Sam and Shaan run their second “drunk ideas” episode, pitching each other six semi-serious business concepts that range from an OnlyFans-style therapy voyeur app to a private photo vault, a virtual Santa experience, a reinvented SlideShare, a food-content restaurant, and a charm school for Indian men. Producer Ben judges the winner and worst idea at the end.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host, co-founder of The Hustle), Shaan Puri (host, investor), Ben (producer)
Only Problems: OnlyFans for Therapy [00:00:00]
Shaan: This business I’m calling “Only Problems.” Forget about crime — the biggest battle is what’s inside. People in life have basically the same five problems: health, wealth, relationships, happiness, purpose. Everybody’s got the same five problems. That’s the dirty secret.
Shaan: I saw Tony Robbins once. He goes, “I’ve helped four million people in these seminars over 22 years, and guess what? People have five problems.” He goes, “If you think ‘woe is me,’ if you think it’s a big burden on you — guess what? In this room right now there’s probably 500 other people who have the same problem as you, whether it’s with their husband or their kids or their parents or their health or whatever.”
Shaan: A lot of people need therapy, but a lot of people aren’t going to therapy. It’s too taboo, it’s too expensive, it’s too vulnerable. They don’t want to do it. People would rather sit on Netflix and watch reality TV for distraction and entertainment.
Shaan: Wait a minute — is that a great idea? You turn therapy into entertainment. It’s called Only Problems. It’s OnlyFans for therapy. Here’s how it works: you pay a monthly subscription and you get to sit in, fly-on-the-wall style, on somebody going through an actual therapy session about the problem that you have — the area of your life you’re most curious about. You can listen to somebody vent about their relationships, their health problems, their career problems, whatever.
Shaan: They’re getting real therapy, but they get it subsidized — cheap therapy, maybe free therapy — because there are 25 anonymous people who don’t know their identity listening in. They get to back-channel chat a little in the chat. The listeners’ identity is also anonymous. Therapists get more clients, people get more help, and other people get second-hand help by sitting in the crowd and listening. They get entertainment and they get help.
Welcome to the Drunk Ideas Episode [00:03:30]
Shaan: All right, so we’re here. We’re going to do a fan favorite — the drunk ideas episode. This episode started when I had some business ideas that — I’ll admit it — I knew they were bad. But they weren’t all bad. They were bad-good. Bad-good is a separate thing altogether.
Sam: How do you explain bad-good?
Shaan: You know what I mean when I say that, right? It’s like the lady who sells farts in a jar. When you’re telling someone about it you’re like, “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.” And then she makes five hundred thousand dollars.
Sam: Have you seen that lady?
Shaan: Yeah. This idea is like the Beefy Five-Layer Burrito at Taco Bell. It’s bad-good. So basically, these are ideas that I know are not great, but there’s some nugget of gold in them. There’s some truth to them, and they need to be said.
Shaan: You know, being drunk is like air cover for saying some silly, stupid things. Neither of us drink. I don’t drink. Sam doesn’t drink. When’s the last time you drank — like ten years ago?
Sam: Eight years ago. But I’m not like, you know, I don’t have my sobriety coin or whatever. I just generally don’t drink. It’s not like a thing. I don’t have a problem.
Shaan: You should lie and say you did.
Sam: No, I didn’t have to overcome this. I just kind of… yeah.
Shaan: And the best drunk idea last time — I still think about it all the time — was called the Really Long Distance Girlfriend. It was a service where you just text a lady and she becomes your companion, but you never actually see her because she’s just a really long-distance girlfriend. And she’s the best kind of girlfriend. She’s only supportive — because she’s paid. That’s it. She’s paid to be great. And you don’t have to be a great boyfriend. She’s just a great girlfriend at a distance. And I should set up a call center in Ukraine because I think that idea still has legs.
Shaan: All right. So last time it was just me, this time we both were supposed to do this. How was this for you?
Sam: I’m good. I’ve got a few, but some of them are actually like good ideas, and some of them aren’t even that funny. I’ve got a couple.
Shaan: I want you to start.
Sam: Most of my ideas are bad-bad ideas.
Shaan: No, I’ve got a couple of good ones. Most of mine are things that already kind of exist and I’m shocked that they work.
Sam: All right, all right. So we’re going to pitch each other these — I don’t know what yours are, you don’t know what mine are. We’re going to pitch each other, and then producer Ben — powerful producer Ben, man of God Ben, Ben who can still dunk — he’s going to be the judge at the end. He’ll give us the best and the worst idea.
Idea #1: Hideaway (Private Photo Vault App) [00:07:00]
Shaan: All right, I’ll go first. The first idea, Sam — it’s called Hideaway. Let me ask you a question. Think of the scariest things in the world. Maybe you’re thinking about snakes, maybe public speaking — we’ve heard those studies. But public speaking is sort of silly. Nobody’s actually afraid of public speaking; they’re afraid of public humiliation. And there’s no greater humiliation than digital humiliation.
Shaan: You’re in a work presentation and you try to share your screen and you’ve still got a tab open from last night — that’s public humiliation. But the worst one is when somebody just takes your phone and opens it up and you don’t know where they’re going to go with it. And when they go to your browser and the first letter they’re going to type starts with P, you’re like — what’s going to autofill? Please let me have googled PBS recently.
Sam: Right.
Shaan: So what Hideaway does — this is our first product, we’re really all about preventing digital humiliation — is a private camera roll. It’s going to combine two of my favorite ideas. One, we solve the pain of somebody taking your phone or you trying to show them a photo but you’re scrolling through your entire camera roll, which is a ridiculous invasion of privacy. And two, one of my favorite ideas growing up — in movies you see the rich people have a room with a secret bookcase. You pull the fourth book on the second shelf and a secret door emerges.
Shaan: So it’s that. It’s a secret bookcase. It’s a Murphy door for your phone. It’s Hideaway. It’s basically a camera and camera roll that is kept private and separate from your main camera roll. You open the app, it’s disguised to look like a harmless app — it looks like a Kindle app, like a bookshelf. But only when you tap the third, seventh, and eighth books does it flip over and it’s a camera. That camera roll is for your eyes only. Hideaway.
Shaan: It could be a calculator app, it could be a book reading app. It’s got to be something that looks harmless — so that even if your parent looked over your shoulder and saw it, they’d think “Oh, my son is just browsing the latest books, he’s just doing some quick calculations.” They don’t know you’re going to your secret camera roll.
Sam: All right, let me elaborate on this a little. Do me a favor — go to “photo vault app” in search. The first result I see is Private Photo Vault — Pic Safe. And the icon is incredible. Hey, YouTube guy, put the icon of this on the screen. It’s a manila folder, but Photoshopped onto it is a giant key lock, and the key is just going directly through the middle of the manila folder. Which is incredible.
Sam: So this app has been reviewed 807,000 times and it’s #86 in the App Store. It’s been around for a while. The founder’s name is William Siddell — he’s based out of Vegas. I can’t find much information about this company, and you shouldn’t be able to, because I believe he’s one of the only employees. An app that’s been reviewed 800,000 times must have been downloaded tens of millions of times. The premium version is like $50 a year, and it stores photos, documents, all that stuff. It makes the app look like a game and you have to do photo ID, then type in three different passwords to get to the photo vault password.
Sam: This app — I’ve not seen a lot of people online talk about it, but it’s kind of a juggernaut. It’s been around forever. I have to imagine that photos is one of the most popular categories in the App Store, and this has been ranked #86. I bet it’s been ranked like that for a long, long time. It’s crazy the number of reviews.
Sam: If you go to the Google Play Store, it tells you the download range. Apple doesn’t do that, but on Google Play this has been downloaded at least 10 million plus. So it’s above 10 but less than 50 million. That’s just on Google Play — let alone Apple.
Shaan: Yeah. You know how I feel about Android.
Sam: You’re already thinking — if Google Play is at 10 million… you know what my boys on Apple are doing.
Shaan: And by the way, I don’t know why I said that. There’s a guy in the YouTube comments who always reacts with a laughing emoji whenever I say something about Android. So I decided to make that my thing. I don’t really have anything against it. For the record, I do.
Sam: The key feature of this that I didn’t have in my pitch: decoy password. So if a nosy person wants into your private photos and they have a dummy password, it’ll show them just a random set of safe images. They think they got in. This guy thought of everything.
Shaan: Dude. It’s fascinating.
Sam: So let’s just say — if Google has 10 million, and Apple probably has equal or more… let’s just say he has 20 to 30 million downloads total. If you assume a 3% conversion on the premium version, you’d have around one million paying premium users at $40 a year — this guy has probably grossed around $40 million lifetime from his premium version.
Sam: At the bottom of the page, the copyright says 2011–2020. It says “Legendary Software Labs LLC.” And I just got a call from the state of Delaware, and they said there has never been a better-named company. They triple-stamped the double stamp. This is a legendary software. Your drunk idea is validated.
Idea #2: Santa’s Club (Virtual Santa Experience) [00:19:00]
Shaan: All right, you’re up.
Sam: So I found something that seems like it came out of a drunken bar hangout one night. Do me a favor — go to santasclub.com.
Shaan: Oh god. Is this NSFW?
Sam: No, it’s safe. It could go either way, but no. And actually — “not safe for work” needs to be gone now that we’re all working from home.
Shaan: That’s a good point.
Sam: Have you seen “not safe for life” on Reddit? I go to these forums and some of the stuff is tagged “not safe for life” and it’s hilarious — like someone popping a zit. Not safe for life.
Shaan: Okay, so I’m on Santa’s Club.
Sam: Santa’s Club was started in 2020 by a guy named Will Evelsizer. Each year about 15,000 people come to his site and spend money. The business only operates two months out of the year. Basically, if you go to the website, you’ll see your typical look at Santa Claus in a studio. You get to spend 15 minutes and do a virtual Santa sit — sit on his lap, ask what you want for Christmas.
Sam: He’s got a studio — probably in Nevada — where instead of cam girls it’s just fat Santas. And according to articles I read, in the first year he had 15,000 visits and prices range from $35 to $75 per visit. That means he’s doing around $500,000 to a million dollars in only two months. If you go to the website now, he’s already 100% sold out. The guy’s got to go get more Santas.
Shaan: Dude. This is genius. This is hilarious. This is not even a bad-good idea — this is a good-good idea.
Sam: I kind of like it a little better than cameo. I’m going to give you a little side dish — what about cameo for Santas?
Shaan: Former Cameo guy, Steve Galanis — he came on the pod. He just needs to implement this in the holiday season.
Sam: Well, it’s very clear: Santa’s Club just needs to get the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, all those characters.
Shaan: That’s great. That’s what you gotta do.
Sam: Ben, do you guys have any holidays where you need a character?
Ben: Yeah, like Pioneer Day. Maybe a pioneer-type dude.
Sam: We’re going to call it Fairy Inc. The employees are going to be the fairies — Easter Bunny, Santa, Tooth Fairy. What else is there?
Shaan: We’re going to have any copyright issues? Because that’s what we call Morning Brew — “on the download.”
Sam: This is a good business. So it started as a drunken idea but it’s actually cool. I know this lady who dresses like Elsa from Frozen and people pay her to do calls. She’s like a Disney character, basically — a paid cosplay cameo call or recorded video. That makes a lot of sense. Obviously the Disney characters have copyright issues, but Santa, Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy — you can do that.
Shaan: Especially if you did it on demand. Somebody could rip out hundreds of these in a studio every day — “Ho ho, Merry Christmas, Amanda! Your mom wanted me to tell you you’ve been doing a great job.” Each one is $40 a pop.
Sam: You know how on webinars you’ll see a pre-recorded thing but the guy acts like it’s live? You could do the same thing.
Shaan: Yeah, I hate webinars like that, but it works.
Sam: I give this a good-good idea. That’s solid. Anything else, or can I hit you with my next one?
Shaan: Hit me.
Idea #3: Only Problems (Revisited + Fight Club Analogy) [00:27:00]
Shaan: What’s the name of a fast-growing company that does billions of dollars and serves creators all around the world? It’s bigger than Twitch. They provide private photos and videos to their fans. If you subscribe you might be considered only their fan. That’s right — OnlyFans.
Shaan: OnlyFans is a great business model. But I got to thinking — what other spaces could you do this in? And then you told me about an app called Police Scanner Plus or something like that — it does millions of dollars a year. I just couldn’t get that out of my head. I thought, who would want to listen to that?
Sam: Dude, I listen to it all the time. If I hear a gunshot or a loud backfire of a car I immediately open it up and I’m like, all right, let’s see what’s going on. Was it real?
Shaan: There’s a curiosity component. People just like watching a train wreck. They like to observe from a safe distance. Do you have the app Citizen?
Sam: Citizen is just like that — yeah.
Shaan: Dude, I had to quit using Citizen because when I’m in Brooklyn I’ll pull it up and it looks like my phone screen has chickenpox. There are red dots all over the place and I’m like — there’s crime everywhere. I can’t be doing that anymore.
Shaan: So a lot of people need therapy, but they’re not going. They’d rather sit on Netflix and watch reality TV for distraction and entertainment. But you get to listen to somebody vent. Other people get second-hand entertainment and they get help. It’s called Only Problems.
Sam: Have you ever seen Fight Club?
Shaan: Of course.
Sam: There’s this premise in the movie where Ed Norton — Tyler, I forget his name — meets that woman who’s the love interest, and what they do is go to terminal cancer anonymous meetings. It makes them feel alive because they think they’re all screwed up, and they’re like, “I want to go meet with people who are actually dying,” and it’s oddly therapeutic. What you’re describing is kind of like that, where you sit and you’re like, “Oh wow, this guy really is messed up. I’m good.”
Shaan: Gratitude as a service.
Sam: It ain’t so bad after all. Could be worse. And that’s the thing — the crazier your problems are, the more vulnerable and open you get, the more people tip little hearts in the app, the bigger revenue share you get as part of doing that therapy. So you’re incentivized to be screwed up.
Sam: You can just make stuff up, honestly. But you’re definitely Jerry Springer. Why do we like Jerry Springer? Why do people still watch reruns? Because we like to watch other people have messed-up problems and see them deal with it. That’s what you’re tapping into here, but through an app.
Shaan: If you’re going to run with this, you better hit me at shaanpuri.com. That’s all I got. I need to see an email from somebody trying this idea. I genuinely feel like this is one of those ideas that’s like “no way,” and then it gets huge.
Sam: It reminds me of like the people who want to watch someone do surgery. There are these medical observation rooms — like a two-way mirror setup — where you just sit there and watch. That’s what this reminds me of.
Shaan: Have you ever been to that subreddit called Popping?
Sam: I was going to bring up the addictive way people watch someone pop a blackhead or a pimple or whatever.
Shaan: There’s a subreddit called Popping. I’ve been on the front page. You see this scar right here? I had this growth — like a ping-pong ball-sized thing — and I had to get surgery in 2014 to get it taken out. Right before I go under, I go to the surgeon and say, “Hey man, do you have your iPhone on you?” He goes, “Yeah.” I go, “Can you take some pictures when I’m under? Like before, after, and during, so I can post it on r/Popping?”
Shaan: And he did it. He texted me these beautiful photos of this growth being popped and scraped off my brain. I posted it on that subreddit and got about 80,000 views on my photo album. So I’m a member of r/Popping. I love it.
Sam: You may not have a blue check on Twitter, but you always have this. Put this on your LinkedIn front page.
Shaan: Former front-pager of r/Popping. And he also cut some fat from my stomach and puttied it into the hole where he’d removed the growth.
Sam: You got to fill a hole.
Shaan: He took a little fat off me and just puttied that bad boy in. I woke up and my stomach was hurting. I was like, “Dude, I thought you were going to take it from my leg.” He’s like, “No, your leg was pretty muscular. We just took some off your stomach. You had a lot there.”
Sam: The amount of times I’ve eaten a jar of Jif peanut butter in one sitting is just way too high.
Shaan: We need a GIF of you eating a jar of Jif in one sitting. Have you ever done an NFT?
Sam: I’ve eaten a full jar with just a spoon multiple times. It’s just too addicting.
Shaan: Habitual line stepper.
Sam: All right. On board with Only Problems. Good idea.
Shaan: Thank you.
Idea #4: Reinventing SlideShare [00:38:00]
Sam: All right — you got one, or do you want me to go again?
Shaan: Let me give you this last one. The most popular business publication in the world by digital audience — what do you think it is?
Sam: Most popular? There’s Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, CoinMarketCap — that probably does like 50 million a month — Business Insider…
Shaan: I would hypothesize that the largest business publication in the world is run by basically two people. And it is called SlideShare.
Sam: Wow.
Shaan: SlideShare is this site that was started — I forget her name, she’s pretty outspoken on Twitter and I like her a lot — an Indian woman founder. She started it and sold it to LinkedIn for around $150 million. SlideShare is basically just PowerPoints. That’s what SlideShare is.
Sam: Way to Slack up but make your parents proud at the same time.
Shaan: LinkedIn bought it in 2012 and it just sat there. Then Scribd bought it. I’m almost certain that like one and a half engineers are the only employees working on this. They were for sale for a little while.
Shaan: Basically, they get between 100 to 150 million visits a month. Most of the content — maybe half, could be more by now — is marketing decks, pitch decks, conference decks, business strategy presentations. And it makes virtually no revenue. If you go there you won’t see any ads. It’s just this website that does 100 to 150, maybe 200 million monthly visits. It’s a juggernaut of a website and it hasn’t been updated in years and years.
Shaan: Here’s my idea: if I were a B2B company — if I were Salesforce, HubSpot, anything selling software to people who go to business conferences — I would buy it and turn it into a B2B lead generation website. And I think you can make a ton of money off this, because any website that gets a ton of traffic from user-generated content — once it hits critical mass, which SlideShare has — it’s almost impossible to stop and almost impossible to catch up with.
Shaan: I think this website is just floating along not doing anything, and it could actually be a business that makes nine figures a year through ads. Super high-value customers because it’s only business people who are going to be there.
Sam: And who bought them? Didn’t LinkedIn buy them at some point?
Shaan: LinkedIn bought them in 2012, it just sat there, and then they sold it to Scribd. And I think Scribd — like LinkedIn — was just like, “Just get this off our hands. Don’t fire anyone who works on it, assume all the liability, just go. Just go away.”
Shaan: I paid $150 million for it and then sold it — probably for something like $10 million or less.
Sam: Missed opportunity. That is a serious missed opportunity.
Shaan: Check out this tweet I just put in the chat. It says — it’s from me — “Free $500 million idea: reinvent and relaunch SlideShare. All right great — great mindset — if there’s a talented engineer and designer who wants to do this, I’ll give you money and share my one-page plan on how to attack this.”
Sam: Wait, you have a one-page plan?
Shaan: You can’t see it. It doesn’t exist. I just wrote that out and was like, if somebody actually reaches out, that’s interesting. I will come up with a one-page plan at that point.
Sam: That’s not that drunk of an idea, but it’s an idea.
Shaan: To me, SlideShare is so ripe for the picking. It’s completely neglected, extremely valuable as a tool. It never really got replaced properly by something else. It didn’t become obsolete. It’s just one of those big opportunities hiding in plain sight.
Sam: And I would love to brainstorm how to attack this. The opportunity was missed. LinkedIn — if someone listening had a little bit of charm and suaveness and was able to get connected with the LinkedIn people, they would have given it to you for free. When you’re owned by Microsoft, they’re just like, “We can’t focus on this right now.”
Shaan: Yeah. An undisclosed price — I can’t imagine this was that much. I could be wrong, but it made no revenue. I feel like they probably got like $10 million or less.
Idea #5: Instagram Ohanas (Food Content Restaurant) [00:50:00]
Shaan: All right, I got another one. I’m all out by the way — you don’t want to know how long this list is. It all came to me in one giant flood. I just dumped them all out.
Sam: What do you do? Do you just like come up with names and then build a business around it? Like Michael Scott?
Shaan: No joke, that’s part of it. My thing was: you have to find something relatable — either something that really sucks or that’s really awesome — and use it in an unexpected way. You’re just smashing two things together. I saw the hidden bookcase thing and was like, I’ve always wanted one of these where I hit the three piano keys and a door opens. So how do I take that awesome thing and use it in an unexpected way?
Sam: Have you ever seen those for guns? You can buy a shelf — like you know how you have a shelf next to your front door that you put your keys on — you click a button and it opens a little bit on the bottom and you just grab your pistol.
Shaan: That’s pretty cool. I like that.
Sam: Put like my fanny pack in there maybe.
Shaan: Okay. Here’s the name of this next one. Ben, you might want to get your pencil out. Instagram Ohanas.
Sam: That sounds a little weird. Like Benihana’s.
Shaan: It’s Benihana’s for photo opportunities. Here’s how it works: it’s a restaurant that’s not about the food, it’s about the content. Like the Museum of Ice Cream, but seated. Basically, people go to restaurants and order like, “Oh, we got a fishbowl drink” or “We’re drinking beer out of a shoe” or “Look at the huge donuts” — and they take pictures and it becomes content. Sparklers instead of birthday candles. Now I started a restaurant — I know all the problems with restaurants. You’ve got food waste, high labor costs, and it’s hard to run right.
Shaan: Here’s how it works: it’s like Benihana’s. About 30 tables, every table seats eight people. You go as a group for an experience — not for the food. Two things happen. Food comes out that’s photo-worthy — either because it’s gross, it’s funny looking, it’s huge, it’s indulgent — like a giant pile of sour gummy worms, or a mega green donut, “Oh look, how are we ever going to eat this?” The giant beer can — 360 ounces, let’s say.
Shaan: The idea is all photo-worthy food, brought out omakase-style. We’re going to call it the Food Porn Café. Instagram Ohanas is the name. But there’s a drone camera that just flies above the table recording everything, dumps it into a Google Drive folder, and there’s a guy in India editing everybody’s photos all night. At the end you’re going to get the three or four best reaction shots because the food gets revealed — it’s like when you get your picture on a roller coaster. Except we’re using outsourced labor, the drone is capturing everything.
Shaan: It feels like a party. There’s a DJ. Like those New York brunches for cool people — this is that, but for food people. Instead of being cool and having to know how to dance and drink champagne at nine in the morning, you sit and food comes out that’s crazy, you eat it, you make a big mess, and your reactions are all photo and video recorded. $100 a person plus tips. Eight people per table, maybe 20 to 30 tables, two or three turns per night. We’re talking a million dollars a month easy. Food cost is way down because it’s not even real food — you’re just doing giant popcorn and silly stuff. No proteins, no food waste, because you’re just bringing out one thing for the table to react to.
Sam: Your five-pound burger doesn’t need to taste good.
Shaan: Exactly. It’s like Benihana’s — there’s a Harvard Business School case study on how amazing Benihana’s is, and one of the reasons is they put the whole restaurant into dining space because the chef is at the table. They have way lower food waste because of the limited menu. You do all that smart stuff.
Sam: Instagram — honestly, what do you think?
Shaan: I’m into it.
Sam: Have you heard the background of Benihana? The guy Rocky?
Shaan: Yeah.
Sam: So we wrote about it — it was one of our most trafficked articles for a long time. He’s an immigrant who came here with nothing. And then you know who his son is? Steve Aoki, the DJ.
Shaan: No way. I did not know that.
Sam: Yeah. Rocky was this international man of mystery — he’d been involved in all kinds of things, Benihana’s got big and went bankrupt and he bought it back and it went big again. It’s a really interesting story. And people love that company. I went — we used to go to team dinners there. I love Benihana’s. But dude, I’m into this.
Shaan: Bring it up. When we’re in a car going somewhere I’m like, “I think there’s a Benihana’s around here” — you know, just tossing the little Benihana flare out there. I never get any support. I’m 0 for 12 on this thing.
Sam: Do you remember that guy you brought up on Instagram during the pandemic who started that cookie business — the most ridiculous cookies?
Shaan: Yeah, I’m not sure how they’re doing now. I ordered cookies and honestly, they were not great. The expectations get way out of whack with a lot of these food crazes.
Sam: And what about the Museum of Ice Cream? They started a little bit before the pandemic, and you and I — a bunch of people — made fun of them because they raised like $50 million at a $250 million valuation. I don’t think they even serve ice cream there, right?
Shaan: It’s like a haunted house. You walk from room to room, each room has its own crazy thing, and sometimes you get to eat a little bit, but most of the time it’s just photos in a cool room. Instagram content in Manhattan. I walked by one recently and the line was around the block. I’ve gone by a few times and there’s always a long line.
Sam: I thought so, but then the SF one closed.
Shaan: Well, SF closed for maintenance. The Manhattan one — I mean, that’s really where it’s at. SF just shut down like every tech person in San Francisco and said “I’m out of here.” It was like an audible sigh.
Sam: I’m on board with this. We did a breakdown where we talked about companies like Cronuts and fondue-only stores and all these things — what do you have to do? You take a food and put it in a weird shape, or a weird size, or a weird color.
Shaan: Or a weird container.
Sam: Or you mash two things that are related but not entirely related — like a burger in the shape of a hot dog, a cronut, a Doritos Locos Taco. Or you take something that’s typically a side or a topping and make it the main thing — like a cookie dough-only place.
Shaan: You’re like the Rain Man of figuring out this food pattern. Everybody else just saw each one of these as “Oh, that’s weird.” And you saw the pattern.
Sam: What’s wrong with the left side of your face right now?
Shaan: I’m downloading it. I’m figuring it out. No — it’s all rooted in like an eating disorder. I go to food therapy. I pay a lady $700 a month just to talk about food every single morning. Clearly there’s issues there.
Sam: I use anything for the time. The number of times I’ve eaten a jar of Jif peanut butter in one sitting is just way too high.
Shaan: We need a GIF of you eating a jar of Jif. Have you ever done an NFT?
Sam: Habitual line stepper.
Idea #6: Swag School (Charm School for Indian Men) [00:62:00]
Shaan: All right. You probably don’t watch this show, but there’s a show that’s hot on Netflix called Indian Matchmaker. Have you seen it?
Sam: Of course I watch that show.
Shaan: You watch it? Okay. In my head I’m just thinking — y’all are screwed up. You guys are so weird. Like, how is the suicide rate not higher? I don’t know, you guys have got to get it together. There’ll be this beautiful doctor in her 30s, making money, she’s pretty, she’s nice, and her mom is yelling at her and criticizing her for not being married. It’s crazy.
Sam: My sister called me last night after finishing season two and she just goes, “I need to ask you something. When you first met Sonya, did you have game? Because on the show, the Indian guys have zero game.” And I was like, “What do you mean?” And she was like, “No, think about it.” She was like, “These guys — they’re nice guys, they’re smart guys, they’ve got good jobs, they’re normal people with no crazy drug habits. The reason they’re still single is because they don’t know how to look at, talk to, or touch a girl.”
Sam: And I was like, “Oh yeah, I had that problem. That’s me too actually.”
Shaan: Dude. I saw someone post a picture of a painting of a naked woman from like the 1700s and it was all Indian guys in the comments saying like “hey baby I love you, I love you for a long time, text me, call me.”
Sam: Yeah, like if you’re ever a girl doing live streaming on whatever app — Twitch, whatever — they just flood the chat saying “show bobs, show bobs” and it’s like, where are all these guys from?
Shaan: So I asked my wife — my sister asked me this, and I asked my wife, I was like, “I don’t think I had game, did I?” And she’s like, “No, you didn’t.” And I was like, “Hmm.” She’s like, “You had a different type — you had intellectual game. You were good at telling stories, you would say interesting things. That counts. That’s basic man stuff.” She’s like, “But you didn’t know how to just, you know, walk down the street and smoothly hold my hand without us having to have a whole conversation about it. The first time — how do you do that smooth?”
Shaan: You know, in San Francisco the streets are a little dangerous. She’s like, “You would always walk on the inside of the street. I’d be on the edge, right by the cars and the bums. You didn’t know to stand on that side. Just the little protective instincts — pull my chair out. Don’t say ‘see ya’ when we leave. When you’re walking to the car, you go to the other side and open the door for me, then you go to the other side.”
Shaan: And I was like, “Oh yeah, that’s so much effort.”
Sam: Right.
Shaan: I remember I dated a girl in Australia and she taught me one thing. We were kind of in the flirting phase and she was a dancer — she was teaching me some moves and she was like, “Okay, just put your hand here.” And then she looked at my hand and goes, “Yeah, but look at it.” My hand was just — limp. It was there, but there was no firmness to it. It was nothing. And she goes, “If you’re going to touch a girl, touch with intent.” And I literally have never forgotten that. That was 15 years ago. In my head I’m always like — that was the first time I got taught man stuff. How to do things with girls. Touch with intent.
Shaan: So here’s the idea: Swag School. It teaches Indian guys how to have a little more game. You go to a seminar, it’s like Toastmasters or Alcoholics Anonymous. You sit in a circle and first you say, “My name is Shaan and I am awkward.” And everyone says, “Welcome, Shaan.” The next guy says, “My name is Pradeep, Dr. Bay Area, and I am awkward.” It goes around the circle. And it’s going to teach you how to look at a girl, how to touch a girl, how to have some presence, how to sit straight, how to dress, how to go in for a kiss. There’s just a girl there to teach you how to do it. Because guess what — you can’t learn it in a textbook.
Shaan: So that’s it. Swag School. What do you think?
Sam: Love it. Have you heard of — do you remember Art of Charm? Our friend Jordan Harbinger?
Shaan: Yeah. I know he has the podcast and I used to read the blog.
Sam: He spoke at one of my events and talked about it. So it was him and two other guys — they had a falling out later — and the business was called Art of Charm. Teaching men how to be more charming. And he would also go talk to Navy SEALs — like, using charm as part of operations or something like that. And they were making, if I remember correctly, $10 million a year hosting these four or five day boot camps.
Shaan: Wait, what? He was teaching Navy SEALs how to use charm?
Sam: That’s what he told me. Like, you know, espionage type stuff. I don’t really know — he called them “operators” or “special ops.”
Shaan: Dude, I want to start a company called Fortune 500 so people can be like, “Oh yeah, I work with Fortune 500 companies.” You’re not lying — it sounds cool when you’re pitching. Like DMV.org or whatever. I’m going to make one called “Navy Seels” — S-E-E-L-S — and you can just say “yeah, I train navy seels.”
Sam: So he was making like $10 million a year hosting these four-day boot camps. And I knew a guy who went to one — this dorky guy I’m friends with — and he married this beautiful, awesome woman. I made a joke to him like, “How did you pull that off?” And he’s like, “Man, I went to this Art of Charm boot camp. It taught me how to be more confident and talk to women. It totally worked.”
Sam: Long story short — Swag School: down. Definitely for it.
Shaan: You validated me. Great.
Wrapping Up + YouTube Comments [01:10:00]
Shaan: I have more — so many more. But I think we save it. If people like this we can make it a recurring thing. This is the second edition of drunk ideas. Let us know what you think in the YouTube comments. I’m replying to them now, reading every single one. I don’t want emails, I don’t want Twitter — I only want YouTube comments now.
Sam: You’re fully on board the YouTube train.
Shaan: It’s going to my head, is it going to my hands? It’s so much fun. The videos get more views now. We’re out of the pathetic range where it’s like 3,300 views and I’m just like, “Oh man.” I used to say, “Well, the podcast is bigger.” But now I think a lot of episodes will get 20, 30, 40,000 views on YouTube.
Sam: And the comment section is interesting. Some of these people are just really stupid. There’s so many stupid commenters.
Shaan: And there are so many scammers. So there’s one scammer who acts like he’s us — he replies to every comment and his thing is “My First Million” but using emoji letters, and he’s like, “Come join my WhatsApp group,” trying to scam you on WhatsApp. And then the other one — it’s always the top comment on every video — I’m like, my mission in life is to eviscerate this person.
Sam: What does it say?
Shaan: It says, “I totally agree with what you just said. In fact, that’s why I started following Aunt Linda. She’s taught me all I need to know about forex trading and crypto trading. If you’re interested, here’s her information.” And then somehow they get like 80 people to comment and so it goes to number one and it looks legit. And it’s like, “I was skeptical at first but she really turned it around for me. I turned $2,000 into $18,000. Thank you so much, Linda!”
Sam: It’s like, “With the economy the way it is nowadays, investing is harder than ever. I’m so thankful for Dr. Baldwin’s investing WhatsApp group. It’s really been a life-changer for me.”
Shaan: And everybody’s like, “Dr. Baldwin is amazing!” It’s the same thing every single day. It’s such a slick scam. It’s a really well-done scam and I can’t stand it.
Sam: Anyway. Yeah, I’m on board — YouTube is our place now. Which means you’re going to have to start, like, getting a look.
Shaan: You’re absolutely right. I tweeted that out — I said “I need a look.” People gave me a bunch of bad ideas. Still looking for a good one.
Ben’s Verdict [01:15:00]
Sam: All right, who won? Ben, give us a best idea, honorable mention, and worst idea.
Ben: For best idea — Only Fans for therapy. It’s both funny and actually a good idea. I know I could pass like four and a half hours on one afternoon. The first half hour I’m like, “This is so stupid,” but I don’t quit the app. And then four hours later I’m like, “This is so stupid,” and I’m still in it. “Honey, come listen to this guy. He’s so stupid.” Like me and Jon and Kate Plus 8.
Ben: For worst idea — since I just pumped up Shaan I’ve got to take him down a notch — Instagram Ohanas. Worst idea, because I feel like you need one food if your whole shtick is all these different instagrammable foods. Also a lot of people are doing this in different ways. Instagram Ohanas — zero out of ten. One food would be enough, but Shaan just likes to over-deliver.
Shaan: Yeah, one of my greatest weaknesses.
Ben: And honorable mention — I wish Sam had done Swag School. I wish Sam had come on here and been like, “So, you know how Indian guys have no game?” Actually a missed opportunity. That was hilarious.
Sam: All right.