about this. Okay, so he gets the call. He's at Pizza Hut; he's crushing it. He creates all those products. Ring ring. "Hello? Yeah, this is Tom speaking." On the other side: "Ronald? Is that you?" And Ronald McDonald calls. He gets called up to the biggest of the big leagues. He gets called by McDonald's. McDonald's says, "We need you."
07:38	Sam Parr	Is he a kid right now, or is he, like...?
07:40	Shaan Puri	Grown-ass man. Okay, so he has a great framework, by the way. One of his frameworks answers the question: How do you invent? Because Odyssey is one of the more creative inventors of our lifetime, and people ask, "How do you invent it?" He goes, "I try to get inside the mind of an ambitious 32-year-old." He's like, basically, when you're 32 you have money, you have taste, so you kind of know what you like and what you don't like. But you're still open-minded; you're not closed off to the world, and you're not easily swayed by every latest trend. You're still with it, and you're still part of every major trend that has staying power. So he's like, "I study the mind of an ambitious 32-year-old." </FormattedResponse>
08:26	Sam Parr	Okay.
08:26	Shaan Puri	He works pretty great. He gets a call from McDonald's; he goes there and they're like, "Alright, where's the opportunity?" He's like, "Alright, let's look at breakfast." They start looking at breakfast. He's like, "Alright, you got coffee—check. You have all your savory foods—check. You've got nothing sweet." He starts thinking and says, "We need French toast. We need pancakes." Then he's like, "Oh, this is average, first-level thinking—ew, get out of the room." He says, "No, no, no, what are we really gonna do?" He's a master of constraints. He asks, "How do we take Denny's Grand Slam breakfast and put it in your hand?" They're like, "What?" He's like, "I want an entire Grand Slam breakfast that will just fit in your hand, because that's what McDonald's does."
09:17	Sam Parr	"This guy sounds like a South Park character."
09:22	Shaan Puri	And so he creates the McGriddle, which is exactly that: a sweet breakfast item that fits in your hand and "pops off." The McGriddle becomes a huge hit. McDonald's breakfast surges on the back of this and creates billions of dollars in market cap. And all because he had to do some invention. He said, "Well, we can't have this messy, drippy syrup — this sticky sandwich." He thought, "I can't put a sticky thing in your hand; then your whole day is ruined and you're not coming back the next day." I've never had a McGriddle. Have you had one?
09:54	Sam Parr	Hell yeah. Yeah, of course there — but you've never had a McGriddle. </FormattedResponse>
09:57	Shaan Puri	"I've never had a McGriddle."
09:58	Sam Parr	Are you, like, "This is the greatest... like, the greatest America"?</FormattedResponse>
10:03	Shaan Puri	One of those caves? Where have you been?
10:07	Sam Parr	I thought.
10:07	Shaan Puri	The war was still going on. Yeah... what the...</FormattedResponse>
10:09	Sam Parr	Hell, man. This is the best. They're the best.
10:12	Shaan Puri	Honestly, I never even considered it. But after this—after this, I'm so in. Apparently there's... so, you tell me. I don't know. Is it not like covered in syrup? And actually, there's something called syrup crystals that are inside the pancake.
10:24	Sam Parr	Little, little balls of sugary syrup. It's wonderful, and it mixes perfectly with the salty sausage.
10:32	Shaan Puri	Okay, so that's it. That's what he did. Tom does it. So he does that—he creates, and you don't.
10:36	Sam Parr	Get the syrup without a mess on your hand. Alright. A lot of people will talk about how you need $1,000,000 and three years of experience to start a business — nonsense. If you listen to at least one episode of this podcast, you know that's completely not true. My last company, The Hustle, we grew to something like $17–$18 million in revenue. I started it with about $300. My current company, Hampton, does over $10 million in revenue. I started it with actually no money — maybe $29 or something like that. Nothing. 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. And so, my old company, The Hustle, 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.
11:34	Shaan Puri	And now you might be thinking, "Alright—what's he really about? Is he just in this for himself? Is he an elite? Is he one of those elites that I should hate? Or is he a man of the people?" Well, he's a man of the people. He created the dollar menu—the dollar menu. Dude, what an iconic, what an iconic move.
11:53	Sam Parr	"Is he an employee at McDonald's right now, or is he an entrepreneur?" "No — I mean, in the story." </FormattedResponse>
12:00	Shaan Puri	"In the story—at this point, of course, that's what he did."
12:02	Sam Parr	"He’s a mercenary, a hired gun. He drops in like a one-man Navy SEAL, nails the target, and bounces after a handful of years."
12:11	Shaan Puri	I don't know why there's no movie about this guy yet. Right? I don't want to see Jason Bourne — I want to see Tom Wright.
12:19	Sam Parr	The only question we have is: does he come in via parachute, or do they storm the beach on a boat? What's he going to do? Yeah — the story's been told.
12:27	Shaan Puri	A hot dog truck barges in, so he creates the dollar menu, creates the McFlurry, and then he goes to Quiznos. Quiznos poaches him. He does a little bit of work there, but the owner of Quiznos is like, "Yeah, this is the guy." So he says, "Forget Quiznos—let's just create a whole new concept together," and they create Smashburger together. I don't know if you've paid attention, but as a former QSR operator myself, I have a lot of respect and esteem for Smashburger.
12:52	Sam Parr	Smash burger is just—it's just thin. I mean, it's a burger that, when you grill it, you put the meat... you stick the thing in the metal into the meat, right? You smash it.
13:01	Shaan Puri	It's kind of like a thin-crust pizza, but for burgers. They kind of smash the burger, which gives it more of a char on both sides.
13:09	Sam Parr	Which is better for them, too, because it's less meat.
13:11	Shaan Puri	Well, I think it's the same. It just gets wider.
13:13	Sam Parr	Got it. Okay.
13:14	Shaan Puri	"But it tastes better." Yeah, I think... okay. So they create "smash burger" and become successful. What a prolific career for this guy, and what a track record. Who has dominated their industry the way this man has dominated fast-food science? Fast-food food science—pretty inspiring.
13:32	Sam Parr	When I Googled his name, it came up with Joboli Foods Corporation. Is he associated with that?
13:38	Shaan Puri	Yeah, I don't know what that is. He's got, like, new stuff that he's doing. He did, like, a new—like a sports-bar type of deal. He's got Smash. He was the CEO of Smashburger for a while. I don't know what all he's doing now, but they were like, "You wanna retire?" He's like, "Retire? I wake up every day. I wake up every day—I'm trying to dominate the palate. You think I wanna go play golf? What, what do you think this is?"
14:01	Sam Parr	Have you googled him? He's a beautiful man. He's just got the most beautiful head of hair I've seen in a long time.
14:08	Shaan Puri	He looks like a British reporter who covers sports. He looks like that guy.
14:14	Sam Parr	In the nineties, in every rom-com, the woman was vying for an editor-in-chief job at Vogue or something like that...
14:22	Shaan Puri	He looks like that woman.
14:23	Sam Parr	Well, no. He—he looks like the second character now. The second character is a British—or California—record-label executive. So they work in A&R, or they're running the label, and they miss the kids' baseball game because they have to check out this band, right? He looks like that character. He looks like the record-label executive from every '90s rom-com movie. Is he like this alpha, "get-after-it" type of guy, or is he like a kooky, forgetful professor who wears two mismatched socks?
14:56	Shaan Puri	Okay, that I don't know. But he's an alpha in my mind. He's an alpha to me; I'm gladly a beta to him. This guy's amazing. Did I tell you, by the way... [unclear phrase: "food packed in the day"]? When I was doing my sushi restaurant chain, we went to, you know, these industry conferences that you just sometimes go to. We went to FarmCon — it's like a farmers' conference. Well, I went to a food version of this. I don't know if you've ever been to any of these quirky industry trade-show conferences, but they're so funny, dude. So I...
15:25	Sam Parr	I went to INBOUND — HubSpot's inbound marketing conference.
15:30	Shaan Puri	"Else, come on up next week."
15:31	Sam Parr	"Yeah. You mean like that? There's a whole talk on converting MQLs [marketing-qualified leads] to SQLs [sales-qualified leads]."
15:40	Shaan Puri	Yeah, like that. I went to this thing because there's QSR Magazine [Quick Service Restaurant]. There's a pre-service magazine and we applied. We're like, "Hey, we really want to go to the conference—can you give us free tickets?" They were like, "Yeah." So we go, and you know what the icebreaker was? When you come in the lobby they had three tables set up with just dirty dishes, like a restaurant table. It was a "speed busing competition." You would go with three other people and you'd have to try to buss the table as fast as you can, and whoever had, like...
16:16	Sam Parr	"That's pretty good."
16:16	Shaan Puri	The best bus... it basically succeeded. The one that won the contest got a key chain or something like that. It was amazing. The guy who organized it—his name was literally Tom Hamburger. It was unreal.
16:27	Sam Parr	Dude, this is—we've done 750+ episodes of MFM, I think, and this happens a lot. Many people don't realize that for the majority of episodes, you and I don't talk in advance; we like to surprise each other on air with the topic. This is funny: what you're saying is very similar to the topic I had brought. Okay—what've you got? This can all actually be related, and I have what I think could be a nice little bow at the end on how this could be good for entrepreneurs or business owners listening. I found a photo of a billboard I saw recently that stopped me in my tracks, so I want you to look at this billboard and tell me what it [is], okay?
17:05	Shaan Puri	So it says "boiled cod," and it's a picture of cod. Slightly more protein per calorie than our bars — David, the David bar. </FormattedResponse>
17:13	Sam Parr	You this.
17:14	Shaan Puri	No. Amazing.
17:15	Sam Parr	Okay, so I want to tell you a story about this, and I want to explain a little bit of nerdy marketing about why it works. The story behind this: we had Peter Rahal on the podcast, I think six months ago. Peter was the guy who started RXBAR in his mom's basement, and he eventually sold it for about $650 million—only six years after starting.
17:36	Shaan Puri	By the way, the episode he did with us was awesome. If you want a fun episode, listen to that one. He basically tells the story of how he built RXBAR and how he's building David Bar. He also had four or five other ideas about categories: if he were going to enter a category, these are the types of categories he looks at and how he would attack them. That's what you always want from an entrepreneur with expertise who comes on the pod—tell me how you did it, tell me what you're doing now. But okay, that's great for you. What about for me? Do you have specific ideas and a specific approach I can learn from for the current white space?
18:13	Sam Parr	He actually had a third part of that: he had a beautiful attitude — not "beautiful" in the sense of being fun to be around, but more Napoleon-like. He had this "conquer the world" energy that I thought was actually kind of cool. Very intense energy. I thought that was interesting. When he came on, he told us a story about RXBAR. He also told a story about David's protein bars — I don't think David had launched them at that time. [I have to give a shout-out to The New York Times Daily; I'm using them as a source for this.] The background behind David is this: with RXBAR, the idea was a natural bar made out of, I think, dates, and it had a very small amount of protein. David noticed and thought, "If I had more protein in this bar, I could approach a larger market and create something a lot bigger." So David found something called EPG — it's a delivery mechanism for protein. Eventually, David's company actually bought the company that owns the patent for EPG. EPG is a type of chemical that allows protein to be delivered to you faster.
19:23	Shaan Puri	So, let me just ask this question: the doc here says it's a modified fat called EPG, which delivers the texture of fat but it passes through your body with 92% fewer calories. Is this...? Remember when Paul Verlaki came on and he was like, "Diet Coke is amazing," and he said, "I just wanted to make, like, Diet Coke for any food." So it's food that tastes really good but it basically just passes straight through your body — it can't be absorbed and therefore doesn't make you fat. Is that what this is basically? Like, some of it tastes good; you could put it in a bar, but because it can't be absorbed by your body, it doesn't have the sort of caloric impact. Is that what it is?
20:07	Sam Parr	So, basically, it's one of the most efficient ways to get tons and tons of protein into your body per calorie. The way they do that is via EPG, which is an incredibly ultra-processed food. I don't know if that's what you're describing, but the criticisms for David — of which we had Justin Mares on the podcast; he's one — he was a very loud, vocal critic of this. He has basically said, "David may get you lots and lots of protein, but it's incredibly ultra-processed." There's an argument as to why that's not good because this chemical—or whatever you want to call it—EPG. There are a lot of people who want to criticize it and say it's bad. I'm not going to place judgment on either side; I'm just telling you there are two sides to this argument, which is what I'm going to get to. But people loved it. And so David—is it even two years old yet?
21:00	Shaan Puri	Yeah, I think it's about one year old, roughly, because he was on the podcast about a year ago. I think it was just about to launch—or had just launched.
21:07	Sam Parr	This year, they're going to do close to $200,000,000 in sales in roughly the second year of business.
21:13	Shaan Puri	They're on.
21:13	Sam Parr	A tear—they did a million dollars in the first week of sales. If you go to any store right now—I don't know what it's like in California—but any store in New York, they're everywhere. David protein bars are everywhere, and they've crushed it on the marketing in particular. They've crushed it on the product side, but they've really killed it on the marketing. So when I saw this sign, "boil cod," it stopped me in my tracks. The reason it stopped me is I'm rereading this book. We had Tim Ferriss on the podcast and he had mentioned this book that he loved. It was called The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing. "Have you ever—have you ever read of that?"
21:44	Shaan Puri	I haven't read it yet.
21:46	Sam Parr	It was one of those things where I skimmed it when I was younger, but when we had him on, he said it was a great book. I thought, you know, I should actually sit down and read it. It's really short — only 100 pages — so you can basically read it in one or two sittings. One of the laws is called the Law of the Opposite, and the reason this is relevant to the story you just told is because it explains the science and methodology behind 22 different ways to stand out and be different. The book focuses on something that's not better but different. The Law of the Opposite states that if you're not the leader of a category, your strategy is dictated by the leader. That means it's better not to try to be better than the leader, but to be the opposite. Customers already have the leader's position locked in their minds, and you win by framing yourself as an alternative. The key is to embrace the differences and often exaggerate them. The reason this works is that marketing is a battle of perceptions, not products. The challenger doesn't need to disprove the leader; they need to define themselves as the antidote — meaning, "we are not them; we're the other choice." This is interesting because David took the criticisms about them being an ultra-processed food and ran toward the fire. On their website, I thought it was a joke. What they're doing is positioning themselves as an alternative to natural foods — they're saying, "yeah, natural frozen cod."
23:09	Shaan Puri	Better.
23:09	Sam Parr	"For, that's the best. That's it—it's definitely the best. But it's disgusting. Who the hell wants to eat that? Eat this other thing that tastes good. It's just a little bit less good in terms of protein per calorie, but you're actually going to be able to consume this." </FormattedResponse>
23:26	Shaan Puri	"They're actually selling."
23:27	Sam Parr	So that's not going to say, "You go to their website; they sell it." They're selling it. And so, this is a masterclass on how to handle this situation.
23:37	Shaan Puri	By the way, on the site it's their cod — they're wild‑caught cod. It's about 23 grams of protein, 100 calories, no sugar. You can get it: four fillets, flash‑frozen. Add to cart. Then there's all their bars — chocolate chip cookie dough, peanut butter chunk — all sold out. So here's all the sold‑out bars; here's cod fully available. We got a lot of this stuff still in stock.
23:59	Sam Parr	And there's a bunch of examples of the law of opposites. Do you remember— I don't know if you remember this as a kid— but you would see commercials for "Avis." Do you remember Avis? </FormattedResponse>
24:07	Shaan Puri	Yeah, the rental car.
24:08	Sam Parr	Yeah. So basically, Avis was number two in the market, and Hertz was the biggest company by far. Avis had this amazing brand campaign where they said, "We're number two, so we try harder." That was their campaign — like, we know we're number two; we're going to try harder. That's another example of the law of opposite. But David has executed this flawlessly, and this is an amazing thing to lean into — and this is not something that... like...
24:33	Shaan Puri	Dude, I'm just kicking myself because when he came on I literally fell in love with the guy. I was like, "I love this guy's intensity, I love this guy's honesty, I love his approach." He's clearly an expert in this field, in this industry—he knows how to attack this. It was so obvious that they had nailed the branding and packaging of the bar. So I'm just mad that I didn't push to try to invest in this thing and be like, "Hey, I'm so bullish on this." It has played out exactly as I would have guessed.
24:59	Sam Parr	"I think you go... I— I think we said, 'What's your goal?' He goes, 'Well, I actually think we're going to expand the TAM [total addressable market], and I think that this is going to be a $10 billion company.'"
25:08	Shaan Puri	Yeah, that's crazy. I like their copy on their site: "We thank our predecessors in the protein industry. We'll take it from here."
25:15	Sam Parr	It's so good, right? They nail it on branding. They nail a bunch of stuff. When I saw this COD billboard, I was like, "Oh, that's so good. That's exactly what the book The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing mentioned with the Law of Opposites," and they completely nailed it. If you are a small business owner, very similar to what this guy Tom Ryan did, I would highly recommend reading this book, then downloading it and uploading it to ChatGPT. It's so cool and interesting for generating ideas on your product and your positioning. What he was explaining about the McRiddle and all that stuff is very, very similar to this: the goal is not to be better — the goal is to be different. A meat-lovers pizza isn't particularly better; it's remarkably different than anything else.
26:02	Shaan Puri	Yes. All right, let's do another topic. Okay — I have a little stock market thing. Can I do a stock thing?
26:13	Sam Parr	Yeah, is there pretty any?
26:15	Shaan Puri	Stupid and dangerous, because most likely it's just going to be wrong and get ripped apart here.
26:20	Sam Parr	Not entirely. So, the last time we talked about this type of stuff, you picked—so, disclosure: we're idiots. Don't do anything we're saying. The last time, though, you picked UFC.
26:32	Shaan Puri	Yeah, so we did an episode called Stockapalooza — I think about a year ago. I don't remember exactly when that was. The idea was that Sam and I would go research and we'd just try to pick a stock. We tried to make a call similar to the "some conference" format, where you try to find a company that you would believe in as an outperformer, and then make your case. I picked TKO, which is the parent company of UFC and WWE. And you picked what — Ferrari?
26:58	Sam Parr	Ferrari. Ferrari. </FormattedResponse>
27:00	Shaan Puri	I think — I believe we did that episode on 02/12/2024. Let's see how the stock has performed since then. The stock at that time was trading at $85, and it's currently at $185. So, you know, up... what is that, over 100%? 117%.
27:23	Sam Parr	"Did you put any of your money into it?"
27:25	Shaan Puri	Of course not, bro. You think I'm here to make money? What's going on? Not because—not for any particular reason. I was just lazy; I didn't pay attention. So anyway, that pick has performed well. I don't think Ferrari's done well; I think Ferrari's down about 5%, so I'm better than you. So let me—let me... you just stay quiet for a minute. Let me just do this segment here. You can give a pick that's bad after this. I was hanging out with somebody recently who's a guest on the podcast — super successful, like a billionaire-type of dude. I asked him two questions. One was, "What would you be doing right now?" The other was, "What would be your AI play if you were young and broke but wanted to do something with AI?" He gave a pretty interesting answer: > "I would go find a business owner who's built a successful book of business — let's say it's in insurance or home mortgages, some nice, juicy industry — and the owner kind of knows, 'Oh, AI probably could... I could probably benefit from AI in my company.'"
28:27	Sam Parr	"But who cares — I'm 60."
28:28	Shaan Puri	But I'm 60. I'm too old to actually figure this stuff out and go to... He said, "I would go to them. I would go to as many of those guys as I can and try to build up a relationship and be like, 'Hey, I will do all of the work to use AI to cut our costs internally. I can automate a bunch of processes and jobs and whatnot. I can increase our accuracy and decrease our costs. If I do that, can you basically carve me out 10% of this business? If I successfully do it, I'll do it totally on contingency.'" "He continued, 'Here's the deal: we can measure the OPEX change that I'm going to make in this business if you just give me free rein for, you know, 12 months.' He said it's the fastest way to kind of own a piece. And then I would try to, in that agreement, maybe create an option to buy the majority of the business at a fair value if I can pull that off." He said, "I thought that was interesting." On the first thing. On the second thing he was talking about, he said, "Yeah... SpaceX. I just think it's unbelievable that there's any counterargument to SpaceX. SpaceX is the most defensible company in the history of humanity. What's the second-best SpaceX? Is there anybody, you know... there are so few companies that can even compete with SpaceX. Think about how monumentally difficult it would be to compete with SpaceX. You'd have to literally get into the rocket business — and not just the rocket business, the reusable rocket business. Not only that, but to do it and be competitive, you know, competing for these giant government contracts, you have to, you know, successfully demonstrate... safe launches over a...?" </FormattedResponse>
30:04	Shaan Puri	A lot of the time he's like, "SpaceX is so unbelievably defensible. I think it's the safest place to put money." I thought that was kind of interesting — just like generational defensibility. Really, the question is: who is set up over the next 20 years? Who just has an incredibly competitive position for the next 20 years? I took that frame. None of these names are unpopular, so I'm not giving you some obscure pick. This is my honest take: I'm basically trying to get into all of these companies because I think over a 20-year horizon they have a combination of advantages. First, they have a tailwind behind them — the wind is in their sails. They're in the right place at the right time; clearly the industries they're in and the tech wave they're surfing is the big tech wave we're going to see play out over 20 years. Second, they don't have much competition, which was my case for the TKO stock pick as well. I was like, "There's no competition to UFC and there's no competition to WWE." The number-two MMA promotions — whether it's PFL or Bellator — these were companies that were literally on the brink of bankruptcy. They're not just in second place; they're literally 100 or 1,000 times smaller and behind. Because of that network effect, they have no chance to ever catch up.
31:31	Sam Parr	UFC is a company worth tens of billions of dollars, and the second-best one. They get in trouble for not being able to make payroll.
31:40	Shaan Puri	Literally, yeah. It's like a rich guy's hobby—typically. Yeah, it's everywhere.
31:44	Sam Parr	"Close. It's like LeBron versus the freshman team—it's not even in the same category."
31:50	Shaan Puri	And so, when you're in that "category of one," it's a pretty big deal. You have growth behind you, but the fact that there's just no competition... same thing with WWE—there's really no competition to WWE. And, of course, since then they both signed major, major streaming deals, way bigger than, you know, people thought they would sign — like billion-dollar-a-year streaming deals. </FormattedResponse>
32:09	Sam Parr	"But what does this have to do with the first part of AI?"
32:12	Shaan Puri	Oh, the AI part—that was separate. Alright, so now: here are five other companies I think are extremely well positioned. The first is a company that I've been— I was wrong about. I owned the stock very early on, and I got so mad during the GameStop thing that I sold out of principle. I'm never gonna let those stupid principles in my...
32:28	Sam Parr	Those are, again, bad ways. They tend to give you bad directions, like "en route to making money."
32:35	Shaan Puri	My big moral stand didn't seem to hurt this company. So, Robinhood was the company I owned the stock in when it was, like, I don't know—$5, $7, whatever it was. It was really early on, like right when it IPO'd basically. It was, like, actually after the IPO it kind of dipped or something. And when the GameStop thing happened, and they basically shut off the ability to buy but continued to let people sell GameStop, I was like, "That is the most corrupt thing I've ever seen."
33:00	Sam Parr	Same.
33:00	Shaan Puri	And it pissed me off so much that I was like, "F these guys — don't I trust these guys? I'm out." Since then, they've basically proceeded to build what's clearly like Morgan Stanley for the next generation. The tailwind behind Robinhood is the following: there's some absurd amount of wealth — I don't know what it is, like $20 trillion, $50 trillion — some stupid number with "trillion" behind it that's just going to get transferred from the parents, you know, boomers, to millennials or Gen Z over the next twenty, thirty years. So the question is: as that money gets handed down, what will those people do with it? It's pretty clear that if you're Gen Z or a millennial, the platforms you trust and gravitate toward for financial services when you have small check deposits is Robinhood. Then it's like, "Great — we have crypto, we have 401(k)s, we have home mortgages, we got credit cards." It's like, "What else do you want?"
33:55	Sam Parr	Wait — they do? They do all those.
33:57	Shaan Puri	They have prediction markets, which is a code word for sports betting and gambling. You could gamble on there; you could buy crypto, buy stocks, or buy fractional shares of private companies. You could do margin trading and options trading. If you want to get really degenerate, you can open a 401(k) with them, get a Robinhood Gold card and use it as your credit card, and even get a home mortgage. It's an unbelievable amount of financial products they've rolled out—all in one app. It's basically this financial super app that Gen Z and millennials are most comfortable with, and as the wealth transfer happens they'll be the beneficiaries of that. I think in the next 20 years they're extremely well positioned.
34:35	Sam Parr	So, Austin Rief, the founder of Morning Brew—one of my closest buddies—has been texting me for the past six months... maybe longer, to be honest.
34:43	Shaan Puri	He’s been texting me about this too. In fact, he’s the only reason I bought it. I did buy it back again, like maybe six months ago. I was about to have a call with him and he had been talking about Robert. He’s kicking himself because he doesn’t own any. It was like his call. He was like, “It’s gonna be great. I’m just waiting for a dip.” The dip never came, and he doesn’t own any of it. It’s basically ripped up like 5x–7x since he’s been wanting to buy.
35:06	Sam Parr	Yeah, he's been talking about it constantly.
35:07	Shaan Puri	I had to call him. So, before the call I bought $100,000 of Robinhood stock just so I could get on the call as a Robinhood shareholder and say, "Oh, thank you for the tip." Since then it's up about 40%. He's responsible for my Robinhood conviction, even though he doesn't own any of it now.
35:21	Sam Parr	Yeah, and I think his reasoning — I forget what it was exactly, or he had more than one — but one of the points was about young people. He owns a company called — or he did own — Morning Brew, which probably had about 200 employees. A lot of them were 23-year-old, $100,000–$150,000–earning people. He was like: > "My staff — that's the default — they all have 100% of their net worth in Robinhood, right? And that is only going to continue to grow. Because they keep their money in there, it's just gonna keep on growing. This company is unstoppable." He's been bragging about that, or calling that, for maybe a year and a half, and so he's absolutely nailed it. And I agree with you: I did not buy into that argument at all. I thought Robinhood was silly. I would — I thought, on principle, I'm not on board with what these...
36:09	Shaan Puri	Guys, you're more of a Schwab-type of guy, I feel like. When it comes to money, you want boring. You want a bow tie. You want, you know, a man with a briefcase — that's what you want.
36:20	Sam Parr	Well, you know, I potentially have a lot of money, and I didn't want to keep it in an app. Thinking about keeping it in an app was kind of nerve‑wracking. The interface was so cute that I thought they cared more about looks. I was like, "I want the ugliest website that's got the biggest vault."
36:37	Shaan Puri	"But you didn't want to keep it in an app, as if it's a shoebox. Where do you think the money is kept in any of these? If it was a website, would that be better? What did you want?"
36:45	Sam Parr	I wanted the "Forgot password" button to be hidden. I didn't want someone to... I don't know. It was too user-friendly.
36:51	Shaan Puri	Yeah, if it's too user-friendly to me.
36:54	Sam Parr	That means it's easily hackable. That was the issue — it was too good. It's like you find good deals on Craigslist because you're finding something interesting that no one else uses. Robinhood scared me.
37:04	Shaan Puri	Honestly, I get it — I actually get what you're talking about. I felt the same. I was like, "I don't want to keep huge amounts of money in this app."
37:10	Sam Parr	But I did keep some. I had some money — I think I bought crypto on it before. For years they did this thing where instead of giving you Uber credit for a new ride, if you referred someone to a new rider they gave you $10. Robinhood had this amazing thing where you could do a "scratch-off." You could pick option one, two, or three (which, obviously, isn't actually one, two, three — it's all the same) and they would give you stock. So, I owned...
37:31	Shaan Puri	"Like, $10 of stock." </FormattedResponse>
37:32	Sam Parr	Yeah. I owned about $10 of Ford, and that is now worth more because I did this, you know, right when they launched. And so I like Robinhood as a company. I just Googled it— is it true they had $1.1 billion in profit on $3 billion in revenue?
37:47	Shaan Puri	Yeah. Basically, when interest rates went up, all of the financial services companies started printing money. Now, all the money that they hold — they're able to... and the money that they lend out is at high rates, but the money they hold is earning 4–5% on their float, which is pretty crazy. So they're, you know, very interest-rate dependent right now. By the way, the criticism for all of these is that these are the valuation... [sentence trails off]
38:09	Sam Parr	Is crazy.
38:10	Shaan Puri	The valuation is crazy. Look at the fundamentals. Oh, you know, Tesla — they need to sell this many, crazy amount of cars in order to justify this. Or even self-driving: it would have to be bigger than Uber to just be where it's valued at currently. Right? So "your upside is priced in" would be the counterargument. By the way, I have no argument against that. I just think, very simply, this has actually served me pretty well, which is — like I told you this story — in 2010 I was kinda like, "oh, these internet companies seem to be pretty dominant; everybody uses them, everybody's..." [sentence trails off] </FormattedResponse>
38:42	Sam Parr	"Me keep."
38:42	Shaan Puri	Using them.
38:43	Sam Parr	Let me get some of that. That's the—yeah, right. It was just...
38:45	Shaan Puri	"I was like, 'I don't really know how to do discounted cash flows. I can't — I can't really tell you much about that, about the P/E ratios and any of that stuff.' But... I don't know. This interesting thing is that toothpaste is not going back in the bottle. So, similarly, it's pretty obvious that with some of these, it's like — yeah."
39:01	Sam Parr	Yeah, like... "I Like Dat Partners" — that's the name of your, let's say, your firm.
39:05	Shaan Puri	Exactly.
39:05	Sam Parr	"I like that. Alright, what's the next one?"
39:07	Shaan Puri	Alright, let me just run through a couple of things. Coinbase is basically the same case, except what they have is nine product lines that each do over $100 million of revenue. I thought that's a stunning, stunning statement. I can't believe how many different ways they make a lot of money. I think crypto — I'm bullish on Bitcoin in general and crypto. If you're bullish on crypto, the most trusted exchange that takes a fee on everyone's interest and enthusiasm around crypto — on every buy and every sell — that's a business that's going to do very well. Also, now the government is pro-crypto. They're buying crypto; there are ETFs; it's in people's retirement accounts. You can't put the toothpaste back in the bottle on that.
39:54	Sam Parr	"And that CEO is an animal. He's an animal."
39:57	Shaan Puri	And so, I just think they're extremely, you know, well positioned — similarly for, you know, the future when it...
40:01	Sam Parr	When it IPO'd, I'd never do this. I've only done this two or three times or something like that... I bought...
40:07	Shaan Puri	"You—you jumped up and clapped."
40:09	Sam Parr	I... I...
40:11	Shaan Puri	You clicked the heels.
40:14	Sam Parr	Right after I purchased, like, $100 worth of stock, I looked at it. I had just made the money back now that it's, like, on a tear. It looks like I'm even now after, I think, three or four years. Alright.
40:31	Shaan Puri	The other two—again, this is, this is so cliché. I mean, I almost didn't even want to do this segment, but I do believe in it, so...
40:38	Sam Parr	"It's not cliché to me because I don't follow all this stuff. So I think a lot of people won't find it totally cliché."
40:43	Shaan Puri	Yeah. Okay. Alright. Well, unfortunately, the YouTube comments aren't as forgiving and kind as you are. So, Tesla is the next one. Basically, if you think about the next big industries to get unlocked—a combination of self-driving cars and robots—it's gonna change the world. Now, the time scale is obviously the question here, but again, if you take a 20-year outlook, nobody's better positioned to do self-driving cars and robots than Tesla. I also think, by the way, he's gonna end up merging X AI with Tesla—he's gonna put it all together.
41:15	Sam Parr	"I don't understand that. I don't get that. I don't get that combo."
41:18	Shaan Puri	Why it would go together well: it's basically one is an AI lab, and then, all that — although the future of Tesla is as an AI company. If he's able to basically financially engineer his way into owning more Tesla by having Tesla buy xAI, he's also done this before with SolarCity, where he bailed out his own companies in a way, right?
41:39	Sam Parr	I guess I get that—the way Twitter has basically become AI, which is then a Tesla-owned thing. That's a wild journey; that's the wild part. I wouldn't—I don't want to own any stock that Elon controls, because he's a crazy person. I don't mind him being crazy; what I mind is that when he tweets something, the stock changes. So I'm like, "Well, what if he gets shot?" which is definitely not unreasonable. There has to be, like, a 1% chance that he gets assassinated, or a 1% chance that he dies doing something reckless.
42:13	Shaan Puri	Yeah, there's crazy — I mean, risk with him.
42:15	Sam Parr	"Yeah, it's too crazy... when he tweeted that 'Trump was a pedophile,' what happened—did it go up or down? ...Did it move?"
42:22	Shaan Puri	Yeah, it went down, but it went back up.
42:24	Sam Parr	That is... but I... yeah.
42:26	Shaan Puri	I don't have the stomach for that. The stock trades in completely crazy ways in the short term. They'll be like, "Oh, we missed delivery estimates by a lot — my bad," and the stock's like up 10%. It's like, "What? What's going on here?"
42:38	Sam Parr	It's weird, man. Tesla's, too.
42:40	Shaan Puri	Weird for me. Yeah... I'm... I'm too.
42:42	Sam Parr	Old school for that, but I do—I understand the argument.
42:46	Shaan Puri	I mean, again, the idea is: we're going to have robots doing human labor. If you disagree with that, then you're wrong — and we disagree. If you realize that robots are going to do human labor, and that human labor is the biggest market in the world (the market for human labor), then the company that makes the robots that perform human labor is going to sell a lot. It will be like the iPhone — a product everybody in the world bought, selling billions of units. As soon as they have robots that can actually do functional work, they're going to sell billions. There will be more robots than humans, because why would you not? I'd be like, "Yeah — give me five of those guys to do stuff around my house, my backyard, my factory, my warehouse, whatever." Once that capability exists, the question becomes: do you believe it will exist? Do you believe that Tesla can pull it off?
43:36	Sam Parr	Yes, it's definitely worth betting that they will pull that.
43:39	Shaan Puri	Once you go down the logic train of, like, the biggest market in the world — human labor — we now have the technology wave happening where robots will be able to do that human labor. If you had that, what would be the demand for it? Pretty much the biggest demand we've ever seen for anything, ever. Okay, great. So let's go to the next one: who is going to be able to do it? Who's well positioned to do it? Tesla. Okay, great. So as you go down that chain you realize they're pretty well positioned.
44:04	Sam Parr	It's just hard, because I have a friend who joined OpenAI — I forget exactly what year — but at the time I think they were worth $30 billion. He was debating; he said, "Should I do this? Should I not do this?" We all said the same thing: "Wow, $30 billion — that's a lot of money. Is there any upside to this?" Well, he joined. I believe he's made about $30 million, and as of now the stock he was granted back then is now worth about $10 million a year, so every vest is something like $10 million.
44:39	Shaan Puri	Right.
44:39	Sam Parr	And he sold a little bit to the point where he's good. But we were talking the other day, and we were like, this could definitely 10x again — like your grants could be $100 million a year. And that's... it's very hard to overcome that, to get to that conclusion, not because of logic, but because of emotion. You know what I mean?
45:00	Shaan Puri	The smartest investors I know—and the reason I think there's merit to a very simple, almost simpleton model of investing—is that, for most people, a two-sentence level of conviction is enough. Looking back at the last ten years, the smartest investors I know always had a two-sentence conviction. They would say, "All you needed to do was Bitcoin and chill." When we sold to Amazon and received our Amazon grant, it was: you own this much Amazon stock. Meanwhile, I did side projects and other things—I got up every day and went to work. All I needed to do was hold Amazon and chill. If you get a big enough lump sum, you can just let things compound. One of my friends, Zach, has a phrase: basically, every year there's one investment that captures the power law. When Ozempic happened, he said, "I just need to own the companies that are Ozempic companies." He was right—Ozempic was the investment theme of the year. You just had to recognize it and take action. It didn't require being a literal genius; you didn't have to predict it years in advance or be knee-deep in clinical trials six years earlier. Even after it happened, you just had to understand what was happening, buy, and hold. That's what mattered. He basically keeps a list: every year, what's the one thing that mattered? What was the one deal?
46:39	Sam Parr	"That, I think, he said, one year was like OnlyFans."
46:42	Shaan Puri	Yeah. One year he was like, "It's OnlyFans this year," and I was like, "OnlyFans?" This was, like, before — it was actually, I think, in 2019 when we talked about it.
46:50	Sam Parr	We talked.
46:51	Shaan Puri	We about sold—we sold to Twitch, and he texted me and he was like, "OnlyFans, I believe, is gonna make more money than Twitch." I go, "Bro, Twitch is making like..." and I shared with him, you know, like, "Twitch is making a lot of money." And he's like, "I said what I said. Everything else is noise for me this year. I just need to figure out if I can get into on the..." [sentence trails off]
47:07	Sam Parr	"Did he get it?"
47:09	Shaan Puri	Yeah. Did—so, you know, he's—no. I just really respect that level of thinking, that type of thing. In fact, one of my friends who's like this came over to my house and he goes, "Take two." I said, "Take two? What's 'take two'?"
47:24	Sam Parr	"Dude, your friends talk really strangely."
47:29	Shaan Puri	"There are no connecting words."
47:33	Sam Parr	It sounds like it's... it's... it's...
47:35	Shaan Puri	Was a Kramer—you just knocked on the door and said, "Take two." I asked him, "What's the thing right now?" because he was the one who, early on, was just like, "You need to have 100% of your net worth in Bitcoin." He would just tell me this every day. This is 2014, 2015, 2016—every day he was telling me the same thing, and he would tell me exactly why. He wrote it down for me and he just kept doing it. Because of him, I own more Bitcoin than I would have otherwise. I didn't listen to him completely—I didn't do 100%—but I did listen to him. He was basically making a case for the company that makes Grand Theft Auto. He was like, "Grand Theft Auto is coming—GTA Six is coming out." Right now the stock is a little depressed because the game's been delayed for multiple years. He's like, "The game is gonna come out, and when the game comes out it's gonna be the biggest selling game ever. There's no competition." He goes and he uses all these economics—like, you know, some word for "there are no substitutes"—like, there's no substitute for GTA.
48:32	Sam Parr	Yeah, he was using words like "elastic, elastic" or something.
48:35	Shaan Puri	Yeah, exactly. So he's like killing.
48:37	Sam Parr	"Rubber bands are stocks, bro."
48:38	Shaan Puri	"He’s like, 'You know, a great investment has these six properties, and, you know, here’s the six properties.'" "And I’m like, 'Grand Theft Auto fits all those.' He’s like, 'Yes.'" So that’s, you know, his big thesis. This is what he was saying a year ago. It’s already up about 30% since he told me this. He would lay out—there’s more to that story [unclear]—I’m like, "Can’t share here." But that type of thinking… I don’t know. It’s very, very attractive to me. I fall—I get seduced by that level of that type of thinking very easily. And obviously I’m cherry-picking things that worked. I’m sure, if I really thought about it, I have a bunch of smart friends who fell in love with random single securities that didn’t do anything. I’m not saying this is a foolproof thing.
49:17	Sam Parr	Dude, whenever we talk about this, I started thinking I'd be like the Warren Buffett thing, where I'm like, "Well, I just don't understand it, so I'm going to stick to that." That's a really novel way of saying, you know, "whatever — I'm not doing it." And then I started thinking about this recently: "Well, it's been eight years. Maybe I should learn about it."
49:36	Shaan Puri	Maybe that circle of confidence needs to expand a little bit.
49:39	Sam Parr	I'm like... Six months ago, I went and bought a book on it and started reading it. I was like, "Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I wish I had read this a long time ago. This book was published years ago—what am I doing? That's hilarious." I'm like, "Well, I don't know it. I don't understand it, so I'm not going to do it." But that's been...
49:56	Shaan Puri	"Eight years. Yeah, I don't know — I should have read Waze sooner."
50:02	Sam Parr	"What's the fourth company?"
50:03	Shaan Puri	OpenAI is one of them, but I think that's the most controversial one because there's so much competition—who knows. I was thinking: who else is uniquely positioned on a 20-year timescale, where they have the winds of technology behind their back? They're in the right space. Clearly they're sitting in the lane with the highest velocity of change and upside. But they also have unique defensibility — they will actually capture it. I think SpaceX is uniquely defensible. I think Coinbase is uniquely defensible. I think Tesla is uniquely defensible. None of these things are completely foolproof, of course. There are competitors — I'm not saying otherwise. But on the sliding scale of defensibility, it's very, very hard to compete with any of those companies because they've built up durable moats — whether regulatory moats, brand, network effects, or hard technical capabilities that take years for others to catch up to. By then, they're already on the next generation.
51:09	Sam Parr	Dude, it's total bro science of financial investing. I don't really read about the fundamentals of companies. The only few times I've bought an individual stock, it's mostly been because of the founder—the entrepreneur behind it. When we hung out with Mario, the guy who started Oscar Health, he explained a little bit about Oscar. I thought, "Okay, it's a health insurance company," but I didn't really know much else. Still, he was really inspiring, so I bought a little bit of that. The first one was Atlassian. I read an article about Atlassian and their office. I don't know if you remember, but my office was in SoMa, and their office was on the same street as my office at The Hustle. I used to look into their office and think, "Wow, I love the interior design." I read a bit about the founders; they seemed really smart, so I bought, I think, $1,000 worth of it because I didn't have much money. I think it turned into $50,000 — like 50x. So both times I made money, it was literally just because the founder interested me. Total bro science. I don't even know what Atlassian does to this day. They make software, but I don't know what software or what's, like...
52:23	Shaan Puri	Australian software, I think—yeah.
52:25	Sam Parr	Yeah. Like, they — they say words like "schedule" instead of "schedule." I'm like, you know, "it's a scheduler; I don't know what a schedule is." But it's been... that's kind of an interesting way. It just seems like someone has willed something into existence and the cool factor. So, for example, Palantir — I'm pretty sure they're trading at like 200 times.
52:48	Shaan Puri	Yes.
52:49	Sam Parr	Revenue or something like that. I have to imagine there's got to be some research on what the Alex Karp–like "cool factor" adds to that multiple. </FormattedResponse>
52:58	Shaan Puri	Yeah. These things become cults. There's enough—there's enough sort of retail energy now that these things become cults. Right now they're trying to make it happen for Opendoor. I don't know if you've paid attention to this.
53:08	Sam Parr	I have — I've seen Opendoor. I don't understand why there's... what's—who's the cult leader behind it? Like, why do people care about Opendoor [original transcription: "omidor"]?
53:14	Shaan Puri	I'm a cop, and it's like this guy, Eric Jackson, and others. I mean, I don't know — I'm not too far in it. I stay away from, like, the, you know, everybody's got their vices. Meme stocks are not one that does it for me, so fortunately I don't get sucked into that.
53:31	Sam Parr	So your buddy was like, "I should just pick one stock and go all in." If there's one skill set that you should go all in on, honestly—like I learned it a little bit with Hermozy, and we've seen it time and time again—it's becoming a very charismatic person who knows how to talk to the masses. That's obviously the answer. That's the skill set you have to learn.
53:49	Shaan Puri	"Manipulation is what I'm saying."
53:51	Sam Parr	Screw everything else — I just learned that. I think Rob [the bank?], who you had on a while ago, talked about some book. He was like, "I don't even want to say the name of this book." He teed it up perfectly, and I think you did the same. He said, "There's just one book on how to manipulate people. I don't even want to say the name. It's just too powerful and I don't want the [unclear phrase]." Do you remember what he said?
54:14	Shaan Puri	Maybe — I don't know... I just said it on our podcast or somewhere else.
54:17	Sam Parr	Yes. Or maybe he said it — I started following him after you had him on, and he said something like that. I went and read it, and I'm like, "Yeah, you're right. This is... this is the skill that everyone should learn. Screw products."
54:27	Shaan Puri	"Screw being smart. But what is it? I wanna know now — I'm not gonna say."
54:31	Sam Parr	Here we go, you.
54:33	Shaan Puri	"Did it to me."
54:35	Sam Parr	"I'll tell you after. Well, no — I don't even remember."
54:37	Shaan Puri	Robert Greene — they say this about his book, right: The 48 Laws of Power. I think one of the marketing shticks — which I don't know if he completely made up or if it's true — was that he used it to market the book by claiming, "this book is banned from prisons."
54:50	Sam Parr	"It's the best."
54:51	Shaan Puri	Because they don't want the prisoners to be able to overtake.
54:57	Sam Parr	So powerful.
54:58	Shaan Puri	Yeah. So powerful that it's banned in prisons — it's just perfect marketing, you know. That's like the cod-level marketing.
55:06	Sam Parr	And I have it somewhere in my Goodreads. I'll say I'll find it, but I don't even remember the title, if I'm being honest. But it was... </FormattedResponse>
55:13	Shaan Puri	Okay, so you think I should go all in on troublesome manipulation, or what? </FormattedResponse>
55:18	Sam Parr	Yeah, I mean — you're... we're kinda... we kinda do that. We do it already.</FormattedResponse>
55:23	Shaan Puri	That ship's ordered, too.
55:24	Sam Parr	"I'm just saying: go all in. Yeah—just be better. Do what you're doing now, but better. Is that it? Is that the pod?"
55:35	Shaan Puri	Yeah, that's it.

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This guy made Millions by inventing the $1 Menu

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