In this episode, Sam Parr and Shaan Puri discuss the fascinating story of “Muscle Milk,” a business that started in a cul-de-sac and eventually sold for $450 million. They also dive into the importance of “micro-learning” and how companies like Headway are leveraging book summaries to build massive, high-margin businesses.
Topics: Muscle Milk, entrepreneurship, business strategy, micro-learning, Headway, venture capital, investment, storytelling.
The Muscle Milk Origin Story [00:00]
Sam Parr: I talk to my barber and he tells me this story that’s pretty crazy about Muscle Milk. So he’s cutting my hair and he knows I have the podcast, so every time I go in for a haircut, he just gives me research and it’s great.
Shaan Puri: Did my handyman know I have the podcast and he always asks me what stocks he should buy? And I’m like, “That’s not the point, bro.”
Sam Parr: He thinks you’re Jim Cramer.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, he’s like, “So, what stocks, what stocks should I buy?” I’m like, “I don’t know, I don’t know. Don’t ask me that. Just change the light bulb, please.”
Sam Parr: If he asks you like, you know, “What’s the best way to increase my testosterone right now using an illicit drug?” I feel like that is what he should be asking you.
Shaan Puri: Clearly he’s not a listener.
Sam Parr: What can I buy from a what can I buy from a forum that will make my tendons stronger? Like, Sam has answers to those types of questions.
Shaan Puri: I’m like, “Do you want to know some really cool subreddits or an illegal place to download books?” I got you, bro.
The Muscle Milk Business Model [00:59]
Sam Parr: I talk to my barber and he’s like, “Dude, you know who’s hair I was cutting?” And he goes, “He’s your neighbor.” “My neighbor?” And he goes, “Yeah, the guy lives just down the street from you. It’s the family that started Muscle Milk.” So they started back in 1998 and it actually started because he bought a sub-brand called Cytomax from his employer. And which is like, who does that? Who who goes to their employer and is like, “Hey, can I buy this like asset that’s kind of undervalued or whatever?” And it’s a niche product and he has this idea, which is he names it Muscle Milk because he wants to name it after mother’s milk, like after breast milk, and he wanted to make a drink that had the nutritional profile of breast milk because he was convinced that breast milk was the most like nutritious food ever. It’s not ended up it’s not what ended up working, but I think it’s a hilarious starting point.
Shaan Puri: Yeah. It’s sort of like how SpaceX started because he wanted to send like a a small plant to Mars. And now he’s like, you know, build like a trillion dollar company doing this.
Sam Parr: You know, uh what’s the colostrum? I get so many ads on on Colostrum, good stuff. Dude, and I don’t Is it like from an animal or a human?
Sam Parr: It’s from a cow, yeah.
Shaan Puri: Damn, so I’m like depriving some newborn cow from, you know, like her fresh milk.
Sam Parr: Well, that’s how all Have you ever seen how milk is made? It’s pretty insane.
Shaan Puri: No. No.
Sam Parr: You know how milk is made? It’s it’s messed up.
Shaan Puri: Is it just tons of devices that hook on to you like an alien?
The Future of Newsletters [03:14]
Shaan Puri: You guys know that I have started a newsletter company and sold it. Sam has done it too. Sam built The Hustle, got it to millions of subscribers, sold it to HubSpot. I built a company called The Milk Road as a crypto newsletter and sold it for millions of dollars one year later. And we’ve both had success with this newsletter business model. So, the team at HubSpot got together and they did a research project called “The Future of Newsletters,” and they’re trying to put together some research around where they see opportunities for the newsletter industry, um what are some of the, you know, sort of checklists, some things you should pay attention to when it comes to newsletters, and a bunch of other data and research that they’re packaging together. If you want to check out what the HubSpot team has put together, go to the link below this video and um and download it. It’s free, and you can check it out and you can learn something about newsletters.
The “Two Hard Pile” Strategy [22:28]
Sam Parr: I have a business that’s pretty cool. Can I tell you about it? Here’s my here’s my opening for this business. Sam, I found the business that you should have started instead of wasting your goddamn time with The Hustle.
Shaan Puri: Okay, I like that.
Sam Parr: So, you built The Hustle, and if you recall, one time you came to me hat in hand, absolutely begging for an investment. You needed the money and you got down on your knees and you said, “Please, sir, invest in my company.” And I looked at it, I I flipped through the business plan like it was a flip book, and I just said, “No thanks.”
Shaan Puri: No, that’s not what you said. You said, “Look, Sam, you’re coming to a knife fight with a knife. I don’t even want you to come to this knife fight with a gun. I want you to come to this knife fight with a magic fucking wand.” And and that clearly And then you turned away on my heel with a dramatic spin and I left the room.
Shaan Puri: And then you tried to pull the door to open, but it was really a push door.
Sam Parr: Totally blew it at the end. That’s the landing. Like you clearly had just read that on a whatever the equivalent was of Twitter and you’re like, “That is now my line.”
Shaan Puri: Yeah, exactly. It was back when I was like I had it written on the inside of my palm and I was like, “Peter Thiel says this magic wand thing, so I’m going to tell somebody.” Totally owns them, no matter what they’re doing. Um, and so, but you know, the reality was, I looked at the business and you were like, “Here’s what I’m doing. I’m creating a media company, so every day we’re going to write the news.” So every every day you had to recreate your product. I was like, “Ooh, that sucks.” Um, it’s like, do you get any Is there any benefit uh of all the work you did in the last three months? It’s like, “Uh, not really. We got to recreate it again. We got to bake that cake every morning.” Okay, sounds good. And then you said, and then I was like, “Cool, so then people pay you certainly for this service that you’re doing.” You’re like, “Nah, it’s free.” Oh, okay. And you’re like, “But then the adverti- then we have to do a separate business basically to a separate customer selling advertisers.” I was like, “Okay, but certainly they’re on retainer and it’s going to be recurring revenue that’s going to stack up.” You’re like, “No, no, no. They’re just going to if they feel like advertising, they will. If they don’t, they don’t. Every month we’re going to start back at zero.” Yep. And I thought, “Damn, this is a tough business to win.” And that’s when I hit you with the knife and the knife fight and blah blah blah.
Shaan Puri: Which it is tough-ish to to do well.
Sam Parr: Yeah, and by the way, the the great best part of the whole thing is five years later after you successfully sold the business and got rich doing it, I then copied your business model and did the same thing for crypto and and was like, came back to you basically being like, “What how did you What was the business plan again? How do you do this?”
Shaan Puri: Um, so so that’s like a big deal.
Sam Parr: But isn’t this isn’t this a it’s like total like life goals story. Build a killer brand, you stuck with the thing, you built it with your family, you do it in the cul-de-sac. Uh, I just think it’s it’s amazing. Sell the thing for $450 million.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, but there’s None of his kids are yoked.
Sam Parr: Right? Like, these guys, they don’t look very yoked. I’m looking at the family now.
Sam Parr: Well, as their public defender, here’s what I have to say about that. One of the things they talked about with Muscle Milk is they go, “We wanted to build a product that everybody would look at it and see a different thing.” So they go, “Women see it as a weight loss product. Men see it as a muscle building product. Some people see it as a snack. Some people see it as a meal replacement.” Our goal was to build a product that you that would basically, you know, solve multiple problems for different people at once.
Shaan Puri: I’m just saying that I want to see some bigger bis and tris on this family photo. They look great. They look very healthy. More importantly, they look happy. The founder’s teeth are beautiful. Like, he’s got a really nice smile. I just think that we should see a little thicker neck.
Sam Parr: Can I tell you one other thing? So this company that bought them uh or originally, I think they were owned by Pepsi. Pepsi owns it now, but before that, they were it was bought by something called Hormel Foods. It’s one of these companies that you’ve never heard of. This company does $12 billion in revenue. They do like a billion and a half dollars of profit a year. And if you go to their website, they the like the the headline, like tagline for them is like, “We sell more pepperonis than anyone on Earth.” And they’re just like food holding company. They own Skippy peanut butter, they own Planters, they own They own Spam. They own Spam, and then they sell just a shit ton of ronies, dude. They just sell pepperonis worldwide. They own Applegate, they own Justin’s, they own Planters, Skippy, Chi-Chi’s. I don’t know what Chi-Chi’s is. Corn I don’t know what that is. They black label bacon. They own a lot of I mean, literally Spam is like on their homepage as like their like their their pride and joy. Like the way my parents pin like pictures of me up on the fridge, that’s what this company does with with Spam.
Shaan Puri: Which is like it’s pretty pretty good, horrible for you. But oh dude, yeah, Hormel pepperoni, I know them. That’s one of my snacks. One of my snacks is like eight pepperoni with a little bit of mozzarella cheese on it, microwaved.
Sam Parr: It’s a pizza without the the pizza?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, I just call it like Redneck Redneck Redneck fitness food.
Sam Parr: Dude, this should be your brand. A line of of “Not That Bad For You” Redneck Snacks. It’s like it’ll it’ll make you farm strong.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, do you know like PB dip? You know you know, I call it dip. But you know PB powder? The powder, yeah. Yeah, you get a spoon of that and you straight and you chuck it up on your the top of your roof of your mouth and you suck on that thing for 60 minutes. I call it uh like fitness dip. So like instead of like having like a fat lip in, you just have uh PB dip. You’re just in your tongue just rub it against that that that dehydrated nut. Ooh, boy. Ooh, boy. You want to have a good time? Put a little PB dip on the roof of your mouth.
Sam Parr: All right, we got our we got our cold open for the episode.
Shaan Puri: Um, by the way, let let me show you one thing. You said something that I do religiously. I just sent Ari a document that I I just sent her one of the tabs. I have dozens of tabs on this. Ari, can you share your screen? So, whenever I read a book, I have this Google Doc that I’ve used since the year like 2010. All right, so check this out. Whenever I read a book, I do a few things. One, I make whenever there’s like a year and a money term or some type of milestone, I write it down in a sheet. And the reason why I write it in a sheet is because a lot of times when you’re building a company or doing anything that’s like really challenging, you you’ll read about someone else and you’re like, “That was easy.” And so I like to do timelines and you’ll see like, “Oh, okay, like they went four years with nothing happening.” And so for those listening, I have got a timeline of uh Coke Industries, which is like um the largest privately held company in America, a biography of their family. And I like did a timeline where every everything major happened in their life and then I converted the dollar amount into uh 2019 dollars, which is when I made this particular one. And it’s really fun to do because you could see that things took, like in this case, like 30 years. Right. And so if you like uh uh if you scroll all the way to the left, I did this with uh Kirk Kerkorian, another one of the uh a guy who I love. And I’ve I every biography I read, I I create one of these.
Sam Parr: Just another man you love. Can I just point out a couple things about this what we’re screen sharing here that are are just just fantastic. This is it’s just a a peek into the mind. First of all, it’s a Google sheet that’s just called “Sheet,” which is just a great title. Okay, scroll over, Ari. So here’s some of the milestones that Sam wrote down. All right, so he starts for for Coke Industries. 19 1900, Fred Coke born. Uh 1924, so 24-year gap, big break finds mentor. Okay, so then it goes 1927, just a quick update, still broke. Then it goes 20 1929, sees success. 1931, big success with two G’s. It’s a big double G success right here. It’s amazing. And then 1940, he uh buys a company and that company he buys it for $4 million. Um Do you also should just have pictures on here where it’s them and the calves and it’s just your calves just for reference and you’re just comparing calves. Because I feel like tell me that’s not part of your research process, is it looking at photos and judging their looks?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, particularly the Coke brothers because they’re like these tall uh waspy guys and I definitely am sizing myself up to them.
Sam Parr: Yeah. The the the the total picture of success includes a picture, for sure.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, it’s like tennis sweaters. It’s like, “Oh, they’re into tennis sweaters, therefore I will wear tennis sweaters.” But yeah, I definitely like two guys that are both 6’2” from the Midwest with blonde hair, blue eyes, like we there’s definitely like a there can only be one of us in this room.
Sam Parr: Dude, there’s this girl who keeps going viral on Twitter and it’s the same tweet she does every time and she just goes, “My dad goes to a bar with his friends every Friday and he makes a list of topics to discuss.” Yes. And then she she puts she has a photo of him holding a printed out agenda and I’ll just read you one of them. “Ted Perry’s fun,” capital story, “shown on Fox News 6.” Next one, “What’s going on with the Bucks?” Question mark. “NFL overtime rules, take ball first or second?” Question mark. “Bahama breezes.” How close is too close to an alligator? Do you think people that throw garbage out of their car window are the same people that don’t pick up their dog poop when walking through my subdivision? And then it read at the bottom, it goes, “Please be on time, as you can see, we have another week of a packed agenda.” And it goes super viral every time. It’s like 100,000 likes and I think everybody who sees this is like, “Yeah, that’s part of the winning life.” I’d like to go to the bar with my friends every Thursday and have like an agenda that we print out and we talk about while wearing our New Balances.
Shaan Puri: Do you know who does this? And he’s not joking.
Sam Parr: I already know, because you’re talking about a legend, a social legend, and I know it has to be Nick Gray. Tell me I’m wrong. No, I’m wrong. Is it not Nick Gray?
Shaan Puri: The second time I hung out with Nick Gray, we went to a bar called Lazarus. Sarah and I came and he goes, “Hey guys, uh I would love to hang out. This is our second time hanging out. I thought it’d be nice to have an agenda so we could stay on track.” And there was a 13-point uh agenda list where it was like, “Ask Sarah about her job, figure out how that’s going on, explain my dating life and get opinions from it.” Uh like it was a and we stuck to that agenda and he took notes. And it was Was it thrilling? Because I think I’m going to absolutely start doing this. It was thrilling. It was thrilling. You know how like You know how like Was it the agenda that was great or the fact that he had an agenda that was great? Which which of the two was greater? The second one. Here’s why. So, look, in a world everyone wants to be a tough guy. It feels good to be a leader, but you want to know something, everyone likes getting led. And like we like the assertive person. I’m just a leader who loves being led. That’s me. That’s on my LinkedIn. I I like leading some stuff, but then there’s other times where it’s like, “Just tell me what to do.” And Right. Small talk is one of those things that no one just like tells you what to do. And when there’s an assigned leader who has something outlined for small talk, I’m just like, “Yes, sir. I’ll do whatever you like me to do.” And uh, “Thank you, may I have another, sir.” Like, it’s like the best way to go about doing stuff. And that’s what Nick Gray does.
Sam Parr: Okay. And by the way, that’s how we do this podcast, actually. We both bring some agenda items and then we discuss in bullet point form.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, and I think it’s good. I and he’s done that for years and it’s awesome.
Sam Parr: All right, we’re going to normalize having conversational agenda hangouts with an agenda. Okay, let’s do more. Um, I have a business that’s pretty cool. Can I tell you about it? Here’s my here’s my opening for this business. Sam, I found the business that you should have started instead of wasting your goddamn time with The Hustle.
Shaan Puri: Okay, I like that.
Sam Parr: So, you built The Hustle, and if you recall, one time you came to me hat in hand, absolutely begging for an investment. You needed the money and you got down on your knees and you said, “Please, sir, invest in my company.” And I looked at it, I I flipped through the business plan like it was a flip book, and I just said, “No thanks.”
Shaan Puri: No, that’s not what you said. You said, “Look, Sam, you’re coming to a knife fight with a knife. I don’t even want you to come to this knife fight with a gun. I want you to come to this knife fight with a magic fucking wand.” And and that clearly And then you turned away on my heel with a dramatic spin and I left the room.
Shaan Puri: And then you tried to pull the door to open, but it was really a push door.
Sam Parr: Totally blew it at the end. That’s the landing. Like you clearly had just read that on a whatever the equivalent was of Twitter and you’re like, “That is now my line.”
Shaan Puri: Yeah, exactly. It was back when I was like I had it written on the inside of my palm and I was like, “Peter Thiel says this magic wand thing, so I’m going to tell somebody.” Totally owns them, no matter what they’re doing. Um, and so, but you know, the reality was, I looked at the business and you were like, “Here’s what I’m doing. I’m creating a media company, so every day we’re going to write the news.” So every every day you had to recreate your product. I was like, “Ooh, that sucks.” Um, it’s like, do you get any Is there any benefit uh of all the work you did in the last three months? It’s like, “Uh, not really. We got to recreate it again. We got to bake that cake every morning.” Okay, sounds good. And then you said, and then I was like, “Cool, so then people pay you certainly for this service that you’re doing.” You’re like, “Nah, it’s free.” Oh, okay. And you’re like, “But then the adverti- then we have to do a separate business basically to a separate customer selling advertisers.” I was like, “Okay, but certainly they’re on retainer and it’s going to be recurring revenue that’s going to stack up.” You’re like, “No, no, no. They’re just going to if they feel like advertising, they will. If they don’t, they don’t. Every month we’re going to start back at zero.” Yep. And I thought, “Damn, this is a tough business to win.” And that’s when I hit you with the knife and the knife fight and blah blah blah.
Shaan Puri: Which it is tough-ish to to do well.
Sam Parr: Yeah, and by the way, the the great best part of the whole thing is five years later after you successfully sold the business and got rich doing it, I then copied your business model and did the same thing for crypto and and was like, came back to you basically being like, “What how did you What was the business plan again? How do you do this?”
Shaan Puri: Um, so so that’s like a big deal.
Sam Parr: But isn’t this isn’t this a it’s like total like life goals story. Build a killer brand, you stuck with the thing, you built it with your family, you do it in the cul-de-sac. Uh, I just think it’s it’s amazing. Sell the thing for $450 million.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, but there’s None of his kids are yoked.
Sam Parr: Right? Like, these guys, they don’t look very yoked. I’m looking at the family now.
Sam Parr: Well, as their public defender, here’s what I have to say about that. One of the things they talked about with Muscle Milk is they go, “We wanted to build a product that everybody would look at it and see a different thing.” So they go, “Women see it as a weight loss product. Men see it as a muscle building product. Some people see it as a snack. Some people see it as a meal replacement.” Our goal was to build a product that you that would basically, you know, solve multiple problems for different people at once.
Shaan Puri: I’m just saying that I want to see some bigger bis and tris on this family photo. They look great. They look very healthy. More importantly, they look happy. The founder’s teeth are beautiful. Like, he’s got a really nice smile. I just think that we should see a little thicker neck.
Sam Parr: Can I tell you one other thing? So this company that bought them uh or originally, I think they were owned by Pepsi. Pepsi owns it now, but before that, they were it was bought by something called Hormel Foods. It’s one of these companies that you’ve never heard of. This company does $12 billion in revenue. They do like a billion and a half dollars of profit a year. And if you go to their website, they the like the the headline, like tagline for them is like, “We sell more pepperonis than anyone on Earth.” And they’re just like food holding company. They own Skippy peanut butter, they own Planters, they own They own Spam. They own Spam, and then they sell just a shit ton of ronies, dude. They just sell pepperonis worldwide. They own Applegate, they own Justin’s, they own Planters, Skippy, Chi-Chi’s. I don’t know what Chi-Chi’s is. Corn I don’t know what that is. They black label bacon. They own a lot of I mean, literally Spam is like on their homepage as like their like their their pride and joy. Like the way my parents pin like pictures of me up on the fridge, that’s what this company does with with Spam.
Shaan Puri: Which is like it’s pretty pretty good, horrible for you. But oh dude, yeah, Hormel pepperoni, I know them. That’s one of my snacks. One of my snacks is like eight pepperoni with a little bit of mozzarella cheese on it, microwaved.
Sam Parr: It’s a pizza without the the pizza?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, I just call it like Redneck Redneck Redneck fitness food.
Sam Parr: Dude, this should be your brand. A line of of “Not That Bad For You” Redneck Snacks. It’s like it’ll it’ll make you farm strong.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, do you know like PB dip? You know you know, I call it dip. But you know PB powder? The powder, yeah. Yeah, you get a spoon of that and you straight and you chuck it up on your the top of your roof of your mouth and you suck on that thing for 60 minutes. I call it uh like fitness dip. So like instead of like having like a fat lip in, you just have uh PB dip. You’re just in your tongue just rub it against that that that dehydrated nut. Ooh, boy. Ooh, boy. You want to have a good time? Put a little PB dip on the roof of your mouth.
Sam Parr: All right, we got our we got our cold open for the episode.
Shaan Puri: Um, by the way, let let me show you one thing. You said something that I do religiously. I just sent Ari a document that I I just sent her one of the tabs. I have dozens of tabs on this. Ari, can you share your screen? So, whenever I read a book, I have this Google Doc that I’ve used since the year like 2010. All right, so check this out. Whenever I read a book, I do a few things. One, I make whenever there’s like a year and a money term or some type of milestone, I write it down in a sheet. And the reason why I write it in a sheet is because a lot of times when you’re building a company or doing anything that’s like really challenging, you you’ll read about someone else and you’re like, “That was easy.” And so I like to do timelines and you’ll see like, “Oh, okay, like they went four years with nothing happening.” And so for those listening, I have got a timeline of uh Coke Industries, which is like um the largest privately held company in America, a biography of their family. And I like did a timeline where every everything major happened in their life and then I converted the dollar amount into uh 2019 dollars, which is when I made this particular one. And it’s really fun to do because you could see that things took, like in this case, like 30 years. Right. And so if you like uh uh if you scroll all the way to the left, I did this with uh Kirk Kerkorian, another one of the uh a guy who I love. And I’ve I every biography I read, I I create one of these.
Sam Parr: Just another man you love. Can I just point out a couple things about this what we’re screen sharing here that are are just just fantastic. This is it’s just a a peek into the mind. First of all, it’s a Google sheet that’s just called “Sheet,” which is just a great title. Okay, scroll over, Ari. So here’s some of the milestones that Sam wrote down. All right, so he starts for for Coke Industries. 19 1900, Fred Coke born. Uh 1924, so 24-year gap, big break finds mentor. Okay, so then it goes 1927, just a quick update, still broke. Then it goes 20 1929, sees success. 1931, big success with two G’s. It’s a big double G success right here. It’s amazing. And then 1940, he uh buys a company and that company he buys it for $4 million. Um Do you also should just have pictures on here where it’s them and the calves and it’s just your calves just for reference and you’re just comparing calves. Because I feel like tell me that’s not part of your research process, is it looking at photos and judging their looks?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, particularly the Coke brothers because they’re like these tall uh waspy guys and I definitely am sizing myself up to them.
Sam Parr: Yeah. The the the the total picture of success includes a picture, for sure.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, it’s like tennis sweaters. It’s like, “Oh, they’re into tennis sweaters, therefore I will wear tennis sweaters.” But yeah, I definitely like two guys that are both 6’2” from the Midwest with blonde hair, blue eyes, like we there’s definitely like a there can only be one of us in this room.
Sam Parr: Dude, there’s this girl who keeps going viral on Twitter and it’s the same tweet she does every time and she just goes, “My dad goes to a bar with his friends every Friday and he makes a list of topics to discuss.” Yes. And then she she puts she has a photo of him holding a printed out agenda and I’ll just read you one of them. “Ted Perry’s fun,” capital story, “shown on Fox News 6.” Next one, “What’s going on with the Bucks?” Question mark. “NFL overtime rules, take ball first or second?” Question mark. “Bahama breezes.” How close is too close to an alligator? Do you think people that throw garbage out of their car window are the same people that don’t pick up their dog poop when walking through my subdivision? And then it read at the bottom, it goes, “Please be on time, as you can see, we have another week of a packed agenda.” And it goes super viral every time. It’s like 100,000 likes and I think everybody who sees this is like, “Yeah, that’s part of the winning life.” I’d like to go to the bar with my friends every Thursday and have like an agenda that we print out and we talk about while wearing our New Balances.
Shaan Puri: Do you know who does this? And he’s not joking.
Sam Parr: I already know, because you’re talking about a legend, a social legend, and I know it has to be Nick Gray. Tell me I’m wrong. No, I’m wrong. Is it not Nick Gray?
Shaan Puri: The second time I hung out with Nick Gray, we went to a bar called Lazarus. Sarah and I came and he goes, “Hey guys, uh I would love to hang out. This is our second time hanging out. I thought it’d be nice to have an agenda so we could stay on track.” And there was a 13-point uh agenda list where it was like, “Ask Sarah about her job, figure out how that’s going on, explain my dating life and get opinions from it.” Uh like it was a and we stuck to that agenda and he took notes. And it was Was it thrilling? Because I think I’m going to absolutely start doing this. It was thrilling. It was thrilling. You know how like You know how like Was it the agenda that was great or the fact that he had an agenda that was great? Which which of the two was greater? The second one. Here’s why. So, look, in a world everyone wants to be a tough guy. It feels good to be a leader, but you want to know something, everyone likes getting led. And like we like the assertive person. I’m just a leader who loves being led. That’s me. That’s on my LinkedIn. I I like leading some stuff, but then there’s other times where it’s like, “Just tell me what to do.” And Right. Small talk is one of those things that no one just like tells you what to do. And when there’s an assigned leader who has something outlined for small talk, I’m just like, “Yes, sir. I’ll do whatever you like me to do.” And uh, “Thank you, may I have another, sir.” Like, it’s like the best way to go about doing stuff. And that’s what Nick Gray does.
Sam Parr: Okay. And by the way, that’s how we do this podcast, actually. We both bring some agenda items and then we discuss in bullet point form.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, and I think it’s good. I and he’s done that for years and it’s awesome.
Sam Parr: All right, we’re going to normalize having conversational agenda hangouts with an agenda. Okay, let’s do more. Um, I have a business that’s pretty cool. Can I tell you about it? Here’s my here’s my opening for this business. Sam, I found the business that you should have started instead of wasting your goddamn time with The Hustle.
Shaan Puri: Okay, I like that.
Sam Parr: So, you built The Hustle, and if you recall, one time you came to me hat in hand, absolutely begging for an investment. You needed the money and you got down on your knees and you said, “Please, sir, invest in my company.” And I looked at it, I I flipped through the business plan like it was a flip book, and I just said, “No thanks.”
Shaan Puri: No, that’s not what you said. You said, “Look, Sam, you’re coming to a knife fight with a knife. I don’t even want you to come to this knife fight with a gun. I want you to come to this knife fight with a magic fucking wand.” And and that clearly And then you turned away on my heel with a dramatic spin and I left the room.
Shaan Puri: And then you tried to pull the door to open, but it was really a push door.
Sam Parr: Totally blew it at the end. That’s the landing. Like you clearly had just read that on a whatever the equivalent was of Twitter and you’re like, “That is now my line.”
Shaan Puri: Yeah, exactly. It was back when I was like I had it written on the inside of my palm and I was like, “Peter Thiel says this magic wand thing, so I’m going to tell somebody.” Totally owns them, no matter what they’re doing. Um, and so, but you know, the reality was, I looked at the business and you were like, “Here’s what I’m doing. I’m creating a media company, so every day we’re going to write the news.” So every every day you had to recreate your product. I was like, “Ooh, that sucks.” Um, it’s like, do you get any Is there any benefit uh of all the work you did in the last three months? It’s like, “Uh, not really. We got to recreate it again. We got to bake that cake every morning.” Okay, sounds good. And then you said, and then I was like, “Cool, so then people pay you certainly for this service that you’re doing.” You’re like, “Nah, it’s free.” Oh, okay. And you’re like, “But then the adverti- then we have to do a separate business basically to a separate customer selling advertisers.” I was like, “Okay, but certainly they’re on retainer and it’s going to be recurring revenue that’s going to stack up.” You’re like, “No, no, no. They’re just going to if they feel like advertising, they will. If they don’t, they don’t. Every month we’re going to start back at zero.” Yep. And I thought, “Damn, this is a tough business to win.” And that’s when I hit you with the knife and the knife fight and blah blah blah.
Shaan Puri: Which it is tough-ish to to do well.
Sam Parr: Yeah, and by the way, the the great best part of the whole thing is five years later after you successfully sold the business and got rich doing it, I then copied your business model and did the same thing for crypto and and was like, came back to you basically being like, “What how did you What was the business plan again? How do you do this?”
Shaan Puri: Um, so so that’s like a big deal.
Sam Parr: But isn’t this isn’t this a it’s like total like life goals story. Build a killer brand, you stuck with the thing, you built it with your family, you do it in the cul-de-sac. Uh, I just think it’s it’s amazing. Sell the thing for $450 million.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, but there’s None of his kids are yoked.
Sam Parr: Right? Like, these guys, they don’t look very yoked. I’m looking at the family now.
Sam Parr: Well, as their public defender, here’s what I have to say about that. One of the things they talked about with Muscle Milk is they go, “We wanted to build a product that everybody would look at it and see a different thing.” So they go, “Women see it as a weight loss product. Men see it as a muscle building product. Some people see it as a snack. Some people see it as a meal replacement.” Our goal was to build a product that you that would basically, you know, solve multiple problems for different people at once.
Shaan Puri: I’m just saying that I want to see some bigger bis and tris on this family photo. They look great. They look very healthy. More importantly, they look happy. The founder’s teeth are beautiful. Like, he’s got a really nice smile. I just think that we should see a little thicker neck.
Sam Parr: Can I tell you one other thing? So this company that bought them uh or originally, I think they were owned by Pepsi. Pepsi owns it now, but before that, they were it was bought by something called Hormel Foods. It’s one of these companies that you’ve never heard of. This company does $12 billion in revenue. They do like a billion and a half dollars of profit a year. And if you go to their website, they the like the the headline, like tagline for them is like, “We sell more pepperonis than anyone on Earth.” And they’re just like food holding company. They own Skippy peanut butter, they own Planters, they own They own Spam. They own Spam, and then they sell just a shit ton of ronies, dude. They just sell pepperonis worldwide. They own Applegate, they own Justin’s, they own Planters, Skippy, Chi-Chi’s. I don’t know what Chi-Chi’s is. Corn I don’t know what that is. They black label bacon. They own a lot of I mean, literally Spam is like on their homepage as like their like their their pride and joy. Like the way my parents pin like pictures of me up on the fridge, that’s what this company does with with Spam.
Shaan Puri: Which is like it’s pretty pretty good, horrible for you. But oh dude, yeah, Hormel pepperoni, I know them. That’s one of my snacks. One of my snacks is like eight pepperoni with a little bit of mozzarella cheese on it, microwaved.
Sam Parr: It’s a pizza without the the pizza?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, I just call it like Redneck Redneck Redneck fitness food.
Sam Parr: Dude, this should be your brand. A line of of “Not That Bad For You” Redneck Snacks. It’s like it’ll it’ll make you farm strong.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, do you know like PB dip? You know you know, I call it dip. But you know PB powder? The powder, yeah. Yeah, you get a spoon of that and you straight and you chuck it up on your the top of your roof of your mouth and you suck on that thing for 60 minutes. I call it uh like fitness dip. So like instead of like having like a fat lip in, you just have uh PB dip. You’re just in your tongue just rub it against that that that dehydrated nut. Ooh, boy. Ooh, boy. You want to have a good time? Put a little PB dip on the roof of your mouth.
Sam Parr: All right, we got our we got our cold open for the episode.
Shaan Puri: Um, by the way, let let me show you one thing. You said something that I do religiously. I just sent Ari a document that I I just sent her one of the tabs. I have dozens of tabs on this. Ari, can you share your screen? So, whenever I read a book, I have this Google Doc that I’ve used since the year like 2010. All right, so check this out. Whenever I read a book, I do a few things. One, I make whenever there’s like a year and a money term or some type of milestone, I write it down in a sheet. And the reason why I write it in a sheet is because a lot of times when you’re building a company or doing anything that’s like really challenging, you you’ll read about someone else and you’re like, “That was easy.” And so I like to do timelines and you’ll see like, “Oh, okay, like they went four years with nothing happening.” And so for those listening, I have got a timeline of uh Coke Industries, which is like um the largest privately held company in America, a biography of their family. And I like did a timeline where every everything major happened in their life and then I converted the dollar amount into uh 2019 dollars, which is when I made this particular one. And it’s really fun to do because you could see that things took, like in this case, like 30 years. Right. And so if you like uh uh if you scroll all the way to the left, I did this with uh Kirk Kerkorian, another one of the uh a guy who I love. And I’ve I every biography I read, I I create one of these.
Sam Parr: Just another man you love. Can I just point out a couple things about this what we’re screen sharing here that are are just just fantastic. This is it’s just a a peek into the mind. First of all, it’s a Google sheet that’s just called “Sheet,” which is just a great title. Okay, scroll over, Ari. So here’s some of the milestones that Sam wrote down. All right, so he starts for for Coke Industries. 19 1900, Fred Coke born. Uh 1924, so 24-year gap, big break finds mentor. Okay, so then it goes 1927, just a quick update, still broke. Then it goes 20 1929, sees success. 1931, big success with two G’s. It’s a big double G success right here. It’s amazing. And then 1940, he uh buys a company and that company he buys it for $4 million. Um Do you also should just have pictures on here where it’s them and the calves and it’s just your calves just for reference and you’re just comparing calves. Because I feel like tell me that’s not part of your research process, is it looking at photos and judging their looks?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, particularly the Coke brothers because they’re like these tall uh waspy guys and I definitely am sizing myself up to them.
Sam Parr: Yeah. The the the the total picture of success includes a picture, for sure.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, it’s like tennis sweaters. It’s like, “Oh, they’re into tennis sweaters, therefore I will wear tennis sweaters.” But yeah, I definitely like two guys that are both 6’2” from the Midwest with blonde hair, blue eyes, like we there’s definitely like a there can only be one of us in this room.
Sam Parr: Dude, there’s this girl who keeps going viral on Twitter and it’s the same tweet she does every time and she just goes, “My dad goes to a bar with his friends every Friday and he makes a list of topics to discuss.” Yes. And then she she puts she has a photo of him holding a printed out agenda and I’ll just read you one of them. “Ted Perry’s fun,” capital story, “shown on Fox News 6.” Next one, “What’s going on with the Bucks?” Question mark. “NFL overtime rules, take ball first or second?” Question mark. “Bahama breezes.” How close is too close to an alligator? Do you think people that throw garbage out of their car window are the same people that don’t pick up their dog poop when walking through my subdivision? And then it read at the bottom, it goes, “Please be on time, as you can see, we have another week of a packed agenda.” And it goes super viral every time. It’s like 100,000 likes and I think everybody who sees this is like, “Yeah, that’s part of the winning life.” I’d like to go to the bar with my friends every Thursday and have like an agenda that we print out and we talk about while wearing our New Balances.
Shaan Puri: Do you know who does this? And he’s not joking.
Sam Parr: I already know, because you’re talking about a legend, a social legend, and I know it has to be Nick Gray. Tell me I’m wrong. No, I’m wrong. Is it not Nick Gray?
Shaan Puri: The second time I hung out with Nick Gray, we went to a bar called Lazarus. Sarah and I came and he goes, “Hey guys, uh I would love to hang out. This is our second time hanging out. I thought it’d be nice to have an agenda so we could stay on track.” And there was a 13-point uh agenda list where it was like, “Ask Sarah about her job, figure out how that’s going on, explain my dating life and get opinions from it.” Uh like it was a and we stuck to that agenda and he took notes. And it was Was it thrilling? Because I think I’m going to absolutely start doing this. It was thrilling. It was thrilling. You know how like You know how like Was it the agenda that was great or the fact that he had an agenda that was great? Which which of the two was greater? The second one. Here’s why. So, look, in a world everyone wants to be a tough guy. It feels good to be a leader, but you want to know something, everyone likes getting led. And like we like the assertive person. I’m just a leader who loves being led. That’s me. That’s on my LinkedIn. I I like leading some stuff, but then there’s other times where it’s like, “Just tell me what to do.” And Right. Small talk is one of those things that no one just like tells you what to do. And when there’s an assigned leader who has something outlined for small talk, I’m just like, “Yes, sir. I’ll do whatever you like me to do.” And uh, “Thank you, may I have another, sir.” Like, it’s like the best way to go about doing stuff. And that’s what Nick Gray does.
Sam Parr: Okay. And by the way, that’s how we do this podcast, actually. We both bring some agenda items and then we discuss in bullet point form.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, and I think it’s good. I and he’s done that for years and it’s awesome.
Sam Parr: All right, we’re going to normalize having conversational agenda hangouts with an agenda. Okay, let’s do more. Um, I have a business that’s pretty cool. Can I tell you about it? Here’s my here’s my opening for this business. Sam, I found the business that you should have started instead of wasting your goddamn time with The Hustle.
Shaan Puri: Okay, I like that.
Sam Parr: So, you built The Hustle, and if you recall, one time you came to me hat in hand, absolutely begging for an investment. You needed the money and you got down on your knees and you said, “Please, sir, invest in my company.” And I looked at it, I I flipped through the business plan like it was a flip book, and I just said, “No thanks.”
Shaan Puri: No, that’s not what you said. You said, “Look, Sam, you’re coming to a knife fight with a knife. I don’t even want you to come to this knife fight with a gun. I want you to come to this knife fight with a magic fucking wand.” And and that clearly And then you turned away on my heel with a dramatic spin and I left the room.
Shaan Puri: And then you tried to pull the door to open, but it was really a push door.
Sam Parr: Totally blew it at the end. That’s the landing. Like you clearly had just read that on a whatever the equivalent was of Twitter and you’re like, “That is now my line.”
Shaan Puri: Yeah, exactly. It was back when I was like I had it written on the inside of my palm and I was like, “Peter Thiel says this magic wand thing, so I’m going to tell somebody.” Totally owns them, no matter what they’re doing. Um, and so, but you know, the reality was, I looked at the business and you were like, “Here’s what I’m doing. I’m creating a media company, so every day we’re going to write the news.” So every every day you had to recreate your product. I was like, “Ooh, that sucks.” Um, it’s like, do you get any Is there any benefit uh of all the work you did in the last three months? It’s like, “Uh, not really. We got to recreate it again. We got to bake that cake every morning.” Okay, sounds good. And then you said, and then I was like, “Cool, so then people pay you certainly for this service that you’re doing.” You’re like, “Nah, it’s free.” Oh, okay. And you’re like, “But then the adverti- then we have to do a separate business basically to a separate customer selling advertisers.” I was like, “Okay, but certainly they’re on retainer and it’s going to be recurring revenue that’s going to stack up.” You’re like, “No, no, no. They’re just going to if they feel like advertising, they will. If they don’t, they don’t. Every month we’re going to start back at zero.” Yep. And I thought, “Damn, this is a tough business to win.” And that’s when I hit you with the knife and the knife fight and blah blah blah.
Shaan Puri: Which it is tough-ish to to do well.
Sam Parr: Yeah, and by the way, the the great best part of the whole thing is five years later after you successfully sold the business and got rich doing it, I then copied your business model and did the same thing for crypto and and was like, came back to you basically being like, “What how did you What was the business plan again? How do you do this?”
Shaan Puri: Um, so so that’s like a big deal.
Sam Parr: But isn’t this isn’t this a it’s like total like life goals story. Build a killer brand, you stuck with the thing, you built it with your family, you do it in the cul-de-sac. Uh, I just think it’s it’s amazing. Sell the thing for $450 million.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, but there’s None of his kids are yoked.
Sam Parr: Right? Like, these guys, they don’t look very yoked. I’m looking at the family now.
Sam Parr: Well, as their public defender, here’s what I have to say about that. One of the things they talked about with Muscle Milk is they go, “We wanted to build a product that everybody would look at it and see a different thing.” So they go, “Women see it as a weight loss product. Men see it as a muscle building product. Some people see it as a snack. Some people see it as a meal replacement.” Our goal was to build a product that you that would basically, you know, solve multiple problems for different people at once.
Shaan Puri: I’m just saying that I want to see some bigger bis and tris on this family photo. They look great. They look very healthy. More importantly, they look happy. The founder’s teeth are beautiful. Like, he’s got a really nice smile. I just think that we should see a little thicker neck.
Sam Parr: Can I tell you one other thing? So this company that bought them uh or originally, I think they were owned by Pepsi. Pepsi owns it now, but before that, they were it was bought by something called Hormel Foods. It’s one of these companies that you’ve never heard of. This company does $12 billion in revenue. They do like a billion and a half dollars of profit a year. And if you go to their website, they the like the the headline, like tagline for them is like, “We sell more pepperonis than anyone on Earth.” And they’re just like food holding company. They own Skippy peanut butter, they own Planters, they own They own Spam. They own Spam, and then they sell just a shit ton of ronies, dude. They just sell pepperonis worldwide. They own Applegate, they own Justin’s, they own Planters, Skippy, Chi-Chi’s. I don’t know what Chi-Chi’s is. Corn I don’t know what that is. They black label bacon. They own a lot of I mean, literally Spam is like on their homepage as like their like their their pride and joy. Like the way my parents pin like pictures of me up on the fridge, that’s what this company does with with Spam.
Shaan Puri: Which is like it’s pretty pretty good, horrible for you. But oh dude, yeah, Hormel pepperoni, I know them. That’s one of my snacks. One of my snacks is like eight pepperoni with a little bit of mozzarella cheese on it, microwaved.
Sam Parr: It’s a pizza without the the pizza?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, I just call it like Redneck Redneck Redneck fitness food.
Sam Parr: Dude, this should be your brand. A line of of “Not That Bad For You” Redneck Snacks. It’s like it’ll it’ll make you farm strong.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, do you know like PB dip? You know you know, I call it dip. But you know PB powder? The powder, yeah. Yeah, you get a spoon of that and you straight and you chuck it up on your the top of your roof of your mouth and you suck on that thing for 60 minutes. I call it uh like fitness dip. So like instead of like having like a fat lip in, you just have uh PB dip. You’re just in your tongue just rub it against that that that dehydrated nut. Ooh, boy. Ooh, boy. You want to have a good time? Put a little PB dip on the roof of your mouth.
Sam Parr: All right, we got our we got our cold open for the episode.
Shaan Puri: Um, by the way, let let me show you one thing. You said something that I do religiously. I just sent Ari a document that I I just sent her one of the tabs. I have dozens of tabs on this. Ari, can you share your screen? So, whenever I read a book, I have this Google Doc that I’ve used since the year like 2010. All right, so check this out. Whenever I read a book, I do a few things. One, I make whenever there’s like a year and a money term or some type of milestone, I write it down in a sheet. And the reason why I write it in a sheet is because a lot of times when you’re building a company or doing anything that’s like really challenging, you you’ll read about someone else and you’re like, “That was easy.” And so I like to do timelines and you’ll see like, “Oh, okay, like they went four years with nothing happening.” And so for those listening, I have got a timeline of uh Coke Industries, which is like um the largest privately held company in America, a biography of their family. And I like did a timeline where every everything major happened in their life and then I converted the dollar amount into uh 2019 dollars, which is when I made this particular one. And it’s really fun to do because you could see that things took, like in this case, like 30 years. Right. And so if you like uh uh if you scroll all the way to the left, I did this with uh Kirk Kerkorian, another one of the uh a guy who I love. And I’ve I every biography I read, I I create one of these.
Sam Parr: Just another man you love. Can I just point out a couple things about this what we’re screen sharing here that are are just just fantastic. This is it’s just a a peek into the mind. First of all, it’s a Google sheet that’s just called “Sheet,” which is just a great title. Okay, scroll over, Ari. So here’s some of the milestones that Sam wrote down. All right, so he starts for for Coke Industries. 19 1900, Fred Coke born. Uh 1924, so 24-year gap, big break finds mentor. Okay, so then it goes 1927, just a quick update, still broke. Then it goes 20 1929, sees success. 1931, big success with two G’s. It’s a big double G success right here. It’s amazing. And then 1940, he uh buys a company and that company he buys it for $4 million. Um Do you also should just have pictures on here where it’s them and the calves and it’s just your calves just for reference and you’re just comparing calves. Because I feel like tell me that’s not part of your research process, is it looking at photos and judging their looks?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, particularly the Coke brothers because they’re like these tall uh waspy guys and I definitely am sizing myself up to them.
Sam Parr: Yeah. The the the the total picture of success includes a picture, for sure.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, it’s like tennis sweaters. It’s like, “Oh, they’re into tennis sweaters, therefore I will wear tennis sweaters.” But yeah, I definitely like two guys that are both 6’2” from the Midwest with blonde hair, blue eyes, like we there’s definitely like a there can only be one of us in this room.
Sam Parr: Dude, there’s this girl who keeps going viral on Twitter and it’s the same tweet she does every time and she just goes, “My dad goes to a bar with his friends every Friday and he makes a list of topics to discuss.” Yes. And then she she puts she has a photo of him holding a printed out agenda and I’ll just read you one of them. “Ted Perry’s fun,” capital story, “shown on Fox News 6.” Next one, “What’s going on with the Bucks?” Question mark. “NFL overtime rules, take ball first or second?” Question mark. “Bahama breezes.” How close is too close to an alligator? Do you think people that throw garbage out of their car window are the same people that don’t pick up their dog poop when walking through my subdivision? And then it read at the bottom, it goes, “Please be on time, as you can see, we have another week of a packed agenda.” And it goes super viral every time. It’s like 100,000 likes and I think everybody who sees this is like, “Yeah, that’s part of the winning life.” I’d like to go to the bar with my friends every Thursday and have like an agenda that we print out and we talk about while wearing our New Balances.
Shaan Puri: Do you know who does this? And he’s not joking.
Sam Parr: I already know, because you’re talking about a legend, a social legend, and I know it has to be Nick Gray. Tell me I’m wrong. No, I’m wrong. Is it not Nick Gray?
Shaan Puri: The second time I hung out with Nick Gray, we went to a bar called Lazarus. Sarah and I came and he goes, “Hey guys, uh I would love to hang out. This is our second time hanging out. I thought it’d be nice to have an agenda so we could stay on track.” And there was a 13-point uh agenda list where it was like, “Ask Sarah about her job, figure out how that’s going on, explain my dating life and get opinions from it.” Uh like it was a and we stuck to that agenda and he took notes. And it was Was it thrilling? Because I think I’m going to absolutely start doing this. It was thrilling. It was thrilling. You know how like You know how like Was it the agenda that was great or the fact that he had an agenda that was great? Which which of the two was greater? The second one. Here’s why. So, look, in a world everyone wants to be a tough guy. It feels good to be a leader, but you want to know something, everyone likes getting led. And like we like the assertive person. I’m just a leader who loves being led. That’s me. That’s on my LinkedIn. I I like leading some stuff, but then there’s other times where it’s like, “Just tell me what to do.” And Right. Small talk is one of those things that no one just like tells you what to do. And when there’s an assigned leader who has something outlined for small talk, I’m just like, “Yes, sir. I’ll do whatever you like me to do.” And uh, “Thank you, may I have another, sir.” Like, it’s like the best way to go about doing stuff. And that’s what Nick Gray does.
Sam Parr: Okay. And by the way, that’s how we do this podcast, actually. We both bring some agenda items and then we discuss in bullet point form.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, and I think it’s good. I and he’s done that for years and it’s awesome.
Sam Parr: All right, we’re going to normalize having conversational agenda hangouts with an agenda. Okay, let’s do more. Um, I have a business that’s pretty cool. Can I tell you about it? Here’s my here’s my opening for this business. Sam, I found the business that you should have started instead of wasting your goddamn time with The Hustle.
Shaan Puri: Okay, I like that.
Sam Parr: So, you built The Hustle, and if you recall, one time you came to me hat in hand, absolutely begging for an investment. You needed the money and you got down on your knees and you said, “Please, sir, invest in my company.” And I looked at it, I I flipped through the business plan like it was a flip book, and I just said, “No thanks.”
Shaan Puri: No, that’s not what you said. You said, “Look, Sam, you’re coming to a knife fight with a knife. I don’t even want you to come to this knife fight with a gun. I want you to come to this knife fight with a magic fucking wand.” And and that clearly And then you turned away on my heel with a dramatic spin and I left the room.
Shaan Puri: And then you tried to pull the door to open, but it was really a push door.
Sam Parr: Totally blew it at the end. That’s the landing. Like you clearly had just read that on a whatever the equivalent was of Twitter and you’re like, “That is now my line.”
Shaan Puri: Yeah, exactly. It was back when I was like I had it written on the inside of my palm and I was like, “Peter Thiel says this magic wand thing, so I’m going to tell somebody.” Totally owns them, no matter what they’re doing. Um, and so, but you know, the reality was, I looked at the business and you were like, “Here’s what I’m doing. I’m creating a media company, so every day we’re going to write the news.” So every every day you had to recreate your product. I was like, “Ooh, that sucks.” Um, it’s like, do you get any Is there any benefit uh of all the work you did in the last three months? It’s like, “Uh, not really. We got to recreate it again. We got to bake that cake every morning.” Okay, sounds good. And then you said, and then I was like, “Cool, so then people pay you certainly for this service that you’re doing.” You’re like, “Nah, it’s free.” Oh, okay. And you’re like, “But then the adverti- then we have to do a separate business basically to a separate customer selling advertisers.” I was like, “Okay, but certainly they’re on retainer and it’s going to be recurring revenue that’s going to stack up.” You’re like, “No, no, no. They’re just going to if they feel like advertising, they will. If they don’t, they don’t. Every month we’re going to start back at zero.” Yep. And I thought, “Damn, this is a tough business to win.” And that’s when I hit you with the knife and the knife fight and blah blah blah.
Shaan Puri: Which it is tough-ish to to do well.
Sam Parr: Yeah, and by the way, the the great best part of the whole thing is five years later after you successfully sold the business and got rich doing it, I then copied your business model and did the same thing for crypto and and was like, came back to you basically being like, “What how did you What was the business plan again? How do you do this?”
Shaan Puri: Um, so so that’s like a big deal.
Sam Parr: But isn’t this isn’t this a it’s like total like life goals story. Build a killer brand, you stuck with the thing, you built it with your family, you do it in the cul-de-sac. Uh, I just think it’s it’s amazing. Sell the thing for $450 million.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, but there’s None of his kids are yoked.
Sam Parr: Right? Like, these guys, they don’t look very yoked. I’m looking at the family now.
Sam Parr: Well, as their public defender, here’s what I have to say about that. One of the things they talked about with Muscle Milk is they go, “We wanted to build a product that everybody would look at it and see a different thing.” So they go, “Women see it as a weight loss product. Men see it as a muscle building product. Some people see it as a snack. Some people see it as a meal replacement.” Our goal was to build a product that you that would basically, you know, solve multiple problems for different people at once.
Shaan Puri: I’m just saying that I want to see some bigger bis and tris on this family photo. They look great. They look very healthy. More importantly, they look happy. The founder’s teeth are beautiful. Like, he’s got a really nice smile. I just think that we should see a little thicker neck.
Sam Parr: Can I tell you one other thing? So this company that bought them uh or originally, I think they were owned by Pepsi. Pepsi owns it now, but before that, they were it was bought by something called Hormel Foods. It’s one of these companies that you’ve never heard of. This company does $12 billion in revenue. They do like a billion and a half dollars of profit a year. And if you go to their website, they the like the the headline, like tagline for them is like, “We sell more pepperonis than anyone on Earth.” And they’re just like food holding company. They own Skippy peanut butter, they own Planters, they own They own Spam. They own Spam, and then they sell just a shit ton of ronies, dude. They just sell pepperonis worldwide. They own Applegate, they own Justin’s, they own Planters, Skippy, Chi-Chi’s. I don’t know what Chi-Chi’s is. Corn I don’t know what that is. They black label bacon. They own a lot of I mean, literally Spam is like on their homepage as like their like their their pride and joy. Like the way my parents pin like pictures of me up on the fridge, that’s what this company does with with Spam.
Shaan Puri: Which is like it’s pretty pretty good, horrible for you. But oh dude, yeah, Hormel pepperoni, I know them. That’s one of my snacks. One of my snacks is like eight pepperoni with a little bit of mozzarella cheese on it, microwaved.
Sam Parr: It’s a pizza without the the pizza?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, I just call it like Redneck Redneck Redneck fitness food.
Sam Parr: Dude, this should be your brand. A line of of “Not That Bad For You” Redneck Snacks. It’s like it’ll it’ll make you farm strong.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, do you know like PB dip? You know you know, I call it dip. But you know PB powder? The powder, yeah. Yeah, you get a spoon of that and you straight and you chuck it up on your the top of your roof of your mouth and you suck on that thing for 60 minutes. I call it uh like fitness dip. So like instead of like having like a fat lip in, you just have uh PB dip. You’re just in your tongue just rub it against that that that dehydrated nut. Ooh, boy. Ooh, boy. You want to have a good time? Put a little PB dip on the roof of your mouth.
Sam Parr: All right, we got our we got our cold open for the episode.
Shaan Puri: Um, by the way, let let me show you one thing. You said something that I do religiously. I just sent Ari a document that I I just sent her one of the tabs. I have dozens of tabs on this. Ari, can you share your screen? So, whenever I read a book, I have this Google Doc that I’ve used since the year like 2010. All right, so check this out. Whenever I read a book, I do a few things. One, I make whenever there’s like a year and a money term or some type of milestone, I write it down in a sheet. And the reason why I write it in a sheet is because a lot of times when you’re building a company or doing anything that’s like really challenging, you you’ll read about someone else and you’re like, “That was easy.” And so I like to do timelines and you’ll see like, “Oh, okay, like they went four years with nothing happening.” And so for those listening, I have got a timeline of uh Coke Industries, which is like um the largest privately held company in America, a biography of their family. And I like did a timeline where every everything major happened in their life and then I converted the dollar amount into uh 2019 dollars, which is when I made this particular one. And it’s really fun to do because you could see that things took, like in this case, like 30 years. Right. And so if you like uh uh if you scroll all the way to the left, I did this with uh Kirk Kerkorian, another one of the uh a guy who I love. And I’ve I every biography I read, I I create one of these.
Sam Parr: Just another man you love. Can I just point out a couple things about this what we’re screen sharing here that are are just just fantastic. This is it’s just a a peek into the mind. First of all, it’s a Google sheet that’s just called “Sheet,” which is just a great title. Okay, scroll over, Ari. So here’s some of the milestones that Sam wrote down. All right, so he starts for for Coke Industries. 19 1900, Fred Coke born. Uh 1924, so 24-year gap, big break finds mentor. Okay, so then it goes 1927, just a quick update, still broke. Then it goes 20 1929, sees success. 1931, big success with two G’s. It’s a big double G success right here. It’s amazing. And then 1940, he uh buys a company and that company he buys it for $4 million. Um Do you also should just have pictures on here where it’s them and the calves and it’s just your calves just for reference and you’re just comparing calves. Because I feel like tell me that’s not part of your research process, is it looking at photos and judging their looks?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, particularly the Coke brothers because they’re like these tall uh waspy guys and I definitely am sizing myself up to them.
Sam Parr: Yeah. The the the the total picture of success includes a picture, for sure.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, it’s like tennis sweaters. It’s like, “Oh, they’re into tennis sweaters, therefore I will wear tennis sweaters.” But yeah, I definitely like two guys that are both 6’2” from the Midwest with blonde hair, blue eyes, like we there’s definitely like a there can only be one of us in this room.
Sam Parr: Dude, there’s this girl who keeps going viral on Twitter and it’s the same tweet she does every time and she just goes, “My dad goes to a bar with his friends every Friday and he makes a list of topics to discuss.” Yes. And then she she puts she has a photo of him holding a printed out agenda and I’ll just read you one of them. “Ted Perry’s fun,” capital story, “shown on Fox News 6.” Next one, “What’s going on with the Bucks?” Question mark. “NFL overtime rules, take ball first or second?” Question mark. “Bahama breezes.” How close is too close to an alligator? Do you think people that throw garbage out of their car window are the same people that don’t pick up their dog poop when walking through my subdivision? And then it read at the bottom, it goes, “Please be on time, as you can see, we have another week of a packed agenda.” And it goes super viral every time. It’s like 100,000 likes and I think everybody who sees this is like, “Yeah, that’s part of the winning life.” I’d like to go to the bar with my friends every Thursday and have like an agenda that we print out and we talk about while wearing our New Balances.
Shaan Puri: Do you know who does this? And he’s not joking.
Sam Parr: I already know, because you’re talking about a legend, a social legend, and I know it has to be Nick Gray. Tell me I’m wrong. No, I’m wrong. Is it not Nick Gray?
Shaan Puri: The second time I hung out with Nick Gray, we went to a bar called Lazarus. Sarah and I came and he goes, “Hey guys, uh I would love to hang out. This is our second time hanging out. I thought it’d be nice to have an agenda so we could stay on track.” And there was a 13-point uh agenda list where it was like, “Ask Sarah about her job, figure out how that’s going on, explain my dating life and get opinions from it.” Uh like it was a and we stuck to that agenda and he took notes. And it was Was it thrilling? Because I think I’m going to absolutely start doing this. It was thrilling. It was thrilling. You know how like You know how like Was it the agenda that was great or the fact that he had an agenda that was great? Which which of the two was greater? The second one. Here’s why. So, look, in a world everyone wants to be a tough guy. It feels good to be a leader, but you want to know something, everyone likes getting led. And like we like the assertive person. I’m just a leader who loves being led. That’s me. That’s on my LinkedIn. I I like leading some stuff, but then there’s other times where it’s like, “Just tell me what to do.” And Right. Small talk is one of those things that no one just like tells you what to do. And when there’s an assigned leader who has something outlined for small talk, I’m just like, “Yes, sir. I’ll do whatever you like me to do.” And uh, “Thank you, may I have another, sir.” Like, it’s like the best way to go about doing stuff. And that’s what Nick Gray does.
Sam Parr: Okay. And by the way, that’s how we do this podcast, actually. We both bring some agenda items and then we discuss in bullet point form.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, and I think it’s good. I and he’s done that for years and it’s awesome.
Sam Parr: All right, we’re going to normalize having conversational agenda hangouts with an agenda. Okay, let’s do more. Um, I have a business that’s pretty cool. Can I tell you about it? Here’s my here’s my opening for this business. Sam, I found the business that you should have started instead of wasting your goddamn time with The Hustle.
Shaan Puri: Okay, I like that.
Sam Parr: So, you built The Hustle, and if you recall, one time you came to me hat in hand, absolutely begging for an investment. You needed the money and you got down on your knees and you said, “Please, sir, invest in my company.” And I looked at it, I I flipped through the business plan like it was a flip book, and I just said, “No thanks.”
Shaan Puri: No, that’s not what you said. You said, “Look, Sam, you’re coming to a knife fight with a knife. I don’t even want you to come to this knife fight with a gun. I want you to come to this knife fight with a magic fucking wand.” And and that clearly And then you turned away on my heel with a dramatic spin and I left the room.
Shaan Puri: And then you tried to pull the door to open, but it was really a push door.
Sam Parr: Totally blew it at the end. That’s the landing. Like you clearly had just read that on a whatever the equivalent was of Twitter and you’re like, “That is now my line.”
Shaan Puri: Yeah, exactly. It was back when I was like I had it written on the inside of my palm and I was like, “Peter Thiel says this magic wand thing, so I’m going to tell somebody.” Totally owns them, no matter what they’re doing. Um, and so, but you know, the reality was, I looked at the business and you were like, “Here’s what I’m doing. I’m creating a media company, so every day we’re going to write the news.” So every every day you had to recreate your product. I was like, “Ooh, that sucks.” Um, it’s like, do you get any Is there any benefit uh of all the work you did in the last three months? It’s like, “Uh, not really. We got to recreate it again. We got to bake that cake every morning.” Okay, sounds good. And then you said, and then I was like, “Cool, so then people pay you certainly for this service that you’re doing.” You’re like, “Nah, it’s free.” Oh, okay. And you’re like, “But then the adverti- then we have to do a separate business basically to a separate customer selling advertisers.” I was like, “Okay, but certainly they’re on retainer and it’s going to be recurring revenue that’s going to stack up.” You’re like, “No, no, no. They’re just going to if they feel like advertising, they will. If they don’t, they don’t. Every month we’re going to start back at zero.” Yep. And I thought, “Damn, this is a tough business to win.” And that’s when I hit you with the knife and the knife fight and blah blah blah.
Shaan Puri: Which it is tough-ish to to do well.
Sam Parr: Yeah, and by the way, the the great best part of the whole thing is five years later after you successfully sold the business and got rich doing it, I then copied your business model and did the same thing for crypto and and was like, came back to you basically being like, “What how did you What was the business plan again? How do you do this?”
Shaan Puri: Um, so so that’s like a big deal.
Sam Parr: But isn’t this isn’t this a it’s like total like life goals story. Build a killer brand, you stuck with the thing, you built it with your family, you do it in the cul-de-sac. Uh, I just think it’s it’s amazing. Sell the thing for $450 million.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, but there’s None of his kids are yoked.
Sam Parr: Right? Like, these guys, they don’t look very yoked. I’m looking at the family now.
Sam Parr: Well, as their public defender, here’s what I have to say about that. One of the things they talked about with Muscle Milk is they go, “We wanted to build a product that everybody would look at it and see a different thing.” So they go, “Women see it as a weight loss product. Men see it as a muscle building product. Some people see it as a snack. Some people see it as a meal replacement.” Our goal was to build a product that you that would basically, you know, solve multiple problems for different people at once.
Shaan Puri: I’m just saying that I want to see some bigger bis and tris on this family photo. They look great. They look very healthy. More importantly, they look happy. The founder’s teeth are beautiful. Like, he’s got a really nice smile. I just think that we should see a little thicker neck.
Sam Parr: Can I tell you one other thing? So this company that bought them uh or originally, I think they were owned by Pepsi. Pepsi owns it now, but before that, they were it was bought by something called Hormel Foods. It’s one of these companies that you’ve never heard of. This company does $12 billion in revenue. They do like a billion and a half dollars of profit a year. And if you go to their website, they the like the the headline, like tagline for them is like, “We sell more pepperonis than anyone on Earth.” And they’re just like food holding company. They own Skippy peanut butter, they own Planters, they own They own Spam. They own Spam, and then they sell just a shit ton of ronies, dude. They just sell pepperonis worldwide. They own Applegate, they own Justin’s, they own Planters, Skippy, Chi-Chi’s. I don’t know what Chi-Chi’s is. Corn I don’t know what that is. They black label bacon. They own a lot of I mean, literally Spam is like on their homepage as like their like their their pride and joy. Like the way my parents pin like pictures of me up on the fridge, that’s what this company does with with Spam.
Shaan Puri: Which is like it’s pretty pretty good, horrible for you. But oh dude, yeah, Hormel pepperoni, I know them. That’s one of my snacks. One of my snacks is like eight pepperoni with a little bit of mozzarella cheese on it, microwaved.
Sam Parr: It’s a pizza without the the pizza?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, I just call it like Redneck Redneck Redneck fitness food.
Sam Parr: Dude, this should be your brand. A line of of “Not That Bad For You” Redneck Snacks. It’s like it’ll it’ll make you farm strong.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, do you know like PB dip? You know you know, I call it dip. But you know PB powder? The powder, yeah. Yeah, you get a spoon of that and you straight and you chuck it up on your the top of your roof of your mouth and you suck on that thing for 60 minutes. I call it uh like fitness dip. So like instead of like having like a fat lip in, you just have uh PB dip. You’re just in your tongue just rub it against that that that dehydrated nut. Ooh, boy. Ooh, boy. You want to have a good time? Put a little PB dip on the roof of your mouth.
Sam Parr: All right, we got our we got our cold open for the episode.
Shaan Puri: Um, by the way, let let me show you one thing. You said something that I do religiously. I just sent Ari a document that I I just sent her one of the tabs. I have dozens of tabs on this. Ari, can you share your screen? So, whenever I read a book, I have this Google Doc that I’ve used since the year like 2010. All right, so check this out. Whenever I read a book, I do a few things. One, I make whenever there’s like a year and a money term or some type of milestone, I write it down in a sheet. And the reason why I write it in a sheet is because a lot of times when you’re building a company or doing anything that’s like really challenging, you you’ll read about someone else and you’re like, “That was easy.” And so I like to do timelines and you’ll see like, “Oh, okay, like they went four years with nothing happening.” And so for those listening, I have got a timeline of uh Coke Industries, which is like um the largest privately held company in America, a biography of their family. And I like did a timeline where every everything major happened in their life and then I converted the dollar amount into uh 2019 dollars, which is when I made this particular one. And it’s really fun to do because you could see that things took, like in this case, like 30 years. Right. And so if you like uh uh if you scroll all the way to the left, I did this with uh Kirk Kerkorian, another one of the uh a guy who I love. And I’ve I every biography I read, I I create one of these.
Sam Parr: Just another man you love. Can I just point out a couple things about this what we’re screen sharing here that are are just just fantastic. This is it’s just a a peek into the mind. First of all, it’s a Google sheet that’s just called “Sheet,” which is just a great title. Okay, scroll over, Ari. So here’s some of the milestones that Sam wrote down. All right, so he starts for for Coke Industries. 19 1900, Fred Coke born. Uh 1924, so 24-year gap, big break finds mentor. Okay, so then it goes 1927, just a quick update, still broke. Then it goes 20 1929, sees success. 1931, big success with two G’s. It’s a big double G success right here. It’s amazing. And then 1940, he uh buys a company and that company he buys it for $4 million. Um Do you also should just have pictures on here where it’s them and the calves and it’s just your calves just for reference and you’re just comparing calves. Because I feel like tell me that’s not part of your research process, is it looking at photos and judging their looks?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, particularly the Coke brothers because they’re like these tall uh waspy guys and I definitely am sizing myself up to them.
Sam Parr: Yeah. The the the the total picture of success includes a picture, for sure.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, it’s like tennis sweaters. It’s like, “Oh, they’re into tennis sweaters, therefore I will wear tennis sweaters.” But yeah, I definitely like two guys that are both 6’2” from the Midwest with blonde hair, blue eyes, like we there’s definitely like a there can only be one of us in this room.
Sam Parr: Dude, there’s this girl who keeps going viral on Twitter and it’s the same tweet she does every time and she just goes, “My dad goes to a bar with his friends every Friday and he makes a list of topics to discuss.” Yes. And then she she puts she has a photo of him holding a printed out agenda and I’ll just read you one of them. “Ted Perry’s fun,” capital story, “shown on Fox News 6.” Next one, “What’s going on with the Bucks?” Question mark. “NFL overtime rules, take ball first or second?” Question mark. “Bahama breezes.” How close is too close to an alligator? Do you think people that throw garbage out of their car window are the same people that don’t pick up their dog poop when walking through my subdivision? And then it read at the bottom, it goes, “Please be on time, as you can see, we have another week of a packed agenda.” And it goes super viral every time. It’s like 100,000 likes and I think everybody who sees this is like, “Yeah, that’s part of the winning life.” I’d like to go to the bar with my friends every Thursday and have like an agenda that we print out and we talk about while wearing our New Balances.
Shaan Puri: Do you know who does this? And he’s not joking.
Sam Parr: I already know, because you’re talking about a legend, a social legend, and I know it has to be Nick Gray. Tell me I’m wrong. No, I’m wrong. Is it not Nick Gray?
Shaan Puri: The second time I hung out with Nick Gray, we went to a bar called Lazarus. Sarah and I came and he goes, “Hey guys, uh I would love to hang out. This is our second time hanging out. I thought it’d be nice to have an agenda so we could stay on track.” And there was a 13-point uh agenda list where it was like, “Ask Sarah about her job, figure out how that’s going on, explain my dating life and get opinions from it.” Uh like it was a and we stuck to that agenda and he took notes. And it was Was it thrilling? Because I think I’m going to absolutely start doing this. It was thrilling. It was thrilling. You know how like You know how like Was it the agenda that was great or the fact that he had an agenda that was great? Which which of the two was greater? The second one. Here’s why. So, look, in a world everyone wants to be a tough guy. It feels good to be a leader, but you want to know something, everyone likes getting led. And like we like the assertive person. I’m just a leader who loves being led. That’s me. That’s on my LinkedIn. I I like leading some stuff, but then there’s other times where it’s like, “Just tell me what to do.” And Right. Small talk is one of those things that no one just like tells you what to do. And when there’s an assigned leader who has something outlined for small talk, I’m just like, “Yes, sir. I’ll do whatever you like me to do.” And uh, “Thank you, may I have another, sir.” Like, it’s like the best way to go about doing stuff. And that’s what Nick Gray does.
Sam Parr: Okay. And by the way, that’s how we do this podcast, actually. We both bring some agenda items and then we discuss in bullet point form.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, and I think it’s good. I and he’s done that for years and it’s awesome.
Sam Parr: All right, we’re going to normalize having conversational agenda hangouts with an agenda. Okay, let’s do more. Um, I have a business that’s pretty cool. Can I tell you about it? Here’s my here’s my opening for this business. Sam, I found the business that you should have started instead of wasting your goddamn time with The Hustle.
Shaan Puri: Okay, I like that.
Sam Parr: So, you built The Hustle, and if you recall, one time you came to me hat in hand, absolutely begging for an investment. You needed the money and you got down on your knees and you said, “Please, sir, invest in my company.” And I looked at it, I I flipped through the business plan like it was a flip book, and I just said, “No thanks.”
Shaan Puri: No, that’s not what you said. You said, “Look, Sam, you’re coming to a knife fight with a knife. I don’t even want you to come to this knife fight with a gun. I want you to come to this knife fight with a magic fucking wand.” And and that clearly And then you turned away on my heel with a dramatic spin and I left the room.
Shaan Puri: And then you tried to pull the door to open, but it was really a push door.
Sam Parr: Totally blew it at the end. That’s the landing. Like you clearly had just read that on a whatever the equivalent was of Twitter and you’re like, “That is now my line.”
Shaan Puri: Yeah, exactly. It was back when I was like I had it written on the inside of my palm and I was like, “Peter Thiel says this magic wand thing, so I’m going to tell somebody.” Totally owns them, no matter what they’re doing. Um, and so, but you know, the reality was, I looked at the business and you were like, “Here’s what I’m doing. I’m creating a media company, so every day we’re going to write the news.” So every every day you had to recreate your product. I was like, “Ooh, that sucks.” Um, it’s like, do you get any Is there any benefit uh of all the work you did in the last three months? It’s like, “Uh, not really. We got to recreate it again. We got to bake that cake every morning.” Okay, sounds good. And then you said, and then I was like, “Cool, so then people pay you certainly for this service that you’re doing.” You’re like, “Nah, it’s free.” Oh, okay. And you’re like, “But then the adverti- then we have to do a separate business basically to a separate customer selling advertisers.” I was like, “Okay, but certainly they’re on retainer and it’s going to be recurring revenue that’s going to stack up.” You’re like, “No, no, no. They’re just going to if they feel like advertising, they will. If they don’t, they don’t. Every month we’re going to start back at zero.” Yep. And I thought, “Damn, this is a tough business to win.” And that’s when I hit you with the knife and the knife fight and blah blah blah.
Shaan Puri: Which it is tough-ish to to do well.
Sam Parr: Yeah, and by the way, the the great best part of the whole thing is five years later after you successfully sold the business and got rich doing it, I then copied your business model and did the same thing for crypto and and was like, came back to you basically being like, “What how did you What was the business plan again? How do you do this?”
Shaan Puri: Um, so so that’s like a big deal.
Sam Parr: But isn’t this isn’t this a it’s like total like life goals story. Build a killer brand, you stuck with the thing, you built it with your family, you do it in the cul-de-sac. Uh, I just think it’s it’s amazing. Sell the thing for $450 million.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, but there’s None of his kids are yoked.
Sam Parr: Right? Like, these guys, they don’t look very yoked. I’m looking at the family now.
Sam Parr: Well, as their public defender, here’s what I have to say about that. One of the things they talked about with Muscle Milk is they go, “We wanted to build a product that everybody would look at it and see a different thing.” So they go, “Women see it as a weight loss product. Men see it as a muscle building product. Some people see it as a snack. Some people see it as a meal replacement.” Our goal was to build a product that you that would basically, you know, solve multiple problems for different people at once.
Shaan Puri: I’m just saying that I want to see some bigger bis and tris on this family photo. They look great. They look very healthy. More importantly, they look happy. The founder’s teeth are beautiful. Like, he’s got a really nice smile. I just think that we should see a little thicker neck.
Sam Parr: Can I tell you one other thing? So this company that bought them uh or originally, I think they were owned by Pepsi. Pepsi owns it now, but before that, they were it was bought by something called Hormel Foods. It’s one of these companies that you’ve never heard of. This company does $12 billion in revenue. They do like a billion and a half dollars of profit a year. And if you go to their website, they the like the the headline, like tagline for them is like, “We sell more pepperonis than anyone on Earth.” And they’re just like food holding company. They own Skippy peanut butter, they own Planters, they own They own Spam. They own Spam, and then they sell just a shit ton of ronies, dude. They just sell pepperonis worldwide. They own Applegate, they own Justin’s, they own Planters, Skippy, Chi-Chi’s. I don’t know what Chi-Chi’s is. Corn I don’t know what that is. They black label bacon. They own a lot of I mean, literally Spam is like on their homepage as like their like their their pride and joy. Like the way my parents pin like pictures of me up on the fridge, that’s what this company does with with Spam.
Shaan Puri: Which is like it’s pretty pretty good, horrible for you. But oh dude, yeah, Hormel pepperoni, I know them. That’s one of my snacks. One of my snacks is like eight pepperoni with a little bit of mozzarella cheese on it, microwaved.
Sam Parr: It’s a pizza without the the pizza?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, I just call it like Redneck Redneck Redneck fitness food.
Sam Parr: Dude, this should be your brand. A line of of “Not That Bad For You” Redneck Snacks. It’s like it’ll it’ll make you farm strong.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, do you know like PB dip? You know you know, I call it dip. But you know PB powder? The powder, yeah. Yeah, you get a spoon of that and you straight and you chuck it up on your the top of your roof of your mouth and you suck on that thing for 60 minutes. I call it uh like fitness dip. So like instead of like having like a fat lip in, you just have uh PB dip. You’re just in your tongue just rub it against that that that dehydrated nut. Ooh, boy. Ooh, boy. You want to have a good time? Put a little PB dip on the roof of your mouth.
Sam Parr: All right, we got our we got our cold open for the episode.
Shaan Puri: Um, by the way, let let me show you one thing. You said something that I do religiously. I just sent Ari a document that I I just sent her one of the tabs. I have dozens of tabs on this. Ari, can you share your screen? So, whenever I read a book, I have this Google Doc that I’ve used since the year like 2010. All right, so check this out. Whenever I read a book, I do a few things. One, I make whenever there’s like a year and a money term or some type of milestone, I write it down in a sheet. And the reason why I write it in a sheet is because a lot of times when you’re building a company or doing anything that’s like really challenging, you you’ll read about someone else and you’re like, “That was easy.” And so I like to do timelines and you’ll see like, “Oh, okay, like they went four years with nothing happening.” And so for those listening, I have got a timeline of uh Coke Industries, which is like um the largest privately held company in America, a biography of their family. And I like did a timeline where every everything major happened in their life and then I converted the dollar amount into uh 2019 dollars, which is when I made this particular one. And it’s really fun to do because you could see that things took, like in this case, like 30 years. Right. And so if you like uh uh if you scroll all the way to the left, I did this with uh Kirk Kerkorian, another one of the uh a guy who I love. And I’ve I every biography I read, I I create one of these.
Sam Parr: Just another man you love. Can I just point out a couple things about this what we’re screen sharing here that are are just just fantastic. This is it’s just a a peek into the mind. First of all, it’s a Google sheet that’s just called “Sheet,” which is just a great title. Okay, scroll over, Ari. So here’s some of the milestones that Sam wrote down. All right, so he starts for for Coke Industries. 19 1900, Fred Coke born. Uh 1924, so 24-year gap, big break finds mentor. Okay, so then it goes 1927, just a quick update, still broke. Then it goes 20 1929, sees success. 1931, big success with two G’s. It’s a big double G success right here. It’s amazing. And then 1940, he uh buys a company and that company he buys it for $4 million. Um Do you also should just have pictures on here where it’s them and the calves and it’s just your calves just for reference and you’re just comparing calves. Because I feel like tell me that’s not part of your research process, is it looking at photos and judging their looks?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, particularly the Coke brothers because they’re like these tall uh waspy guys and I definitely am sizing myself up to them.
Sam Parr: Yeah. The the the the total picture of success includes a picture, for sure.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, it’s like tennis sweaters. It’s like, “Oh, they’re into tennis sweaters, therefore I will wear tennis sweaters.” But yeah, I definitely like two guys that are both 6’2” from the Midwest with blonde hair, blue eyes, like we there’s definitely like a there can only be one of us in this room.
Sam Parr: Dude, there’s this girl who keeps going viral on Twitter and it’s the same tweet she does every time and she just goes, “My dad goes to a bar with his friends every Friday and he makes a list of topics to discuss.” Yes. And then she she puts she has a photo of him holding a printed out agenda and I’ll just read you one of them. “Ted Perry’s fun,” capital story, “shown on Fox News 6.” Next one, “What’s going on with the Bucks?” Question mark. “NFL overtime rules, take ball first or second?” Question mark. “Bahama breezes.” How close is too close to an alligator? Do you think people that throw garbage out of their car window are the same people that don’t pick up their dog poop when walking through my subdivision? And then it read at the bottom, it goes, “Please be on time, as you can see, we have another week of a packed agenda.” And it goes super viral every time. It’s like 100,000 likes and I think everybody who sees this is like, “Yeah, that’s part of the winning life.” I’d like to go to the bar with my friends every Thursday and have like an agenda that we print out and we talk about while wearing our New Balances.
Shaan Puri: Do you know who does this? And he’s not joking.
Sam Parr: I already know, because you’re talking about a legend, a social legend, and I know it has to be Nick Gray. Tell me I’m wrong. No, I’m wrong. Is it not Nick Gray?
Shaan Puri: The second time I hung out with Nick Gray, we went to a bar called Lazarus. Sarah and I came and he goes, “Hey guys, uh I would love to hang out. This is our second time hanging out. I thought it’d be nice to have an agenda so we could stay on track.” And there was a 13-point uh agenda list where it was like, “Ask Sarah about her job, figure out how that’s going on, explain my dating life and get opinions from it.” Uh like it was a and we stuck to that agenda and he took notes. And it was Was it thrilling? Because I think I’m going to absolutely start doing this. It was thrilling. It was thrilling. You know how like You know how like Was it the agenda that was great or the fact that he had an agenda that was great? Which which of the two was greater? The second one. Here’s why. So, look, in a world everyone wants to be a tough guy. It feels good to be a leader, but you want to know something, everyone likes getting led. And like we like the assertive person. I’m just a leader who loves being led. That’s me. That’s on my LinkedIn. I I like leading some stuff, but then there’s other times where it’s like, “Just tell me what to do.” And Right. Small talk is one of those things that no one just like tells you what to do. And when there’s an assigned leader who has something outlined for small talk, I’m just like, “Yes, sir. I’ll do whatever you like me to do.” And uh, “Thank you, may I have another, sir.” Like, it’s like the best way to go about doing stuff. And that’s what Nick Gray does.
Sam Parr: Okay. And by the way, that’s how we do this podcast, actually. We both bring some agenda items and then we discuss in bullet point form.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, and I think it’s good. I and he’s done that for years and it’s awesome.
Sam Parr: All right, we’re going to normalize having conversational agenda hangouts with an agenda. Okay, let’s do more. Um, I have a business that’s pretty cool. Can I tell you about it? Here’s my here’s my opening for this business. Sam, I found the business that you should have started instead of wasting your goddamn time with The Hustle.
Shaan Puri: Okay, I like that.
Sam Parr: So, you built The Hustle, and if you recall, one time you came to me hat in hand, absolutely begging for an investment. You needed the money and you got down on your knees and you said, “Please, sir, invest in my company.” And I looked at it, I I flipped through the business plan like it was a flip book, and I just said, “No thanks.”
Shaan Puri: No, that’s not what you said. You said, “Look, Sam, you’re coming to a knife fight with a knife. I don’t even want you to come to this knife fight with a gun. I want you to come to this knife fight with a magic fucking wand.” And and that clearly And then you turned away on my heel with a dramatic spin and I left the room.
Shaan Puri: And then you tried to pull the door to open, but it was really a push door.
Sam Parr: Totally blew it at the end. That’s the landing. Like you clearly had just read that on a whatever the equivalent was of Twitter and you’re like, “That is now my line.”
Shaan Puri: Yeah, exactly. It was back when I was like I had it written on the inside of my palm and I was like, “Peter Thiel says this magic wand thing, so I’m going to tell somebody.” Totally owns them, no matter what they’re doing. Um, and so, but you know, the reality was, I looked at the business and you were like, “Here’s what I’m doing. I’m creating a media company, so every day we’re going to write the news.” So every every day you had to recreate your product. I was like, “Ooh, that sucks.” Um, it’s like, do you get any Is there any benefit uh of all the work you did in the last three months? It’s like, “Uh, not really. We got to recreate it again. We got to bake that cake every morning.” Okay, sounds good. And then you said, and then I was like, “Cool, so then people pay you certainly for this service that you’re doing.” You’re like, “Nah, it’s free.” Oh, okay. And you’re like, “But then the adverti- then we have to do a separate business basically to a separate customer selling advertisers.” I was like, “Okay, but certainly they’re on retainer and it’s going to be recurring revenue that’s going to stack up.” You’re like, “No, no, no. They’re just going to if they feel like advertising, they will. If they don’t, they don’t. Every month we’re going to start back at zero.” Yep. And I thought, “Damn, this is a tough business to win.” And that’s when I hit you with the knife and the knife fight and blah blah blah.
Shaan Puri: Which it is tough-ish to to do well.
Sam Parr: Yeah, and by the way, the the great best part of the whole thing is five years later after you successfully sold the business and got rich doing it, I then copied your business model and did the same thing for crypto and and was like, came back to you basically being like, “What how did you What was the business plan again? How do you do this?”
Shaan Puri: Um, so so that’s like a big deal.
Sam Parr: But isn’t this isn’t this a it’s like total like life goals story. Build a killer brand, you stuck with the thing, you built it with your family, you do it in the cul-de-sac. Uh, I just think it’s it’s amazing. Sell the thing for $450 million.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, but there’s None of his kids are yoked.
Sam Parr: Right? Like, these guys, they don’t look very yoked. I’m looking at the family now.
Sam Parr: Well, as their public defender, here’s what I have to say about that. One of the things they talked about with Muscle Milk is they go, “We wanted to build a product that everybody would look at it and see a different thing.” So they go, “Women see it as a weight loss product. Men see it as a muscle building product. Some people see it as a snack. Some people see it as a meal replacement.” Our goal was to build a product that you that would basically, you know, solve multiple problems for different people at once.
Shaan Puri: I’m just saying that I want to see some bigger bis and tris on this family photo. They look great. They look very healthy. More importantly, they look happy. The founder’s teeth are beautiful. Like, he’s got a really nice smile. I just think that we should see a little thicker neck.
Sam Parr: Can I tell you one other thing? So this company that bought them uh or originally, I think they were owned by Pepsi. Pepsi owns it now, but before that, they were it was bought by something called Hormel Foods. It’s one of these companies that you’ve never heard of. This company does $12 billion in revenue. They do like a billion and a half dollars of profit a year. And if you go to their website, they the like the the headline, like tagline for them is like, “We sell more pepperonis than anyone on Earth.” And they’re just like food holding company. They own Skippy peanut butter, they own Planters, they own They own Spam. They own Spam, and then they sell just a shit ton of ronies, dude. They just sell pepperonis worldwide. They own Applegate, they own Justin’s, they own Planters, Skippy, Chi-Chi’s. I don’t know what Chi-Chi’s is. Corn I don’t know what that is. They black label bacon. They own a lot of I mean, literally Spam is like on their homepage as like their like their their pride and joy. Like the way my parents pin like pictures of me up on the fridge, that’s what this company does with with Spam.
Shaan Puri: Which is like it’s pretty pretty good, horrible for you. But oh dude, yeah, Hormel pepperoni, I know them. That’s one of my snacks. One of my snacks is like eight pepperoni with a little bit of mozzarella cheese on it, microwaved.
Sam Parr: It’s a pizza without the the pizza?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, I just call it like Redneck Redneck Redneck fitness food.
Sam Parr: Dude, this should be your brand. A line of of “Not That Bad For You” Redneck Snacks. It’s like it’ll it’ll make you farm strong.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, do you know like PB dip? You know you know, I call it dip. But you know PB powder? The powder, yeah. Yeah, you get a spoon of that and you straight and you chuck it up on your the top of your roof of your mouth and you suck on that thing for 60 minutes. I call it uh like fitness dip. So like instead of like having like a fat lip in, you just have uh PB dip. You’re just in your tongue just rub it against that that that dehydrated nut. Ooh, boy. Ooh, boy. You want to have a good time? Put a little PB dip on the roof of your mouth.
Sam Parr: All right, we got our we got our cold open for the episode.
Shaan Puri: Um, by the way, let let me show you one thing. You said something that I do religiously. I just sent Ari a document that I I just sent her one of the tabs. I have dozens of tabs on this. Ari, can you share your screen? So, whenever I read a book, I have this Google Doc that I’ve used since the year like 2010. All right, so check this out. Whenever I read a book, I do a few things. One, I make whenever there’s like a year and a money term or some type of milestone, I write it down in a sheet. And the reason why I write it in a sheet is because a lot of times when you’re building a company or doing anything that’s like really challenging, you you’ll read about someone else and you’re like, “That was easy.” And so I like to do timelines and you’ll see like, “Oh, okay, like they went four years with nothing happening.” And so for those listening, I have got a timeline of uh Coke Industries, which is like um the largest privately held company in America, a biography of their family. And I like did a timeline where every everything major happened in their life and then I converted the dollar amount into uh 2019 dollars, which is when I made this particular one. And it’s really fun to do because you could see that things took, like in this case, like 30 years. Right. And so if you like uh uh if you scroll all the way to the left, I did this with uh Kirk Kerkorian, another one of the uh a guy who I love. And I’ve I every biography I read, I I create one of these.
Sam Parr: Just another man you love. Can I just point out a couple things about this what we’re screen sharing here that are are just just fantastic. This is it’s just a a peek into the mind. First of all, it’s a Google sheet that’s just called “Sheet,” which is just a great title. Okay, scroll over, Ari. So here’s some of the milestones that Sam wrote down. All right, so he starts for for Coke Industries. 19 1900, Fred Coke born. Uh 1924, so 24-year gap, big break finds mentor. Okay, so then it goes 1927, just a quick update, still broke. Then it goes 20 1929, sees success. 1931, big success with two G’s. It’s a big double G success right here. It’s amazing. And then 1940, he uh buys a company and that company he buys it for $4 million. Um Do you also should just have pictures on here where it’s them and the calves and it’s just your calves just for reference and you’re just comparing calves. Because I feel like tell me that’s not part of your research process, is it looking at photos and judging their looks?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, particularly the Coke brothers because they’re like these tall uh waspy guys and I definitely am sizing myself up to them.
Sam Parr: Yeah. The the the the total picture of success includes a picture, for sure.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, it’s like tennis sweaters. It’s like, “Oh, they’re into tennis sweaters, therefore I will wear tennis sweaters.” But yeah, I definitely like two guys that are both 6’2” from the Midwest with blonde hair, blue eyes, like we there’s definitely like a there can only be one of us in this room.
Sam Parr: Dude, there’s this girl who keeps going viral on Twitter and it’s the same tweet she does every time and she just goes, “My dad goes to a bar with his friends every Friday and he makes a list of topics to discuss.” Yes. And then she she puts she has a photo of him holding a printed out agenda and I’ll just read you one of them. “Ted Perry’s fun,” capital story, “shown on Fox News 6.” Next one, “What’s going on with the Bucks?” Question mark. “NFL overtime rules, take ball first or second?” Question mark. “Bahama breezes.” How close is too close to an alligator? Do you think people that throw garbage out of their car window are the same people that don’t pick up their dog poop when walking through my subdivision? And then it read at the bottom, it goes, “Please be on time, as you can see, we have another week of a packed agenda.” And it goes super viral every time. It’s like 100,000 likes and I think everybody who sees this is like, “Yeah, that’s part of the winning life.” I’d like to go to the bar with my friends every Thursday and have like an agenda that we print out and we talk about while wearing our New Balances.
Shaan Puri: Do you know who does this? And he’s not joking.
Sam Parr: I already know, because you’re talking about a legend, a social legend, and I know it has to be Nick Gray. Tell me I’m wrong. No, I’m wrong. Is it not Nick Gray?
Shaan Puri: The second time I hung out with Nick Gray, we went to a bar called Lazarus. Sarah and I came and he goes, “Hey guys, uh I would love to hang out. This is our second time hanging out. I thought it’d be nice to have an agenda so we could stay on track.” And there was a 13-point uh agenda list where it was like, “Ask Sarah about her job, figure out how that’s going on, explain my dating life and get opinions from it.” Uh like it was a and we stuck to that agenda and he took notes. And it was Was it thrilling? Because I think I’m going to absolutely start doing this. It was thrilling. It was thrilling. You know how like You know how like Was it the agenda that was great or the fact that he had an agenda that was great? Which which of the two was greater? The second one. Here’s why. So, look, in a world everyone wants to be a tough guy. It feels good to be a leader, but you want to know something, everyone likes getting led. And like we like the assertive person. I’m just a leader who loves being led. That’s me. That’s on my LinkedIn. I I like leading some stuff, but then there’s other times where it’s like, “Just tell me what to do.” And Right. Small talk is one of those things that no one just like tells you what to do. And when there’s an assigned leader who has something outlined for small talk, I’m just like, “Yes, sir. I’ll do whatever you like me to do.” And uh, “Thank you, may I have another, sir.” Like, it’s like the best way to go about doing stuff. And that’s what Nick Gray does.
Sam Parr: Okay. And by the way, that’s how we do this podcast, actually. We both bring some agenda items and then we discuss in bullet point form.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, and I think it’s good. I and he’s done that for years and it’s awesome.
Sam Parr: All right, we’re going to normalize having conversational agenda hangouts with an agenda. Okay, let’s do more. Um, I have a business that’s pretty cool. Can I tell you about it? Here’s my here’s my opening for this business. Sam, I found the business that you should have started instead of wasting your goddamn time with The Hustle.
Shaan Puri: Okay, I like that.
Sam Parr: So, you built The Hustle, and if you recall, one time you came to me hat in hand, absolutely begging for an investment. You needed the money and you got down on your knees and you said, “Please, sir, invest in my company.” And I looked at it, I I flipped through the business plan like it was a flip book, and I just said, “No thanks.”
Shaan Puri: No, that’s not what you said. You said, “Look, Sam, you’re coming to a knife fight with a knife. I don’t even want you to come to this knife fight with a gun. I want you to come to this knife fight with a magic fucking wand.” And and that clearly And then you turned away on my heel with a dramatic spin and I left the room.
Shaan Puri: And then you tried to pull the door to open, but it was really a push door.
Sam Parr: Totally blew it at the end. That’s the landing. Like you clearly had just read that on a whatever the equivalent was of Twitter and you’re like, “That is now my line.”
Shaan Puri: Yeah, exactly. It was back when I was like I had it written on the inside of my palm and I was like, “Peter Thiel says this magic wand thing, so I’m going to tell somebody.” Totally owns them, no matter what they’re doing. Um, and so, but you know, the reality was, I looked at the business and you were like, “Here’s what I’m doing. I’m creating a media company, so every day we’re going to write the news.” So every every day you had to recreate your product. I was like, “Ooh, that sucks.” Um, it’s like, do you get any Is there any benefit uh of all the work you did in the last three months? It’s like, “Uh, not really. We got to recreate it again. We got to bake that cake every morning.” Okay, sounds good. And then you said, and then I was like, “Cool, so then people pay you certainly for this service that you’re doing.” You’re like, “Nah, it’s free.” Oh, okay. And you’re like, “But then the adverti- then we have to do a separate business basically to a separate customer selling advertisers.” I was like, “Okay, but certainly they’re on retainer and it’s going to be recurring revenue that’s going to stack up.” You’re like, “No, no, no. They’re just going to if they feel like advertising, they will. If they don’t, they don’t. Every month we’re going to start back at zero.” Yep. And I thought, “Damn, this is a tough business to win.” And that’s when I hit you with the knife and the knife fight and blah blah blah.
Shaan Puri: Which it is tough-ish to to do well.
Sam Parr: Yeah, and by the way, the the great best part of the whole thing is five years later after you successfully sold the business and got rich doing it, I then copied your business model and did the same thing for crypto and and was like, came back to you basically being like, “What how did you What was the business plan again? How do you do this?”
Shaan Puri: Um, so so that’s like a big deal.
Sam Parr: But isn’t this isn’t this a it’s like total like life goals story. Build a killer brand, you stuck with the thing, you built it with your family, you do it in the cul-de-sac. Uh, I just think it’s it’s amazing. Sell the thing for $450 million.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, but there’s None of his kids are yoked.
Sam Parr: Right? Like, these guys, they don’t look very yoked. I’m looking at the family now.
Sam Parr: Well, as their public defender, here’s what I have to say about that. One of the things they talked about with Muscle Milk is they go, “We wanted to build a product that everybody would look at it and see a different thing.” So they go, “Women see it as a weight loss product. Men see it as a muscle building product. Some people see it as a snack. Some people see it as a meal replacement.” Our goal was to build a product that you that would basically, you know, solve multiple problems for different people at once.
Shaan Puri: I’m just saying that I want to see some bigger bis and tris on this family photo. They look great. They look very healthy. More importantly, they look happy. The founder’s teeth are beautiful. Like, he’s got a really nice smile. I just think that we should see a little thicker neck.
Sam Parr: Can I tell you one other thing? So this company that bought them uh or originally, I think they were owned by Pepsi. Pepsi owns it now, but before that, they were it was bought by something called Hormel Foods. It’s one of these companies that you’ve never heard of. This company does $12 billion in revenue. They do like a billion and a half dollars of profit a year. And if you go to their website, they the like the the headline, like tagline for them is like, “We sell more pepperonis than anyone on Earth.” And they’re just like food holding company. They own Skippy peanut butter, they own Planters, they own They own Spam. They own Spam, and then they sell just a shit ton of ronies, dude. They just sell pepperonis worldwide. They own Applegate, they own Justin’s, they own Planters, Skippy, Chi-Chi’s. I don’t know what Chi-Chi’s is. Corn I don’t know what that is. They black label bacon. They own a lot of I mean, literally Spam is like on their homepage as like their like their their pride and joy. Like the way my parents pin like pictures of me up on the fridge, that’s what this company does with with Spam.
Shaan Puri: Which is like it’s pretty pretty good, horrible for you. But oh dude, yeah, Hormel pepperoni, I know them. That’s one of my snacks. One of my snacks is like eight pepperoni with a little bit of mozzarella cheese on it, microwaved.
Sam Parr: It’s a pizza without the the pizza?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, I just call it like Redneck Redneck Redneck fitness food.
Sam Parr: Dude, this should be your brand. A line of of “Not That Bad For You” Redneck Snacks. It’s like it’ll it’ll make you farm strong.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, do you know like PB dip? You know you know, I call it dip. But you know PB powder? The powder, yeah. Yeah, you get a spoon of that and you straight and you chuck it up on your the top of your roof of your mouth and you suck on that thing for 60 minutes. I call it uh like fitness dip. So like instead of like having like a fat lip in, you just have uh PB dip. You’re just in your tongue just rub it against that that that dehydrated nut. Ooh, boy. Ooh, boy. You want to have a good time? Put a little PB dip on the roof of your mouth.
Sam Parr: All right, we got our we got our cold open for the episode.
Shaan Puri: Um, by the way, let let me show you one thing. You said something that I do religiously. I just sent Ari a document that I I just sent her one of the tabs. I have dozens of tabs on this. Ari, can you share your screen? So, whenever I read a book, I have this Google Doc that I’ve used since the year like 2010. All right, so check this out. Whenever I read a book, I do a few things. One, I make whenever there’s like a year and a money term or some type of milestone, I write it down in a sheet. And the reason why I write it in a sheet is because a lot of times when you’re building a company or doing anything that’s like really challenging, you you’ll read about someone else and you’re like, “That was easy.” And so I like to do timelines and you’ll see like, “Oh, okay, like they went four years with nothing happening.” And so for those listening, I have got a timeline of uh Coke Industries, which is like um the largest privately held company in America, a biography of their family. And I like did a timeline where every everything major happened in their life and then I converted the dollar amount into uh 2019 dollars, which is when I made this particular one. And it’s really fun to do because you could see that things took, like in this case, like 30 years. Right. And so if you like uh uh if you scroll all the way to the left, I did this with uh Kirk Kerkorian, another one of the uh a guy who I love. And I’ve I every biography I read, I I create one of these.
Sam Parr: Just another man you love. Can I just point out a couple things about this what we’re screen sharing here that are are just just fantastic. This is it’s just a a peek into the mind. First of all, it’s a Google sheet that’s just called “Sheet,” which is just a great title. Okay, scroll over, Ari. So here’s some of the milestones that Sam wrote down. All right, so he starts for for Coke Industries. 19 1900, Fred Coke born. Uh 1924, so 24-year gap, big break finds mentor. Okay, so then it goes 1927, just a quick update, still broke. Then it goes 20 1929, sees success. 1931, big success with two G’s. It’s a big double G success right here. It’s amazing. And then 1940, he uh buys a company and that company he buys it for $4 million. Um Do you also should just have pictures on here where it’s them and the calves and it’s just your calves just for reference and you’re just comparing calves. Because I feel like tell me that’s not part of your research process, is it looking at photos and judging their looks?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, particularly the Coke brothers because they’re like these tall uh waspy guys and I definitely am sizing myself up to them.
Sam Parr: Yeah. The the the the total picture of success includes a picture, for sure.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, it’s like tennis sweaters. It’s like, “Oh, they’re into tennis sweaters, therefore I will wear tennis sweaters.” But yeah, I definitely like two guys that are both 6’2” from the Midwest with blonde hair, blue eyes, like we there’s definitely like a there can only be one of us in this room.
Sam Parr: Dude, there’s this girl who keeps going viral on Twitter and it’s the same tweet she does every time and she just goes, “My dad goes to a bar with his friends every Friday and he makes a list of topics to discuss.” Yes. And then she she puts she has a photo of him holding a printed out agenda and I’ll just read you one of them. “Ted Perry’s fun,” capital story, “shown on Fox News 6.” Next one, “What’s going on with the Bucks?” Question mark. “NFL overtime rules, take ball first or second?” Question mark. “Bahama breezes.” How close is too close to an alligator? Do you think people that throw garbage out of their car window are the same people that don’t pick up their dog poop when walking through my subdivision? And then it read at the bottom, it goes, “Please be on time, as you can see, we have another week of a packed agenda.” And it goes super viral every time. It’s like 100,000 likes and I think everybody who sees this is like, “Yeah, that’s part of the winning life.” I’d like to go to the bar with my friends every Thursday and have like an agenda that we print out and we talk about while wearing our New Balances.
Shaan Puri: Do you know who does this? And he’s not joking.
Sam Parr: I already know, because you’re talking about a legend, a social legend, and I know it has to be Nick Gray. Tell me I’m wrong. No, I’m wrong. Is it not Nick Gray?
Shaan Puri: The second time I hung out with Nick Gray, we went to a bar called Lazarus. Sarah and I came and he goes, “Hey guys, uh I would love to hang out. This is our second time hanging out. I thought it’d be nice to have an agenda so we could stay on track.” And there was a 13-point uh agenda list where it was like, “Ask Sarah about her job, figure out how that’s going on, explain my dating life and get opinions from it.” Uh like it was a and we stuck to that agenda and he took notes. And it was Was it thrilling? Because I think I’m going to absolutely start doing this. It was thrilling. It was thrilling. You know how like You know how like Was it the agenda that was great or the fact that he had an agenda that was great? Which which of the two was greater? The second one. Here’s why. So, look, in a world everyone wants to be a tough guy. It feels good to be a leader, but you want to know something, everyone likes getting led. And like we like the assertive person. I’m just a leader who loves being led. That’s me. That’s on my LinkedIn. I I like leading some stuff, but then there’s other times where it’s like, “Just tell me what to do.” And Right. Small talk is one of those things that no one just like tells you what to do. And when there’s an assigned leader who has something outlined for small talk, I’m just like, “Yes, sir. I’ll do whatever you like me to do.” And uh, “Thank you, may I have another, sir.” Like, it’s like the best way to go about doing stuff. And that’s what Nick Gray does.
Sam Parr: Okay. And by the way, that’s how we do this podcast, actually. We both bring some agenda items and then we discuss in bullet point form.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, and I think it’s good. I and he’s done that for years and it’s awesome.
Sam Parr: All right, we’re going to normalize having conversational agenda hangouts with an agenda. Okay, let’s do more. Um, I have a business that’s pretty cool. Can I tell you about it? Here’s my here’s my opening for this business. Sam, I found the business that you should have started instead of wasting your goddamn time with The Hustle.
Shaan Puri: Okay, I like that.
Sam Parr: So, you built The Hustle, and if you recall, one time you came to me hat in hand, absolutely begging for an investment. You needed the money and you got down on your knees and you said, “Please, sir, invest in my company.” And I looked at it, I I flipped through the business plan like it was a flip book, and I just said, “No thanks.”
Shaan Puri: No, that’s not what you said. You said, “Look, Sam, you’re coming to a knife fight with a knife. I don’t even want you to come to this knife fight with a gun. I want you to come to this knife fight with a magic fucking wand.” And and that clearly And then you turned away on my heel with a dramatic spin and I left the room.
Shaan Puri: And then you tried to pull the door to open, but it was really a push door.
Sam Parr: Totally blew it at the end. That’s the landing. Like you clearly had just read that on a whatever the equivalent was of Twitter and you’re like, “That is now my line.”
Shaan Puri: Yeah, exactly. It was back when I was like I had it written on the inside of my palm and I was like, “Peter Thiel says this magic wand thing, so I’m going to tell somebody.” Totally owns them, no matter what they’re doing. Um, and so, but you know, the reality was, I looked at the business and you were like, “Here’s what I’m doing. I’m creating a media company, so every day we’re going to write the news.” So every every day you had to recreate your product. I was like, “Ooh, that sucks.” Um, it’s like, do you get any Is there any benefit uh of all the work you did in the last three months? It’s like, “Uh, not really. We got to recreate it again. We got to bake that cake every morning.” Okay, sounds good. And then you said, and then I was like, “Cool, so then people pay you certainly for this service that you’re doing.” You’re like, “Nah, it’s free.” Oh, okay. And you’re like, “But then the adverti- then we have to do a separate business basically to a separate customer selling advertisers.” I was like, “Okay, but certainly they’re on retainer and it’s going to be recurring revenue that’s going to stack up.” You’re like, “No, no, no. They’re just going to if they feel like advertising, they will. If they don’t, they don’t. Every month we’re going to start back at zero.” Yep. And I thought, “Damn, this is a tough business to win.” And that’s when I hit you with the knife and the knife fight and blah blah blah.
Shaan Puri: Which it is tough-ish to to do well.
Sam Parr: Yeah, and by the way, the the great best part of the whole thing is five years later after you successfully sold the business and got rich doing it, I then copied your business model and did the same thing for crypto and and was like, came back to you basically being like, “What how did you What was the business plan again? How do you do this?”
Shaan Puri: Um, so so that’s like a big deal.
Sam Parr: But isn’t this isn’t this a it’s like total like life goals story. Build a killer brand, you stuck with the thing, you built it with your family, you do it in the cul-de-sac. Uh, I just think it’s it’s amazing. Sell the thing for $450 million.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, but there’s None of his kids are yoked.
Sam Parr: Right? Like, these guys, they don’t look very yoked. I’m looking at the family now.
Sam Parr: Well, as their public defender, here’s what I have to say about that. One of the things they talked about with Muscle Milk is they go, “We wanted to build a product that everybody would look at it and see a different thing.” So they go, “Women see it as a weight loss product. Men see it as a muscle building product. Some people see it as a snack. Some people see it as a meal replacement.” Our goal was to build a product that you that would basically, you know, solve multiple problems for different people at once.
Shaan Puri: I’m just saying that I want to see some bigger bis and tris on this family photo. They look great. They look very healthy. More importantly, they look happy. The founder’s teeth are beautiful. Like, he’s got a really nice smile. I just think that we should see a little thicker neck.
Sam Parr: Can I tell you one other thing? So this company that bought them uh or originally, I think they were owned by Pepsi. Pepsi owns it now, but before that, they were it was bought by something called Hormel Foods. It’s one of these companies that you’ve never heard of. This company does $12 billion in revenue. They do like a billion and a half dollars of profit a year. And if you go to their website, they the like the the headline, like tagline for them is like, “We sell more pepperonis than anyone on Earth.” And they’re just like food holding company. They own Skippy peanut butter, they own Planters, they own They own Spam. They own Spam, and then they sell just a shit ton of ronies, dude. They just sell pepperonis worldwide. They own Applegate, they own Justin’s, they own Planters, Skippy, Chi-Chi’s. I don’t know what Chi-Chi’s is. Corn I don’t know what that is. They black label bacon. They own a lot of I mean, literally Spam is like on their homepage as like their like their their pride and joy. Like the way my parents pin like pictures of me up on the fridge, that’s what this company does with with Spam.
Shaan Puri: Which is like it’s pretty pretty good, horrible for you. But oh dude, yeah, Hormel pepperoni, I know them. That’s one of my snacks. One of my snacks is like eight pepperoni with a little bit of mozzarella cheese on it, microwaved.
Sam Parr: It’s a pizza without the the pizza?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, I just call it like Redneck Redneck Redneck fitness food.
Sam Parr: Dude, this should be your brand. A line of of “Not That Bad For You” Redneck Snacks. It’s like it’ll it’ll make you farm strong.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, do you know like PB dip? You know you know, I call it dip. But you know PB powder? The powder, yeah. Yeah, you get a spoon of that and you straight and you chuck it up on your the top of your roof of your mouth and you suck on that thing for 60 minutes. I call it uh like fitness dip. So like instead of like having like a fat lip in, you just have uh PB dip. You’re just in your tongue just rub it against that that that dehydrated nut. Ooh, boy. Ooh, boy. You want to have a good time? Put a little PB dip on the roof of your mouth.
Sam Parr: All right, we got our we got our cold open for the episode.
Shaan Puri: Um, by the way, let let me show you one thing. You said something that I do religiously. I just sent Ari a document that I I just sent her one of the tabs. I have dozens of tabs on this. Ari, can you share your screen? So, whenever I read a book, I have this Google Doc that I’ve used since the year like 2010. All right, so check this out. Whenever I read a book, I do a few things. One, I make whenever there’s like a year and a money term or some type of milestone, I write it down in a sheet. And the reason why I write it in a sheet is because a lot of times when you’re building a company or doing anything that’s like really challenging, you you’ll read about someone else and you’re like, “That was easy.” And so I like to do timelines and you’ll see like, “Oh, okay, like they went four years with nothing happening.” And so for those listening, I have got a timeline of uh Coke Industries, which is like um the largest privately held company in America, a biography of their family. And I like did a timeline where every everything major happened in their life and then I converted the dollar amount into uh 2019 dollars, which is when I made this particular one. And it’s really fun to do because you could see that things took, like in this case, like 30 years. Right. And so if you like uh uh if you scroll all the way to the left, I did this with uh Kirk Kerkorian, another one of the uh a guy who I love. And I’ve I every biography I read, I I create one of these.
Sam Parr: Just another man you love. Can I just point out a couple things about this what we’re screen sharing here that are are just just fantastic. This is it’s just a a peek into the mind. First of all, it’s a Google sheet that’s just called “Sheet,” which is just a great title. Okay, scroll over, Ari. So here’s some of the milestones that Sam wrote down. All right, so he starts for for Coke Industries. 19 1900, Fred Coke born. Uh 1924, so 24-year gap, big break finds mentor. Okay, so then it goes 1927, just a quick update, still broke. Then it goes 20 1929, sees success. 1931, big success with two G’s. It’s a big double G success right here. It’s amazing. And then 1940, he uh buys a company and that company he buys it for $4 million. Um Do you also should just have pictures on here where it’s them and the calves and it’s just your calves just for reference and you’re just comparing calves. Because I feel like tell me that’s not part of your research process, is it looking at photos and judging their looks?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, particularly the Coke brothers because they’re like these tall uh waspy guys and I definitely am sizing myself up to them.
Sam Parr: Yeah. The the the the total picture of success includes a picture, for sure.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, it’s like tennis sweaters. It’s like, “Oh, they’re into tennis sweaters, therefore I will wear tennis sweaters.” But yeah, I definitely like two guys that are both 6’2” from the Midwest with blonde hair, blue eyes, like we there’s definitely like a there can only be one of us in this room.
Sam Parr: Dude, there’s this girl who keeps going viral on Twitter and it’s the same tweet she does every time and she just goes, “My dad goes to a bar with his friends every Friday and he makes a list of topics to discuss.” Yes. And then she she puts she has a photo of him holding a printed out agenda and I’ll just read you one of them. “Ted Perry’s fun,” capital story, “shown on Fox News 6.” Next one, “What’s going on with the Bucks?” Question mark. “NFL overtime rules, take ball first or second?” Question mark. “Bahama breezes.” How close is too close to an alligator? Do you think people that throw garbage out of their car window are the same people that don’t pick up their dog poop when walking through my subdivision? And then it read at the bottom, it goes, “Please be on time, as you can see, we have another week of a packed agenda.” And it goes super viral every time. It’s like 100,000 likes and I think everybody who sees this is like, “Yeah, that’s part of the winning life.” I’d like to go to the bar with my friends every Thursday and have like an agenda that we print out and we talk about while wearing our New Balances.
Shaan Puri: Do you know who does this? And he’s not joking.
Sam Parr: I already know, because you’re talking about a legend, a social legend, and I know it has to be Nick Gray. Tell me I’m wrong. No, I’m wrong. Is it not Nick Gray?
Shaan Puri: The second time I hung out with Nick Gray, we went to a bar called Lazarus. Sarah and I came and he goes, “Hey guys, uh I would love to hang out. This is our second time hanging out. I thought it’d be nice to have an agenda so we could stay on track.” And there was a 13-point uh agenda list where it was like, “Ask Sarah about her job, figure out how that’s going on, explain my dating life and get opinions from it.” Uh like it was a and we stuck to that agenda and he took notes. And it was Was it thrilling? Because I think I’m going to absolutely start doing this. It was thrilling. It was thrilling. You know how like You know how like Was it the agenda that was great or the fact that he had an agenda that was great? Which which of the two was greater? The second one. Here’s why. So, look, in a world everyone wants to be a tough guy. It feels good to be a leader, but you want to know something, everyone likes getting led. And like we like the assertive person. I’m just a leader who loves being led. That’s me. That’s on my LinkedIn. I I like leading some stuff, but then there’s other times where it’s like, “Just tell me what to do.” And Right. Small talk is one of those things that no one just like tells you what to do. And when there’s an assigned leader who has something outlined for small talk, I’m just like, “Yes, sir. I’ll do whatever you like me to do.” And uh, “Thank you, may I have another, sir.” Like, it’s like the best way to go about doing stuff. And that’s what Nick Gray does.
Sam Parr: Okay. And by the way, that’s how we do this podcast, actually. We both bring some agenda items and then we discuss in bullet point form.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, and I think it’s good. I and he’s done that for years and it’s awesome.
Sam Parr: All right, we’re going to normalize having conversational agenda hangouts with an agenda. Okay, let’s do more. Um, I have a business that’s pretty cool. Can I tell you about it? Here’s my here’s my opening for this business. Sam, I found the business that you should have started instead of wasting your goddamn time with The Hustle.
Shaan Puri: Okay, I like that.
Sam Parr: So, you built The Hustle, and if you recall, one time you came to me hat in hand, absolutely begging for an investment. You needed the money and you got down on your knees and you said, “Please, sir, invest in my company.” And I looked at it, I I flipped through the business plan like it was a flip book, and I just said, “No thanks.”
Shaan Puri: No, that’s not what you said. You said, “Look, Sam, you’re coming to a knife fight with a knife. I don’t even want you to come to this knife fight with a gun. I want you to come to this knife fight with a magic fucking wand.” And and that clearly And then you turned away on my heel with a dramatic spin and I left the room.
Shaan Puri: And then you tried to pull the door to open, but it was really a push door.
Sam Parr: Totally blew it at the end. That’s the landing. Like you clearly had just read that on a whatever the equivalent was of Twitter and you’re like, “That is now my line.”
Shaan Puri: Yeah, exactly. It was back when I was like I had it written on the inside of my palm and I was like, “Peter Thiel says this magic wand thing, so I’m going to tell somebody.” Totally owns them, no matter what they’re doing. Um, and so, but you know, the reality was, I looked at the business and you were like, “Here’s what I’m doing. I’m creating a media company, so every day we’re going to write the news.” So every every day you had to recreate your product. I was like, “Ooh, that sucks.” Um, it’s like, do you get any Is there any benefit uh of all the work you did in the last three months? It’s like, “Uh, not really. We got to recreate it again. We got to bake that cake every morning.” Okay, sounds good. And then you said, and then I was like, “Cool, so then people pay you certainly for this service that you’re doing.” You’re like, “Nah, it’s free.” Oh, okay. And you’re like, “But then the adverti- then we have to do a separate business basically to a separate customer selling advertisers.” I was like, “Okay, but certainly they’re on retainer and it’s going to be recurring revenue that’s going to stack up.” You’re like, “No, no, no. They’re just going to if they feel like advertising, they will. If they don’t, they don’t. Every month we’re going to start back at zero.” Yep. And I thought, “Damn, this is a tough business to win.” And that’s when I hit you with the knife and the knife fight and blah blah blah.
Shaan Puri: Which it is tough-ish to to do well.
Sam Parr: Yeah, and by the way, the the great best part of the whole thing is five years later after you successfully sold the business and got rich doing it, I then copied your business model and did the same thing for crypto and and was like, came back to you basically being like, “What how did you What was the business plan again? How do you do this?”
Shaan Puri: Um, so so that’s like a big deal.
Sam Parr: But isn’t this isn’t this a it’s like total like life goals story. Build a killer brand, you stuck with the thing, you built it with your family, you do it in the cul-de-sac. Uh, I just think it’s it’s amazing. Sell the thing for $450 million.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, but there’s None of his kids are yoked.
Sam Parr: Right? Like, these guys, they don’t look very yoked. I’m looking at the family now.
Sam Parr: Well, as their public defender, here’s what I have to say about that. One of the things they talked about with Muscle Milk is they go, “We wanted to build a product that everybody would look at it and see a different thing.” So they go, “Women see it as a weight loss product. Men see it as a muscle building product. Some people see it as a snack. Some people see it as a meal replacement.” Our goal was to build a product that you that would basically, you know, solve multiple problems for different people at once.
Shaan Puri: I’m just saying that I want to see some bigger bis and tris on this family photo. They look great. They look very healthy. More importantly, they look happy. The founder’s teeth are beautiful. Like, he’s got a really nice smile. I just think that we should see a little thicker neck.
Sam Parr: Can I tell you one other thing? So this company that bought them uh or originally, I think they were owned by Pepsi. Pepsi owns it now, but before that, they were it was bought by something called Hormel Foods. It’s one of these companies that you’ve never heard of. This company does $12 billion in revenue. They do like a billion and a half dollars of profit a year. And if you go to their website, they the like the the headline, like tagline for them is like, “We sell more pepperonis than anyone on Earth.” And they’re just like food holding company. They own Skippy peanut butter, they own Planters, they own They own Spam. They own Spam, and then they sell just a shit ton of ronies, dude. They just sell pepperonis worldwide. They own Applegate, they own Justin’s, they own Planters, Skippy, Chi-Chi’s. I don’t know what Chi-Chi’s is. Corn I don’t know what that is. They black label bacon. They own a lot of I mean, literally Spam is like on their homepage as like their like their their pride and joy. Like the way my parents pin like pictures of me up on the fridge, that’s what this company does with with Spam.
Shaan Puri: Which is like it’s pretty pretty good, horrible for you. But oh dude, yeah, Hormel pepperoni, I know them. That’s one of my snacks. One of my snacks is like eight pepperoni with a little bit of mozzarella cheese on it, microwaved.
Sam Parr: It’s a pizza without the the pizza?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, I just call it like Redneck Redneck Redneck fitness food.
Sam Parr: Dude, this should be your brand. A line of of “Not That Bad For You” Redneck Snacks. It’s like it’ll it’ll make you farm strong.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, do you know like PB dip? You know you know, I call it dip. But you know PB powder? The powder, yeah. Yeah, you get a spoon of that and you straight and you chuck it up on your the top of your roof of your mouth and you suck on that thing for 60 minutes. I call it uh like fitness dip. So like instead of like having like a fat lip in, you just have uh PB dip. You’re just in your tongue just rub it against that that that dehydrated nut. Ooh, boy. Ooh, boy. You want to have a good time? Put a little PB dip on the roof of your mouth.
Sam Parr: All right, we got our we got our cold open for the episode.
Shaan Puri: Um, by the way, let let me show you one thing. You said something that I do religiously. I just sent Ari a document that I I just sent her one of the tabs. I have dozens of tabs on this. Ari, can you share your screen? So, whenever I read a book, I have this Google Doc that I’ve used since the year like 2010. All right, so check this out. Whenever I read a book, I do a few things. One, I make whenever there’s like a year and a money term or some type of milestone, I write it down in a sheet. And the reason why I write it in a sheet is because a lot of times when you’re building a company or doing anything that’s like really challenging, you you’ll read about someone else and you’re like, “That was easy.” And so I like to do timelines and you’ll see like, “Oh, okay, like they went four years with nothing happening.” And so for those listening, I have got a timeline of uh Coke Industries, which is like um the largest privately held company in America, a biography of their family. And I like did a timeline where every everything major happened in their life and then I converted the dollar amount into uh 2019 dollars, which is when I made this particular one. And it’s really fun to do because you could see that things took, like in this case, like 30 years. Right. And so if you like uh uh if you scroll all the way to the left, I did this with uh Kirk Kerkorian, another one of the uh a guy who I love. And I’ve I every biography I read, I I create one of these.
Sam Parr: Just another man you love. Can I just point out a couple things about this what we’re screen sharing here that are are just just fantastic. This is it’s just a a peek into the mind. First of all, it’s a Google sheet that’s just called “Sheet,” which is just a great title. Okay, scroll over, Ari. So here’s some of the milestones that Sam wrote down. All right, so he starts for for Coke Industries. 19 1900, Fred Coke born. Uh 1924, so 24-year gap, big break finds mentor. Okay, so then it goes 1927, just a quick update, still broke. Then it goes 20 1929, sees success. 1931, big success with two G’s. It’s a big double G success right here. It’s amazing. And then 1940, he uh buys a company and that company he buys it for $4 million. Um Do you also should just have pictures on here where it’s them and the calves and it’s just your calves just for reference and you’re just comparing calves. Because I feel like tell me that’s not part of your research process, is it looking at photos and judging their looks?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, particularly the Coke brothers because they’re like these tall uh waspy guys and I definitely am sizing myself up to them.
Sam Parr: Yeah. The the the the total picture of success includes a picture, for sure.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, it’s like tennis sweaters. It’s like, “Oh, they’re into tennis sweaters, therefore I will wear tennis sweaters.” But yeah, I definitely like two guys that are both 6’2” from the Midwest with blonde hair, blue eyes, like we there’s definitely like a there can only be one of us in this room.
Sam Parr: Dude, there’s this girl who keeps going viral on Twitter and it’s the same tweet she does every time and she just goes, “My dad goes to a bar with his friends every Friday and he makes a list of topics to discuss.” Yes. And then she she puts she has a photo of him holding a printed out agenda and I’ll just read you one of them. “Ted Perry’s fun,” capital story, “shown on Fox News 6.” Next one, “What’s going on with the Bucks?” Question mark. “NFL overtime rules, take ball first or second?” Question mark. “Bahama breezes.” How close is too close to an alligator? Do you think people that throw garbage out of their car window are the same people that don’t pick up their dog poop when walking through my subdivision? And then it read at the bottom, it goes, “Please be on time, as you can see, we have another week of a packed agenda.” And it goes super viral every time. It’s like 100,000 likes and I think everybody who sees this is like, “Yeah, that’s part of the winning life.” I’d like to go to the bar with my friends every Thursday and have like an agenda that we print out and we talk about while wearing our New Balances.
Shaan Puri: Do you know who does this? And he’s not joking.
Sam Parr: I already know, because you’re talking about a legend, a social legend, and I know it has to be Nick Gray. Tell me I’m wrong. No, I’m wrong. Is it not Nick Gray?
Shaan Puri: The second time I hung out with Nick Gray, we went to a bar called Lazarus. Sarah and I came and he goes, “Hey guys, uh I would love to hang out. This is our second time hanging out. I thought it’d be nice to have an agenda so we could stay on track.” And there was a 13-point uh agenda list where it was like, “Ask Sarah about her job, figure out how that’s going on, explain my dating life and get opinions from it.” Uh like it was a and we stuck to that agenda and he took notes. And it was Was it thrilling? Because I think I’m going to absolutely start doing this. It was thrilling. It was thrilling. You know how like You know how like Was it the agenda that was great or the fact that he had an agenda that was great? Which which of the two was greater? The second one. Here’s why. So, look, in a world everyone wants to be a tough guy. It feels good to be a leader, but you want to know something, everyone likes getting led. And like we like the assertive person. I’m just a leader who loves being led. That’s me. That’s on my LinkedIn. I I like leading some stuff, but then there’s other times where it’s like, “Just tell me what to do.” And Right. Small talk is one of those things that no one just like tells you what to do. And when there’s an assigned leader who has something outlined for small talk, I’m just like, “Yes, sir. I’ll do whatever you like me to do.” And uh, “Thank you, may I have another, sir.” Like, it’s like the best way to go about doing stuff. And that’s what Nick Gray does.
Sam Parr: Okay. And by the way, that’s how we do this podcast, actually. We both bring some agenda items and then we discuss in bullet point form.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, and I think it’s good. I and he’s done that for years and it’s awesome.
Sam Parr: All right, we’re going to normalize having conversational agenda hangouts with an agenda. Okay, let’s do more. Um, I have a business that’s pretty cool. Can I tell you about it? Here’s my here’s my opening for this business. Sam, I found the business that you should have started instead of wasting your goddamn time with The Hustle.
Shaan Puri: Okay, I like that.
Sam Parr: So, you built The Hustle, and if you recall, one time you came to me hat in hand, absolutely begging for an investment. You needed the money and you got down on your knees and you said, “Please, sir, invest in my company.” And I looked at it, I I flipped through the business plan like it was a flip book, and I just said, “No thanks.”
Shaan Puri: No, that’s not what you said. You said, “Look, Sam, you’re coming to a knife fight with a knife. I don’t even want you to come to this knife fight with a gun. I want you to come to this knife fight with a magic fucking wand.” And and that clearly And then you turned away on my heel with a dramatic spin and I left the room.
Shaan Puri: And then you tried to pull the door to open, but it was really a push door.
Sam Parr: Totally blew it at the end. That’s the landing. Like you clearly had just read that on a whatever the equivalent was of Twitter and you’re like, “That is now my line.”
Shaan Puri: Yeah, exactly. It was back when I was like I had it written on the inside of my palm and I was like, “Peter Thiel says this magic wand thing, so I’m going to tell somebody.” Totally owns them, no matter what they’re doing. Um, and so, but you know, the reality was, I looked at the business and you were like, “Here’s what I’m doing. I’m creating a media company, so every day we’re going to write the news.” So every every day you had to recreate your product. I was like, “Ooh, that sucks.” Um, it’s like, do you get any Is there any benefit uh of all the work you did in the last three months? It’s like, “Uh, not really. We got to recreate it again. We got to bake that cake every morning.” Okay, sounds good. And then you said, and then I was like, “Cool, so then people pay you certainly for this service that you’re doing.” You’re like, “Nah, it’s free.” Oh, okay. And you’re like, “But then the adverti- then we have to do a separate business basically to a separate customer selling advertisers.” I was like, “Okay, but certainly they’re on retainer and it’s going to be recurring revenue that’s going to stack up.” You’re like, “No, no, no. They’re just going to if they feel like advertising, they will. If they don’t, they don’t. Every month we’re going to start back at zero.” Yep. And I thought, “Damn, this is a tough business to win.” And that’s when I hit you with the knife and the knife fight and blah blah blah.
Shaan Puri: Which it is tough-ish to to do well.
Sam Parr: Yeah, and by the way, the the great best part of the whole thing is five years later after you successfully sold the business and got rich doing it, I then copied your business model and did the same thing for crypto and and was like, came back to you basically being like, “What how did you What was the business plan again? How do you do this?”
Shaan Puri: Um, so so that’s like a big deal.
Sam Parr: But isn’t this isn’t this a it’s like total like life goals story. Build a killer brand, you stuck with the thing, you built it with your family, you do it in the cul-de-sac. Uh, I just think it’s it’s amazing. Sell the thing for $450 million.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, but there’s None of his kids are yoked.
Sam Parr: Right? Like, these guys, they don’t look very yoked. I’m looking at the family now.
Sam Parr: Well, as their public defender, here’s what I have to say about that. One of the things they talked about with Muscle Milk is they go, “We wanted to build a product that everybody would look at it and see a different thing.” So they go, “Women see it as a weight loss product. Men see it as a muscle building product. Some people see it as a snack. Some people see it as a meal replacement.” Our goal was to build a product that you that would basically, you know, solve multiple problems for different people at once.
Shaan Puri: I’m just saying that I want to see some bigger bis and tris on this family photo. They look great. They look very healthy. More importantly, they look happy. The founder’s teeth are beautiful. Like, he’s got a really nice smile. I just think that we should see a little thicker neck.
Sam Parr: Can I tell you one other thing? So this company that bought them uh or originally, I think they were owned by Pepsi. Pepsi owns it now, but before that, they were it was bought by something called Hormel Foods. It’s one of these companies that you’ve never heard of. This company does $12 billion in revenue. They do like a billion and a half dollars of profit a year. And if you go to their website, they the like the the headline, like tagline for them is like, “We sell more pepperonis than anyone on Earth.” And they’re just like food holding company. They own Skippy peanut butter, they own Planters, they own They own Spam. They own Spam, and then they sell just a shit ton of ronies, dude. They just sell pepperonis worldwide. They own Applegate, they own Justin’s, they own Planters, Skippy, Chi-Chi’s. I don’t know what Chi-Chi’s is. Corn I don’t know what that is. They black label bacon. They own a lot of I mean, literally Spam is like on their homepage as like their like their their pride and joy. Like the way my parents pin like pictures of me up on the fridge, that’s what this company does with with Spam.
Shaan Puri: Which is like it’s pretty pretty good, horrible for you. But oh dude, yeah, Hormel pepperoni, I know them. That’s one of my snacks. One of my snacks is like eight pepperoni with a little bit of mozzarella cheese on it, microwaved.
Sam Parr: It’s a pizza without the the pizza?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, I just call it like Redneck Redneck Redneck fitness food.
Sam Parr: Dude, this should be your brand. A line of of “Not That Bad For You” Redneck Snacks. It’s like it’ll it’ll make you farm strong.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, do you know like PB dip? You know you know, I call it dip. But you know PB powder? The powder, yeah. Yeah, you get a spoon of that and you straight and you chuck it up on your the top of your roof of your mouth and you suck on that thing for 60 minutes. I call it uh like fitness dip. So like instead of like having like a fat lip in, you just have uh PB dip. You’re just in your tongue just rub it against that that that dehydrated nut. Ooh, boy. Ooh, boy. You want to have a good time? Put a little PB dip on the roof of your mouth.
Sam Parr: All right, we got our we got our cold open for the episode.
Shaan Puri: Um, by the way, let let me show you one thing. You said something that I do religiously. I just sent Ari a document that I I just sent her one of the tabs. I have dozens of tabs on this. Ari, can you share your screen? So, whenever I read a book, I have this Google Doc that I’ve used since the year like 2010. All right, so check this out. Whenever I read a book, I do a few things. One, I make whenever there’s like a year and a money term or some type of milestone, I write it down in a sheet. And the reason why I write it in a sheet is because a lot of times when you’re building a company or doing anything that’s like really challenging, you you’ll read about someone else and you’re like, “That was easy.” And so I like to do timelines and you’ll see like, “Oh, okay, like they went four years with nothing happening.” And so for those listening, I have got a timeline of uh Coke Industries, which is like um the largest privately held company in America, a biography of their family. And I like did a timeline where every everything major happened in their life and then I converted the dollar amount into uh 2019 dollars, which is when I made this particular one. And it’s really fun to do because you could see that things took, like in this case, like 30 years. Right. And so if you like uh uh if you scroll all the way to the left, I did this with uh Kirk Kerkorian, another one of the uh a guy who I love. And I’ve I every biography I read, I I create one of these.
Sam Parr: Just another man you love. Can I just point out a couple things about this what we’re screen sharing here that are are just just fantastic. This is it’s just a a peek into the mind. First of all, it’s a Google sheet that’s just called “Sheet,” which is just a great title. Okay, scroll over, Ari. So here’s some of the milestones that Sam wrote down. All right, so he starts for for Coke Industries. 19 1900, Fred Coke born. Uh 1924, so 24-year gap, big break finds mentor. Okay, so then it goes 1927, just a quick update, still broke. Then it goes 20 1929, sees success. 1931, big success with two G’s. It’s a big double G success right here. It’s amazing. And then 1940, he uh buys a company and that company he buys it for $4 million. Um Do you also should just have pictures on here where it’s them and the calves and it’s just your calves just for reference and you’re just comparing calves. Because I feel like tell me that’s not part of your research process, is it looking at photos and judging their looks?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, particularly the Coke brothers because they’re like these tall uh waspy guys and I definitely am sizing myself up to them.
Sam Parr: Yeah. The the the the total picture of success includes a picture, for sure.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, it’s like tennis sweaters. It’s like, “Oh, they’re into tennis sweaters, therefore I will wear tennis sweaters.” But yeah, I definitely like two guys that are both 6’2” from the Midwest with blonde hair, blue eyes, like we there’s definitely like a there can only be one of us in this room.
Sam Parr: Dude, there’s this girl who keeps going viral on Twitter and it’s the same tweet she does every time and she just goes, “My dad goes to a bar with his friends every Friday and he makes a list of topics to discuss.” Yes. And then she she puts she has a photo of him holding a printed out agenda and I’ll just read you one of them. “Ted Perry’s fun,” capital story, “shown on Fox News 6.” Next one, “What’s going on with the Bucks?” Question mark. “NFL overtime rules, take ball first or second?” Question mark. “Bahama breezes.” How close is too close to an alligator? Do you think people that throw garbage out of their car window are the same people that don’t pick up their dog poop when walking through my subdivision? And then it read at the bottom, it goes, “Please be on time, as you can see, we have another week of a packed agenda.” And it goes super viral every time. It’s like 100,000 likes and I think everybody who sees this is like, “Yeah, that’s part of the winning life.” I’d like to go to the bar with my friends every Thursday and have like an agenda that we print out and we talk about while wearing our New Balances.
Shaan Puri: Do you know who does this? And he’s not joking.
Sam Parr: I already know, because you’re talking about a legend, a social legend, and I know it has to be Nick Gray. Tell me I’m wrong. No, I’m wrong. Is it not Nick Gray?
Shaan Puri: The second time I hung out with Nick Gray, we went to a bar called Lazarus. Sarah and I came and he goes, “Hey guys, uh I would love to hang out. This is our second time hanging out. I thought it’d be nice to have an agenda so we could stay on track.” And there was a 13-point uh agenda list where it was like, “Ask Sarah about her job, figure out how that’s going on, explain my dating life and get opinions from it.” Uh like it was a and we stuck to that agenda and he took notes. And it was Was it thrilling? Because I think I’m going to absolutely start doing this. It was thrilling. It was thrilling. You know how like You know how like Was it the agenda that was great or the fact that he had an agenda that was great? Which which of the two was greater? The second one. Here’s why. So, look, in a world everyone wants to be a tough guy. It feels good to be a leader, but you want to know something, everyone likes getting led. And like we like the assertive person. I’m just a leader who loves being led. That’s me. That’s on my LinkedIn. I I like leading some stuff, but then there’s other times where it’s like, “Just tell me what to do.” And Right. Small talk is one of those things that no one just like tells you what to do. And when there’s an assigned leader who has something outlined for small talk, I’m just like, “Yes, sir. I’ll do whatever you like me to do.” And uh, “Thank you, may I have another, sir.” Like, it’s like the best way to go about doing stuff. And that’s what Nick Gray does.
Sam Parr: Okay. And by the way, that’s how we do this podcast, actually. We both bring some agenda items and then we discuss in bullet point form.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, and I think it’s good. I and he’s done that for years and it’s awesome.
Sam Parr: All right, we’re going to normalize having conversational agenda hangouts with an agenda. Okay, let’s do more. Um, I have a business that’s pretty cool. Can I tell you about it? Here’s my here’s my opening for this business. Sam, I found the business that you should have started instead of wasting your goddamn time with The Hustle.
Shaan Puri: Okay, I like that.
Sam Parr: So, you built The Hustle, and if you recall, one time you came to me hat in hand, absolutely begging for an investment. You needed the money and you got down on your knees and you said, “Please, sir, invest in my company.” And I looked at it, I I flipped through the business plan like it was a flip book, and I just said, “No thanks.”
Shaan Puri: No, that’s not what you said. You said, “Look, Sam, you’re coming to a knife fight with a knife. I don’t even want you to come to this knife fight with a gun. I want you to come to this knife fight with a magic fucking wand.” And and that clearly And then you turned away on my heel with a dramatic spin and I left the room.
Shaan Puri: And then you tried to pull the door to open, but it was really a push door.
Sam Parr: Totally blew it at the end. That’s the landing. Like you clearly had just read that on a whatever the equivalent was of Twitter and you’re like, “That is now my line.”
Shaan Puri: Yeah, exactly. It was back when I was like I had it written on the inside of my palm and I was like, “Peter Thiel says this magic wand thing, so I’m going to tell somebody.” Totally owns them, no matter what they’re doing. Um, and so, but you know, the reality was, I looked at the business and you were like, “Here’s what I’m doing. I’m creating a media company, so every day we’re going to write the news.” So every every day you had to recreate your product. I was like, “Ooh, that sucks.” Um, it’s like, do you get any Is there any benefit uh of all the work you did in the last three months? It’s like, “Uh, not really. We got to recreate it again. We got to bake that cake every morning.” Okay, sounds good. And then you said, and then I was like, “Cool, so then people pay you certainly for this service that you’re doing.” You’re like, “Nah, it’s free.” Oh, okay. And you’re like, “But then the adverti- then we have to do a separate business basically to a separate customer selling advertisers.” I was like, “Okay, but certainly they’re on retainer and it’s going to be recurring revenue that’s going to stack up.” You’re like, “No, no, no. They’re just going to if they feel like advertising, they will. If they don’t, they don’t. Every month we’re going to start back at zero.” Yep. And I thought, “Damn, this is a tough business to win.” And that’s when I hit you with the knife and the knife fight and blah blah blah.
Shaan Puri: Which it is tough-ish to to do well.
Sam Parr: Yeah, and by the way, the the great best part of the whole thing is five years later after you successfully sold the business and got rich doing it, I then copied your business model and did the same thing for crypto and and was like, came back to you basically being like, “What how did you What was the business plan again? How do you do this?”
Shaan Puri: Um, so so that’s like a big deal.
Sam Parr: But isn’t this isn’t this a it’s like total like life goals story. Build a killer brand, you stuck with the thing, you built it with your family, you do it in the cul-de-sac. Uh, I just think it’s it’s amazing. Sell the thing for $450 million.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, but there’s None of his kids are yoked.
Sam Parr: Right? Like, these guys, they don’t look very yoked. I’m looking at the family now.
Sam Parr: Well, as their public defender, here’s what I have to say about that. One of the things they talked about with Muscle Milk is they go, “We wanted to build a product that everybody would look at it and see a different thing.” So they go, “Women see it as a weight loss product. Men see it as a muscle building product. Some people see it as a snack. Some people see it as a meal replacement.” Our goal was to build a product that you that would basically, you know, solve multiple problems for different people at once.
Shaan Puri: I’m just saying that I want to see some bigger bis and tris on this family photo. They look great. They look very healthy. More importantly, they look happy. The founder’s teeth are beautiful. Like, he’s got a really nice smile. I just think that we should see a little thicker neck.
Sam Parr: Can I tell you one other thing? So this company that bought them uh or originally, I think they were owned by Pepsi. Pepsi owns it now, but before that, they were it was bought by something called Hormel Foods. It’s one of these companies that you’ve never heard of. This company does $12 billion in revenue. They do like a billion and a half dollars of profit a year. And if you go to their website, they the like the the headline, like tagline for them is like, “We sell more pepperonis than anyone on Earth.” And they’re just like food holding company. They own Skippy peanut butter, they own Planters, they own They own Spam. They own Spam, and then they sell just a shit ton of ronies, dude. They just sell pepperonis worldwide. They own Applegate, they own Justin’s, they own Planters, Skippy, Chi-Chi’s. I don’t know what Chi-Chi’s is. Corn I don’t know what that is. They black label bacon. They own a lot of I mean, literally Spam is like on their homepage as like their like their their pride and joy. Like the way my parents pin like pictures of me up on the fridge, that’s what this company does with with Spam.
Shaan Puri: Which is like it’s pretty pretty good, horrible for you. But oh dude, yeah, Hormel pepperoni, I know them. That’s one of my snacks. One of my snacks is like eight pepperoni with a little bit of mozzarella cheese on it, microwaved.
Sam Parr: It’s a pizza without the the pizza?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, I just call it like Redneck Redneck Redneck fitness food.
Sam Parr: Dude, this should be your brand. A line of of “Not That Bad For You” Redneck Snacks. It’s like it’ll it’ll make you farm strong.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, do you know like PB dip? You know you know, I call it dip. But you know PB powder? The powder, yeah. Yeah, you get a spoon of that and you straight and you chuck it up on your the top of your roof of your mouth and you suck on that thing for 60 minutes. I call it uh like fitness dip. So like instead of like having like a fat lip in, you just have uh PB dip. You’re just in your tongue just rub it against that that that dehydrated nut. Ooh, boy. Ooh, boy. You want to have a good time? Put a little PB dip on the roof of your mouth.
Sam Parr: All right, we got our we got our cold open for the episode.
Shaan Puri: Um, by the way, let let me show you one thing. You said something that I do religiously. I just sent Ari a document that I I just sent her one of the tabs. I have dozens of tabs on this. Ari, can you share your screen? So, whenever I read a book, I have this Google Doc that I’ve used since the year like 2010. All right, so check this out. Whenever I read a book, I do a few things. One, I make whenever there’s like a year and a money term or some type of milestone, I write it down in a sheet. And the reason why I write it in a sheet is because a lot of times when you’re building a company or doing anything that’s like really challenging, you you’ll read about someone else and you’re like, “That was easy.” And so I like to do timelines and you’ll see like, “Oh, okay, like they went four years with nothing happening.” And so for those listening, I have got a timeline of uh Coke Industries, which is like um the largest privately held company in America, a biography of their family. And I like did a timeline where every everything major happened in their life and then I converted the dollar amount into uh 2019 dollars, which is when I made this particular one. And it’s really fun to do because you could see that things took, like in this case, like 30 years. Right. And so if you like uh uh if you scroll all the way to the left, I did this with uh Kirk Kerkorian, another one of the uh a guy who I love. And I’ve I every biography I read, I I create one of these.
Sam Parr: Just another man you love. Can I just point out a couple things about this what we’re screen sharing here that are are just just fantastic. This is it’s just a a peek into the mind. First of all, it’s a Google sheet that’s just called “Sheet,” which is just a great title. Okay, scroll over, Ari. So here’s some of the milestones that Sam wrote down. All right, so he starts for for Coke Industries. 19 1900, Fred Coke born. Uh 1924, so 24-year gap, big break finds mentor. Okay, so then it goes 1927, just a quick update, still broke. Then it goes 20 1929, sees success. 1931, big success with two G’s. It’s a big double G success right here. It’s amazing. And then 1940, he uh buys a company and that company he buys it for $4 million. Um Do you also should just have pictures on here where it’s them and the calves and it’s just your calves just for reference and you’re just comparing calves. Because I feel like tell me that’s not part of your research process, is it looking at photos and judging their looks?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, particularly the Coke brothers because they’re like these tall uh waspy guys and I definitely am sizing myself up to them.
Sam Parr: Yeah. The the the the total picture of success includes a picture, for sure.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, it’s like tennis sweaters. It’s like, “Oh, they’re into tennis sweaters, therefore I will wear tennis sweaters.” But yeah, I definitely like two guys that are both 6’2” from the Midwest with blonde hair, blue eyes, like we there’s definitely like a there can only be one of us in this room.
Sam Parr: Dude, there’s this girl who keeps going viral on Twitter and it’s the same tweet she does every time and she just goes, “My dad goes to a bar with his friends every Friday and he makes a list of topics to discuss.” Yes. And then she she puts she has a photo of him holding a printed out agenda and I’ll just read you one of them. “Ted Perry’s fun,” capital story, “shown on Fox News 6.” Next one, “What’s going on with the Bucks?” Question mark. “NFL overtime rules, take ball first or second?” Question mark. “Bahama breezes.” How close is too close to an alligator? Do you think people that throw garbage out of their car window are the same people that don’t pick up their dog poop when walking through my subdivision? And then it read at the bottom, it goes, “Please be on time, as you can see, we have another week of a packed agenda.” And it goes super viral every time. It’s like 100,000 likes and I think everybody who sees this is like, “Yeah, that’s part of the winning life.” I’d like to go to the bar with my friends every Thursday and have like an agenda that we print out and we talk about while wearing our New Balances.
Shaan Puri: Do you know who does this? And he’s not joking.
Sam Parr: I already know, because you’re talking about a legend, a social legend, and I know it has to be Nick Gray. Tell me I’m wrong. No, I’m wrong. Is it not Nick Gray?
Shaan Puri: The second time I hung out with Nick Gray, we went to a bar called Lazarus. Sarah and I came and he goes, “Hey guys, uh I would love to hang out. This is our second time hanging out. I thought it’d be nice to have an agenda so we could stay on track.” And there was a 13-point uh agenda list where it was like, “Ask Sarah about her job, figure out how that’s going on, explain my dating life and get opinions from it.” Uh like it was a and we stuck to that agenda and he took notes. And it was Was it thrilling? Because I think I’m going to absolutely start doing this. It was thrilling. It was thrilling. You know how like You know how like Was it the agenda that was great or the fact that he had an agenda that was great? Which which of the two was greater? The second one. Here’s why. So, look, in a world everyone wants to be a tough guy. It feels good to be a leader, but you want to know something, everyone likes getting led. And like we like the assertive person. I’m just a leader who loves being led. That’s me. That’s on my LinkedIn. I I like leading some stuff, but then there’s other times where it’s like, “Just tell me what to do.” And Right. Small talk is one of those things that no one just like tells you what to do. And when there’s an assigned leader who has something outlined for small talk, I’m just like, “Yes, sir. I’ll do whatever you like me to do.” And uh, “Thank you, may I have another, sir.” Like, it’s like the best way to go about doing stuff. And that’s what Nick Gray does.
Sam Parr: Okay. And by the way, that’s how we do this podcast, actually. We both bring some agenda items and then we discuss in bullet point form.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, and I think it’s good. I and he’s done that for years and it’s awesome.
Sam Parr: All right, we’re going to normalize having conversational agenda hangouts with an agenda. Okay, let’s do more. Um, I have a business that’s pretty cool. Can I tell you about it? Here’s my here’s my opening for this business. Sam, I found the business that you should have started instead of wasting your goddamn time with The Hustle.
Shaan Puri: Okay, I like that.
Sam Parr: So, you built The Hustle, and if you recall, one time you came to me hat in hand, absolutely begging for an investment. You needed the money and you got down on your knees and you said, “Please, sir, invest in my company.” And I looked at it, I I flipped through the business plan like it was a flip book, and I just said, “No thanks.”
Shaan Puri: No, that’s not what you said. You said, “Look, Sam, you’re coming to a knife fight with a knife. I don’t even want you to come to this knife fight with a gun. I want you to come to this knife fight with a magic fucking wand.” And and that clearly And then you turned away on my heel with a dramatic spin and I left the room.
Shaan Puri: And then you tried to pull the door to open, but it was really a push door.
Sam Parr: Totally blew it at the end. That’s the landing. Like you clearly had just read that on a whatever the equivalent was of Twitter and you’re like, “That is now my line.”
Shaan Puri: Yeah, exactly. It was back when I was like I had it written on the inside of my palm and I was like, “Peter Thiel says this magic wand thing, so I’m going to tell somebody.” Totally owns them, no matter what they’re doing. Um, and so, but you know, the reality was, I looked at the business and you were like, “Here’s what I’m doing. I’m creating a media company, so every day we’re going to write the news.” So every every day you had to recreate your product. I was like, “Ooh, that sucks.” Um, it’s like, do you get any Is there any benefit uh of all the work you did in the last three months? It’s like, “Uh, not really. We got to recreate it again. We got to bake that cake every morning.” Okay, sounds good. And then you said, and then I was like, “Cool, so then people pay you certainly for this service that you’re doing.” You’re like, “Nah, it’s free.” Oh, okay. And you’re like, “But then the adverti- then we have to do a separate business basically to a separate customer selling advertisers.” I was like, “Okay, but certainly they’re on retainer and it’s going to be recurring revenue that’s going to stack up.” You’re like, “No, no, no. They’re just going to if they feel like advertising, they will. If they don’t, they don’t. Every month we’re going to start back at zero.” Yep. And I thought, “Damn, this is a tough business to win.” And that’s when I hit you with the knife and the knife fight and blah blah blah.
Shaan Puri: Which it is tough-ish to to do well.
Sam Parr: Yeah, and by the way, the the great best part of the whole thing is five years later after you successfully sold the business and got rich doing it, I then copied your business model and did the same thing for crypto and and was like, came back to you basically being like, “What how did you What was the business plan again? How do you do this?”
Shaan Puri: Um, so so that’s like a big deal.
Sam Parr: But isn’t this isn’t this a it’s like total like life goals story. Build a killer brand, you stuck with the thing, you built it with your family, you do it in the cul-de-sac. Uh, I just think it’s it’s amazing. Sell the thing for $450 million.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, but there’s None of his kids are yoked.
Sam Parr: Right? Like, these guys, they don’t look very yoked. I’m looking at the family now.
Sam Parr: Well, as their public defender, here’s what I have to say about that. One of the things they talked about with Muscle Milk is they go, “We wanted to build a product that everybody would look at it and see a different thing.” So they go, “Women see it as a weight loss product. Men see it as a muscle building product. Some people see it as a snack. Some people see it as a meal replacement.” Our goal was to build a product that you that would basically, you know, solve multiple problems for different people at once.
Shaan Puri: I’m just saying that I want to see some bigger bis and tris on this family photo. They look great. They look very healthy. More importantly, they look happy. The founder’s teeth are beautiful. Like, he’s got a really nice smile. I just think that we should see a little thicker neck.
Sam Parr: Can I tell you one other thing? So this company that bought them uh or originally, I think they were owned by Pepsi. Pepsi owns it now, but before that, they were it was bought by something called Hormel Foods. It’s one of these companies that you’ve never heard of. This company does $12 billion in revenue. They do like a billion and a half dollars of profit a year. And if you go to their website, they the like the the headline, like tagline for them is like, “We sell more pepperonis than anyone on Earth.” And they’re just like food holding company. They own Skippy peanut butter, they own Planters, they own They own Spam. They own Spam, and then they sell just a shit ton of ronies, dude. They just sell pepperonis worldwide. They own Applegate, they own Justin’s, they own Planters, Skippy, Chi-Chi’s. I don’t know what Chi-Chi’s is. Corn I don’t know what that is. They black label bacon. They own a lot of I mean, literally Spam is like on their homepage as like their like their their pride and joy. Like the way my parents pin like pictures of me up on the fridge, that’s what this company does with with Spam.
Shaan Puri: Which is like it’s pretty pretty good, horrible for you. But oh dude, yeah, Hormel pepperoni, I know them. That’s one of my snacks. One of my snacks is like eight pepperoni with a little bit of mozzarella cheese on it, microwaved.
Sam Parr: It’s a pizza without the the pizza?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, I just call it like Redneck Redneck Redneck fitness food.
Sam Parr: Dude, this should be your brand. A line of of “Not That Bad For You” Redneck Snacks. It’s like it’ll it’ll make you farm strong.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, do you know like PB dip? You know you know, I call it dip. But you know PB powder? The powder, yeah. Yeah, you get a spoon of that and you straight and you chuck it up on your the top of your roof of your mouth and you suck on that thing for 60 minutes. I call it uh like fitness dip. So like instead of like having like a fat lip in, you just have uh PB dip. You’re just in your tongue just rub it against that that that dehydrated nut. Ooh, boy. Ooh, boy. You want to have a good time? Put a little PB dip on the roof of your mouth.
Sam Parr: All right, we got our we got our cold open for the episode.
Shaan Puri: Um, by the way, let let me show you one thing. You said something that I do religiously. I just sent Ari a document that I I just sent her one of the tabs. I have dozens of tabs on this. Ari, can you share your screen? So, whenever I read a book, I have this Google Doc that I’ve used since the year like 2010. All right, so check this out. Whenever I read a book, I do a few things. One, I make whenever there’s like a year and a money term or some type of milestone, I write it down in a sheet. And the reason why I write it in a sheet is because a lot of times when you’re building a company or doing anything that’s like really challenging, you you’ll read about someone else and you’re like, “That was easy.” And so I like to do timelines and you’ll see like, “Oh, okay, like they went four years with nothing happening.” And so for those listening, I have got a timeline of uh Coke Industries, which is like um the largest privately held company in America, a biography of their family. And I like did a timeline where every everything major happened in their life and then I converted the dollar amount into uh 2019 dollars, which is when I made this particular one. And it’s really fun to do because you could see that things took, like in this case, like 30 years. Right. And so if you like uh uh if you scroll all the way to the left, I did this with uh Kirk Kerkorian, another one of the uh a guy who I love. And I’ve I every biography I read, I I create one of these.
Sam Parr: Just another man you love. Can I just point out a couple things about this what we’re screen sharing here that are are just just fantastic. This is it’s just a a peek into the mind. First of all, it’s a Google sheet that’s just called “Sheet,” which is just a great title. Okay, scroll over, Ari. So here’s some of the milestones that Sam wrote down. All right, so he starts for for Coke Industries. 19 1900, Fred Coke born. Uh 1924, so 24-year gap, big break finds mentor. Okay, so then it goes 1927, just a quick update, still broke. Then it goes 20 1929, sees success. 1931, big success with two G’s. It’s a big double G success right here. It’s amazing. And then 1940, he uh buys a company and that company he buys it for $4 million. Um Do you also should just have pictures on here where it’s them and the calves and it’s just your calves just for reference and you’re just comparing calves. Because I feel like tell me that’s not part of your research process, is it looking at photos and judging their looks?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, particularly the Coke brothers because they’re like these tall uh waspy guys and I definitely am sizing myself up to them.
Sam Parr: Yeah. The the the the total picture of success includes a picture, for sure.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, it’s like tennis sweaters. It’s like, “Oh, they’re into tennis sweaters, therefore I will wear tennis sweaters.” But yeah, I definitely like two guys that are both 6’2” from the Midwest with blonde hair, blue eyes, like we there’s definitely like a there can only be one of us in this room.
Sam Parr: Dude, there’s this girl who keeps going viral on Twitter and it’s the same tweet she does every time and she just goes, “My dad goes to a bar with his friends every Friday and he makes a list of topics to discuss.” Yes. And then she she puts she has a photo of him holding a printed out agenda and I’ll just read you one of them. “Ted Perry’s fun,” capital story, “shown on Fox News 6.” Next one, “What’s going on with the Bucks?” Question mark. “NFL overtime rules, take ball first or second?” Question mark. “Bahama breezes.” How close is too close to an alligator? Do you think people that throw garbage out of their car window are the same people that don’t pick up their dog poop when walking through my subdivision? And then it read at the bottom, it goes, “Please be on time, as you can see, we have another week of a packed agenda.” And it goes super viral every time. It’s like 100,000 likes and I think everybody who sees this is like, “Yeah, that’s part of the winning life.” I’d like to go to the bar with my friends every Thursday and have like an agenda that we print out and we talk about while wearing our New Balances.
Shaan Puri: Do you know who does this? And he’s not joking.
Sam Parr: I already know, because you’re talking about a legend, a social legend, and I know it has to be Nick Gray. Tell me I’m wrong. No, I’m wrong. Is it not Nick Gray?
Shaan Puri: The second time I hung out with Nick Gray, we went to a bar called Lazarus. Sarah and I came and he goes, “Hey guys, uh I would love to hang out. This is our second time hanging out. I thought it’d be nice to have an agenda so we could stay on track.” And there was a 13-point uh agenda list where it was like, “Ask Sarah about her job, figure out how that’s going on, explain my dating life and get opinions from it.” Uh like it was a and we stuck to that agenda and he took notes. And it was Was it thrilling? Because I think I’m going to absolutely start doing this. It was thrilling. It was thrilling. You know how like You know how like Was it the agenda that was great or the fact that he had an agenda that was great? Which which of the two was greater? The second one. Here’s why. So, look, in a world everyone wants to be a tough guy. It feels good to be a leader, but you want to know something, everyone likes getting led. And like we like the assertive person. I’m just a leader who loves being led. That’s me. That’s on my LinkedIn. I I like leading some stuff, but then there’s other times where it’s like, “Just tell me what to do.” And Right. Small talk is one of those things that no one just like tells you what to do. And when there’s an assigned leader who has something outlined for small talk, I’m just like, “Yes, sir. I’ll do whatever you like me to do.” And uh, “Thank you, may I have another, sir.” Like, it’s like the best way to go about doing stuff. And that’s what Nick Gray does.
Sam Parr: Okay. And by the way, that’s how we do this podcast, actually. We both bring some agenda items and then we discuss in bullet point form.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, and I think it’s good. I and he’s done that for years and it’s awesome.
Sam Parr: All right, we’re going to normalize having conversational agenda hangouts with an agenda. Okay, let’s do more. Um, I have a business that’s pretty cool. Can I tell you about it? Here’s my here’s my opening for this business. Sam, I found the business that you should have started instead of wasting your goddamn time with The Hustle.
Shaan Puri: Okay, I like that.
Sam Parr: So, you built The Hustle, and if you recall, one time you came to me hat in hand, absolutely begging for an investment. You needed the money and you got down on your knees and you said, “Please, sir, invest in my company.” And I looked at it, I I flipped through the business plan like it was a flip book, and I just said, “No thanks.”
Shaan Puri: No, that’s not what you said. You said, “Look, Sam, you’re coming to a knife fight with a knife. I don’t even want you to come to this knife fight with a gun. I want you to come to this knife fight with a magic fucking wand.” And and that clearly And then you turned away on my heel with a dramatic spin and I left the room.
Shaan Puri: And then you tried to pull the door to open, but it was really a push door.
Sam Parr: Totally blew it at the end. That’s the landing. Like you clearly had just read that on a whatever the equivalent was of Twitter and you’re like, “That is now my line.”
Shaan Puri: Yeah, exactly. It was back when I was like I had it written on the inside of my palm and I was like, “Peter Thiel says this magic wand thing, so I’m going to tell somebody.” Totally owns them, no matter what they’re doing. Um, and so, but you know, the reality was, I looked at the business and you were like, “Here’s what I’m doing. I’m creating a media company, so every day we’re going to write the news.” So every every day you had to recreate your product. I was like, “Ooh, that sucks.” Um, it’s like, do you get any Is there any benefit uh of all the work you did in the last three months? It’s like, “Uh, not really. We got to recreate it again. We got to bake that cake every morning.” Okay, sounds good. And then you said, and then I was like, “Cool, so then people pay you certainly for this service that you’re doing.” You’re like, “Nah, it’s free.” Oh, okay. And you’re like, “But then the adverti- then we have to do a separate business basically to a separate customer selling advertisers.” I was like, “Okay, but certainly they’re on retainer and it’s going to be recurring revenue that’s going to stack up.” You’re like, “No, no, no. They’re just going to if they feel like advertising, they will. If they don’t, they don’t. Every month we’re going to start back at zero.” Yep. And I thought, “Damn, this is a tough business to win.” And that’s when I hit you with the knife and the knife fight and blah blah blah.
Shaan Puri: Which it is tough-ish to to do well.
Sam Parr: Yeah, and by the way, the the great best part of the whole thing is five years later after you successfully sold the business and got rich doing it, I then copied your business model and did the same thing for crypto and and was like, came back to you basically being like, “What how did you What was the business plan again? How do you do this?”
Shaan Puri: Um, so so that’s like a big deal.
Sam Parr: But isn’t this isn’t this a it’s like total like life goals story. Build a killer brand, you stuck with the thing, you built it with your family, you do it in the cul-de-sac. Uh, I just think it’s it’s amazing. Sell the thing for $450 million.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, but there’s None of his kids are yoked.
Sam Parr: Right? Like, these guys, they don’t look very yoked. I’m looking at the family now.
Sam Parr: Well, as their public defender, here’s what I have to say about that. One of the things they talked about with Muscle Milk is they go, “We wanted to build a product that everybody would look at it and see a different thing.” So they go, “Women see it as a weight loss product. Men see it as a muscle building product. Some people see it as a snack. Some people see it as a meal replacement.” Our goal was to build a product that you that would basically, you know, solve multiple problems for different people at once.
Shaan Puri: I’m just saying that I want to see some bigger bis and tris on this family photo. They look great. They look very healthy. More importantly, they look happy. The founder’s teeth are beautiful. Like, he’s got a really nice smile. I just think that we should see a little thicker neck.
Sam Parr: Can I tell you one other thing? So this company that bought them uh or originally, I think they were owned by Pepsi. Pepsi owns it now, but before that, they were it was bought by something called Hormel Foods. It’s one of these companies that you’ve never heard of. This company does $12 billion in revenue. They do like a billion and a half dollars of profit a year. And if you go to their website, they the like the the headline, like tagline for them is like, “We sell more pepperonis than anyone on Earth.” And they’re just like food holding company. They own Skippy peanut butter, they own Planters, they own They own Spam. They own Spam, and then they sell just a shit ton of ronies, dude. They just sell pepperonis worldwide. They own Applegate, they own Justin’s, they own Planters, Skippy, Chi-Chi’s. I don’t know what Chi-Chi’s is. Corn I don’t know what that is. They black label bacon. They own a lot of I mean, literally Spam is like on their homepage as like their like their their pride and joy. Like the way my parents pin like pictures of me up on the fridge, that’s what this company does with with Spam.
Shaan Puri: Which is like it’s pretty pretty good, horrible for you. But oh dude, yeah, Hormel pepperoni, I know them. That’s one of my snacks. One of my snacks is like eight pepperoni with a little bit of mozzarella cheese on it, microwaved.
Sam Parr: It’s a pizza without the the pizza?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, I just call it like Redneck Redneck Redneck fitness food.
Sam Parr: Dude, this should be your brand. A line of of “Not That Bad For You” Redneck Snacks. It’s like it’ll it’ll make you farm strong.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, do you know like PB dip? You know you know, I call it dip. But you know PB powder? The powder, yeah. Yeah, you get a spoon of that and you straight and you chuck it up on your the top of your roof of your mouth and you suck on that thing for 60 minutes. I call it uh like fitness dip. So like instead of like having like a fat lip in, you just have uh PB dip. You’re just in your tongue just rub it against that that that dehydrated nut. Ooh, boy. Ooh, boy. You want to have a good time? Put a little PB dip on the roof of your mouth.
Sam Parr: All right, we got our we got our cold open for the episode.
Shaan Puri: Um, by the way, let let me show you one thing. You said something that I do religiously. I just sent Ari a document that I I just sent her one of the tabs. I have dozens of tabs on this. Ari, can you share your screen? So, whenever I read a book, I have this Google Doc that I’ve used since the year like 2010. All right, so check this out. Whenever I read a book, I do a few things. One, I make whenever there’s like a year and a money term or some type of milestone, I write it down in a sheet. And the reason why I write it in a sheet is because a lot of times when you’re building a company or doing anything that’s like really challenging, you you’ll read about someone else and you’re like, “That was easy.” And so I like to do timelines and you’ll see like, “Oh, okay, like they went four years with nothing happening.” And so for those listening, I have got a timeline of uh Coke Industries, which is like um the largest privately held company in America, a biography of their family. And I like did a timeline where every everything major happened in their life and then I converted the dollar amount into uh 2019 dollars, which is when I made this particular one. And it’s really fun to do because you could see that things took, like in this case, like 30 years. Right. And so if you like uh uh if you scroll all the way to the left, I did this with uh Kirk Kerkorian, another one of the uh a guy who I love. And I’ve I every biography I read, I I create one of these.
Sam Parr: Just another man you love. Can I just point out a couple things about this what we’re screen sharing here that are are just just fantastic. This is it’s just a a peek into the mind. First of all, it’s a Google sheet that’s just called “Sheet,” which is just a great title. Okay, scroll over, Ari. So here’s some of the milestones that Sam wrote down. All right, so he starts for for Coke Industries. 19 1900, Fred Coke born. Uh 1924, so 24-year gap, big break finds mentor. Okay, so then it goes 1927, just a quick update, still broke. Then it goes 20 1929, sees success. 1931, big success with two G’s. It’s a big double G success right here. It’s amazing. And then 1940, he uh buys a company and that company he buys it for $4 million. Um Do you also should just have pictures on here where it’s them and the calves and it’s just your calves just for reference and you’re just comparing calves. Because I feel like tell me that’s not part of your research process, is it looking at photos and judging their looks?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, particularly the Coke brothers because they’re like these tall uh waspy guys and I definitely am sizing myself up to them.
Sam Parr: Yeah. The the the the total picture of success includes a picture, for sure.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, it’s like tennis sweaters. It’s like, “Oh, they’re into tennis sweaters, therefore I will wear tennis sweaters.” But yeah, I definitely like two guys that are both 6’2” from the Midwest with blonde hair, blue eyes, like we there’s definitely like a there can only be one of us in this room.
Sam Parr: Dude, there’s this girl who keeps going viral on Twitter and it’s the same tweet she does every time and she just goes, “My dad goes to a bar with his friends every Friday and he makes a list of topics to discuss.” Yes. And then she she puts she has a photo of him holding a printed out agenda and I’ll just read you one of them. “Ted Perry’s fun,” capital story, “shown on Fox News 6.” Next one, “What’s going on with the Bucks?” Question mark. “NFL overtime rules, take ball first or second?” Question mark. “Bahama breezes.” How close is too close to an alligator? Do you think people that throw garbage out of their car window are the same people that don’t pick up their dog poop when walking through my subdivision? And then it read at the bottom, it goes, “Please be on time, as you can see, we have another week of a packed agenda.” And it goes super viral every time. It’s like 100,000 likes and I think everybody who sees this is like, “Yeah, that’s part of the winning life.” I’d like to go to the bar with my friends every Thursday and have like an agenda that we print out and we talk about while wearing our New Balances.
Shaan Puri: Do you know who does this? And he’s not joking.
Sam Parr: I already know, because you’re talking about a legend, a social legend, and I know it has to be Nick Gray. Tell me I’m wrong. No, I’m wrong. Is it not Nick Gray?
Shaan Puri: The second time I hung out with Nick Gray, we went to a bar called Lazarus. Sarah and I came and he goes, “Hey guys, uh I would love to hang out. This is our second time hanging out. I thought it’d be nice to have an agenda so we could stay on track.” And there was a 13-point uh agenda list where it was like, “Ask Sarah about her job, figure out how that’s going on, explain my dating life and get opinions from it.” Uh like it was a and we stuck to that agenda and he took notes. And it was Was it thrilling? Because I think I’m going to absolutely start doing this. It was thrilling. It was thrilling. You know how like You know how like Was it the agenda that was great or the fact that he had an agenda that was great? Which which of the two was greater? The second one. Here’s why. So, look, in a world everyone wants to be a tough guy. It feels good to be a leader, but you want to know something, everyone likes getting led. And like we like the assertive person. I’m just a leader who loves being led. That’s me. That’s on my LinkedIn. I I like leading some stuff, but then there’s other times where it’s like, “Just tell me what to do.” And Right. Small talk is one of those things that no one just like tells you what to do. And when there’s an assigned leader who has something outlined for small talk, I’m just like, “Yes, sir. I’ll do whatever you like me to do.” And uh, “Thank you, may I have another, sir.” Like, it’s like the best way to go about doing stuff. And that’s what Nick Gray does.
Sam Parr: Okay. And by the way, that’s how we do this podcast, actually. We both bring some agenda items and then we discuss in bullet point form.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, and I think it’s good. I and he’s done that for years and it’s awesome.
Sam Parr: All right, we’re going to normalize having conversational agenda hangouts with an agenda. Okay, let’s do more. Um, I have a business that’s pretty cool. Can I tell you about it? Here’s my here’s my opening for this business. Sam, I found the business that you should have started instead of wasting your goddamn time with The Hustle.
Shaan Puri: Okay, I like that.
Sam Parr: So, you built The Hustle, and if you recall, one time you came to me hat in hand, absolutely begging for an investment. You needed the money and you got down on your knees and you said, “Please, sir, invest in my company.” And I looked at it, I I flipped through the business plan like it was a flip book, and I just said, “No thanks.”
Shaan Puri: No, that’s not what you said. You said, “Look, Sam, you’re coming to a knife fight with a knife. I don’t even want you to come to this knife fight with a gun. I want you to come to this knife fight with a magic fucking wand.” And and that clearly And then you turned away on my heel with a dramatic spin and I left the room.
Shaan Puri: And then you tried to pull the door to open, but it was really a push door.
Sam Parr: Totally blew it at the end. That’s the landing. Like you clearly had just read that on a whatever the equivalent was of Twitter and you’re like, “That is now my line.”
Shaan Puri: Yeah, exactly. It was back when I was like I had it written on the inside of my palm and I was like, “Peter Thiel says this magic wand thing, so I’m going to tell somebody.” Totally owns them, no matter what they’re doing. Um, and so, but you know, the reality was, I looked at the business and you were like, “Here’s what I’m doing. I’m creating a media company, so every day we’re going to write the news.” So every every day you had to recreate your product. I was like, “Ooh, that sucks.” Um, it’s like, do you get any Is there any benefit uh of all the work you did in the last three months? It’s like, “Uh, not really. We got to recreate it again. We got to bake that cake every morning.” Okay, sounds good. And then you said, and then I was like, “Cool, so then people pay you certainly for this service that you’re doing.” You’re like, “Nah, it’s free.” Oh, okay. And you’re like, “But then the adverti- then we have to do a separate business basically to a separate customer selling advertisers.” I was like, “Okay, but certainly they’re on retainer and it’s going to be recurring revenue that’s going to stack up.” You’re like, “No, no, no. They’re just going to if they feel like advertising, they will. If they don’t, they don’t. Every month we’re going to start back at zero.” Yep. And I thought, “Damn, this is a tough business to win.” And that’s when I hit you with the knife and the knife fight and blah blah blah.
Shaan Puri: Which it is tough-ish to to do well.
Sam Parr: Yeah, and by the way, the the great best part of the whole thing is five years later after you successfully sold the business and got rich doing it, I then copied your business model and did the same thing for crypto and and was like, came back to you basically being like, “What how did you What was the business plan again? How do you do this?”
Shaan Puri: Um, so so that’s like a big deal.
Sam Parr: But isn’t this isn’t this a it’s like total like life goals story. Build a killer brand, you stuck with the thing, you built it with your family, you do it in the cul-de-sac. Uh, I just think it’s it’s amazing. Sell the thing for $450 million.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, but there’s None of his kids are yoked.
Sam Parr: Right? Like, these guys, they don’t look very yoked. I’m looking at the family now.
Sam Parr: Well, as their public defender, here’s what I have to say about that. One of the things they talked about with Muscle Milk is they go, “We wanted to build a product that everybody would look at it and see a different thing.” So they go, “Women see it as a weight loss product. Men see it as a muscle building product. Some people see it as a snack. Some people see it as a meal replacement.” Our goal was to build a product that you that would basically, you know, solve multiple problems for different people at once.
Shaan Puri: I’m just saying that I want to see some bigger bis and tris on this family photo. They look great. They look very healthy. More importantly, they look happy. The founder’s teeth are beautiful. Like, he’s got a really nice smile. I just think that we should see a little thicker neck.
Sam Parr: Can I tell you one other thing? So this company that bought them uh or originally, I think they were owned by Pepsi. Pepsi owns it now, but before that, they were it was bought by something called Hormel Foods. It’s one of these companies that you’ve never heard of. This company does $12 billion in revenue. They do like a billion and a half dollars of profit a year. And if you go to their website, they the like the the headline, like tagline for them is like, “We sell more pepperonis than anyone on Earth.” And they’re just like food holding company. They own Skippy peanut butter, they own Planters, they own They own Spam. They own Spam, and then they sell just a shit ton of ronies, dude. They just sell pepperonis worldwide. They own Applegate, they own Justin’s, they own Planters, Skippy, Chi-Chi’s. I don’t know what Chi-Chi’s is. Corn I don’t know what that is. They black label bacon. They own a lot of I mean, literally Spam is like on their homepage as like their like their their pride and joy. Like the way my parents pin like pictures of me up on the fridge, that’s what this company does with with Spam.
Shaan Puri: Which is like it’s pretty pretty good, horrible for you. But oh dude, yeah, Hormel pepperoni, I know them. That’s one of my snacks. One of my snacks is like eight pepperoni with a little bit of mozzarella cheese on it, microwaved.
Sam Parr: It’s a pizza without the the pizza?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, I just call it like Redneck Redneck Redneck fitness food.
Sam Parr: Dude, this should be your brand. A line of of “Not That Bad For You” Redneck Snacks. It’s like it’ll it’ll make you farm strong.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, do you know like PB dip? You know you know, I call it dip. But you know PB powder? The powder, yeah. Yeah, you get a spoon of that and you straight and you chuck it up on your the top of your roof of your mouth and you suck on that thing for 60 minutes. I call it uh like fitness dip. So like instead of like having like a fat lip in, you just have uh PB dip. You’re just in your tongue just rub it against that that that dehydrated nut. Ooh, boy. Ooh, boy. You want to have a good time? Put a little PB dip on the roof of your mouth.
Sam Parr: All right, we got our we got our cold open for the episode.
Shaan Puri: Um, by the way, let let me show you one thing. You said something that I do religiously. I just sent Ari a document that I I just sent her one of the tabs. I have dozens of tabs on this. Ari, can you share your screen? So, whenever I read a book, I have this Google Doc that I’ve used since the year like 2010. All right, so check this out. Whenever I read a book, I do a few things. One, I make whenever there’s like a year and a money term or some type of milestone, I write it down in a sheet. And the reason why I write it in a sheet is because a lot of times when you’re building a company or doing anything that’s like really challenging, you you’ll read about someone else and you’re like, “That was easy.” And so I like to do timelines and you’ll see like, “Oh, okay, like they went four years with nothing happening.” And so for those listening, I have got a timeline of uh Coke Industries, which is like um the largest privately held company in America, a biography of their family. And I like did a timeline where every everything major happened in their life and then I converted the dollar amount into uh 2019 dollars, which is when I made this particular one. And it’s really fun to do because you could see that things took, like in this case, like 30 years. Right. And so if you like uh uh if you scroll all the way to the left, I did this with uh Kirk Kerkorian, another one of the uh a guy who I love. And I’ve I every biography I read, I I create one of these.
Sam Parr: Just another man you love. Can I just point out a couple things about this what we’re screen sharing here that are are just just fantastic. This is it’s just a a peek into the mind. First of all, it’s a Google sheet that’s just called “Sheet,” which is just a great title. Okay, scroll over, Ari. So here’s some of the milestones that Sam wrote down. All right, so he starts for for Coke Industries. 19 1900, Fred Coke born. Uh 1924, so 24-year gap, big break finds mentor. Okay, so then it goes 1927, just a quick update, still broke. Then it goes 20 1929, sees success. 1931, big success with two G’s. It’s a big double G success right here. It’s amazing. And then 1940, he uh buys a company and that company he buys it for $4 million. Um Do you also should just have pictures on here where it’s them and the calves and it’s just your calves just for reference and you’re just comparing calves. Because I feel like tell me that’s not part of your research process, is it looking at photos and judging their looks?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, particularly the Coke brothers because they’re like these tall uh waspy guys and I definitely am sizing myself up to them.
Sam Parr: Yeah. The the the the total picture of success includes a picture, for sure.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, it’s like tennis sweaters. It’s like, “Oh, they’re into tennis sweaters, therefore I will wear tennis sweaters.” But yeah, I definitely like two guys that are both 6’2” from the Midwest with blonde hair, blue eyes, like we there’s definitely like a there can only be one of us in this room.
Sam Parr: Dude, there’s this girl who keeps going viral on Twitter and it’s the same tweet she does every time and she just goes, “My dad goes to a bar with his friends every Friday and he makes a list of topics to discuss.” Yes. And then she she puts she has a photo of him holding a printed out agenda and I’ll just read you one of them. “Ted Perry’s fun,” capital story, “shown on Fox News 6.” Next one, “What’s going on with the Bucks?” Question mark. “NFL overtime rules, take ball first or second?” Question mark. “Bahama breezes.” How close is too close to an alligator? Do you think people that throw garbage out of their car window are the same people that don’t pick up their dog poop when walking through my subdivision? And then it read at the bottom, it goes, “Please be on time, as you can see, we have another week of a packed agenda.” And it goes super viral every time. It’s like 100,000 likes and I think everybody who sees this is like, “Yeah, that’s part of the winning life.” I’d like to go to the bar with my friends every Thursday and have like an agenda that we print out and we talk about while wearing our New Balances.
Shaan Puri: Do you know who does this? And he’s not joking.
Sam Parr: I already know, because you’re talking about a legend, a social legend, and I know it has to be Nick Gray. Tell me I’m wrong. No, I’m wrong. Is it not Nick Gray?
Shaan Puri: The second time I hung out with Nick Gray, we went to a bar called Lazarus. Sarah and I came and he goes, “Hey guys, uh I would love to hang out. This is our second time hanging out. I thought it’d be nice to have an agenda so we could stay on track.” And there was a 13-point uh agenda list where it was like, “Ask Sarah about her job, figure out how that’s going on, explain my dating life and get opinions from it.” Uh like it was a and we stuck to that agenda and he took notes. And it was Was it thrilling? Because I think I’m going to absolutely start doing this. It was thrilling. It was thrilling. You know how like You know how like Was it the agenda that was great or the fact that he had an agenda that was great? Which which of the two was greater? The second one. Here’s why. So, look, in a world everyone wants to be a tough guy. It feels good to be a leader, but you want to know something, everyone likes getting led. And like we like the assertive person. I’m just a leader who loves being led. That’s me. That’s on my LinkedIn. I I like leading some stuff, but then there’s other times where it’s like, “Just tell me what to do.” And Right. Small talk is one of those things that no one just like tells you what to do. And when there’s an assigned leader who has something outlined for small talk, I’m just like, “Yes, sir. I’ll do whatever you like me to do.” And uh, “Thank you, may I have another, sir.” Like, it’s like the best way to go about doing stuff. And that’s what Nick Gray does.
Sam Parr: Okay. And by the way, that’s how we do this podcast, actually. We both bring some agenda items and then we discuss in bullet point form.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, and I think it’s good. I and he’s done that for years and it’s awesome.
Sam Parr: All right, we’re going to normalize having conversational agenda hangouts with an agenda. Okay, let’s do more. Um, I have a business that’s pretty cool. Can I tell you about it? Here’s my here’s my opening for this business. Sam, I found the business that you should have started instead of wasting your goddamn time with The Hustle.
Shaan Puri: Okay, I like that.
Sam Parr: So, you built The Hustle, and if you recall, one time you came to me hat in hand, absolutely begging for an investment. You needed the money and you got down on your knees and you said, “Please, sir, invest in my company.” And I looked at it, I I flipped through the business plan like it was a flip book, and I just said, “No thanks.”
Shaan Puri: No, that’s not what you said. You said, “Look, Sam, you’re coming to a knife fight with a knife. I don’t even want you to come to this knife fight with a gun. I want you to come to this knife fight with a magic fucking wand.” And and that clearly And then you turned away on my heel with a dramatic spin and I left the room.
Shaan Puri: And then you tried to pull the door to open, but it was really a push door.
Sam Parr: Totally blew it at the end. That’s the landing. Like you clearly had just read that on a whatever the equivalent was of Twitter and you’re like, “That is now my line.”
Shaan Puri: Yeah, exactly. It was back when I was like I had it written on the inside of my palm and I was like, “Peter Thiel says this magic wand thing, so I’m going to tell somebody.” Totally owns them, no matter what they’re doing. Um, and so, but you know, the reality was, I looked at the business and you were like, “Here’s what I’m doing. I’m creating a media company, so every day we’re going to write the news.” So every every day you had to recreate your product. I was like, “Ooh, that sucks.” Um, it’s like, do you get any Is there any benefit uh of all the work you did in the last three months? It’s like, “Uh, not really. We got to recreate it again. We got to bake that cake every morning.” Okay, sounds good. And then you said, and then I was like, “Cool, so then people pay you certainly for this service that you’re doing.” You’re like, “Nah, it’s free.” Oh, okay. And you’re like, “But then the adverti- then we have to do a separate business basically to a separate customer selling advertisers.” I was like, “Okay, but certainly they’re on retainer and it’s going to be recurring revenue that’s going to stack up.” You’re like, “No, no, no. They’re just going to if they feel like advertising, they will. If they don’t, they don’t. Every month we’re going to start back at zero.” Yep. And I thought, “Damn, this is a tough business to win.” And that’s when I hit you with the knife and the knife fight and blah blah blah.
Shaan Puri: Which it is tough-ish to to do well.
Sam Parr: Yeah, and by the way, the the great best part of the whole thing is five years later after you successfully sold the business and got rich doing it, I then copied your business model and did the same thing for crypto and and was like, came back to you basically being like, “What how did you What was the business plan again? How do you do this?”
Shaan Puri: Um, so so that’s like a big deal.
Sam Parr: But isn’t this isn’t this a it’s like total like life goals story. Build a killer brand, you stuck with the thing, you built it with your family, you do it in the cul-de-sac. Uh, I just think it’s it’s amazing. Sell the thing for $450 million.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, but there’s None of his kids are yoked.
Sam Parr: Right? Like, these guys, they don’t look very yoked. I’m looking at the family now.
Sam Parr: Well, as their public defender, here’s what I have to say about that. One of the things they talked about with Muscle Milk is they go, “We wanted to build a product that everybody would look at it and see a different thing.” So they go, “Women see it as a weight loss product. Men see it as a muscle building product. Some people see it as a snack. Some people see it as a meal replacement.” Our goal was to build a product that you that would basically, you know, solve multiple problems for different people at once.
Shaan Puri: I’m just saying that I want to see some bigger bis and tris on this family photo. They look great. They look very healthy. More importantly, they look happy. The founder’s teeth are beautiful. Like, he’s got a really nice smile. I just think that we should see a little thicker neck.
Sam Parr: Can I tell you one other thing? So this company that bought them uh or originally, I think they were owned by Pepsi. Pepsi owns it now, but before that, they were it was bought by something called Hormel Foods. It’s one of these companies that you’ve never heard of. This company does $12 billion in revenue. They do like a billion and a half dollars of profit a year. And if you go to their website, they the like the the headline, like tagline for them is like, “We sell more pepperonis than anyone on Earth.” And they’re just like food holding company. They own Skippy peanut butter, they own Planters, they own They own Spam. They own Spam, and then they sell just a shit ton of ronies, dude. They just sell pepperonis worldwide. They own Applegate, they own Justin’s, they own Planters, Skippy, Chi-Chi’s. I don’t know what Chi-Chi’s is. Corn I don’t know what that is. They black label bacon. They own a lot of I mean, literally Spam is like on their homepage as like their like their their pride and joy. Like the way my parents pin like pictures of me up on the fridge, that’s what this company does with with Spam.
Shaan Puri: Which is like it’s pretty pretty good, horrible for you. But oh dude, yeah, Hormel pepperoni, I know them. That’s one of my snacks. One of my snacks is like eight pepperoni with a little bit of mozzarella cheese on it, microwaved.
Sam Parr: It’s a pizza without the the pizza?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, I just call it like Redneck Redneck Redneck fitness food.
Sam Parr: Dude, this should be your brand. A line of of “Not That Bad For You” Redneck Snacks. It’s like it’ll it’ll make you farm strong.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, do you know like PB dip? You know you know, I call it dip. But you know PB powder? The powder, yeah. Yeah, you get a spoon of that and you straight and you chuck it up on your the top of your roof of your mouth and you suck on that thing for 60 minutes. I call it uh like fitness dip. So like instead of like having like a fat lip in, you just have uh PB dip. You’re just in your tongue just rub it against that that that dehydrated nut. Ooh, boy. Ooh, boy. You want to have a good time? Put a little PB dip on the roof of your mouth.
Sam Parr: All right, we got our we got our cold open for the episode.
Shaan Puri: Um, by the way, let let me show you one thing. You said something that I do religiously. I just sent Ari a document that I I just sent her one of the tabs. I have dozens of tabs on this. Ari, can you share your screen? So, whenever I read a book, I have this Google Doc that I’ve used since the year like 2010. All right, so check this out. Whenever I read a book, I do a few things. One, I make whenever there’s like a year and a money term or some type of milestone, I write it down in a sheet. And the reason why I write it in a sheet is because a lot of times when you’re building a company or doing anything that’s like really challenging, you you’ll read about someone else and you’re like, “That was easy.” And so I like to do timelines and you’ll see like, “Oh, okay, like they went four years with nothing happening.” And so for those listening, I have got a timeline of uh Coke Industries, which is like um the largest privately held company in America, a biography of their family. And I like did a timeline where every everything major happened in their life and then I converted the dollar amount into uh 2019 dollars, which is when I made this particular one. And it’s really fun to do because you could see that things took, like in this case, like 30 years. Right. And so if you like uh uh if you scroll all the way to the left, I did this with uh Kirk Kerkorian, another one of the uh a guy who I love. And I’ve I every biography I read, I I create one of these.
Sam Parr: Just another man you love. Can I just point out a couple things about this what we’re screen sharing here that are are just just fantastic. This is it’s just a a peek into the mind. First of all, it’s a Google sheet that’s just called “Sheet,” which is just a great title. Okay, scroll over, Ari. So here’s some of the milestones that Sam wrote down. All right, so he starts for for Coke Industries. 19 1900, Fred Coke born. Uh 1924, so 24-year gap, big break finds mentor. Okay, so then it goes 1927, just a quick update, still broke. Then it goes 20 1929, sees success. 1931, big success with two G’s. It’s a big double G success right here. It’s amazing. And then 1940, he uh buys a company and that company he buys it for $4 million. Um Do you also should just have pictures on here where it’s them and the calves and it’s just your calves just for reference and you’re just comparing calves. Because I feel like tell me that’s not part of your research process, is it looking at photos and judging their looks?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, particularly the Coke brothers because they’re like these tall uh waspy guys and I definitely am sizing myself up to them.
Sam Parr: Yeah. The the the the total picture of success includes a picture, for sure.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, it’s like tennis sweaters. It’s like, “Oh, they’re into tennis sweaters, therefore I will wear tennis sweaters.” But yeah, I definitely like two guys that are both 6’2” from the Midwest with blonde hair, blue eyes, like we there’s definitely like a there can only be one of us in this room.
Sam Parr: Dude, there’s this girl who keeps going viral on Twitter and it’s the same tweet she does every time and she just goes, “My dad goes to a bar with his friends every Friday and he makes a list of topics to discuss.” Yes. And then she she puts she has a photo of him holding a printed out agenda and I’ll just read you one of them. “Ted Perry’s fun,” capital story, “shown on Fox News 6.” Next one, “What’s going on with the Bucks?” Question mark. “NFL overtime rules, take ball first or second?” Question mark. “Bahama breezes.” How close is too close to an alligator? Do you think people that throw garbage out of their car window are the same people that don’t pick up their dog poop when walking through my subdivision? And then it read at the bottom, it goes, “Please be on time, as you can see, we have another week of a packed agenda.” And it goes super viral every time. It’s like 100,000 likes and I think everybody who sees this is like, “Yeah, that’s part of the winning life.” I’d like to go to the bar with my friends every Thursday and have like an agenda that we print out and we talk about while wearing our New Balances.
Shaan Puri: Do you know who does this? And he’s not joking.
Sam Parr: I already know, because you’re talking about a legend, a social legend, and I know it has to be Nick Gray. Tell me I’m wrong. No, I’m wrong. Is it not Nick Gray?
Shaan Puri: The second time I hung out with Nick Gray, we went to a bar called Lazarus. Sarah and I came and he goes, “Hey guys, uh I would love to hang out. This is our second time hanging out. I thought it’d be nice to have an agenda so we could stay on track.” And there was a 13-point uh agenda list where it was like, “Ask Sarah about her job, figure out how that’s going on, explain my dating life and get opinions from it.” Uh like it was a and we stuck to that agenda and he took notes. And it was Was it thrilling? Because I think I’m going to absolutely start doing this. It was thrilling. It was thrilling. You know how like You know how like Was it the agenda that was great or the fact that he had an agenda that was great? Which which of the two was greater? The second one. Here’s why. So, look, in a world everyone wants to be a tough guy. It feels good to be a leader, but you want to know something, everyone likes getting led. And like we like the assertive person. I’m just a leader who loves being led. That’s me. That’s on my LinkedIn. I I like leading some stuff, but then there’s other times where it’s like, “Just tell me what to do.” And Right. Small talk is one of those things that no one just like tells you what to do. And when there’s an assigned leader who has something outlined for small talk, I’m just like, “Yes, sir. I’ll do whatever you like me to do.” And uh, “Thank you, may I have another, sir.” Like, it’s like the best way to go about doing stuff. And that’s what Nick Gray does.
Sam Parr: Okay. And by the way, that’s how we do this podcast, actually. We both bring some agenda items and then we discuss in bullet point form.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, and I think it’s good. I and he’s done that for years and it’s awesome.
Sam Parr: All right, we’re going to normalize having conversational agenda hangouts with an agenda. Okay, let’s do more. Um, I have a business that’s pretty cool. Can I tell you about it? Here’s my here’s my opening for this business. Sam, I found the business that you should have started instead of wasting your goddamn time with The Hustle.
Shaan Puri: Okay, I like that.
Sam Parr: So, you built The Hustle, and if you recall, one time you came to me hat in hand, absolutely begging for an investment. You needed the money and you got down on your knees and you said, “Please, sir, invest in my company.” And I looked at it, I I flipped through the business plan like it was a flip book, and I just said, “No thanks.”
Shaan Puri: No, that’s not what you said. You said, “Look, Sam, you’re coming to a knife fight with a knife. I don’t even want you to come to this knife fight with a gun. I want you to come to this knife fight with a magic fucking wand.” And and that clearly And then you turned away on my heel with a dramatic spin and I left the room.
Shaan Puri: And then you tried to pull the door to open, but it was really a push door.
Sam Parr: Totally blew it at the end. That’s the landing. Like you clearly had just read that on a whatever the equivalent was of Twitter and you’re like, “That is now my line.”
Shaan Puri: Yeah, exactly. It was back when I was like I had it written on the inside of my palm and I was like, “Peter Thiel says this magic wand thing, so I’m going to tell somebody.” Totally owns them, no matter what they’re doing. Um, and so, but you know, the reality was, I looked at the business and you were like, “Here’s what I’m doing. I’m creating a media company, so every day we’re going to write the news.” So every every day you had to recreate your product. I was like, “Ooh, that sucks.” Um, it’s like, do you get any Is there any benefit uh of all the work you did in the last three months? It’s like, “Uh, not really. We got to recreate it again. We got to bake that cake every morning.” Okay, sounds good. And then you said, and then I was like, “Cool, so then people pay you certainly for this service that you’re doing.” You’re like, “Nah, it’s free.” Oh, okay. And you’re like, “But then the adverti- then we have to do a separate business basically to a separate customer selling advertisers.” I was like, “Okay, but certainly they’re on retainer and it’s going to be recurring revenue that’s going to stack up.” You’re like, “No, no, no. They’re just going to if they feel like advertising, they will. If they don’t, they don’t. Every month we’re going to start back at zero.” Yep. And I thought, “Damn, this is a tough business to win.” And that’s when I hit you with the knife and the knife fight and blah blah blah.
Shaan Puri: Which it is tough-ish to to do well.
Sam Parr: Yeah, and by the way, the the great best part of the whole thing is five years later after you successfully sold the business and got rich doing it, I then copied your business model and did the same thing for crypto and and was like, came back to you basically being like, “What how did you What was the business plan again? How do you do this?”
Shaan Puri: Um, so so that’s like a big deal.
Sam Parr: But isn’t this isn’t this a it’s like total like life goals story. Build a killer brand, you stuck with the thing, you built it with your family, you do it in the cul-de-sac. Uh, I just think it’s it’s amazing. Sell the thing for $450 million.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, but there’s None of his kids are yoked.
Sam Parr: Right? Like, these guys, they don’t look very yoked. I’m looking at the family now.
Sam Parr: Well, as their public defender, here’s what I have to say about that. One of the things they talked about with Muscle Milk is they go, “We wanted to build a product that everybody would look at it and see a different thing.” So they go, “Women see it as a weight loss product. Men see it as a muscle building product. Some people see it as a snack. Some people see it as a meal replacement.” Our goal was to build a product that you that would basically, you know, solve multiple problems for different people at once.
Shaan Puri: I’m just saying that I want to see some bigger bis and tris on this family photo. They look great. They look very healthy. More importantly, they look happy. The founder’s teeth are beautiful. Like, he’s got a really nice smile. I just think that we should see a little thicker neck.
Sam Parr: Can I tell you one other thing? So this company that bought them uh or originally, I think they were owned by Pepsi. Pepsi owns it now, but before that, they were it was bought by something called Hormel Foods. It’s one of these companies that you’ve never heard of. This company does $12 billion in revenue. They do like a billion and a half dollars of profit a year. And if you go to their website, they the like the the headline, like tagline for them is like, “We sell more pepperonis than anyone on Earth.” And they’re just like food holding company. They own Skippy peanut butter, they own Planters, they own They own Spam. They own Spam, and then they sell just a shit ton of ronies, dude. They just sell pepperonis worldwide. They own Applegate, they own Justin’s, they own Planters, Skippy, Chi-Chi’s. I don’t know what Chi-Chi’s is. Corn I don’t know what that is. They black label bacon. They own a lot of I mean, literally Spam is like on their homepage as like their like their their pride and joy. Like the way my parents pin like pictures of me up on the fridge, that’s what this company does with with Spam.
Shaan Puri: Which is like it’s pretty pretty good, horrible for you. But oh dude, yeah, Hormel pepperoni, I know them. That’s one of my snacks. One of my snacks is like eight pepperoni with a little bit of mozzarella cheese on it, microwaved.
Sam Parr: It’s a pizza without the the pizza?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, I just call it like Redneck Redneck Redneck fitness food.
Sam Parr: Dude, this should be your brand. A line of of “Not That Bad For You” Redneck Snacks. It’s like it’ll it’ll make you farm strong.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, do you know like PB dip? You know you know, I call it dip. But you know PB powder? The powder, yeah. Yeah, you get a spoon of that and you straight and you chuck it up on your the top of your roof of your mouth and you suck on that thing for 60 minutes. I call it uh like fitness dip. So like instead of like having like a fat lip in, you just have uh PB dip. You’re just in your tongue just rub it against that that that dehydrated nut. Ooh, boy. Ooh, boy. You want to have a good time? Put a little PB dip on the roof of your mouth.
Sam Parr: All right, we got our we got our cold open for the episode.
Shaan Puri: Um, by the way, let let me show you one thing. You said something that I do religiously. I just sent Ari a document that I I just sent her one of the tabs. I have dozens of tabs on this. Ari, can you share your screen? So, whenever I read a book, I have this Google Doc that I’ve used since the year like 2010. All right, so check this out. Whenever I read a book, I do a few things. One, I make whenever there’s like a year and a money term or some type of milestone, I write it down in a sheet. And the reason why I write it in a sheet is because a lot of times when you’re building a company or doing anything that’s like really challenging, you you’ll read about someone else and you’re like, “That was easy.” And so I like to do timelines and you’ll see like, “Oh, okay, like they went four years with nothing happening.” And so for those listening, I have got a timeline of uh Coke Industries, which is like um the largest privately held company in America, a biography of their family. And I like did a timeline where every everything major happened in their life and then I converted the dollar amount into uh 2019 dollars, which is when I made this particular one. And it’s really fun to do because you could see that things took, like in this case, like 30 years. Right. And so if you like uh uh if you scroll all the way to the left, I did this with uh Kirk Kerkorian, another one of the uh a guy who I love. And I’ve I every biography I read, I I create one of these.
Sam Parr: Just another man you love. Can I just point out a couple things about this what we’re screen sharing here that are are just just fantastic. This is it’s just a a peek into the mind. First of all, it’s a Google sheet that’s just called “Sheet,” which is just a great title. Okay, scroll over, Ari. So here’s some of the milestones that Sam wrote down. All right, so he starts for for Coke Industries. 19 1900, Fred Coke born. Uh 1924, so 24-year gap, big break finds mentor. Okay, so then it goes 1927, just a quick update, still broke. Then it goes 20 1929, sees success. 1931, big success with two G’s. It’s a big double G success right here. It’s amazing. And then 1940, he uh buys a company and that company he buys it for $4 million. Um Do you also should just have pictures on here where it’s them and the calves and it’s just your calves just for reference and you’re just comparing calves. Because I feel like tell me that’s not part of your research process, is it looking at photos and judging their looks?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, particularly the Coke brothers because they’re like these tall uh waspy guys and I definitely am sizing myself up to them.
Sam Parr: Yeah. The the the the total picture of success includes a picture, for sure.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, it’s like tennis sweaters. It’s like, “Oh, they’re into tennis sweaters, therefore I will wear tennis sweaters.” But yeah, I definitely like two guys that are both 6’2” from the Midwest with blonde hair, blue eyes, like we there’s definitely like a there can only be one of us in this room.
Sam Parr: Dude, there’s this girl who keeps going viral on Twitter and it’s the same tweet she does every time and she just goes, “My dad goes to a bar with his friends every Friday and he makes a list of topics to discuss.” Yes. And then she she puts she has a photo of him holding a printed out agenda and I’ll just read you one of them. “Ted Perry’s fun,” capital story, “shown on Fox News 6.” Next one, “What’s going on with the Bucks?” Question mark. “NFL overtime rules, take ball first or second?” Question mark. “Bahama breezes.” How close is too close to an alligator? Do you think people that throw garbage out of their car window are the same people that don’t pick up their dog poop when walking through my subdivision? And then it read at the bottom, it goes, “Please be on time, as you can see, we have another week of a packed agenda.” And it goes super viral every time. It’s like 100,000 likes and I think everybody who sees this is like, “Yeah, that’s part of the winning life.” I’d like to go to the bar with my friends every Thursday and have like an agenda that we print out and we talk about while wearing our New Balances.
Shaan Puri: Do you know who does this? And he’s not joking.
Sam Parr: I already know, because you’re talking about a legend, a social legend, and I know it has to be Nick Gray. Tell me I’m wrong. No, I’m wrong. Is it not Nick Gray?
Shaan Puri: The second time I hung out with Nick Gray, we went to a bar called Lazarus. Sarah and I came and he goes, “Hey guys, uh I would love to hang out. This is our second time hanging out. I thought it’d be nice to have an agenda so we could stay on track.” And there was a 13-point uh agenda list where it was like, “Ask Sarah about her job, figure out how that’s going on, explain my dating life and get opinions from it.” Uh like it was a and we stuck to that agenda and he took notes. And it was Was it thrilling? Because I think I’m going to absolutely start doing this. It was thrilling. It was thrilling. You know how like You know how like Was it the agenda that was great or the fact that he had an agenda that was great? Which which of the two was greater? The second one. Here’s why. So, look, in a world everyone wants to be a tough guy. It feels good to be a leader, but you want to know something, everyone likes getting led. And like we like the assertive person. I’m just a leader who loves being led. That’s me. That’s on my LinkedIn. I I like leading some stuff, but then there’s other times where it’s like, “Just tell me what to do.” And Right. Small talk is one of those things that no one just like tells you what to do. And when there’s an assigned leader who has something outlined for small talk, I’m just like, “Yes, sir. I’ll do whatever you like me to do.” And uh, “Thank you, may I have another, sir.” Like, it’s like the best way to go about doing stuff. And that’s what Nick Gray does.
Sam Parr: Okay. And by the way, that’s how we do this podcast, actually. We both bring some agenda items and then we discuss in bullet point form.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, and I think it’s good. I and he’s done that for years and it’s awesome.
Sam Parr: All right, we’re going to normalize having conversational agenda hangouts with an agenda. Okay, let’s do more. Um, I have a business that’s pretty cool. Can I tell you about it? Here’s my here’s my opening for this business. Sam, I found the business that you should have started instead of wasting your goddamn time with The Hustle.
Shaan Puri: Okay, I like that.
Sam Parr: So, you built The Hustle, and if you recall, one time you came to me hat in hand, absolutely begging for an investment. You needed the money and you got down on your knees and you said, “Please, sir, invest in my company.” And I looked at it, I I flipped through the business plan like it was a flip book, and I just said, “No thanks.”
Shaan Puri: No, that’s not what you said. You said, “Look, Sam, you’re coming to a knife fight with a knife. I don’t even want you to come to this knife fight with a gun. I want you to come to this knife fight with a magic fucking wand.” And and that clearly And then you turned away on my heel with a dramatic spin and I left the room.
Shaan Puri: And then you tried to pull the door to open, but it was really a push door.
Sam Parr: Totally blew it at the end. That’s the landing. Like you clearly had just read that on a whatever the equivalent was of Twitter and you’re like, “That is now my line.”
Shaan Puri: Yeah, exactly. It was back when I was like I had it written on the inside of my palm and I was like, “Peter Thiel says this magic wand thing, so I’m going to tell somebody.” Totally owns them, no matter what they’re doing. Um, and so, but you know, the reality was, I looked at the business and you were like, “Here’s what I’m doing. I’m creating a media company, so every day we’re going to write the news.” So every every day you had to recreate your product. I was like, “Ooh, that sucks.” Um, it’s like, do you get any Is there any benefit uh of all the work you did in the last three months? It’s like, “Uh, not really. We got to recreate it again. We got to bake that cake every morning.” Okay, sounds good. And then you said, and then I was like, “Cool, so then people pay you certainly for this service that you’re doing.” You’re like, “Nah, it’s free.” Oh, okay. And you’re like, “But then the adverti- then we have to do a separate business basically to a separate customer selling advertisers.” I was like, “Okay, but certainly they’re on retainer and it’s going to be recurring revenue that’s going to stack up.” You’re like, “No, no, no. They’re just going to if they feel like advertising, they will. If they don’t, they don’t. Every month we’re going to start back at zero.” Yep. And I thought, “Damn, this is a tough business to win.” And that’s when I hit you with the knife and the knife fight and blah blah blah.
Shaan Puri: Which it is tough-ish to to do well.
Sam Parr: Yeah, and by the way, the the great best part of the whole thing is five years later after you successfully sold the business and got rich doing it, I then copied your business model and did the same thing for crypto and and was like, came back to you basically being like, “What how did you What was the business plan again? How do you do this?”
Shaan Puri: Um, so so that’s like a big deal.
Sam Parr: But isn’t this isn’t this a it’s like total like life goals story. Build a killer brand, you stuck with the thing, you built it with your family, you do it in the cul-de-sac. Uh, I just think it’s it’s amazing. Sell the thing for $450 million.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, but there’s None of his kids are yoked.
Sam Parr: Right? Like, these guys, they don’t look very yoked. I’m looking at the family now.
Sam Parr: Well, as their public defender, here’s what I have to say about that. One of the things they talked about with Muscle Milk is they go, “We wanted to build a product that everybody would look at it and see a different thing.” So they go, “Women see it as a weight loss product. Men see it as a muscle building product. Some people see it as a snack. Some people see it as a meal replacement.” Our goal was to build a product that you that would basically, you know, solve multiple problems for different people at once.
Shaan Puri: I’m just saying that I want to see some bigger bis and tris on this family photo. They look great. They look very healthy. More importantly, they look happy. The founder’s teeth are beautiful. Like, he’s got a really nice smile. I just think that we should see a little thicker neck.
Sam Parr: Can I tell you one other thing? So this company that bought them uh or originally, I think they were owned by Pepsi. Pepsi owns it now, but before that, they were it was bought by something called Hormel Foods. It’s one of these companies that you’ve never heard of. This company does $12 billion in revenue. They do like a billion and a half dollars of profit a year. And if you go to their website, they the like the the headline, like tagline for them is like, “We sell more pepperonis than anyone on Earth.” And they’re just like food holding company. They own Skippy peanut butter, they own Planters, they own They own Spam. They own Spam, and then they sell just a shit ton of ronies, dude. They just sell pepperonis worldwide. They own Applegate, they own Justin’s, they own Planters, Skippy, Chi-Chi’s. I don’t know what Chi-Chi’s is. Corn I don’t know what that is. They black label bacon. They own a lot of I mean, literally Spam is like on their homepage as like their like their their pride and joy. Like the way my parents pin like pictures of me up on the fridge, that’s what this company does with with Spam.
Shaan Puri: Which is like it’s pretty pretty good, horrible for you. But oh dude, yeah, Hormel pepperoni, I know them. That’s one of my snacks. One of my snacks is like eight pepperoni with a little bit of mozzarella cheese on it, microwaved.
Sam Parr: It’s a pizza without the the pizza?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, I just call it like Redneck Redneck Redneck fitness food.
Sam Parr: Dude, this should be your brand. A line of of “Not That Bad For You” Redneck Snacks. It’s like it’ll it’ll make you farm strong.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, do you know like PB dip? You know you know, I call it dip. But you know PB powder? The powder, yeah. Yeah, you get a spoon of that and you straight and you chuck it up on your the top of your roof of your mouth and you suck on that thing for 60 minutes. I call it uh like fitness dip. So like instead of like having like a fat lip in, you just have uh PB dip. You’re just in your tongue just rub it against that that that dehydrated nut. Ooh, boy. Ooh, boy. You want to have a good time? Put a little PB dip on the roof of your mouth.
Sam Parr: All right, we got our we got our cold open for the episode.
Shaan Puri: Um, by the way, let let me show you one thing. You said something that I do religiously. I just sent Ari a document that I I just sent her one of the tabs. I have dozens of tabs on this. Ari, can you share your screen? So, whenever I read a book, I have this Google Doc that I’ve used since the year like 2010. All right, so check this out. Whenever I read a book, I do a few things. One, I make whenever there’s like a year and a money term or some type of milestone, I write it down in a sheet. And the reason why I write it in a sheet is because a lot of times when you’re building a company or doing anything that’s like really challenging, you you’ll read about someone else and you’re like, “That was easy.” And so I like to do timelines and you’ll see like, “Oh, okay, like they went four years with nothing happening.” And so for those listening, I have got a timeline of uh Coke Industries, which is like um the largest privately held company in America, a biography of their family. And I like did a timeline where every everything major happened in their life and then I converted the dollar amount into uh 2019 dollars, which is when I made this particular one. And it’s really fun to do because you could see that things took, like in this case, like 30 years. Right. And so if you like uh uh if you scroll all the way to the left, I did this with uh Kirk Kerkorian, another one of the uh a guy who I love. And I’ve I every biography I read, I I create one of these.
Sam Parr: Just another man you love. Can I just point out a couple things about this what we’re screen sharing here that are are just just fantastic. This is it’s just a a peek into the mind. First of all, it’s a Google sheet that’s just called “Sheet,” which is just a great title. Okay, scroll over, Ari. So here’s some of the milestones that Sam wrote down. All right, so he starts for for Coke Industries. 19 1900, Fred Coke born. Uh 1924, so 24-year gap, big break finds mentor. Okay, so then it goes 1927, just a quick update, still broke. Then it goes 20 1929, sees success. 1931, big success with two G’s. It’s a big double G success right here. It’s amazing. And then 1940, he uh buys a company and that company he buys it for $4 million. Um Do you also should just have pictures on here where it’s them and the calves and it’s just your calves just for reference and you’re just comparing calves. Because I feel like tell me that’s not part of your research process, is it looking at photos and judging their looks?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, particularly the Coke brothers because they’re like these tall uh waspy guys and I definitely am sizing myself up to them.
Sam Parr: Yeah. The the the the total picture of success includes a picture, for sure.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, it’s like tennis sweaters. It’s like, “Oh, they’re into tennis sweaters, therefore I will wear tennis sweaters.” But yeah, I definitely like two guys that are both 6’2” from the Midwest with blonde hair, blue eyes, like we there’s definitely like a there can only be one of us in this room.
Sam Parr: Dude, there’s this girl who keeps going viral on Twitter and it’s the same tweet she does every time and she just goes, “My dad goes to a bar with his friends every Friday and he makes a list of topics to discuss.” Yes. And then she she puts she has a photo of him holding a printed out agenda and I’ll just read you one of them. “Ted Perry’s fun,” capital story, “shown on Fox News 6.” Next one, “What’s going on with the Bucks?” Question mark. “NFL overtime rules, take ball first or second?” Question mark. “Bahama breezes.” How close is too close to an alligator? Do you think people that throw garbage out of their car window are the same people that don’t pick up their dog poop when walking through my subdivision? And then it read at the bottom, it goes, “Please be on time, as you can see, we have another week of a packed agenda.” And it goes super viral every time. It’s like 100,000 likes and I think everybody who sees this is like, “Yeah, that’s part of the winning life.” I’d like to go to the bar with my friends every Thursday and have like an agenda that we print out and we talk about while wearing our New Balances.
Shaan Puri: Do you know who does this? And he’s not joking.
Sam Parr: I already know, because you’re talking about a legend, a social legend, and I know it has to be Nick Gray. Tell me I’m wrong. No, I’m wrong. Is it not Nick Gray?
Shaan Puri: The second time I hung out with Nick Gray, we went to a bar called Lazarus. Sarah and I came and he goes, “Hey guys, uh I would love to hang out. This is our second time hanging out. I thought it’d be nice to have an agenda so we could stay on track.” And there was a 13-point uh agenda list where it was like, “Ask Sarah about her job, figure out how that’s going on, explain my dating life and get opinions from it.” Uh like it was a and we stuck to that agenda and he took notes. And it was Was it thrilling? Because I think I’m going to absolutely start doing this. It was thrilling. It was thrilling. You know how like You know how like Was it the agenda that was great or the fact that he had an agenda that was great? Which which of the two was greater? The second one. Here’s why. So, look, in a world everyone wants to be a tough guy. It feels good to be a leader, but you want to know something, everyone likes getting led. And like we like the assertive person. I’m just a leader who loves being led. That’s me. That’s on my LinkedIn. I I like leading some stuff, but then there’s other times where it’s like, “Just tell me what to do.” And Right. Small talk is one of those things that no one just like tells you what to do. And when there’s an assigned leader who has something outlined for small talk, I’m just like, “Yes, sir. I’ll do whatever you like me to do.” And uh, “Thank you, may I have another, sir.” Like, it’s like the best way to go about doing stuff. And that’s what Nick Gray does.
Sam Parr: Okay. And by the way, that’s how we do this podcast, actually. We both bring some agenda items and then we discuss in bullet point form.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, and I think it’s good. I and he’s done that for years and it’s awesome.
Sam Parr: All right, we’re going to normalize having conversational agenda hangouts with an agenda. Okay, let’s do more. Um, I have a business that’s pretty cool. Can I tell you about it? Here’s my here’s my opening for this business. Sam, I found the business that you should have started instead of wasting your goddamn time with The Hustle.
Shaan Puri: Okay, I like that.
Sam Parr: So, you built The Hustle, and if you recall, one time you came to me hat in hand, absolutely begging for an investment. You needed the money and you got down on your knees and you said,