Shaan recaps 7 days in Los Angeles, rotating through dinners and meetings with founders, athletes, and investors — most unnamed for privacy. Observations: LA money culture brags about consumption while SF brags about achievement; a billion-dollar company CEO spends the first 8 hours of any new hire’s orientation watching them do nothing but observe; the “number two guy network” is the most underused resource in networking; Ben Levy is a case study in non-transactional check-ins and dot-connecting. Sam adds the Bucked Up story — two affiliate marketers who went from $250/day on L-Arginine to $250M/year in pre-workout powder by reading the news correctly (MLB bans deer antler spray = athletes want it). The episode closes with the Enhanced Games, an Erewhon riff, and a dinner conversation that spawned a content idea about ethics debates.
Speakers: Shaan Puri (host), Sam Parr (host)
Seven Days in LA [00:00:00]
Shaan: I just spent about seven days in Los Angeles rotating through dinners, meetings, and hangouts with a pretty interesting cross-section of people — some famous, some not famous at all but worth a lot. I have a bunch of observations, most of which I can share without naming names.
Sam: Let’s hear it.
The Sweaty Startups CEO [00:06:00]
Shaan: There’s this guy who built a billion-dollar public company. Not a tech company — a business. He considers himself a “sweaty startup” guy: boring industry, operational excellence, compounding over decades. We ended up at a dinner together and he was not at all what I expected.
He runs laundromats, among other things. He talked about laundromats the way I’ve heard people talk about SaaS metrics. He knows his contribution margin by location, his customer lifetime value, his churn proxies. He’s done for laundromats what other people have done for recurring revenue internet businesses.
His company does nine figures and he runs it with a very small corporate team. The insight was that most “boring” businesses fail because the operator treats them as boring — so they never build the data layer, never systematize the unit economics. He built the data layer. That’s the whole game.
Sam: He’s basically Sweaty Startups’ Nick Huber thesis at scale.
Shaan: Exactly. And the thing about how he onboards people — he has a practice where new operators who join the company spend their first eight hours of day one just observing. Not doing anything. Not learning the systems. Just watching how work gets done on the floor.
He said: you learn more in those eight hours than in the first two weeks of training. Because training teaches you the ideal process. Watching teaches you what actually happens, what the real friction points are, where the bottlenecks form, what nobody told you.
He applies the same thing to acquisitions. Before he buys a business, he goes and spends time just watching — not asking questions, not reviewing financials — watching people work. He said: the financials tell you what happened. Watching tells you what’s about to happen.
NBA Players [00:16:00]
Shaan: Met some NBA players through a mutual connection. Observation: the ones who are going to have a good life after basketball are very obvious — they’re the ones who are genuinely curious about other people. They ask questions. They listen to the answers.
The ones who won’t are equally obvious. Their eyes glaze when anyone is talking who isn’t them or isn’t talking about them. That’s not a basketball thing — that’s a human thing. But it’s very exposed in that environment because there’s so much social pressure to treat them like the center of the room. The ones who thrive push against that.
LA vs. SF Bragging Culture [00:22:00]
Shaan: One thing I noticed: the way wealthy people talk about their success is very different in LA versus San Francisco.
In SF, the brag is achievement-based. “We’re doing $50M ARR.” “We grew 3x last year.” The implicit message is: I’m building something important.
In LA, the brag is consumption-based. “I just bought this house.” “We flew private to Cabo.” “I joined this membership club.” The implicit message is: I have arrived.
Neither is better — they’re just different signals for different audiences. But it creates a weird dissonance when you’re in LA coming from SF. The metrics feel off. You’re trying to triangulate achievement from what people are driving and where they’re vacationing.
The other thing: in SF everyone knows what you do before you get in the room. In LA, nobody knows. So the first twenty minutes of every conversation are this slow mutual positioning ritual where you figure out if you should take the other person seriously.
The Veneers Rabbit Hole [00:28:00]
Shaan: I got sent down a veneers rabbit hole. You know what veneers are?
Sam: The teeth things.
Shaan: Yes. And I didn’t know how many levels of veneers there were. There are cheap veneers, mid-range veneers, and then high-end veneers that are hand-sculpted for your face, your skin tone, the shape of your jaw, the way your lips curl. A full set of the high-end veneers is like $60,000 to $80,000.
And once you know that, you can tell by looking. In LA, you can look around any room and categorize people by their veneer tier. I spent an entire dinner doing this. It was a weird superpower I didn’t ask for.
Sam: I’m going to ruin every photo I’m ever in now.
Rich Parents and High School Donations [00:34:00]
Shaan: Weird thing I heard about: in certain wealthy zip codes in LA, parents donate enormous sums of money to their kids’ high school football programs. Not to the school generally. Specifically to the football program.
We’re talking like $5 million for a new field house. $2 million for a jumbotron. And the kids playing on these teams genuinely believe they’ve earned it. They practice on facilities that rival small college programs and think it reflects how good their team is.
The interesting part — someone at dinner who coaches at a public school pointed out: these kids then get absolutely crushed when they meet kids from rural schools who developed under zero conditions. The artificial environment creates fragility. They’ve optimized for the optics of performance rather than performance.
Sam: That’s a metaphor for a lot of things.
Shaan: It is. And the parents think they’re doing something virtuous. They gave to a school — that’s good, right? They didn’t think through whether the giving was actually helping.
The Contrarian VC [00:42:00]
Shaan: I met a VC who was one of the most interesting people I encountered. He doesn’t have a photo on his Twitter profile — just an egg. He deliberately doesn’t build a following. His entire thesis is that the best deals come from founders who don’t know him yet.
He said: “Everyone with a following is fishing in the same pond. I’d rather fish in ponds nobody knows about.”
He’s been hunting for deals in spaces that are culturally taboo — content categories or industries that institutional VCs won’t touch because their LPs would object. His theory: if the best VCs won’t fund it for political reasons, the returns should be higher because the competition is lower.
Sam: Like what?
Shaan: He gave OnlyFans-adjacent content infrastructure as an example. Not OnlyFans itself, but the picks-and-shovels around it — tools, payment processing, creator management. He said: there’s $20 billion flowing through these platforms and the software supporting it is running on spreadsheets and credit cards.
He also does something interesting with his fund structure. He raises his rounds as SPVs — special purpose vehicles, one deal at a time — and he has one LP who writes all the checks. His entire fund is one person.
He said: “Everyone else is spending 40% of their time fundraising. I spend zero. I just have to be right more often than not for one person, and that person has been with me long enough to know my track record.”
The “center of the universe” bet — his words — is that you only need to be right once per decade, and you need to be positioned to take your full position when you are. He’s structured his whole operation around that.
Neighborhoods, Not Cities [00:52:00]
Shaan: One framing shift that came out of these seven days: the city as a unit of analysis is basically useless.
“I’m moving to LA.” Okay, but which LA? The entertainment industry LA around Culver City and Silver Lake is one city. The tech money LA in Bel Air and Pacific Palisades is another city. The Beverly Hills old money LA is another. They don’t overlap much. The people don’t cross-pollinate. The culture is totally different.
Same with San Francisco. The Mission is not Pacific Heights is not the Sunset.
So when someone says “I love LA” or “I hate LA” or “I should move to New York,” the statement is almost incoherent. The question is which neighborhood. The density and overlap of a specific neighborhood is what creates the serendipity or doesn’t. That’s the real unit.
You could have an extraordinary life in a place nobody talks about if you’re in the right neighborhood of that place.
Ben Levy: The Perfect Networker [01:00:00]
Shaan: I kept running into this observation across multiple interactions: somehow after these dinners, people would end up keeping in touch with Ben — our producer and business partner — and not necessarily with me.
I asked someone about it. They said: Ben hits me up two or three times a week. Never a favor, never a pitch. Just “how’s that thing going you mentioned?” or a link to something relevant to something I said months ago.
Sam: I could pull up my texts with him right now. He definitely does this.
Shaan: So I started watching how he does it. The mechanics are simple:
One — he remembers what you’re working on. Not in a creepy way, just in a “I was paying attention” way.
Two — he checks in without asking for anything. The check-in itself is the gift. Most people only reach out when they need something. Ben reaches out to give you something: his attention, a link, a connection.
Three — he connects dots. “You said you’re interested in X. I just met someone who knows more about X than anyone I’ve talked to. You should meet them.”
Four — he’s indefatigable. You can not reply to three messages and he doesn’t take offense. He’ll just keep coming. No friction, no guilt, just warmth.
And here’s what I noticed: nobody else does this. I’m supposed to be good at this — I run a media company, I’m constantly meeting people, I talk about relationships. But I probably text most people a couple times a year max, and it’s usually transactional.
Ben figured out that most successful people are profoundly lonely from a “someone who actually cares about what I’m doing” standpoint. They’re surrounded by people who want something from them. The person who shows up with zero ask and consistent curiosity is anomalous — almost shockingly so.
The Number Two Guy Network [01:10:00]
Shaan: This led me to an adjacent insight. Why were we getting access to certain people in LA — NBA players, executives, interesting founders — who we wouldn’t normally meet?
Because we’re friends with their number twos.
There’s an NBA player we hung out with because we know his close friend / unofficial business partner — the guy who travels with him, helps with brand deals, manages relationships. Nobody’s trying to reach that guy. They’re all trying to get to the NBA player. But the number two guy has 98% of the access at 2% of the inbox volume.
I noticed this with the Huberman Lab, actually. I went out to LA and hung out with Rob Moore — the producer who runs the Huberman operation. Huberman is the face. Rob runs the whole thing. He introduced me to the people Huberman has interviewed, knew exactly who could be interesting to talk to, had a feel for opportunities. And he had time for me, which Huberman would not.
The number two guy network is the most underused resource in professional networking:
- They’re nicer, because they don’t have the social armor that comes with celebrity
- They’re more available, because nobody’s targeting them
- They’re more interesting, because they actually do the work
- They’re the gatekeepers — they decide what gets to their principal and what doesn’t
If you want access to a level of person you can’t reach directly, find out who their number two is. Build that relationship. The number two is both more reachable and often more useful.
Bucked Up: From $8 Domain to $250M [01:18:00]
Sam: Okay, I have one story from meeting somebody in LA that I have to share: Bucked Up.
Have you heard of Bucked Up?
Shaan: No. Is that a hunting thing?
Sam: Not exactly. Let me just tell you the story.
Two brothers. Early 2000s. Pure affiliate marketers — they’d find a brand that wanted leads, rank for the relevant keywords on Google (which was easy back then), send them customers, pocket the margin. Three employees, $25 million a year in revenue, enormous profit margins.
A guy comes to them and says: I have this supplement called L-Arginine Plus. Something about energy or circulation. Can you affiliate market it? They get it to $3,000 a day within three weeks. 50% margin. Good, not great.
Then one of the brothers reads a news article: Major League Baseball has just banned deer antler spray. He reads that and thinks: if the MLB banned it, it must actually work. And every athlete in the country is now going to want it.
Shaan: He learned the right lesson from that.
Sam: The right lesson exactly. He buys deerantlerspray.com for $8. Ranks number one on Google almost immediately. Demand is modest — niche product, athletes know about it, he’s making money but nothing crazy.
Then the Super Bowl happens. Ray Lewis — one of the greatest linebackers of all time — tears something in the playoffs. There’s a two-week gap before the Super Bowl. He plays in the Super Bowl. The Ravens win. He’s incredible. And it comes out that Ray Lewis used deer antler spray during that week to recover and get back on the field.
Demand explodes. GNC approaches them: can we get 30 units? No, sorry — 30,000 units. He can barely keep up. He’s the number one player in a suddenly national category.
But deer antler spray is a ceiling. So he rebrands and expands. He’s talking to a GNC franchise owner who says: pre-workout supplements are huge but the category’s messy — a lot of bad products. He sees an opening.
He changes the name to Bucked Up. Leans into the deer aesthetic. Builds out a full pre-workout line. Goes to market with flavors called things like “Mother Bucker,” “Woke AF,” “LFG Pre-Workout,” and “Rut.”
Shaan: Those are all names of very angry dogs.
Sam: They’re perfect names. The brand is absolutely on point for the category. And today Bucked Up apparently does something like $250 million a year in revenue.
The whole thing started with an $8 domain and reading the news correctly.
The Enhanced Games [01:28:00]
Shaan: While we’re on performance-enhancing things — did you see the Enhanced Games?
Sam: I saw something about that. Was that the Olympics but with steroids?
Shaan: Basically yes. It’s a planned international sports competition where athletes are allowed to use any performance-enhancing substance they want. No drug testing. The premise: athletes are adults, their bodies are their own, and the current anti-doping regime is more political than scientific.
It’s funded — at least partially — by the same guy who funded Peter Thiel’s lawsuit against Gawker. So it has some serious capital behind it. Their website was down when I looked it up.
The argument is interesting even if you’re skeptical of the execution. A lot of anti-doping rules are internally inconsistent — blood doping, for example, is illegal in sports, but it’s literally just removing your own blood, refrigerating it to increase red blood cell concentration, and reinjecting it. It’s your blood. The argument that it’s cheating collapses pretty fast when you examine it.
Sam: Lance Armstrong used to be kind of a hero of mine until the lying part. The lying was the bad part. If he’d just been honest about it I’d have been fine.
Shaan: The lying is always the thing. And in a world where everyone in cycling was doing it, him doing it is… arguably fair?
There was a documentary about an amateur cyclist who blood-doped and documented the whole thing. He improved significantly. It just works. And he wasn’t hurting anyone.
Anyway, whether or not the Enhanced Games actually happens, the concept generates interesting conversations about what we think enhancement means and why we draw the lines where we do.
Ethics Debates and the Content Idea [01:36:00]
Sam: Speaking of interesting dinner conversations — I was at one of these dinners in LA and someone said they’d just been called for jury duty. The case: a guy on an online forum for consensual meetups had responded to a post he thought was from a woman and her husband, setting up a role-play scenario. The husband had fabricated the wife’s consent. She didn’t know. The forum-goer showed up thinking he had consent from both parties.
The question for the jury: should this guy go to prison for rape?
Shaan: That’s a devastating scenario for everyone involved.
Sam: The husband is clearly the villain. But what about the guy who showed up? He had what he thought was consent. He was deceived. Does that matter legally? The table went around with totally different opinions and the conversation was genuinely good.
And it made me think: this format — take a real ethically ambiguous legal case, present it to smart people, let them debate — could make a great podcast or YouTube channel. Like the way those Harvard ethics class videos work, where the professor poses a trolley-problem variant and you just watch the students debate it.
Shaan: Somebody builds it well and you’d have an instant audience. The demand for “intelligent debate about real situations” is huge and underserved. The podcast ecosystem has a lot of hot takes and not many actual deliberations.
Sam: Ten minutes, one case, two sides, listener vote. I’d watch that.
Erewhon [01:44:00]
Shaan: The last thing. Erewhon.
Sam: The grocery store?
Shaan: The grocery store. I went in to buy the most expensive water they had. $20. Normal. Then I bought the most expensive chocolate. Fine. Then I started looking at everything else.
Erewhon is basically a D2C popup shop in grocery form. They stock products that aren’t on any normal shelf, from brands that couldn’t get shelf space at Whole Foods. But the products are real — they’re not gimmicks. The curation is genuinely good. And everything costs three to five times what it should.
Sam: It’s to Whole Foods what Aoli is to mayonnaise.
Shaan: That’s the exact right analogy. Layup content: buy everything in one category at Erewhon, blind taste test it against Trader Joe’s and Walmart versions, rank them. Become the Erewhon guy. Every week a new category.
If I was broke and needed to build an audience fast, I’d be at Erewhon every Saturday with a camera. The content writes itself — you’ve got celebrity sightings, absurd product names, real blind taste tests. It’s food content that feels like fashion content.
Sam: You would be back to zero so fast buying Erewhon every week.
Shaan: That’s the bit. “Spending my last dollar so you don’t have to.” All right, I think that’s everything from the trip.