4 dumb ideas that made people rich

- January 23, 2026 (about 2 months ago) • 01:04:19

Transcript

Start Time	Speaker	Text
00:00	Shaan Puri	Sam, I have a list of what I'm calling "dumb ideas that made a million dollars." These are obscure lists that really only people like you and me would ever keep. I have a list of dumb ideas that actually work. I say "dumb" not because I think they're dumb — I actually think they're genius — because being clever and doing simple things is a form of genius. I think other people would call these dumb ideas, though. So I want to run through them with you, and I want you to give me a reaction to each one. </FormattedResponse>
00:30	Sam Parr	Alright. Let's hear it.
00:31	Shaan Puri	Alright. First one came up — I was watching the NFL playoffs this weekend. I don't know if you've paid any attention, but the Chicago Bears — who have sucked for a long time — are in the playoffs. Chicago has this rival, the Green Bay Packers. The Packers have been great for a long time and the Bears have sucked for a very long time, so it's kind of a rivalry just by location, but they're not really close rivals. I'm watching the game and I look in the crowd and see a ton of people wearing... I don't know how much you know about football, but do you know what the Packers fans wear on their head?
01:08	Sam Parr	Yeah, Cheeseheads.
01:10	Shaan Puri	Cheeseheads. So, what do the Bears fans wear?
01:13	Sam Parr	"I don't know—helmets. I... I don't know cheese."
01:16	Shaan Puri	Graters. So I see all these fans wearing this silver cheese grater hat, and I'm like, "Oh, that's clever." We're about to shred the Green Bay Packers — we're gonna shred the Cheeseheads. I thought, this is really smart. I started to look into the story behind it, and the story is kind of crazy. If you go to foampartyhats.com, this business started in 2017. Grace Roxas and her son Manuel Roxas created this thing. For about fifteen years they had, just for fun, been making party hats — think for their own daughter's parties. They made fun party hats for all the guests. People loved it. They kind of gave it up, then they moved, and later they started again. They decided, "We're going to make these foam hats for special events, parties, occasions, and sports." They've been trucking along. They got on Shark Tank and they gave up 25% of their company for $100. Right? So, like—Mark Cuban, yeah. They made hats for birthdays, weddings, corporate events — all these novelty hats — and then came the boom. This grater-head thing has just taken off and become a viral frenzy. There's this coach — I don't know if you've seen him — Ben Johnson. He's got kind of a Sam Parr–if-he-was-into-football energy. He's basically this young coach who's supposed to be really, really smart. He's super ripped, so every time in the postgame, in the locker room, he rips off his shirt — which most of the old, 70-year-old coaches would never do — and he gets his team really fired up. He gives the game ball to this guy who comes out...
02:53	Sam Parr	And I don't know if you can see this, but he's—yeah.
02:55	Shaan Puri	This wide receiver, DJ Moore, is wearing the hat — and the team starts chanting, "Go DJ, go!" A Lil Wayne song plays and he starts dancing. The clip goes viral, getting about 2.2 million views. Suddenly, the hats are flying off the shelves. They do about 10,000 orders in a week, which is roughly $500,000 in a week. They have a huge waitlist and backlog because they make these by hand, apparently. This illustrates the idea of team-specific novelty merch. When I went to that Warriors game, I walked out and bought my son a jersey and a little ball — but it was pretty vanilla, cookie-cutter stuff. With social media, teams now have little trends or meme moments. If you can fast-follow those moments and create something that makes people laugh or is worth sharing, you can get a lot of spread. That's what this company has been doing with these hats: going viral and building basically a $1 million-plus business off novelty foam hats. Isn't that wild?
04:09	Sam Parr	They do a really good job of making me part of the story. It looks like a Hispanic family: the son is kind of the CEO, and the mom is the one who's the brains—she came up with the idea and originally made it. Yeah, it looks pretty awesome.
04:25	Shaan Puri	Yeah, but I think if somebody takes this idea... There was another company — a T‑shirt company; I can't remember the name — that was doing this for sports teams. They realized the drop-shipping infrastructure has become so good that if anything happens in the game — like last night — within an hour after the game they can have the store up for that product, that slogan, that moment. When "Linsanity" happens in New York, they have the Linsanity line ready to go. I forgot the company's name, but they're operating much faster — orders of magnitude faster — than the typical merch industry, creating team-specific, moment-specific merch. I just think that's... it's not the best business, not a business I would want to be in, but it is a simple man's business — anybody can understand what they're doing and try to replicate it. If you niche down even further, forget T‑shirts: think giant oversized foam hats. There's a $1 million business sitting in oversized foam hats, which is pretty wild. Alright, ready for the next one.
05:28	Sam Parr	Yeah, that was a quotable last line: "There's a million-dollar business sitting in oversized foam hats." Alright, so a lot of people watch and listen to this show because they want to hear us just tell them exactly what to do when it comes to starting or growing a business. A lot of people who are listening have a full-time job and want to start something on the side—a side hustle. A lot of people message Sean and me and say, "Alright, I want to start something on the side. Is this a good idea?" What they're really saying is, "Just give me the ideas." Well, my friends, you're in luck. My old company, The Hustle, put together 100 different side-hustle ideas, and they've appropriately called it the Side Hustle Idea Database. It's a list of 100 pretty good ideas, frankly—I went through them, they're awesome. It gives you how to start them, how to grow them, things like that. It gives you a little bit of inspiration. So check it out. It's called the Side Hustle Idea Database. It's in the description below—you'll see the link. Click it, check it out, and let me know in the comments what you think.
06:27	Shaan Puri	Alright, here's the next one. As you know, a long time ago I was running a business called birthdayalarm.com. This business was started by Michael and Zocci Birch. It had been going for 20+ years, generating millions of dollars a year. It was one of the earliest viral businesses ever. I think Birthday Alarm has had like 50,000,000+ members with zero marketing spend, because Michael was one of the pioneers of viral marketing and he understood how to get this business to grow virally.
06:56	Sam Parr	How much revenue has this done over the course? It's twenty years—it's twenty years old.
07:01	Shaan Puri	Yeah, I think it's more than that. It's probably 25 years old now.</FormattedResponse>
07:04	Sam Parr	And so, has this done approximately 100 million over twenty-five years?
07:08	Shaan Puri	Probably not a 100 — probably like over 50. So maybe 75 million is my guess. Wow. And it's just hyper-profitable, by the way. That's not just revenue — that's profit for a business like this.
07:20	Sam Parr	Three million every year for twenty-five years—ish. </FormattedResponse>
07:24	Shaan Puri	Not exactly, but yeah. Average—let's say average: two to three.
07:28	Sam Parr	Okay. Wow — amazing.
07:29	Shaan Puri	Because the business model is very simple: it's reminders for your friends' and family's birthdays. Fantastic. Then I was like, "But the reminders are free, so you make the money when people pay to send a card." I remember when we were trying to grow or revitalize the business — I was brainstorming ideas with him. I said, "You know, I try not to be too smart, so I always just look at what's already working, or has worked in the past, or is working for other people." That was my first question before I tell you any of my bad ideas: tell me about some things that are already proven to work. He goes, "You know, at the beginning these guys approached us with this goofy idea that I thought was a total scam." He said, "But I think they've actually made even more money than we did without the 50 million members." I go, "What is it?" He goes, "It's this thing called the International Star Registry."
08:18	Sam Parr	"Oh my gosh, I have heard of this."
08:21	Shaan Puri	And so he goes: they let you—for a special occasion, like a friend's birthday—name a star after that friend. You can name a star in the universe after your friend; the service will show you the star and tell you its location. And for the low price of $25, that star is yours. Technically—not technically—it's not yours at all. It's not owned, not even officially named. It's just named in our book that we're going to keep in our office. These guys have been printing millions of dollars for more than 20 years just naming stars after people. This got popular; it's been referenced in movies. In "A Walk to Remember," someone is dying and they name a star after her—it's this emotional, sentimental thing. I love it because it's a pure-play marketing product. There is no product: you don't get to have the star. There's nothing that changes hands. It's literally not even officially naming the star after them—it's literally just, "we are going to write it down in our book permanently." It's like something I would trick my kids with.
09:25	Sam Parr	"Dude, what's really funny is if you Google Star Registry, you could see they're buying ads against each other. There are dozens of these, which begs the question: whose book is the more permanent book? But is this the one that was founded in 1979?"
09:40	Shaan Puri	Yeah — 1979, when space was hot and the moon and all that. So you get a certificate, you get a map of where the thing is, and you get to have that forever in their book. The funny thing is the details of this, which I think are pretty funny. Think about it from a marketing point of view: how do you legitimize this, you know, frankly illegitimate thing? What they did was they basically made their book so official. They're like, "It's placed in the Library of Congress," and, "We store the official book in a Swiss vault in a Swiss bank," — just leveraging prestige.
10:20	Sam Parr	"And are any of those things impressive? How do you get a book into the library?"
10:25	Shaan Puri	You probably donate a copy.
10:27	Sam Parr	One of my favorite copywriters, Joe Sugarman, wrote a famous ad for Casio watches. He asked the guys who made the watch to explain how it was made. They said, "We use a quartz movement and this type of aluminum." He responded, "Hold on—did you say 'quartz movement'?" They said, "Yeah, it's like a movement that every $10 watch uses." He pushed further: "Tell me more about quartz," and then, "Tell me about the steel—oh, this metal?" They replied, "Oh, just aluminum. This pen company uses it. Hell, even NASA uses it." From that he pulled the phrase "space-grade aluminum" and turned it into ad copy. For example: > "Made with the same aluminum that's space-grade." He took a simple truth and made it sound much cooler than it really is—sort of like using the aura of a Swiss bank account. </FormattedResponse>
11:34	Shaan Puri	He took a fact and made it valuable.
11:36	Sam Parr	Yeah.
11:36	Shaan Puri	By the way, I think this is the—what's that thing called—the Rorschach test, or whatever: the inkblot where you're like, "Is this a bunny rabbit or a serial killer?" Right? To me, that's what you just described as the test for this podcast. It's like if there was a speakeasy and you had to come in and we had to decide who gets in and who gets out. I'd tell this Joseph Sugarman story and I'd ask, "Do you find that amazing or repulsive?" If they're like, "Well, that's bullshit," I'd say, "Cool — you should head to the next bar." If they're like, "That's amazing! How do I do that?" I'd say, "Come on in — welcome to MFM." </FormattedResponse>
12:08	Sam Parr	"That's pretty good. How long do you—did you ever look up who owned this company? Did they have, like, some crazy story, like Michael Birch?"
12:15	Shaan Puri	Yeah. So it was owned by this Canadian advertising executive, but only for about a year. I think he passed away two years later. Then a mom of 12—who had gifted a star to her husband and loved it—found out the business was for sale. She bought it, and they grew it as a family business. Now her son is the operator of it, or something like that. So this mom of 12 did it. Which, by the way, if you're a mom of 12, you're hired—you're capable of doing anything. If you can be a mother of 12... I don't know what Navy SEAL training is like, but it does not compare to being a mother of 12.
12:53	Sam Parr	Dude, on their About Us page — it's called starregistry.com — they explain how they're "democratizing the cosmos" and all this stuff. Then they have a line that says, "Do not be fooled by the impostors," and it's this...
13:09	Shaan Puri	"Those other guys." </FormattedResponse>
13:10	Sam Parr	It's this big paragraph that says: > "In the vast experience of celestial naming, there are also impostors seeking to capitalize on the allure of the stars. Numerous companies have attempted to copy us, and they go on to say why they are the more official one." Right — it's pretty funny.
13:29	Shaan Puri	Yeah — snake oil salesman says the other guy's oil is terrible for you. Did I tell you how he came up with this idea? Michael had a — they were both, I think, working at an insurance company. He said they were making really good money because computers were new and not many people knew how to program for them. The internet was new; insurance companies needed somebody who could do database programming or whatever. He told me they were making like a really good salary — maybe like $200k a year, maybe combined between the two of them. I don't know. They were doing well. Then the internet boom starts, kind of like 1998–1999, and he's like, "What am I doing sitting here at an insurance company? I gotta be a part of this." I'm sure today many people feel that way about AI and robotics and where the world is going. His friend sends him a link to, you know, some Friendster or something like that. He's like, "Wow — this is incredible. I gotta get in there. I gotta start doing things." So he decides he's going to create a self-updating address book. Like, today this is still an unsolved problem. By the way, Sam — you move, I don't have your new address. I have to keep asking you for your address; I don't know when you move. He had this idea: when Sam moves, he changes his address once and it changes automatically for anybody he's already allowed to have his address. A great idea. Still a great idea. This is an idea he had many times. Like Sean Parker — who's famous from The Social Network and Facebook — tried to start a company doing this too. A bunch of smart people have been like, "We're gonna solve this problem." It just turns out people don't really care enough to do it. He's building this thing called Lemon Link. He said the best thing that ever happened was, "We had no money." So he's the programmer, the designer, the product manager, customer service, the janitor — everything — because there's nobody else. He told his wife when he quit his job, "Give me three months to try this computer thing and this internet thing, and if it doesn't work in three months I promise we'll go back to having a job." I think they were pregnant with their second or third kid, so it wasn't a super stable time to quit. Two years go by and he's like, "I'm so close. Just keep going; I need another three months. Let me keep going." He's still doing customer service and Lemon Link is not growing. The only customer feedback he's getting is basically "shut down my account, I don't need this," or "hey, thanks for that birthday reminder — you saved my butt." He had added one feature in addition to the address thing: "Save their birthday too and I'll tell you when it's their birthday." That was a good feature. He kept seeing that feedback, and this was pre-Facebook, so people didn't have an easy online way to know when their friends' birthdays were. He realized, "Oh — this is a thing." Because he was doing customer service and finally faced reality — nobody wants my original idea, but they do want this — overnight he creates birthdayalarm.com. Within a couple of weeks he gets like 10,000 members and he's like, "Oh my God." He figured out a viral loop and said to this day that getting to 10,000 members before making any money was still the best feeling.
16:49	Sam Parr	It's pretty crazy. He had the audacity to stop working on that and work on Bebo... Most everyone else would say, "All right—birthday alarm. How do we make anniversary alarm? How do we do this? How do we do that?"
16:59	Shaan Puri	It’s working, and it starts making a little bit of money — not much, but a little. His friend Morgan sends him a link to Friendster. He thinks, "Of course people are going to want this internet thing. It's not just for looking up information — they'll want to talk to their friends and post photos about each other." That makes total sense. So he created a Friendster-like product before Bebo. It goes viral again because he really understands virality. But he's losing money: the more members that sign up, the more his bandwidth costs increase. At the time, social networks didn't have any clear way to make money. Today, Facebook is known for ads; back then, there were no ads and no ad network — nobody had ever done that before, and nobody knew how to make money off those things. So he went to a meetup and sold the business to James Currier for $2,000,000. He went to work for them for a year. As social networking matured and he saw what MySpace was doing, he realized, "Okay, I think I know what I should be doing." He learned even more about virality there and decided to start Bebo.
18:06	Sam Parr	Then he started Bebo. That was the one that took off. In two or three years, he grew it from nothing to an $800 million exit.
18:12	Shaan Puri	Right. I'm not sure how many years. Yeah—three, four years, probably.
18:15	Sam Parr	Like, very short. Yeah — what a baller. Damn. And now he's just the sole proprietor of littlebirthdayalarm.com.
18:25	Shaan Puri	"Just a mom-and-pop shop."
18:27	Sam Parr	Yeah, just trying to make ends meet. I have one more.
18:30	Shaan Puri	It's a very dumb idea that I admire for its simplicity. So, you're probably a subscriber to this YouTube channel. Can you just type in "ten hour fireplace"?
18:41	Sam Parr	Of course. I mean, everyone is, aren't they?
18:45	Shaan Puri	So, there—what you will see: describe what you see when you type in "ten hour fireplace" and then click their YouTube channel. </FormattedResponse>
18:50	Sam Parr	They have done a very good job of naming it, so I see, "Oh my god—I didn't realize it was that big." Okay, holy moly. Okay, so, obviously it's what you guys expect: it's a ten-hour video of a fireplace with 157 million views.
19:06	Shaan Puri	Exactly. How many videos are on this channel, Sam?
19:10	Sam Parr	So they posted this ten years ago, and shockingly they have 120,000 subscribers, and there is one video. It's so funny. There are points in the video that... you know how when you scroll over YouTube there's points where it spikes, like where the viewers are like, "Why?"
19:26	Shaan Puri	"The viewers are just loving it."
19:28	Sam Parr	Yeah, why is it?
19:30	Shaan Puri	So, if I look at the most-replayed section... like
19:31	Sam Parr	Oh, they don't even add logs. They don't even add logs to the fire, so it must be like a 30-second loop just done over and over and over again. There are parts where it spikes; you can see the part at 5 hours and 55 minutes.
19:43	Shaan Puri	Thrilling. Everybody knows about that part.
19:47	Sam Parr	Oh, the top comment: "Bro's a millionaire."
19:50	Shaan Puri	Bro's a millionaire because this channel was started by one person in Romania. It's a channel with one video, so this guy just "hit it and quit it." This is the one-hit wonder.
20:01	Sam Parr	Did you just say, "This is the world posted"?
20:05	Shaan Puri	One video: a 30-second loop of a fireplace—or I don't know if it's a 30-second loop, but a 10-hour video of a fireplace crackling. This guy made a million dollars in Romania. Did he try to follow it up with another video, turn it into an empire, create a brand? No. He just put the video up and let it run, baby. I admire this. I admire the restraint—maybe more than I admire the ingenuity. </FormattedResponse>
20:29	Sam Parr	Dude, have you noticed on YouTube what's been going on with these types of channels? I don't know... I guess we can call them ambient channels. Let's categorize them as ambient channels. I love ambient channels. I listen to, like, the weird ones. It started as white noise. There's this company called Brain.fm—do you know Brain.fm?
20:50	Shaan Puri	Yeah.
20:50	Sam Parr	I love Brain.fm. They make some of my favorite noise—just great noise. I was a paid subscriber to Brain.fm years ago.
21:00	Shaan Puri	Oh my God.
21:01	Sam Parr	So I love Brain.fm, but then I started going down the rabbit hole of other music. There's like — is it lo-fi Mac Miller? It's basically just Mac Miller. For some reason I don't know how I got to it. I like Mac Miller, but not enough that I would think he'd start popping up on my channel. It's tons of lo-fi Mac Miller, which I love. What I've noticed is that there's basically a quadrant — or a huge graph — where it's like, "let's do old money, let's do 1980s, let's do this," and then it's like, "now select country." For example, I keep getting targeted with "old money Brazil" or "1980s finance." And they create the best AI thumbnail. So type in "old money Brazil music."
21:44	Shaan Puri	Old Money — Brazil music
21:46	Sam Parr	Trust me, it's so strange.
21:49	Shaan Puri	Alright. I see this gentleman in a nice suit with a cigar and "Old Money Brazil" — an elegant bossa nova, timeless luxury instrumental playlist: 74,000 views.
22:00	Sam Parr	I get targeted with so many of these. There was another one where it was like...
22:04	Shaan Puri	You get targeted, or you select, or you beg for them. </FormattedResponse>
22:09	Sam Parr	You make the algorithm, so, yeah... If I see that image, it might get first.
22:13	Shaan Puri	"We shape our algorithms; then our algorithms shape us." — the old Winston Churchill.
22:17	Sam Parr	But then there were even crazier ones, where it's like "Greedy American Revolution" — I don't know, like "locked-in American Revolution" or something like that. It's crazy how specific they get. But they basically just take... you know, I'm joking — this is real.
22:36	Shaan Puri	90 minutes of American Revolutionary War music — "Liberty Song" playlist.
22:42	Sam Parr	And they, like, say, "Do you see a good — a good one?"
22:45	Shaan Puri	"Oh—define good, bro. I'm never gonna click any of these."
22:48	Sam Parr	Like, the thumbnails are so funny. I'll have to find a different one, but the thumbnail I tweeted the other day was, "the thumbnail gods have been smiling on me." It's got this American Revolution–style music — the best thumbnail ever. I keep getting targeted over and over and over. These guys must be doing well. You've never seen these.
23:11	Shaan Puri	Well, I've seen just a normal lo-fi channel, so like Lo-fi Girl, for example. Lo-fi Girl I think is probably the biggest channel in this category: about 15 million subscribers and 2.5 billion views on the channel. It's making about $100 a month on this channel right now, and that's just... that's one channel. Right now she's live—there are 30,000 people just listening to this right now while we're recording this.
23:38	Sam Parr	It's the best. So, look at the... look at.
23:40	Shaan Puri	"Then, why don't we just do this?"
23:42	Sam Parr	It sounds awesome.
23:43	Shaan Puri	Why are we talking?
23:45	Sam Parr	"Look at the thumbnail that I sent to you."
23:48	Shaan Puri	Oh, this is incredible. What is this?
23:51	Sam Parr	Explain what you see.
23:53	Shaan Puri	I mean, I don't even have a word for this. It looks—what's the painting at the top of the Sistine Chapel [The Creation of Adam] where the naked man's reaching out to God and their fingers are about to touch? It looks like that guy, but he's got his dukes up, like he's about to fight. He's a hairless, naked man with half a mullet, and it just says, "classical music that goes hard."
24:14	Sam Parr	Yeah, or I'll see them where it looks like panties like that, and they're making the "shocker" sign. I get so many of these. I think there's this weird, underground world. There's that underground world, and there's the underground world of the comments. If you look at MFM's comments—people can't see this, but on the back end we've tried to ban them—it's like: > "I can't believe no one has been blessed. Why hasn't anyone blessed me before? They've just blessed me after I read this book called 'Millionaires R Us.'" Or: > "I totally agree with this video, and it's so funny that you guys start making these points because I read about this exact thing in the 'Millionaires R Us' book by this person who's a total saint."
24:56	Shaan Puri	Dude, this is... Those guys are like the bane of my existence, by the way. Same.
25:00	Sam Parr	"It's the worst."
25:01	Shaan Puri	I just sit there and manually try to get rid of them. Have you seen this guy, Yang Mun, on Instagram? He's... like an "AI monk," and he's got this healing guide. He's got a "no million."
25:15	Sam Parr	I'm so into it.
25:16	Shaan Puri	He’s got like one to two million followers. It’s a monk who’s just doing talking-head advice videos, and then he sells a healing guide. Again, it’s like — you know — it’s a guy… no, it’s a kid who’s 17 with the “broccoli” haircut. He had just moved to Miami, and he’s in a house with seven other guys, and they’re all creating these accounts that are like… dude, there’s one of just…
25:37	Sam Parr	Elderly sold on WAP. You know, what's that? They call it "WAP" — it's where you buy, like, financial newsletters. If you go to his... if you go to Yang Man's Linktree, you click on...
25:47	Shaan Puri	Because that's what a monk would do, right? Open up the e‑book Time to Heal, young man.
25:55	Sam Parr	And it's like things you might love. I bet it's like newsletters that say, "10x your wealth with this stock tip."
26:03	Shaan Puri	Yeah, but there are people doing this. They're doing it with fake grandparents: they have accounts like "Wisdom from Grandparents," but they're all AI. It's like "What I wish I knew when I was younger," "the one thing," "you know, the love that got away." They just post content like that — they're just printing views right now. </FormattedResponse>
26:18	Sam Parr	Dude, this stuff gets me every time. It sucks. I love this stuff. I fall victim to this worse than a grandparent falls victim to buying the top listing on Amazon. Every birthday — every gift-giving experience at my house right now from grandparents — it's like: "You guys all just typed in buy kids bike and bought the exact same thing." </FormattedResponse>
26:39	Shaan Puri	Alright, I gotta show you one more — this is the best one. So, I'm on YouTube the other day, and you know when the algorithm just, like, has a curated, five-star experience for you? This is one of the most intense shoe salesmen you'll ever meet. It's a CBS News archive from 1983.
26:58	MFM	"A shoe store here in Sharon, Pennsylvania is just... you know, a shoe store. Oh no — that's the playing field of a champion. Here he comes now, out of the bullpen: the hottest pitcher of the retail shoe game today, big number one, Larry Jolton." </FormattedResponse>
27:24	MFM	Let me see.</FormattedResponse>
27:25	Shaan Puri	Come on up.
27:25	MFM	Come on.
27:26	Shaan Puri	Alright, so this video was of this guy, Larry Jolton, who was the number one shoe salesman in America. This is back in 1983. He sold $400,000 worth of shoes at this physical shoe store—himself, by hand. It's in Pennsylvania, in some place like Rayer's or something like that; it's a famous shoe store. So he was the number one hustler, and this video is amazing because...
27:50	Sam Parr	I want to see—what's that? The hook is great. I'm in. I'm—I'm bought in.
27:55	Shaan Puri	Here you go. I wouldn't.
27:57	Sam Parr	Go any big on that?
27:58	MFM	You got some nice dress shoes — 20% off. I do too, especially in the summertime. Listen to me: you order the two shoes, whatever color you want. If they come in and they don't fit or you don't like them, you're not obligated to.
28:09	Sam Parr	"Take it big."
28:11	MFM	Day. Clean it up.
28:12	MFM	Larry Cholton is the Cy Young of his time — the best of the big-league shoe pitchers. There are only 38,000 feet in Sharon, Pennsylvania. Last year, Larry Joseph sold $423,000 worth of shoes.
28:29	Sam Parr	It's gonna.
28:29	MFM	"Be busy today, fellas. I can feel it — I can feel it. It's gonna be busy."
28:33	MFM	His stats make him the MVP — the officially recognized champion shoe salesman.
28:39	MFM	That's not bad. One time.
28:41	Shaan Puri	Alright, so watch this: they show him doing this thing, and there are a couple of amazing parts. I'd say one is—he's like, "The worst thing in the world is someone leaves without a shoe." He's like, "That's not gonna happen on my watch." He's serving four or five customers at once and is basically selling them on fit, not size. He's got all these go-to slogans, and he says things like, "That's a good-looking shoe right there on you." Then he'll deliver them to their house. "I'll deliver to your house. I'll deliver to your office. I'll find you on the street. I'll give you..." (trails off)
29:13	Sam Parr	The shoes—don't worry. And he's like, "You ever have a problem?"
29:15	Shaan Puri	"You just give right back to me."
29:16	Sam Parr	I'm Zary...
29:17	Shaan Puri	They show that he never takes a lunch break. They show him eating a burger.</FormattedResponse>
29:22	MFM	You have to keep up your strength, because sometimes the game goes into extra innings.
29:26	Shaan Puri	He's just eating a burger in the back — a burger in the shoe rack where he keeps the sizes. He takes bites as he runs back and forth to get customers' shoe sizes.
29:36	Sam Parr	This guy is awesome.
29:38	Shaan Puri	He's like, and then he's like, you know, he's—he's like his sales philosophy. So he's like, "You don't wanna be the nice guy." He's like, "Some people just wanna be told. They wanna be told what they need." He's like, "They come in, they think their shoes are size eight and a half. They're walking around with cramped feet all the time." He's like, "You gotta give them a size ten."
29:55	Sam Parr	He's like, he tells a...</FormattedResponse>
29:57	Shaan Puri	Story about this guy who didn't know what he wanted. He's like, "The customer doesn't always know what they want; you gotta help them." He's like, "Yes, that's the art of shoe sales." But it's his overall energy. When he's walking around the bullpen he's like, "Gotta be a big day today, boys. We've got a lot of shoes—we gotta move today." All the other shoe salesmen clearly don't care. This is a very inspiring video, not just about being the best, but about having a championship mentality in anything you do.
30:22	Sam Parr	Dude, he died this year. His obituary goes in-depth about how he was on that show and a bunch of other shows. It says the National Shoe Retailers Association named him Salesman of the Year in 1983, 1984, and 1985. They say he was a larger-than-life figure. This guy's awesome.
30:39	Shaan Puri	He's incredible, right? I love this man.
30:43	Sam Parr	Larry's a salt of the earth type of guy.
30:45	Shaan Puri	If you're going to do anything today, bring that Larry Jolton energy — that championship mindset. Whatever you do, sell whatever you sell the way Larry sold shoes today. Alright, that's the final word here.
30:57	Sam Parr	Have you ever studied sales? I imagine, if I had to guess, you did. You and I have behaved similarly: we're pretty charismatic, so we think that's all it takes. But I've hired salesmen and saleswomen before, and I've seen the difference between a really winning one and a pretty good one. It's a total gap. The greats have both the talent and — this thing I'm going to describe. The second thing they all have to have is process: they know that saying this gets that. It's like a "mouse-in-a-maze-finding-the-cheese" type of energy. The really good ones just kind of blindly go, "Oh, that worked — no ego, I'm just going to do that." If they throw something out there that gets a laugh or a response, they repeat it. They follow this process.
31:44	Shaan Puri	Guys like you and me actually suck at sales, and the reason we suck at sales is because we want to use charm, charisma, talent—whatever. But the best people use process. The reason we actually suck isn't even because we can't adapt. Over time we're problem-solvers: it's a puzzle—"Oh, I gotta do this," and then that gets me the solution I want. We get bored doing that. The most impressive thing about this guy isn't that he sold $400,000 worth of shoes; it's that he just kept doing it year after year after year. He never got bored of it. I have this phrase I say now because every day when I do my workout we start with this ten-minute routine where I basically loosen up my IT band. It's like a fascia release on my IT band, which is painful, boring, and it doesn't look cool. You don't feel like you're getting any stronger or more athletic—it's the opposite of what you want when you go into a workout—but I need it. I've had knee injuries and I have to keep doing this. You can't do it once or twice; you can't do it for two weeks and be done. You basically have to constantly do this if you want to stay healthy, if you've got that sort of leg condition. Now, when I go in I say, "Alright, boys—we're not getting bored of greatness today." Let's not get bored of greatness today. That's the Larry mentality: you can't get bored with doing the thing that leads to great results, even if it's the same thing you've done before. You can't get bored. You can't become nonchalant about it. You can't go on autopilot with it. You can't cut corners or cut it short because you've already done it before. You have to do it. When I'm coaching my team it's the same thing. We played a game the other day, and in the warm-ups I knew we were going to kick this team's butt because their warm-up was so sloppy. I was like, "If they warm up like this, they're not going to be able to play at a high level," because this tells me everything I need to know. I don't need to do a scouting report—it's over. Sure enough, we beat them by almost 50 points. They didn't have a lot of talent, but they were shortcutting the process. I just feel like getting bored of what gets great results is a real problem. It's been a real problem for me in my life, and I know that for other people—if you're smart and talented and you get off on solving new problems and new puzzles—it can become an Achilles' heel.
33:57	Sam Parr	Dude, I'm always—I'm the biggest victim of these stories where it's like a company does the small things right and it, like, levers up or levels up to the big things. So, for example, have you heard of Rakuten?
34:08	Shaan Puri	Yeah, I know them well.
34:10	Sam Parr	So, Rakuten's a Japanese company. I think they're like the Amazon of Japan, right? ish. Yeah... it's kinda.
34:16	Shaan Puri	It's retail, but there's also a big discounting component to it — a deals component — that I think Amazon doesn't really have. </FormattedResponse>
34:24	Sam Parr	Yes, but it's just like a multi-billion-dollar, huge, massive thing—whatever. For some reason I came along, the founder, and I started reading about him. They have a book because they're famous for having a culty culture. The culture is like—they're super into it—and he released a handbook on what their culture is and what their values are. It was one of these things that were supposed to be internal, and it was a hit. Now everyone reads it—or a lot of people read it. He has, like, 30 rules or something of Rakuten, and rule number one is: > "Every Tuesday from three to four, everyone at every office throughout the world stops what they're doing and we clean. We refuse to have hired cleaners." His reasoning was that if we keep our desks clean, it's the same thing—you keep your desk clean and you have a clean mind. It's going to keep you disciplined. Same thing—there's a general, I forget which one, who had the famous speech "Make Your Bed." And then there's all these other famous stories, like a coach of Indiana basketball or something like that who turned around the team, and he's like, "I started by teaching the front desk how to answer, tie the phone, how..."
35:27	Shaan Puri	To shoelaces, yeah.
35:28	Sam Parr	Yeah, it's like these stories—over and over and over again. I love all of them. I'm always... I'm always into these. I don't know how often they are true, but I buy into them. Have you ever tried one of these things with your—? I mean, it sounds like you're doing it with your basketball team warming up, right?
35:43	Shaan Puri	Yeah, we try. I mean, the hard part is having the courage to actually live by it. You can read the story back — that's great and that makes total sense. Then you get into an environment where you've got all these people who aren't as bought into it. They don't really care. Are you really going to force it? Are you really going to enforce it? How much of a standard is it, and how many exceptions are you going to create? Are you going to let your best player not do it? Or are you going to let a meeting get in the way of it? It's in the compromises where things get interesting. I have never gone to the extent where I'm truly hardcore about it, because I think it takes a different level of leadership and courage that I personally don't possess.
36:23	Sam Parr	Let me reframe it for you. In high school—my freshman year—I went to an all-boys school. At the first cross-country practice, the coach got up and delivered what felt like a Remember the Titans moment. He said: > "I'm not here to teach you how to be the best runner. What I'm here to do this year is teach all of you boys how to become men, and we're going to do it by learning how to run better. We're going to show up earlier than we anticipate. We're going to run when we don't feel like it. We're going to go through the pain no matter what. We're going to stick around until the last person's finished because that's what we do with our teammates." At the time, I kind of laughed a little bit, but then I started buying into it. It brought our team together. Cross country is a nerdy sport, but my high school team won all the time—we always won. The coach had this idea of being great and how you're going to become a great man through running by doing all these small things, and it totally worked for our team. It was awesome. Because of that, this coach developed a kind of cult personality. We used to have a phrase: "Tradition doesn't graduate." I still remember it—tradition doesn't graduate.
37:35	Shaan Puri	Like that.
37:35	Sam Parr	He was like, "I've been doing this since the eighties. Tradition doesn't graduate — you guys are gonna graduate, but we've been doing this the same way and it works." I just remember all of these culty lines. We're talking high school cross country — nothing significant — but it meaningfully impacted me, and it was awesome. So this type of story that inspires you to be a better human being by teaching you how to work better or clean your desk better — I love that story.
37:56	Shaan Puri	My buddy Jason told me an amazing story. Jason Hitchcock — I think you know Jason — he used to work at Bebo. I was pretty hard on Jason; I would give him feedback all the time: “Hey, you gotta do this, you gotta do this, you gotta do this.” Maybe it’s because he was one of the non-engineers, so I felt like, you know, there are only a few non-engineers — I'm going to tell you what I think. The engineers don't really have as much to say because that's not my domain. I noticed he took it really well. He always had an incredible attitude. In a one-on-one I gave him credit for that. I said, “Man, I think that you have just like a 10 out of 10 attitude at life and at work and I just really respect that. I know that I give you a bunch of feedback, but you take it so incredibly well,” and he was like, “Receive it.” I said, “What?” He goes, “I don't take it. I receive it.” Then he asked, “Can I tell you a story about where that comes from?” I said, “Yeah, sure.” He said: in his freshman year of high school he wanted to play water polo. His older brother was the captain of the water polo team, and Jason thought he was as good as him or was going to be better. He was feeling himself a little bit — a hotshot. They get in the pool, and for water polo you're basically treading water while you're playing, so it's a hard sport. During warm-up you're probably not going as hard, so Jason's brother was being a little sloppy in warm-up while treading water. But when he's throwing the ball his arm is skimming the surface — it's in the water still...
39:15	Sam Parr	It's not out of the water like you would want it.
39:16	Shaan Puri	When you're really playing in a game, the varsity coach walks by and says, "Jason, get your arm out of the water. Keep your arm out of the water." Jason's like, "Yeah, yeah, thanks, coach," and keeps going. A couple minutes later, being a little lazy again, the coach repeats, "Jason, keep your arm out of the water." Jason responds, "Yeah, coach, sorry. I will—I'm just getting warmed up." The coach blows the whistle. Everybody comes over and he says: > "Hey everybody, I'm Coach. I just want to introduce you to Jason. Jason is a freshman. Jason is too good for feedback." He basically pulls Jason aside and embarrasses him in front of everyone. He explains: "Look, Jason, feedback is a gift. If I'm going to give you that gift, you have to receive the gift. Don't just throw the gift away when I give you that gift." He asks you to think about what it takes to give somebody feedback: you have to be kind of vulnerable, you're risking conflict, and you have to care about making that person better. Those are the things it takes to give that gift. So "feedback is a gift" became a mantra at the company. It was a lesson from his high school water polo coach, and the story with the lesson is what we needed for people to really get it.
40:49	Sam Parr	I love stories like this—they always get me going. I distinctly remember we did a podcast a year ago where we were talking. I think I was actually motivating you. You had said something like, "I haven't done anything world-changing; I've been doing this thing," and I was like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa—why are you saying that? Who cares?" Just creating a small game that makes someone a little bit happier is worth it. That's not necessarily less meaningful than anything else. I've grown to believe that. High school sports are, on the surface, very insignificant—and yet they're a world-changing experience for many kids. We need to take that same energy to work. For example: we're making a podcast—that's fine. But even with something way less glamorous, like making B2B software, it's not that there's nothing special about it. You can learn how to be excellent here. You can learn how to follow through. You can learn how to do what you say you'll do. You can learn how to have this uneearned pride—where you make tough decisions when no one is looking. I think that has carried over to employees and how I've been working with my team.
41:57	Shaan Puri	"That's cool — I like it. Sam's in his leadership arc; that's definitely the season you're in. You started. You gotta, like, start going by Samuel or something. I feel like we need to upgrade the name — everything. I think... you need to reinvent yourself here, actually."
42:11	Sam Parr	"Father. Just father."
42:16	Shaan Puri	It's a word everyone calls you: "father."
42:19	Sam Parr	I told them to call him Sam. Just the same way the stargazing thing exists, there's this thing called UniversalMinistries.com where you can sign up and get ordained as a minister. I've had to do that in a while... yeah, I've had to do that too, because I've officiated a couple of weddings before. It's obviously a crack of bullshit, but I am a minister, so we could go by minister. I am a legal witness. Alright, Sean — I want someone who's in the aviation business, in the grocery store business, and who actually had a pretty important character in a movie, Marty Supreme, which recently just came out.
42:59	Shaan Puri	Okay, I haven't seen the movie yet.
43:01	Sam Parr	Okay, but you know what it is, right? It's, like, the biggest movie going on right now.
43:04	Shaan Puri	Timothée Chalamet and ping pong... I—I don't know. That's literally the only two words I know of.
43:09	Sam Parr	Or, as Adam Sandler says: "Timothée Chalamet—like, he... if you see that, when he does that, it's so good." Okay, so Google "John Cat Miodontis."
43:19	Shaan Puri	Alright. John "The Big Cat" — here we go. Who am I looking at? American. Okay, here's just a quick description: American billionaire businessman and radio talk show host. He's the owner, president, chairman, and CEO of grocery chains Gristedes and d'Agostino supermarkets in Manhattan. "I've never heard of that." Okay, go ahead — $5 billion net worth.
43:38	Sam Parr	Yeah, have you never heard of this guy?
43:40	Shaan Puri	"No—he... but he's a— is this guy the famous actor? Like, why does he look so, so familiar?"
43:45	Sam Parr	He's a familiar face. He's one of those guys—sort of like the character in The Dark Knight who plays the police chief, where you're like, "I've seen this actor everywhere. What's his name?" He sort of has that type of energy. So here's his story. I think he's 80 now. He was born—I guess that would mean sometime in the 1940s—and he immigrated as a baby from Greece. He came to New York; I believe he moved to Harlem. He was an okay student and went to Brooklyn Tech, which I think in New York is a pretty good school. But eventually he actually got into "West"? [unclear]. So he's clearly smart but decided not to go to school. Instead, he bought a small grocery store. At about age 20, he convinced the failing grocery store owner to sell to him on an owner-financing type of setup, where he didn't have to come up with a lot of money. Do you know anything about grocery stores? They're like the hardest business to run.
44:36	Shaan Puri	"It's like a no-margin business, right?"
44:38	Sam Parr	Yeah, it's a commodity — there are no margins. If you look at the biggest grocery stores, or at least some of the mid-sized regional giants, they do about 3% margins. It's incredibly challenging. You have food that's going to spoil, and particularly back in the 1970s when he was doing it, you didn't have the best systems to make sure your food wouldn't spoil. It was very hard. But he's a dog — he's got that immigrant hustle — and he's able to grow this business. I think it took something like seven years. By the time he's only 32, he had— I found this cool quote on Newspapers.com in an old article—he grew the business to the point where he was making something like $40,000,000 a year in revenue and had 12 or 15 locations. He goes, "I'm now paying myself..." Actually, he said this at the age of 28: "I'm paying myself a million dollars a year." Through just hustle and grind, he kind of makes it work and did a lot of the things we take for granted now. His grocery stores were called Red Apple. They did free check cashing, they did free delivery, and it was a discount store. A lot of that isn't particularly groundbreaking now, but he provided a pretty simple service and he did it really well. Now Red Apple, which I think has about 100 locations in the city, owns Gristedes. Have you heard of Gristedes?
45:50	Shaan Puri	No. Is that like a New York thing? I... [trails off]
45:52	Sam Parr	Yeah, these are all—it's all local things. But here's where it gets weird: he does two interesting moves. At the age of 32, I think, he was like, "I was gonna get into jets." His dream was to be a pilot. He'd never been able to do that, so he gets his pilot's license just for fun. He does a move I've actually heard Richard Branson do as well: he buys a jet. It's kind of interesting and kind of fun, but then he's like, "I gotta turn this into a business. I gotta do something." So he buys one plane—a relatively small plane. In his biography, it was just a Cessna, nothing fancy. He starts allowing customers to charter his plane from New York City to Atlantic City. This is in the 1970s and 1980s, so the airlines are still somewhat nascent and it's pretty complicated... but he pulls it off. Now, officially, he's in the aviation business. One thing leads to another. Over about eight years it grows into a fleet of roughly 40 planes and jets, which he eventually sells to Warren Buffett. That was one of the beginnings of NetJets, which is one of Berkshire Hathaway's crown jewels, I believe.
46:56	Shaan Puri	And so, he was doing it as private charters — not like an airline, like Branson.
47:00	Sam Parr	No private charters, but he tried to get into the actual airline business, and I don't think it worked out. Now, while all of this is going on, he's still only like 33, 34, 35 years old. He does another crazy thing: he hears about an oil refinery going out of business in Pennsylvania. The grocery store business is a commodity — lots of unions, very low margins, 24-hour operations. You have to be working 24 hours to make it work. Somehow — which I never would have thought would be a thing — he made the leap that they are comparable. He gets into the oil business and he finds an oil refining company. Do you know what that means?
47:37	Shaan Puri	Not, I mean, not really. They are a middleman in the oil process, between drilling for the oil and selling it to the end customer. Is my guess. What?
47:46	Sam Parr	Not exactly. These are all very vague terms, so I had to figure out what oil refining actually is. Basically, if I had to dumb it down, they do two things. One, they have massive pools or tanks in the ground that can store tons and tons of oil. You drill the oil, it goes to this thing, and it's not particularly useful—you can't use it. So there's a process where you have to refine it. You can take parts of that crude oil and turn it into oil you can use in cars, oil you can burn as kerosene. Oil can turn into multiple products along the way. That's what he did: he bought a business that did that, which is actually kind of ridiculous. You never would have thought that would have been a thing, but it works.
48:31	Shaan Puri	And by the way, when you're reading about this or watching whatever you watched for this, is he just like a "gunslinger"? Why is he going into all these different spaces? He can't help himself—does he have some aspiration, or is he just wired that way? Did you give us a sense of why this guy is doing all of it? Why is he bouncing from totally different hard thing to totally different hard thing? </FormattedResponse>
48:53	Sam Parr	This is why I wanted to bring him up. I think you and I will get a kick out of people like him. But let me just add that he does two things now. In his sixties — I think he's close to 80 now — he does two other wild things. One: he started an AM radio political, weekly radio show, which he still hosts. You can't find it on YouTube and you can't find it on Spotify. You literally only get this on AM radio. He records every single Sunday, and I've listened to it. His co-host is this Long Island guy who's like, "Hey John, what do you think about this Mondani guy?" It's hilarious. He's a...
49:35	Shaan Puri	Very.
49:35	Sam Parr	Unrefined billionaire, I would say — and I mean that in a cool way. The second thing he did was run for mayor in 2012, I think, and he almost won. He said, "I'm gonna be a mayor for the people in Harlem and the people in Wall Street." He's this very salt-of-the-earth, immigrant-energy type of billionaire. But the reason why he's interesting is—what's that word you've been obsessed with? Generative.
50:05	Shaan Puri	"Yeah."
50:05	Sam Parr	He's very generative, but he does this in a way... the charm—like when Donald Trump is being a "nice guy." The charm he has is like "screw it, let's just do it"—you know, "what's money among friends?" This is an old-timey, "what's a little..." attitude: "I'll take a little, you take a little, we all win." It's that type of energy.
50:24	Shaan Puri	My word is my bond. My word is stronger than oak.
50:27	Sam Parr	This guy is actually—he has that energy with him, but he's not hateful at all. He's a Republican, but he talks very fondly of Obama and Hillary. He's not a hater at all, and he's got this very folksy vibe. When you hear him talk, he has a thick New York accent, but it's very much a "spit on my hand, shake your hand" type of energy. I have found him very fascinating because of that. Also, his company is called Red Apple Holding Company. I think they have like 8,000 or 9,000 employees. His family runs it. I believe he and his kids own a building in New York City; they all live in the same building and run the company together. He's still incredibly active even at the age of 80—he's constantly doing stuff. He's very interesting to me, and also he looks very funny, like he...
51:18	Shaan Puri	"And then, looks... he was just an actor. He just had a cameo. Was he playing himself, or...?"
51:21	Sam Parr	"Was to this, so Marty Supreme, which is the hottest thing going. I went and saw it the other day."
51:26	Shaan Puri	By the way, how is it? Like... must-watch? Okay.
51:29	Sam Parr	Where are we at? Did you see Uncut Gems?
51:31	Shaan Puri	Loved Uncut Gems.
51:32	Sam Parr	If you loved it, you'll like this. So, if Uncut Gems is a 9 out of 10 on the stress scale, Marty Supreme is an 8 out of 10. For people like me—if you're in my boat—you'll hate it. I hated Uncut Gems, and I hate Marty Supreme.
51:45	Shaan Puri	Too much, yeah.
51:46	Sam Parr	All the characters are pretty evil, and there's no redeeming qualities in any of them. But he — this guy John — is a pretty interesting, not-minor character in Marty. I was like, "this guy is everywhere." He's a man about town; he's always doing stuff. He seems like the Jesse Itzler category of people who have fun while winning and doing well. He's just a really fascinating guy to me.
52:12	Shaan Puri	Dude, I'm reading this guy's Wikipedia and I'm like, "Wow — that's really amazing. Oh, that's really amazing." Then it's like he gave a speech at the Stern School of Business expressing his unease about his daughter's graduating class. He said, "480 of the 580 kids are Asian, including Indian, and that's scary. When you think about it, we're gonna deport most of these kids." Then I was like, "Oh... well, that may not be so amazing, you know... yeah, might."
52:36	Sam Parr	"Kick me."
52:36	Shaan Puri	Right off this podcast.
52:39	Sam Parr	"Did he really say that?"
52:41	Shaan Puri	I figured... I don't — it's on the Wikipedia page.
52:42	Sam Parr	I didn't.
52:43	Shaan Puri	See that one.
52:44	Sam Parr	But I did see other things where I'm like, I couldn't tell if you were trying to be funny and it reads stupid, or like—right, right. Yeah, he does... he does seem like he's an 80-year-old New Yorker who has a little bit of a big mouth. But my vibe, my read on it was that he was an alright guy. But maybe—well, maybe I was.
53:02	Shaan Puri	Assembling this list of what you call "capital men", I feel like he would be one of the capital men. He just takes money, goes into these maverick new spaces, creates new investments, new entities, whole new industries, and, you know, wins more often than not. He doesn't win every time. You actually can't be a capital man if you have a perfect record; it kind of means you weren't playing as rough as you should have. But he wins more often than not. I feel like this guy's in that bucket.
53:36	Sam Parr	Yeah, I was reading his book, and there seems to be a common theme. A lot of these guys have one point in their life where they're just... what was the phrase we used? They're "leveraged up to the tits." Like, they have crazy amounts of debt.
53:48	MFM	What's a…
53:48	Shaan Puri	Scientific term.
53:51	Sam Parr	Derek from More Plates More Dates — he always says, "this guy's juiced to the gills." When I was reading about old Johnny Katz, I was like, "this guy's leveraged to the tits; he's leveraged to the gills." So yeah, you have to pay the price to do a lot of this stuff. But I love these young guys who have this gun‑slinging energy.
54:14	Shaan Puri	So he is your Billy of the week.
54:16	Sam Parr	Yeah, so the whole "anti-Indian thing"... I didn't know about that when I got into this. So this is a little—this is...
54:21	Shaan Puri	Start to throw you.
54:23	Sam Parr	Yeah, so I should have done a little capital-J journalism. Otherwise, I was going to say we should have invited him onto the pod [podcast], but I think — I think that probably won't be happening.
54:32	Shaan Puri	"Hey, we could still invite him. Let's see... let's see what happens."
54:35	Sam Parr	"You should ask him about that quote."
54:36	Shaan Puri	We'll just make sure we do it remotely. I don't disclose my location.
54:42	Sam Parr	I didn't realize he said that. So did he? What other dumb stuff did he say? He said—he said, like... a few dumb...
54:50	Shaan Puri	There's something about Hitler. Yeah, I don't know. Oh man — a classic blunder: comparing taxes on the wealthy to how Hitler punished the Jews, which is...
54:59	Sam Parr	Yeah, that's probably not the best place to go.
55:01	Shaan Puri	"A trap we've all fallen into."
55:03	Sam Parr	Yeah, I did read that line, and I was like, "Dude... we have seen time and time again that type of comparison. People have tried to make it; literally, not once has it ever worked."
55:14	Shaan Puri	Dude, I might end up being the richest man in California. Have you heard about this "billionaire tax"?
55:19	Sam Parr	"Yeah, so is the gist of it that net worths will be taxed at 5%?" </FormattedResponse>
55:24	Shaan Puri	Yes. A one-time tax of 5% for billionaires. So all the billionaires are leaving, which will mean they'll just be like, "Okay, we'll move to the next class of people." Soon enough, I'll be the last man standing in California.
55:39	Sam Parr	Yeah, I think that's a pretty stupid law. But at the same time, I'm like, isn't it crazy how little power a billionaire has if they have to leave their home?
55:49	Shaan Puri	"If Rokana can believe."
55:51	Sam Parr	Yeah... do you really have that much power? It's like another Dark Knight reference. Have you seen when Bane is talking to the guy doing construction? The little guy says, "I'm in control." Bane puts his hand on his shoulder and asks, "Do you feel in control?" Because, like, Bane is about to snap his neck. That's sort of like that.
56:08	Shaan Puri	That's the 850,000 votes it takes to put this on the bill.
56:12	Sam Parr	That—that's sort of the energy I'm feeling right now, which is like these billionaires being like, "You know, we're the big shots." It's like—you don't look like the big shot if you have to leave your... if you have to flee your home. That said, it is kind of a stupid rule. The analogy I always use is: let's say you buy a Picasso painting for $5 at a garage sale, and it turns out you didn't realize it, but you bought a one-of-one rare piece of art. Now your net worth is hundreds of millions of dollars, or whatever the painting is worth. How are you supposed to pay taxes on that assessed value?
56:45	Shaan Puri	Yeah, it's complicated. I mean, you don't even have to go as far as the "finding a Picasso at a garage sale" example — that's more of an edge case. But imagine you're a founder of a startup in San Francisco. On paper, your net worth is $200 million ($200,000,000). That's just because you had an AI company that was hot and you raised around that amount. That doesn't mean you actually have that money. It doesn't mean that money is anywhere close to guaranteed for you. Yet you would be on the hook for the taxes the following year, which is pretty wild. All it'll do is drive the wealthiest people out. It'll drive the startup founders who want to get wealthy out — because why would you start here? You'd literally be strangling the golden goose of California. It's like, "Oh yeah, what did you achieve? What did you accomplish with that?"
57:34	Sam Parr	I read that — it said 20 or 30 families have left. Prominent families. You should make a public announcement. Oh, I believe "'20 the thirty-first" — [unclear phrasing], yeah.
57:46	Shaan Puri	What a great idea. That's hilarious. That's like that one time I tweeted that I was buying Bitcoin, and then it somehow got picked up by all the Bitcoin magazines and newspapers. They were like, "Executive Sean Pourre says he's moving 20% of his net worth into Bitcoin." And I'm like, "I don't think y'all know how small that net worth is, you know? That's not magazine-worthy." This has escalated far too quickly for me.
58:13	Sam Parr	"I saw some guy on the line announce that he was leaving, and everyone started making fun of him. They were like, 'You know, you're not important enough for us to care.'"
58:23	Shaan Puri	Yeah, you own two duplexes. You didn't qualify the bill, alright. </FormattedResponse>
58:29	Sam Parr	Is that... is that what it is? By the way, one billion (1,000,000,000).
58:32	Shaan Puri	Well, there was a proposal for $50 million that didn't make it. Then they went to the "billionaire tax" because it's like, who's going to not vote for that? So that's the one that's currently proposed. But you people have done the math: even if you tax the billionaires—even if you took all the billionaires' money—it doesn't plug the hole in California spending. It's basically setting a precedent. It's kind of like income tax, right? Income tax, I think, was supposed to be a one-time thing. What was the first one—like 3%? It was pitched as a one-time-only 3% tax on income: "don't worry, guys, it's okay." And now everybody pays income tax—20%, 30%, 40%, 50% of your income every year. So the worry is once they set the precedent that they could tax you on property on which you have not realized any gains, then that's a problem. If they set the bar at a billion, they could easily change it or add tiers. Like, "also if you're over $100 million then you pay this," and "if you're over $40 million you're going to pay this," and they could just continue on from there.
59:36	Sam Parr	I've always found it interesting how people come up with round numbers to use as thresholds. If I remember correctly, I think in the 1910s or the 1920s the idea of a "millionaire" kind of came to be, where people were using the phrase "millionaire" like, "you're a millionaire, you've made it." It's kind of funny that a hundred years later we still use that as a threshold, right? Because a millionaire in nineteen...
59:59	Shaan Puri	2020 should.
01:00:00	Sam Parr	Would be something like 20 million today. I think it was 18 or 20 times, or something like that. And then—billionaire, like, people say, "billionaires shouldn't exist," and I'm like, okay, but why 1 billion? Why not 800 million? It's just... I've always found that interesting: how we have settled on this perfectly round number.
01:00:17	Shaan Puri	Dude, so yesterday I took my whole basketball team—the team I'm coaching—to the Warriors game. I wanted to make it special. After they won their last game, in the locker room we normally just go over what went well and what went poorly. I said, "Wanna do something for you guys? It's your birthday coming up. Do you want to go to the Warriors game?" We went as a group, and they got to go courtside to see Steph Curry. It was cool.
01:00:41	Sam Parr	"And you just ruined all of their eligibility for going to the NCAA by providing..." </FormattedResponse>
01:00:46	Shaan Puri	"I accidentally violated HIPAA."
01:00:49	Sam Parr	"So how did you get courtside?" "You just knew a guy?" "Knew a guy. Don't— I don't know if he wants me to say, so..."
01:00:56	Shaan Puri	I won't say his name, but yeah—no, the guy's with the team, an ex-player. He literally waved his hand and said, "I'll let them come down." The security guard was like, "I guess if he's waving his hand, you can go." So me and these other 18 guys all went. Anyway, that's part of the story. I had one extra ticket, so I took my son, who's four and a half, to his first basketball game. We had to leave after the second quarter because it's bedtime and I had to drive him back home. On the drive back, I was hoping for this amazing father–son bonding time. I wanted him to love the game—like, "watch, that's the greatest shooter ever, Steph Curry." It felt like, "that's the closest we've ever been to God," right here, five feet away. He was trying to care, but he didn't really—he was like, "Can we get his candy now?" I had gotten him some M&Ms and said, "Every time the Warriors make a shot, you get an M&M." Suddenly he was locked into the game. When we finally left, the drive home was an amazing moment. I put the Tesla in self-driving and talked to my son for about an hour. It was one-on-one time—rare, because I have three kids. He told me, "You know what I want to be when I grow up? I want to be a builder." I was like, "Amazing. A builder of what?" He asked, "Do I have to pick?" I said, "No, I guess not." I started explaining: somebody built this bridge, somebody built this building, somebody built this car. Somehow I began explaining who Elon Musk is. I basically gave him a podcast episode in the car: "You know, rockets—this guy builds rockets that land themselves." He asked, "What did they do before they landed themselves?" I said, "Honestly, I don't know. Maybe that's a bit of hype—people went to the moon and came back, so they do come back... don't ask too many questions." Then we talked about Tesla. He asked, "Did he start it?" I said, "No, not technically, but let's not get into those details." I told him Elon Musk is the richest man in the world—he has the most money in the whole world. My son asked, "How much money does he have?" I said, "He's got like $300–$400 billion." He was quiet for about thirty seconds. I asked, "Did you hear how much money he has? Are you still there? Did you fall asleep?" He said, "Can it even fit in his wallet?" I said, "No." He asked, "So, we use a grocery cart?" I started explaining the concept of banks. Anyway, I had this long conversation with him about money and about the builders—the prolific people who make all this happen. It just reminded me... I don't know.
01:03:29	Sam Parr	By the way, did your son have a take on the simulation?
01:03:32	Shaan Puri	We didn't get there; that'll be the next time. He does have a lot of questions similar to that — you know, "Where did the Earth come from?" And then I'm like, "Yo, honestly, we're very much past the edge of my understanding. I don't know, to be honest." And who's older, the Earth or the Sun? There are a lot of questions that are pretty tough. But the good thing is, in the car they have AI built in, so you just—if I don't know...
01:03:53	Sam Parr	We just turn on AI, ask AI, and AI tells us.</FormattedResponse>
01:03:56	Shaan Puri	Anyway, so that's that.
01:03:58	Sam Parr	Alright, that's the pod.

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4 dumb ideas that made people rich

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