Sam and Shaan debate whether billionaires who claim to fly coach are lying, use Grant Cardone’s $60M Malibu house purchase as a jumping-off point for discussing his legitimacy, and dig into N2 Publishing (now Stroll), a bootstrapped neighborhood magazine franchise doing $130M/year in revenue. They also cover ConvertKit’s new ad sales network, Sam’s framework for co-founder alignment, and end with a riff on family traditions worth stealing.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host), Shaan Puri (host)
Grant Cardone’s $60M Malibu House [00:00:00]
Sam: I was reading an article in the New York Times about these Malibu homes and how these crazy rich guys are coming in and buying them. Grant Cardone was one of the features — they didn’t feature him as Grant Cardone, they were like “another local buyer is motivational speaker and real estate entrepreneur Grant Cardone.” He was just a guy they were interviewing, not like this internet celebrity.
He recently bought a house in Malibu, I think it was for $60 million, and he was like “I’m going to spend another” — I forget — “tens of millions of dollars renovating it.” That’s one of those things: when you see what people spend on their personal real estate, it’s hard to fake that. I’m just thinking, who would have thought that those things he’s selling would make that much wealth? That’s pretty crazy, isn’t it?
Shaan: You know what’s even crazier? The one time I talked to Grant Cardone for an extended period — we had like a 40-minute conversation — 20 minutes of it was on why buying a house is so stupid and why he rents everything. He was going off. People were like “oh your penthouse is rented?” He’s like, “Yeah, bro. Your house is not an asset. Why would I buy a house?” He was like, “I buy real estate that pays me, brother. I rent this penthouse. I always rent. I rent everything. I want to be able to move. I want to live in the place I like, and I take my money and I put it to work.”
And then you know, because he’s like a big-time showman, right — he points off somewhere and he goes, “Hold on, brother, I can’t hear you, I got something in my ear. It’s a voice. It’s asking me one question: who’s got my money? That’s what I gotta ask every morning. I wake up, I look to the heavens, and I say, ‘who’s got my money?’ And then I go and I get that money from them.”
And I was like, this is incredible.
Sam: Wait, where did you hang out with him for 45 minutes?
Shaan: He used to use Blab — the same product where I met Martin Shkreli. It attracted a whole bunch of grifters. Grant Cardone was there and I was like, “all right, who’s that?” I would go into all the rooms that had a big following. This guy’s driving a bunch of growth and engagement — who are you? And sure enough it was often people who are somewhat controversial. That’s who people like to watch on live stream.
So Grant would go on there and do his 10X meetups. If you haven’t gone into this world, you need to spend three hours. People would come on and they’d be like, “Uncle G! Uncle G! What’s up, man!” And they’d be doing the 10X sign. Then it would be one after another. “Grant, 10X 10X, brother. Just want to thank you. Before I was thinking the sky’s the limit, and now the sky is the floor. Am I right?” And Grant’s like, “Amen, brother.”
And I was like, wow, these people are really like this — these are the converted. A lot of people found real value in this, because this wasn’t a recorded testimonial, this is a live stream where random people are calling in. It’d be very hard to fake. They’re wearing the hat, holding up the books — they really liked his stuff.
I’d never heard of this guy. In the tech world you don’t know who this character is. If you’re in real estate you know him, if you’re in the motivational self-help world you know him, but he’s not crossing all boundaries the way Tai Lopez did.
The Second Thing You Should Watch: Grant’s Deal Breakdowns [00:04:30]
Shaan: The first thing you should watch is his community streams. The second thing is he does these deal breakdowns — very interesting. It’s like if Dave Ramsey had people call in and say, “Dave, I make $80,000 a year and I’ve got student debt, what should I do?” People do that with Grant. They’re like, “Hey Grant, I got $200,000, I’m looking at a property, the address is 3909 West Boise Street in Idaho, whatever…”
He’ll basically Google it, he’s got a whiteboard behind him, and he workshops the deal with them live. A speed version of underwriting a deal. I’ve actually learned a bunch from it. I’m sure somebody who’s a real estate master is like, “this is the Jim Cramer of real estate, he’s saying things that sound smart but he’s not considering X, Y, Z.” But if you’re a beginner in real estate, which I am, you will learn a bunch and you’ll be entertained.
Sam: He’s got pro wrestling vibes.
Shaan: Exactly. That’s why I’m doing the impressions — I like him because he’s entertaining, I’ve learned some stuff, and I’ve been very entertained. Have you seen his videos on YouTube where he just does sales calls for an hour?
Sam: I have. I think they’re fake.
Shaan: Yeah, it might be fake, because he’s always pulling a rabbit out of a hat. It’s like watching a pickup artist video — “oh my god, she was literally running to get in her cab, he said this one thing and she got out of the cab and started talking to him, this guy’s amazing.” And you’re like, wait a minute, maybe he just edited three really good ones out of 500 failures into this video.
But he’s doing an hour of continuous sales calls, so it might be scripted — the guy on the other line is like, “yeah, I’ll say yes, call me, we’ll role play.” Like the TV show Pawn Stars. You’re telling me that in one day you had a guy come in with a Civil War gun, a guy who had Napoleon’s hat, and another guy who owns a Picasso, all in Las Vegas?
Sam: Yeah, it’s like dude, the Undertaker was dead and then he came back to life and won the match. Yeah, you’re falling for scripted drama.
Shaan: Right. It might be that. But nonetheless these sales calls are very entertaining. It’s obviously very Wolf of Wall Street, macho sales, but I like to see it because I’ve never seen anything like that. I don’t do phone sales, that’s not in my life. I don’t know people who are as ridiculous as Grant Cardone, who are willing to say things as ridiculous as Grant Cardone. This is not a style of communication or salesmanship I think you can read, study, or intuit — so it’s just nice to see it live.
Anyway, I’ve gone down these rabbit holes of Grant Cardone and come out the other side being like: yeah, he is definitely self-promoting, and he’s making most of his money on the brand and not the meat and bones of the business. But respect — he hustles really hard, he’s a good self-promoter, he is smart, and he does well.
Sam: I don’t think he’s a hack at all. I think the criticism isn’t “this guy is dumb or lazy.” The criticism would be he’s just selling you a bag of dreams. He makes his money on people who want to be him, and they’re not really going to be like him. He’s promoting that dream. But I think that’s true of a lot of things in life. That’s true of Nike also. Like, would I go buy Nike sneakers because Michael Jordan wore them? Do I really think Michael Jordan is a scumbag for that? He’s not tricking me into thinking I can be like Mike. Although that is literally what the commercial says.
The Billionaires-Flying-Coach Debate [00:09:00]
Shaan: I have a question. When was the last time you flew?
Sam: I just flew last week — oh no, sorry, not last week, last month. Hawaii.
Shaan: Hawaii? How about before that?
Sam: I don’t know, when we went to Austin, Miami, something like that. So like once a year, or once every six months.
Shaan: Yeah, you’re not flying a ton right now. When you flew to Hawaii, did you fly first class or coach?
Sam: First class.
Shaan: So I went to Idaho this weekend with Ben — podcast Ben — and I spoke at an event. I don’t like to travel. This was work-related, they wanted me to speak at a conference. Whenever they want me to speak at a conference I say, “Yeah that’s cool, I’ll come speak, but you have to pay for first class flights for me and Sarah, my wife.” That’s a fair trade — I won’t charge you to come, because I like you, but I do want you to pay for my flight, and it has to be first class. I don’t like flying coach.
Well, my flights got screwed up for some reason both ways and I had to fly middle seat, back row, because the flight got canceled and they fit me on these last-minute ones. And I started thinking about that stereotype, the story of the rich billionaire who says, “Oh yeah, even though he was a billionaire he still flew coach. Nothing changed.” The idea is supposed to be “nothing changed.” And it’s like — Amazon’s old desks were doors.
Sam: Oh dude, I did that. I did that to be cute at our office. It cost more to do that. A door is expensive. I bought like the shittiest door and it was like $80. Then we bought cinder blocks and it was a pain in the ass. I’m like, dude, this thing at Ikea is $25 and it’s better. Also flat.
Shaan: That’s a stupid story. Maybe they had a door while they folded T-shirts on it for a day while they waited for the real supplies to come.
Sam: This whole “flying coach as a rich person” thing — and I’m not talking about like rich, like millions or tens of millions. I’m talking about when you hear billionaires or hundreds-of-millions people say this — I think that is total nonsense. I tweeted that. I’m like, this is a lie. Any rich person — I’m talking real rich — who says they do that, they’re lying. I want to see proof.
And I had a bunch of really really rich people come back at me and say they do it. Do you know who Palmer Luckey is?
Shaan: Palmer Luckey started Oculus, which he sold — he’s in the ballpark of billions of dollars, and his new company is worth tens of billions.
Sam: He tweeted back at me and said, “I only fly coach.”
Shaan: That guy’s definitely a billionaire.
Sam: And I had some other people DM me. One guy, I know his company’s public and he’s worth hundreds of millions — he said, “I’ll fly first class no matter what internationally, but I have no problem taking Southwest if it’s a short flight.” And I understand that argument if it’s like an hour. But if you’re going from New York to LA, or anything above three hours, I don’t believe it. I think they’re lying. I just think they’re full of it.
I asked Dharmesh from HubSpot, I’m like, “Do you do this?” He goes, “No, that’s a ridiculous thing, of course I don’t do that.” And he had this whole thing.
Shaan: I think the main thing people were saying was, “ex-person used to do this.” Which is either their PR team being like, “Hey, Bill, we need you to do a coach flight here — we’ll keep your private jet and Epstein’s jet off the radar, we can have this measure of austerity here.” And I’m pretty sure it works, by the way. The fact that so many people posted articles of “billionaire flies coach” — that’s not news, but the fact that it’s newsworthy is more proof that this is likely a PR stunt.
Because I’ve done it too. I’ve been like, “Oh, Warren Buffett still drives an old beat-up ‘83 Camry.” And “Sam Bankman-Fried, newest young billionaire, did you know he only eats bananas and sleeps on a beanbag?” These stories work. They’re worth telling. Which makes me think this is a PR scheme.
Sam: But the other interpretation was they did it so they could tell the company, “Hey, from the top down we’re all being frugal, we’re not wasteful.” I understand that. But it’s like, dude, you and your three kids are taking your vacation to France and you’re going to fly coach on Spirit Airlines? That ain’t gonna happen. You’re lying.
Shaan: Show me receipts. If you’re really doing this, show me your Spirit Airlines frequent flyer miles history. Dude, I’ve sat on Spirit Air and had the pilot come out mid-flight and rearrange the seating because someone was too heavy. He’s like, “We need to do a two-for-one trade — you need to move to the left side of the plane, and you two need to move to the right, we need better balance.”
Sam: Unless you’ve done that, you don’t have that trillionaire energy.
Shaan: Yeah, I’ve done that on pontoon boats where you’re like, “Hey you guys gotta switch seats.” But I’ve never done that on a plane. I didn’t even think it was real. I thought the pilot was joking.
Sam: It was not a joke. They literally were like, “We need to rebalance.”
Vibe Check on Economy Class [00:14:00]
Shaan: I was just sitting in this back row seat, my back was sore, it took forever. Just the vibe of the people you’re sitting next to — it sucked. I will do it if I have to, but if I’m worth hundreds of millions of dollars, what’s the difference between a $1,500 and a $500 ticket? Anyone who says otherwise, I think they’re an idiot and they’re lying.
Sam: Some people were like, “Oh, Bill Gates—” I read that thread because it’s pretty interesting. They slammed you with examples.
Shaan: I think it’s either the PR thing, or they did it to send a message inside the company — “Hey, from the top down we’re all being frugal.” But like, are you flying Spirit on your personal vacation to France? No you’re not.
Sam’s New Business & Co-Founder Alignment Framework [00:17:00]
Sam: I’m working on this new thing. I’ve got six figures in revenue now, six figures of cash in the bank, and it was all from phones — calling constantly. No website, a Typeform, and calling them, then sending a Stripe link.
Shaan: What’s effective on the call? Give me the strategy without sharing the whole thing.
Sam: I’m not really selling. Basically I’m making a community for a particular type of salesperson. The place where the business is at right now — I only want like 50 people to join right now. I don’t want a lot of people because I want to make sure it’s legit and good. Also because it’s an exclusive paid community — I need to make sure each person can actually provide value for one another. I can’t just let anyone in. I only want in the type of person who makes the next true person feel more valuable.
So in a way I’m like, “No, I don’t know if I have space for you. I don’t know if we can make this work. But we may be able to — that’s why I’m here to interview, to see if this will be a good fit for you.” That’s basically what I’m doing.
Shaan: You’re using the scarcity line, but this time it’s not actually BS, it’s real.
Sam: Yeah, I guess. I don’t know how to explain it, but it is true. I can only make it truly work for a limited number of people, otherwise it sucks. Remember how we interviewed the Chief folks? They said they had 60,000 people apply but they only have like 10 or 15,000 members. I kind of believe it.
Anyway, I’m working on it. I started it with my friend Joe. We did something interesting the other day. When I started companies in the past I partnered with the wrong people — not every time, but sometimes. The mistake I’m trying to not make this time is making sure I partner with the right folks.
You’re saying partner like a business partner, not an external partnership — like your co-founder type of thing. Someone you give a substantial amount of equity to. Which is very similar to a marriage. I actually did this exercise in my marriage but I’ve never done it for a business partner.
We basically said: separately, write down three things. What does success look like to you in ten years? What are you willing to give up to achieve that? And what do you value, day-to-day, and how do you want to get there? We each wrote that down, came together, and went through it. “Here’s all the things that are important to me. Let’s look at what’s important to you. Oh wow, they align really nicely. This thing doesn’t align — is that a game-breaker for you?”
Then we also went through scenarios. Like: you’re Lance Armstrong, it’s 1999, you know everyone’s cheating and you have to cheat if you want to win. What are you gonna do? There’s no right or wrong answer, but it’s like, let’s just see how our values align in different scenarios.
So we’ve been doing this thing where we’re trying to figure out why this partnership won’t work — let’s get all that out of the way first. And it has been awesome. More people should do this.
Shaan: Have you ever done something like that?
Sam: Funny you say this — I have, actually. We kind of stumbled upon it organically at my first business, the sushi business. The idea was to create a Chipotle-like restaurant chain for sushi. At this point we’d been doing it six to nine months. We already had the equity splits, we’re all best friends, known each other four years. Surely we know everything about each other, right?
This mentor guy — a smarter business person we wanted to partner with, a chef — he flew each of us out to LA one by one, hung out with us, and told us: “I feel like all of you guys say the same words but they mean different things.” I was like, “What do you mean?” He goes, “You all say ‘we want to do this the right way’ — but I think you all have a different definition of the right way. If I asked you each what you mean by success, put a number and a time frame around it — I bet it’s all different.”
We came home and did the exercise. Created a list of questions, sat in our own corners, wrote our answers silently, then compared. Jesus, they were so different. Me and one guy were pretty aligned. The third guy’s answers were way different.
The biggest differences were time scale — how long do you expect to work on this before seeing any tangible success? And what would be a win for you? One guy was like, “Man, if I could be making six figures I’ll do this forever.” I was like, “Dude, I want to make $10 million in three years.” The other guy was somewhere in the middle.
We were like, you would be happy with one path and I would be completely unhappy with that same path. And if we hadn’t talked about it, our definition of success would have been very different.
Shaan: You should publish this, by the way. There was a New York Times article — “17 questions to ask your future spouse” type thing. We should do a business partner version. Whatever you and Joe just did — compile those questions, because it’ll save people years of pain if they can identify these things upfront versus rushing in to co-founding.
Sam: Yeah, I like that. Here’s what I put down personally. What I want in my life: a net worth — I want a seat at the big boys’ table. I want people to think I know what I’m talking about when it comes to business. I want freedom — to be able to live in different cities with my family. I want to be present in my children’s lives. I want to own a bunch of real estate. I want to have fun and adventure. I want to work really hard for six or seven months and then chill for three months.
Then: how I want to get there. I want to build this particular business. I don’t want a boss. I don’t want to have meetings. I want few if any employees reporting to me. I want to be incredibly aggressive about this business. I want to treat it like a job — 40 hours a week. Few employees, close to no standing meetings. And a revenue target of $100 million in five years. I don’t care if we actually hit it, but I want that to be the target.
Joe answered similarly on a lot of those. Like, all right, there’s some alignment here.
Shaan: The Lance Armstrong one — I for sure cheat. You basically have two options: exit the sport or cheat. It’s not even cheating at that point when everybody’s doing it, it’s just the new normal. It’d be one thing if one person’s cheating and winning and everybody else is clean. But my belief is that basically all Olympic sports, plus pretty much all professional sports, are full of PEDs. Whether you believe people are clean is just a naiveness test.
Same thing with cheating in marriage: what percentage of NBA players do you think cheat on their wives? Yeah. The answer isn’t a number, the answer is just yes. There might be one outlier — credit to the AC Green of this — but I think the same thing applies. So yeah, that one’s the easy one for me.
N2 Publishing / Stroll: The $130M Neighborhood Magazine Company [00:30:00]
Shaan: Have you heard of this company called N2 Publishing?
Sam: No. What do they do?
Shaan: The reason I like this story is they’re succeeding wonderfully in a place that everyone thought it was impossible to succeed. It’s called N2 Publishing — they just rebranded last week to Stroll. It’s basically neighborhood magazines. Magazines in upscale neighborhoods. I’m pretty sure they have like 650 to 800 of these, and they’re all print.
So in like Danville or a nice suburb — whatever the specific neighborhood you’re in — they send you a magazine once a month. It’s like a bulletin, a newsletter, a magazine. Physically in the mail.
The company has like 250 employees. Most are ad sales people. They hire — or actually franchise — someone who lives in that neighborhood. They pay like $5,000 or $10,000 to become the official publisher of that area. That person has to gather a couple stories every month. But the stories are not that good — it’s just like people there’s this old idea with local publishing: “people don’t care about the writing, they literally just want to see people they know and places they know.” You can just list names and they would love that. That’s kind of what they do.
It says: here’s what’s going on, the local high school had their graduation and eight kids went to Stanford, this new restaurant opened and the guy is a Greek immigrant bringing some of his Greek taste to the area. Just going thing to thing.
Anyway, it’s a bootstrap business that’s been around for 18 years. They announced they’re doing about $150 million a year in revenue, and they’ve been profitable every single year. And they don’t have a website. The HQ has a website, but each individual magazine — no website. 100% done through paper.
Sam: That is crazy. How did you get these numbers? Is this something public?
Shaan: If you Google “Stroll Axios” — they just did a big announcement on Axios last week. The founder and CEO gave the revenue numbers. He said, “We do $130 million in revenue, we have 18,000-plus advertisers, we’ve been profitable every single year, we expect revenue to double every four years.” And they’re just expanding to all these cities. Changed the name from N2 to Stroll.
Sam: It’s doubling every four years — so that’s growing about 14% a year. Not like killing it, but doing pretty good.
Shaan: This is amazing. How do you find these businesses?
Sam: There’s this blog I read called Flash and Flames — if you Google it, it’s just some guy named Colin in England who writes about cool B2B media companies. I also read loads of niche trade publications that have literally 500 website visits a day. And when I did research on the CEO — Dwayne Hixson — I found it’s heavily rooted in Christian stuff. Their mission is something like “to create jobs, value people, and bring glory to God, and we just so happen to be doing it through creating this newspaper thing.”
Shaan: I wonder how many more of these there are. I could imagine somebody doing a doctor’s office monthly. Go to every doctor’s office, eat the cost of print, then go to advertisers and pharma companies: “We have 15,000 doctor’s offices that read and subscribe to this thing, you should advertise.” But here’s the thing — selling local ads to local dentists and realtors, a $500 ad to Kathy in Scottsdale about her open house? That’s a grind. That’s a really hard job. Maybe they threw the God angle in there because that’s the only way you can motivate someone to be on the phone all day doing that.
Sam: But if you did this for other subgroups, you wouldn’t need to advertise locally. Like a doctor’s office magazine — you could advertise to all the companies that sell to medical professionals. Or an e-commerce Shopify mag sent to every Shopify owner’s home, awesome case studies about e-commerce brands. Then you go tell Klaviyo and Postscript and every Shopify app company: “You should advertise in this, we have hyper-targeted distribution.”
The question is, is this better than a newsletter?
Shaan: I think that’s the wrong question. What’s quite interesting is that they’re selling a franchise — which is very weird for a media company. That is actually the more interesting thing. Do I think this is an awesome business? Yes. Do I think it’s better than a newsletter? No, I’d probably do a newsletter. But I would consider doing it this way: “Hey, we have 10,000 people already pre-signed up for this small neighborhood in Arizona. If you want to buy this list as a publisher, it’s a $10,000 buy-in, and we’ll monetize it for you. You get 15% of all the revenue we sell, but you’ve got to make sure you put it out all the time.”
That’s an intriguing business model. The ad rates for print could potentially be higher because you’re actually holding and seeing something. And you could do this with a lot of different things.
Sam: Do you know anything about the cost of print and delivery? That’s the biggest difference from a newsletter — no hard costs for print or shipping.
Shaan: They didn’t reveal too much, but they said their national team has editorial oversight to ensure editorial standards are non-partisan and community focused. They keep a cut of all ad revenue. Local operators use Stroll’s national printing, copy editing, and operational resources. The company distributes the magazine for free in readers’ mail. Pretty fascinating.
ConvertKit’s New Ad Sales Network [00:40:00]
Shaan: Did you hear what ConvertKit announced? They launched this thing where they hired an ad sales team and they’re going to go out and sell ads, and they’re going to give you — the user — 85% of the revenue they sell.
Sam: This is smart. I was always wondering why the email platforms don’t do this. Once you start your newsletter you’re like, “Alright cool,” and you de facto become an ad sales person. Guess what — you’re not great at it because you’re not doing it full time. It sucks. You would happily pay somebody a 15% commission for filling your ad spots and doing it well.
I was always thinking, like, a Mailchimp, a beehive, a ConvertKit — why aren’t they making this their business model, in addition to their SaaS revenue? ConvertKit is at pretty significant scale. I wonder how big this is going to be for them.
Shaan: So how did the ad sales team work at The Hustle?
Sam: Dude, listen to this. There was a period where Trung was on fire and he was our only writer — basically, he wrote the email every single day for like eight months. We were doing over a million dollars a month in revenue. There was one Trung. And we had like 20 ad sales people.
Shaan: That is crazy.
Sam: It was pretty crazy. That business could have been Trung and like four growth marketers, making over a million dollars a month. But we had eight, ten, maybe fifty — I don’t remember exactly — ad sales people. Each ad sales person needs an operations person, then editors to edit the ads.
Like, Morning Brew I think has 250 people. I would bet you most of them are ad sales or ad-sales-related.
Shaan: So with your ad team, you had some commission structure — like 4% or something?
Sam: Yeah. So the easy oversimplification: 4.4% of total ad revenue. Then just assume $100,000 a head in salary. Let’s say you’ve got 10 sellers doing $10 million in revenue. That’s $1 million in base salaries. Plus commissions — 4% of $10 million is $400,000. So $1.4 million for 10 ad sales people on $10 million in revenue. But then there are account executives helping them and operations people, so yeah.
Shaan: Okay so compared to ConvertKit’s 15% — at 10 million in revenue, you paid about 14% all-in versus their flat 15%. So roughly the same, just way less headache.
Sam: Exactly. And here’s why the ConvertKit model is actually better. One time we had Goldman Sachs as an advertiser and we had a story on some meme Instagram account, and I was like, “For this email, let’s use the word ‘shit’ in every single sentence.” And another time we wrote an entire email in the voice of Donald Trump — if you read it to yourself it sounds like Trump. Goldman Sachs got really mad and said, “You said ‘shit’ literally 84 times in this email, we’re not sponsoring you anymore.”
And I was like, good, screw off, I don’t care about you. But Katie sold the ad and her commission was going to get cut. So I was like, okay, I don’t want to hurt you, so I’m willing to hold back certain stuff — but I don’t give a shit about that brand. If they want to muzzle us, screw them. With ConvertKit’s setup, it could actually be more advantageous for the creator in that way.
Shaan: Katie’s amazing, by the way. We work with her too. She’s really good.
Life Hack: Steal Other Families’ Traditions [00:49:00]
Shaan: So God’s Ben — business partner Ben, not podcast Ben — was visiting. He’s staying at my house, we hang out for the week, get a bunch of stuff done. And on the last day I see him hunched over the table. He’s got a pen out, writing something by hand, which is not like us — we do everything on the computer. I was like, “What are you writing?” And I notice he’s not holding a pen, he’s holding a marker. He’s drawing something.
“What are you doing, man?” He’s drawing like birthday cards on giant pieces of paper. He’s got six of them. “What is this?” I’m like, “What’s the occasion?” He’s like, “It’s my dad’s birthday.” He says it’s a family tradition — every time it’s someone in the family’s birthday, they all get out paper and markers and draw them birthday cards. Inside jokes, whatever. “Oh dad, you’re the man for this reason.” “You love the Suns? Here’s a picture of Chris Paul holding a birthday cake for you, singing you happy birthday.”
And I saw it and I was like, this is amazing.
Now, everything Ben has told me about his dad — and shout out to Andy by the way, his dad listens to the pod — his dad is amazing. Here’s one thing that’s amazing about him: his dad’s a huge Phoenix Suns fan. So is Ben. I’m like, “Oh, did you get it from your dad?” He’s like, “No, it’s the opposite. Growing up, my dad didn’t really care about basketball or the Suns. I got super into it, and my dad just does this thing where whatever each of his kids is into, he’s like, ‘all right, I’m into it too.’ Not just supportive — he goes all in.”
The common move would be: you’re supportive, you show up to games, you’re kind of doing the crossword in your lap because it’s not your thing. His dad said the opposite: “Oh, you like the Suns? No no no, we like the Suns. We love everything about the Suns. We eat, live, and breathe the Suns now.”
And for his other son who does real estate — his dad’s like, “Oh, you do real estate? No, we do real estate.” He works for his son for free, helping him sell real estate 40 hours a week, hitting up LinkedIn. He doesn’t want to be paid. He’s that great of a dad. The other son does this comedy thing, so now the dad is in the comedy scene.
Wait, that’s an amazing dad — and a horrible son. Pay your dad, dog.
Sam: He doesn’t want the money.
Shaan: I was like, I’m gonna do this. On the dad’s side, I was like, holy shit. Ben works with me, Andy basically works with me too. He listens to every episode of the podcast, responds to every email we put out — not trying to get special treatment, replying like a fan. He’d be like, “Oh I love number three,” or “I love the way you and Sam did this.” How sick is that, to have your dad become your wingman for your favorite hobby?
I’m gonna do that.
Sam: So that was the first learning. The second was the birthday poster thing.
Shaan: Right. He’s like, “Yeah, my mom came up with this early on — love’s not about the gifts, this is just a fun thing we do for each other.”
Sam: Wait, when you wake up on your birthday, you have posters all over the house?
Shaan: Yeah. My mom would put posters all over the house that the other kids had made.
Sam: Oh wow. We did this too, actually.
Shaan: Honestly it made my day. I’d be so eager to walk upstairs. Kind of like when you walk downstairs on Christmas morning and see stuff around the Christmas tree — I felt that same joy. Walk over, see signs all over the place, and I know I get the breakfast I want that day.
Sam: I basically started like — I don’t even care about my birthday anymore because it’s always the same thing. And I hate the sameness of life. When Facebook came out with the birthday reminders, your wall becomes a thousand people who don’t really care about you writing “Happy Birthday.” I hate that because then I feel guilty that I have to reply.
And what other people do is throw money at the problem, which becomes a different kind of burden. I gotta get you a gift. But the birthday poster is so much better than a Hallmark card — it’s actually thoughtful, it’s kind of goofy and funny, it’s more entertaining, personal touch.
When we came home from this farming conference, my daughter had drawn a poster that says “Welcome home, Dada.” And it’s still the first thing I see in my bathroom every day — it’s a poster on the wall. Every day I go to the bathroom I see “Welcome home, Dada.” Which is a little bit true, the bathroom is my home.
So this personal poster thing is a great life hack. And it got me thinking — I’m going to start stealing everybody’s favorite family traditions. That’s my new question for people: “What are these family traditions you got?” People don’t even know they’re so baked into their operating system until you keep digging. And if a family tradition has lasted 20 years of your life, it’s probably awesome and I should steal it.
Shaan: I think that’s good. In my family, we’re all atheists but we still pray before every time we eat dinner. Like, you don’t eat until you pray, even though no one believes in God. That’s kind of an interesting tradition.
We do birthday posters. I don’t think we have any other traditions like that.
The one we started — I think I talked about this — we do end-of-year reviews where we do previews and reviews of the year to come. That’s our newest tradition. I like that one a lot.
Sam: My wife makes really good waffles with strawberries every Sunday morning. She goes all out. It’s one meal a week I know I can always look forward to. That’s it — one over-the-top meal a week.
Shaan: I give credit to my dad for the fun factor. My mom was more practical. My dad would do the same Monday night dinner — and it’s not because he’s a better cook, but he would add showmanship. He’d get these trays — everybody had their own circular tray with like four dishes — and he would add a quarter. We were always like, “Yeah, there’s coins there! I got a quarter!” It’s the equivalent of a McDonald’s Happy Meal but with a quarter. There was always something that was a little extra.
Or: he would come home and put his wallet down, but the game was I would always steal the wallet, and he’d chase me, and I’d have to hide it. The game was: can he get his wallet back? It’s like, how do you turn those two minutes of coming home from autopilot into something that’s actually fun and breaks everybody’s kind of mood for a second?
Sam: That’s a great question to ask someone: “What’s a really good family tradition?” I’m going to steal them too.
Shaan: I got a buddy — I don’t think I could convince my family to do it, but — he started dating this girl and I was like, “How’s it going?” She’s like, they have this weird tradition. He went on their annual family cabin trip to Tahoe. He’s expecting skiing and all that, but at night they did this thing.
Sam: Oh no. Is it like a blood cult?
Shaan: He’s like, “Yeah, they all read Harry Potter. But they read it aloud, and they read it in the voices.” I was like, oh my god. Little circle, sitting there.
Sam: Exactly.
Shaan: But to them it was their thing. And I was like, I respect a family that’s willing to be a little silly even as everybody gets old. I really respect that. If that’s your thing, that’s your thing. Let me go ahead and read Order of the Phoenix in the voice — let’s do this. But I say: like cornrows and sleeve tattoos, I respect that others do it, but that ain’t for me.
Product Managers Are the Throw Pillows of Tech [01:01:00]
Sam: My new line — I tweeted this out, just bothered people — “Product managers are the bottled water of tech.” It’s just a funny backhanded slide. Nobody knows what to make of it. It’s a compliment but it’s clearly kind of an insult. Like, I like bottled water, but I guess bottled water is useless.
Then somebody one-upped it and I’m like, that’s my new thing. He goes, “They’re more like the throw pillows.” Throw pillows — that’s such a good dis. Girls love them, they look good, they’re completely useless and annoying, especially annoying when you actually need to go to sleep. Calling something the throw pillow of X is just an awesome slam. I’m saving that in my back pocket.
Shaan: I met people at this conference and there was a lot of listeners there. Someone came up to me and said, “When did you guys decide to make the switch from talking about business to just being 12 year olds? And are you happy with that switch?”
I was like — A, I don’t remember, and B, yeah, I think so. But it was Steph Smith’s fiancé. He goes, “I love the pod, but like, when was that switch made where you were gonna go from talking about actual business to being 12?”
Sam: When I was 12, we had a question like this that went viral through our school — “When did you tell your dad you’re gay?” It was like a trap question. There’s no good answer. Literally everybody in every school in the school district of Texas was saying this question for like three months and then it just went away.
That’s what that question is. “When did you guys decide to switch the podcast up to being 12-year-old idiots?” — he just totally alpha’d you.
Shaan: He got me. It was pretty good.
Sam: And on that note —
Shaan: All right, we’re out. See you.