Speakers: Sam Parr (host), Shaan Puri (host)
Bill Ackman’s “May I Meet You?” [00:00:00]
Shaan Puri: I got the best opener. May I meet you, Sam?
Sam Parr: Oh my god.
Shaan Puri: Did you see this? The “May I meet you” thing?
Sam Parr: I didn’t see the context, but I saw the quote. Bill Ackman said, “This is how you meet women. May I meet you.” Is that right?
Shaan Puri: Yeah. Oh, dude. This is—we’re doing a deep dive, by the way. This is not a casual reference. I’m going all in. This is my first topic.
Sam Parr: Okay. Okay. So, tell me about it. What happened?
Shaan Puri: The great Bill Ackman. We won’t just call him Bill Ackman. He’s going to be called the great Bill Ackman. Not only has he proven to be a prolific billionaire investor, he’s also just the best at Twitter because he uses it all wrong. It’s Have you seen how Magic Johnson uses Twitter?
Sam Parr: No.
Shaan Puri: All right. So, Magic Johnson, the great basketball player, does not know how to use Twitter. So if you go to his Twitter, he just tweets the most obvious thing. So it’ll be like, “Lakers playing the Celtics tonight. Whoever scores more points tonight’s going to take it home.” And it’s like, what? Yeah, that’s how all games work. Whoever scores more points wins. Or he’ll be like, “They’re losing now. If this stays this way, they’ll lose the game.”
But he’s not joking. He’s been doing this for seven years. And so Bill Ackman, if you don’t know, originally famous for being a controversial and prolific investor, right?
Sam Parr: Yeah. He basically owns this company called Pershing Square Management. He’s an activist investor. So what he would do is he would buy stakes in companies that he either really believed in that he thought were undervalued, but he’s also an activist in that if he sees corporate wrongdoing or he thinks a company has had malfeasance, then he will come out and talk about it while taking a big short position against it.
And so he did that with Herbalife because he’s like, “This is an MLM and this is not right the way that they do their MLM,” and he got burned on that one. But that’s what he does. Okay. So he’s a billionaire activist investor. Awesome. Whatever. Great story. I want to have him on the podcast. His life story and his approach to investing is pretty legendary.
Shaan Puri: Yeah. He’s got one of these stories where he was successful in his Harvard dorm investing, that type of thing. I think he’s also hit bottom many times and bounced back. Okay. So he said, “I hear from many young men that they find it difficult to meet young women in a public setting. In other words, online culture has destroyed their ability to spontaneously meet strangers.” I’m reading this. I say, “Yeah, true. I’m glad you’re speaking on this.”
Sam Parr: Nodding head.
Shaan Puri: Nodding head. Nodding head. So he says, “As such, I thought I’d share a few words that I used in my youth to meet someone.”
Sam Parr: Don’t go there. That’s when it stops. Now the head nod went from “put everything I was doing down.” What is he about to do? It’s when I saw the dude from Red Bull jump out of the space station and skydive. I was like, oh my god, he’s talking about pickup lines he used in his youth. Let’s hear this.
Shaan Puri: He goes, “I would ask, ‘May I meet you?’” Maybe I got to tell him that. “May I meet you?” I don’t know how you say this but, “May I meet you?” before engaging further in conversation. “I almost never got a no.”
Sam Parr: Oh my god. That’s—
Shaan Puri: “Inevitably opened up the way for a further conversation. I got to meet a lot of really interesting people this way.” He goes, “I think it’s the effectiveness of proper grammar and politeness that is effective. You might try—and yes, this will also work for women seeking men as well as same-sex interactions. This is versatile. Just my two cents from a happily married guy about our next generation.”
So this thing goes wild. “May I meet you?” You know what I told my wife when I saw her? I picked her up in real life. I said, “What’s the difference between a chickpea and a lentil? I don’t pay $500 to have a lentil on my face.” I made a joke about peeing on my face. And it worked. Thank God I didn’t say, “May I meet you?”
Sam Parr: Yeah. Actually, I don’t think we’re allowed to make fun of this given what you did to actually meet your wife.
Shaan Puri: If a girl will reply to “May I meet you,” I think that she’s not someone I want to go out with. Which I’m just joking by the way a little bit. I do think that you can walk up to a girl and be like, “What’s going on? Do you want to hang out sometime?” I do think that straightforward and casual can crush it. But Tinder with the “May I meet you” billboard. Love it.
Sam Parr: There’s people who are just going around doing “May I meet you.”
Shaan Puri: Dude, that video—I already know. They’re just walking up to people saying, “May I meet you.” So, people are just going crazy with this “May I meet you” thing. And it got me thinking. Number one, Bill Ackman’s the best. Number two, do you think that this actually would work? And number three, and this is totally improvised, the top five MFM formal pickup lines in addition to that. So, we’re going to go there in a second. But first, what do you think of this?
Sam Parr: Okay. “May I meet you?” I have a joke that I say—not a joke. When it comes to flirting, I think as long as the girl laughs, you could pretty much say anything. And so you can get away with anything. So if you say it in a certain way, yeah, it could work, but “May I meet you” is probably not the best, right? Do you think if you were 22 or 23 and you read this, you’re a big Bill Ackman guy, you’re on Twitter all the time, do you think you would have laughed and then secretly that Friday gone out and done it?
Shaan Puri: No, I would not have used this line. Would you have?
Sam Parr: I probably would have. So desperate. Beggars can’t be choosers. Try everything.
Shaan Puri: I read the book The Game and then for five years, my opening line to anybody I saw at a party was, “Hey, I need you guys to help me settle this argument I’m having with my friend.”
Sam Parr: “How many oceans are there? Five or seven?”
Shaan Puri: That would be better. We had this whole elaborate story about an ex-girlfriend and then it was too much. And maybe if it was just loud in the bar or the club or whatever, they were just like, “What?” And then I was like, “I’m giving the background of a story first.”
Sam Parr: No, I’m just peacocking. I’m just trying to attract you.
Shaan Puri: All right, Sam. I’m going to take a second here. I’m going to write some of our own pickup lines because why is Bill Ackman the only one who can give young men this sort of advice? I think we too should steer the next generation. So, here we go. You want to take a second? Let’s write down a few.
Sam Parr: Shaan, there’s not a chance that I can come up with great pickup lines. And first of all, I’ve been married for 12 years.
Shaan Puri: All right. I will give you three then if you can’t give me any. All right. Ready? I just wrote one down. How about this? This is actually a close cousin to “May I meet you?” “May I take your jacket?” So now, first, she’s already undressing. Second, you’re in. She’s not going to say no, right? She’s very kind of you to do a generous act. She will think you work there and that you’re the staff. So now you just have to bridge that gap. But the hardest part is done. You’re into the conversation now. She’s going to say yes and start what we call in sales as the “yes ladder.” So I like that one. I think that one’s pretty good.
Another one: “Are you cold?” I found that women are always cold. They’re just a cold species. And so I just think you have a good chance of them being like, “You know what, yeah, I am cold. You see me, you understand me.” And then from there, you may have to give the jacket from the previous girl that you talked to and give it to this girl.
Sam Parr: I can’t believe you have children. I can’t believe that someone let you do that.
Shaan Puri: I had a big advantage which was my wife was looking for a guy like me. I hit the lottery. She was like—I was like, “What? Your type is me? That’s insane. Are you crazy? Is there something wrong with you?”
Sam Parr: For some reason at my company Hampton, we have 20 or 25 employees. 20 of them are women. Men are getting left behind as Scott Galloway says. I don’t know, something about it. And so I overhear all these conversations that they have. They brag about their boyfriends being uglier than them. Did you know that women do this?
Shaan Puri: They brag about it?
Sam Parr: Like they want to date someone who’s uglier than them. Is that the craziest thing you’ve ever heard of?
Shaan Puri: That doesn’t even make sense. What is the—because it implies something else or is there more to the story or that’s the fact?
Sam Parr: Because they want to be the hot one in the relationship. But you’ve never seen this, Shaan, that women want to—
Shaan Puri: Explain so much.
Sam Parr: Yeah. Same. What’s your third one?
Shaan Puri: My third one is, “Hey, I’m Bill Ackman. I’m the billionaire founder of Pershing Square. Nice to meet you.” That one could work too. It would have worked, but it needs some pre-work.
Sam Parr: This actually makes a ton of sense. I’m pretty sure he was worth $10 million when he was 27 years old. And so here Bill Ackman—and also he’s 6’3” by the way. Do you know this about him? Yeah. So they were like, “Oh, you’re a handsome, 6’3” rich guy also.”
Shaan Puri: “You may see me again.”
Sam Parr: So yeah, this is not the best person to get advice from. He might be onto something though because you know what show women love? Bridgerton. And they love the formality of Bridgerton. So maybe he’s tapped into this secret desire that they have to just be incredibly formal or be treated like a princess.
Sam Parr: Dude, I used to think that as a kid, but I looked like Napoleon Dynamite whenever I tried to be proper. It was as if I was—it just never worked. Like when you had braces and an afro. Flash the Sam Parr high school yearbook photo. “Hello, miss thing.” It never worked. Frankly, nothing really worked. So, who am I to say? But no, that never worked.
Josh and the Street Interview Agency [00:07:15]
Sam Parr: Let me tell you about something. I have two things I want to get your opinion on and just riff on. This one’s short. Let’s do this guy. Have you heard of this thing called 203dia.com?
Shaan Puri: Oh. I’ve seen this.
Sam Parr: So, first of all, if you’ve ever been on TikTok, you see these videos where it’s a young guy interviewing other good-looking people at Washington Square Park and asking them what they think of this deodorant or, “Take a bite of this brand’s chocolate and what do you think?” And it’s a review, but it’s supposed to look organic.
This guy named Josh, he started working with Oliver at Tabs Chocolate. You know Tabs Chocolate. It is and was a popular product. So, this guy Oliver, who was a 20-year-old entrepreneur, 22-year-old entrepreneur at the time, hired this other guy named Josh, who at the time I think was only 19, and he’s like, “Hey, I’m going to pay you money to go to Washington Square Park, which is a popular park here in New York City, and I want you to interview people about my chocolate and get good clips that are testimonials for TikTok.”
And it worked. He killed it. So eventually Josh is like, “I should do this for other people.” So at the age of 19 or 20, he drops out of Syracuse University and he starts doing this for other people. He’s now making $300,000 a month in revenue doing this. He’s got something like 46 employees, which are a lot of freelancers. He goes to parks in New York City, LA, and Miami interviewing people.
He tells a story about how he started, but actually the Wall Street Journal wrote about him. And he’s like, “I just would DM founders on Twitter constantly and I would show them these videos that I’m doing and I would do free work just to get some videos that maybe look more legit.” And he starts filming these videos and now he’s killing it. He’s building this business. I’m not sure if this business is going to be his big thing. Who knows how huge this could be, but anyone who’s bold enough to go to one of these parks and walk up to someone at the age of 20 and build a company doing $3 million a year in revenue, this kid’s going to be it.
We talked about how door-to-door sales is this weird breeding ground of incredible entrepreneurs. You know why Mormons are so successful? Well, one of the things they have to do is their mission where for two years you block out the world, you wake up every day, you go knock on doors and you try to spread the gospel about something you believe in. That also happens to be incredible training for entrepreneurship and sales.
This is the same sort of thing. Not only is the agency working because he took a format that works on social, which is a street interview, but no founder really wants to go do this. This is extremely exhausting to go do and you’re basically putting yourself out there for rejection and humiliation along the way. And he just productized that. It was like, let me productize this one ad format. And so that’s kind of genius.
When he does this, I don’t know if you see, he basically walks 30,000 to 50,000 steps a day when he’s doing this. He puts his Apple Health tracker or whatever and it’s like, yeah, I’m just walking around the entire day. I was walking 10 miles a day doing these street interviews. It’s pretty incredible hustle. So first of all, just being a college kid and doing this, I bet you just him, he probably could have potentially been making $300,000 a year doing this.
There’s a skill here, but it’s honestly mostly boldness and it’s mostly just getting after it. Pretty much anyone could do this, but no one will do it, right? Someone’s paying him money because they’re like, “I’m too embarrassed to go talk to a stranger in the park and film this. This feels stupid.” But then he’s operationalized it. In fact, our friend—I originally heard about him because Ramon was like, “I’m in New York City because I paid this kid some absurd amount of money to do these things.” And I was like, “What?” He goes, “Yes, man. I just gave this kid tens of thousands of dollars and he’s just walking up to strangers.” And I’m like, that’s so interesting that that’s how scared we are. Which me too. I don’t want to do it.
Shaan Puri: Dude, I saw this guy’s Twitter feed and I just called him because I was like, “Wow.” I just DM’d him. I was like, “What’s your number?” And I called him because I was like, “May I meet you?” Yeah. “May I meet you, sir?” And it totally worked. By the way, I think he listens to the podcast, so I’m glad we get to shout him out now. He’s a real hustler, man.
I think this is such a cool—I have this phrase that sounds a little condescending, and I don’t mean it that way at all. In fact, I think this is one of the best things you could do, which is what I call a white belt business, like a starter business. What’s a great first business to start? Because your first business is probably going to be one of your worst businesses. You’re going to be at your worst because you’re just getting into the game. You’re not your best yet. And you maybe don’t have the network, the capital, the skills, or the knowledge of the big things you want to go do in life. That’s fine. Just get in the game.
This is one of the best examples of a “just get in the game” business that he’s doing in New York. Guess what? After listening to this podcast, if you’re between the ages of 18 and 25 and you’re like, “Oh man, I just want to be successful so bad. I’m willing to work. I’m a hard worker,” and nothing’s working for you yet, if you listen to this and you don’t go do this, I’m calling your bluff. Because this is a business that’s available to anybody. You could be in Miami doing this. You could be in Los Angeles doing this. You could be in pretty much any city doing this. Hell, you could be in the boonies doing this and it doesn’t really matter. In fact, that could be your shtick—you go to Costco and you talk to ordinary people.
Sam Parr: Did you see this kid who has this page called the School of Hard Knocks?
Shaan Puri: Oh, this podcaster who’s getting 5,000 times more views than us. Yeah, I saw that kid.
Sam Parr: He’s not a podcaster. Well, it started like man-on-the-street short Instagram stuff. Now he’s turned it into a real thing.
Shaan Puri: The funny thing is it is a podcast, it’s just so short, right? He does the same thing. He’s like, “I talk to successful people. I hold the mic and then I ask a question then they answer.” It’s an interview. It could be considered a podcast, but you’re right. What he did was he shrunk it into a more authentic format catching somebody on the street. But at this point he’s not bumping into Shaq.
Sam Parr: Dude, he had Tom Cruise on this.
Shaan Puri: Tom Cruise on this. Yeah. It’s like those guys see his content, they follow, he sets it up where he can bump into them. But he’s really young. I think that guy’s—he’s got the F-boy, he’s got the broccoli haircut. He’s got to be by law under the age of 27 if you have that. So I think it’s kind of amazing. It’s this one-minute compilation where he just cuts up a quick question and answer with a star on the street and it just works great.
Tom Freston and the Founding of MTV [00:13:45]
Sam Parr: All right, I want to show you one more thing. I sent you the article in the Wall Street Journal. Check this out. In 1981, Warner was a big cable company or entertainment company, and they decided to create a music channel where they were basically just going to be music videos, and it was going to be called MTV.
And so they had a group of four or five basically punk rock/hippie guys who they said, “You’re in charge. Figure this out.” And one of the guys, the guy’s name was Tom Freston. Tom Freston had this amazing article about him in the Wall Street Journal the other day and I want to get your take on this. Basically he tells the story of founding MTV. MTV, you and I were raised with it, but the people who are 18, 19, 21 years old now, the MTV they know now is not what it used to be. What it used to be was basically music videos and then also cartoons and TV shows like The Real World and things like that.
Shaan Puri: Yeah.
Sam Parr: But eventually MTV, they became—they owned Nickelodeon and they owned Comedy Central. Listen to the things that this guy Tom—he was head of programming. Listen to some of the shows that came because of him: Blue’s Clues, Beavis and Butt-Head, The Adventures of Pete & Pete, SpongeBob, Daria, The Daily Show, Jackass, South Park, Crank Yankers, The Fairly OddParents, Chappelle’s Show, The Last Airbender, The Colbert Report, Ren & Stimpy, The Real World, Dora the Explorer, Rugrats.
Shaan Puri: I’m going to have a nostalgia seizure over here. You’re just saying those names. Names I haven’t heard, thoughts I haven’t had.
Sam Parr: And so this article goes really deep, but there was one thing that really stuck out to me. Listen to this quote. Tom tells a story and he has all these hilarious bits. He was like, basically, “We were the rejects.” He goes, “The receptionist sold cocaine and the office had one clothing rule: No frontal nudity.” These guys were the real deal, man.
But he’s got this amazing line. He says, “I had this idea. I said, ‘Let’s find the type of pot-smoking guys in high school who sat in the back of the class that could draw well and have some character living inside their heads, like this crazy guy named Steve who made up SpongeBob. Let’s get these guys who don’t know anything about how to make a TV show or a series and school them and we’re going to crank these things out.’”
Shaan Puri: Dude, so good.
Sam Parr: That’s great, right? And the reason I thought that was interesting is because, first of all, there were four founders of MTV and they are now like the mafia a little bit. One of them was Bob Pittman who is the CEO of iHeartMedia. Another guy runs the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. They’re all big shots.
But I thought it was interesting this line because in business, I think you and I at times have fallen in this trap, but I think we’re actually better. And I think a lot of our listeners do this where they come up with an idea and they iterate their way to this idea versus taking a stance and saying—for example, I think Barstool has done—I don’t particularly love Barstool’s content but I think they’ve done an excellent job of planting their flag and saying, “This is what we are and this is the bet we’re making.”
Or Vice did a good job where they’re like, “We’re youth culture and we’re going to give inexperienced guys cameras and send them to Africa and maybe they get something.” Or Pixar saying, “We think that computers and animation can tell stories just as good if not better than real-life actors.” But the idea of saying, “This is the bet, we’re taking this bet.” And even if it’s a silly bet of saying, “We’re going to give potheads jobs and let them create content,” when I look back at that, I think that’s actually brilliant and very romantic and very cool to take a stance.
Taking Simple Ideas Seriously [00:18:30]
Shaan Puri: Yeah, I feel like you did this with The Hustle. I got to give you some props here. When I think about who in my group did this, I would say there’s really two groups of people. One, Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith. And they were doing Calm. They had from the beginning this idea, this problem that they wanted to solve which was meditation is this thing that’s incredibly good for you and so few people do it.
And even when the initial results were somewhat lukewarm and it was unclear what to do and investors didn’t want to fund it, they did not iterate and pivot like crazy around into other ideas like, “Oh today we’re a messaging app and tomorrow we’re going to do delivery of weed.” They were like, “No, we’re going to do 50 different attempts to make meditation a thing because that’s the thing we think is important and that’s what we believe in and so that’s what we’re going to do.”
So, they launched this app called “Do Nothing for 2 Minutes.” It’s meditation in disguise, almost like a gimmick. It was an app where if you touched your phone in a 2-minute period, it would start over. And it would just play calming music like waves crashing on a beach and just for 2 minutes, you just couldn’t touch your phone.
The next one they did was this app called Checky, which is again they did this viral app about how many times a day do you check your phone? We’ve heard of this idea of screen time. Checky would be like, “Hey, you’ve unlocked the lock screen 398 times today. You are the little rat in the maze who’s addicted to the cocaine pellets. You’re pushing the button over and over again trying to see if you can get the prize out.”
And so they did many different versions of this. Ultimately, Sleep Stories was the thing that worked for them and helped them really accelerate growth, but it was the same thing. There was meditation at night instead of just during the day. And they did it. They pulled it off. I just remember when it was so uncool and lack of momentum, lack of investment traction, lack of sex appeal. There was no other comparable in the market that was like, “We’re just doing what they’re doing.” But in our category, which is what entrepreneurs use to validate themselves, they kept going. So I thought that was a “plant your flag” and I thought you did too where you were like, “I’m betting on email.”
Sam Parr: Yeah.
Shaan Puri: And we’re going to be independent. I was like, “Dude, Facebook videos right now are going viral. Snapchat just came out. You got to start doing Snapchat.” I tried to dangle every shiny little—
Sam Parr: We didn’t even have an Instagram handle. I don’t think we had Instagram when we sold.
Shaan Puri: And you were just like, “No, we’re going to be—” and you kept calling it a pirate ship and I was like, “Brother, it’s a newsletter,” and you’re like, “No, I’m building a pirate ship.”
Sam Parr: I said, “I’m building a pirate ship and every email subscriber I get is just a little bit more wind in my sails.”
Shaan Puri: And I was like, “Why is he reciting poetry?” and then I also kind of liked it. But I was like, “Damn, I don’t say cool stuff like that as a CEO. I should probably have lines like that.” And then you had a tattoo of a pirate ship on your thigh and I was like, “I don’t know what’s going on.”
Sam Parr: Bold, fast, fun, baby. That’s the male version of “Live, Laugh, Love.”
Shaan Puri: You wearing shorts right now? Pop that sucker out.
Sam Parr: Well, I wear pants all the time now because I don’t want people to see it.
Shaan Puri: Sold the company. Still got the tattoo, though. So yeah, I thought you did a great job of the “plant your flag in the ground.”
Sam Parr: Let me tell you where I messed up. I messed up not believing a couple things. One, when people start something, most things don’t work right away. Even though whatever you see on our podcast and all these things, they don’t work right away. The thing is, can you deal with the pushback and stay the same? And that’s really hard to do that every day. It was really hard for me to do that every day.
But the second thing is underestimating how big something can get. I drastically underestimated how big we could get. So I think the year we sold we did $12 million in revenue and I was like, “I think I can get this to 50, 60, 70,” and I was like, “But looking back, this is foolish.” Morning Brew, our competitors who only sold part of the business so they were able to keep running it, they’re at $90 million in revenue. And I can give you other examples of people that are doing hundreds of millions of revenue.
Same with Barstool. If you look at them in 2014, you’re like, “This company is going to make hundreds of millions a year in revenue.” You would say that’s insane, that can’t happen. Same with Calm, a meditation app, it’s going to be a multi-billion dollar thing. And I think the issue is you underestimate how big something can get because you don’t realize that the TAM, once you have a really cool product, it can expand. And I think that that’s really hard to see because the numbers don’t say that, but you just have to have faith, right?
Shaan Puri: Yeah. Everything takes longer than you think, but it can be bigger than you think. That’s kind of the weird rule of thumb for an entrepreneur. You think it’s going to happen faster, it’s not. Sorry, it’s going to take way longer than you want and way longer than you think. Way longer than you expect. But on the upside, you’ve probably underestimated yourself even though you think you’re being Mr. Ambitious.
Sam Parr: Yeah, exactly. And I have this—I want to hear about your mistake, but let me tell you one quick thing. Before my company, The Hustle, before we were an email newsletter, we were an events business. And we had Tim Westergren. Tim Westergren is this guy who founded Pandora. Pandora doesn’t get talked about enough nowadays, but I’m pretty sure it’s still a multi-billion dollar revenue business. And at its heyday, it was worth tens of billions of dollars. It was one of the early pioneers of the app on the iPhone.
Tim Westergren has this amazing story where he told the story at my event and then I wrote about it on The Hustle. It was the very first article we ever published and it went viral. The title of the article is “Here’s how Pandora’s founder convinced 50 early employees to work for two years without pay.” Basically, the company started the Music Genome Project. And what he did was he raised $5 million and he convinced 50 to 100 musicians, struggling musicians, to come work for him.
He basically had legitimately an Excel spreadsheet. And he created 50 attributes for a song. And they would sit all day listening to music and they would write the attributes in the spreadsheet. Eventually after doing this for years, they had this massive database. But unfortunately, it didn’t find product-market fit. They just had this database, but they’re like, “What do we do with it?”
Originally, they had it in Best Buy where you can listen to a CD in Best Buy and be like, “Here’s 10 other CDs that you could potentially buy that fit that song.” But it wasn’t really working. And so, he ran out of money. But he was like, “This thing is magical.” And he convinced his employees to continue working for him for 18 months without pay.
Someone in the crowd goes, “What speech did you give on a weekly basis to convince these people to work for you?” And he goes, “Man, it’s hard. If I close my eyes though, I think I could figure it out.” And he goes, “We all know that what we have created here is very unique and it’s solving a gigantic problem. No one on earth is going to do what we’ve done. And when you use this product, we all know how magical it is. It will find its home. Everyone on the planet loves music. And there’s millions of musicians who produce great music and they can’t find each other. When this thing finally finds its home, it’s going to change culture. How many times in your life can you say that you’ve had a chance to do that? That’s what this is about.” How good is that?
Shaan Puri: That’s almost a separate skill, which is you make everything bigger than it is. Elon is the master of this. He doesn’t just say, “Hey, we’re going to build a company that launches satellites.” He’s not even going to say, “We’re going to build a company that launches the best reusable rockets.” He’s like, “We’re going to take humans from being a single-planet species to a multi-planetary species, which is basically going to save the human race and all consciousness as we know it in the universe because something will happen to the earth at some point and there’s no plan if we don’t do something.” So, he creates this incredible grand-scale vision, sense of urgency and purpose around what he does.
Sam Parr: But you can do that with anything. He did it when he got a coworker pregnant and he was like, “The biggest risk to civilization is underpopulation. We need to be having more children.” And I was like, this is the Teflon Don. How is he Neo in the Matrix dodging these bullets that are coming at him for impregnating this woman?
Shaan Puri: He just rebranded cheating like aioli is to mayonnaise.
Sam Parr: Yeah. He was like—it was the most noble cheat I’d ever heard of. I was like, “This is incredible. How did he tie this to the collapse of population and civilization itself?”
Shaan Puri: It was amazing. But you could do this for anything. Have you read the biographies or listened to the Founders podcast on Patagonia or Dyson?
Sam Parr: Haven’t.
Shaan Puri: Okay. Well, do you know anything about Dyson?
Sam Parr: I know that Dyson’s so hot right now. It’s the cool thing for a successful CEO to be into. It’s like, “You know who my hero is? It’s not Musk or Jobs. It’s Dyson.” It’s the cool thing to say.
Shaan Puri: Dyson basically—I think they do three things: vacuums, hand dryers in restrooms, and blow dryers. So blowing and sucking basically. That’s not inherently cool, but why are they such a cool company? It’s because the CEO has done such a good job of making Dyson the standard of excellence. And so when I think of an employee wanting to work at Dyson, I’m like, “Vacuums?” It’s like, “Well no, it’s excellence. We are going to make the best.”
There is something very appealing about that and so you don’t have to be going to Mars to give one of these speeches. By the way, anytime you have more than 15 employees, your job is basically 40% this. And so you have to get good at this. I don’t think you need this world-changing product to say this is cool. I mean we’re talking about Rugrats and SpongeBob and we look back at it and it’s dope, right? It’s like how cool would it be to be part of changing culture.
Shaan Puri: Yeah. I’ve really come to appreciate this that everybody who’s successful in life has just taken a simple idea very seriously, way more seriously than you would expect, way more seriously than was necessary, way more seriously than everybody else. And whether that’s bringing cartoons to TV sets around the country or it’s making a vacuum cleaner that’s better than the last vacuum cleaner, better than any vacuum cleaner that sucks more than anyone else can suck in the world—if that’s your thing, you know that’s your thing. It kind of doesn’t really matter what your thing is because your experience of it is going to consume your world.
Sam Parr: Dude, one of our most beloved people is Nick Gray who hosts cocktail parties.
Shaan Puri: Two-hour cocktail parties.
Sam Parr: He took it very seriously. He’s like, “I’m going to write a book about how to host a dinner party.” And it’s like, “Are you sure you need to? It’s not an email?” and he’s like, “No, it’s a book and it’s a science and it’s an art and I’m going to master it.” And that’s why he’s fallen in love with it. That’s why he’s done such a good job with it. That’s why it’s really opened up all these doors. It became much bigger than somebody would expect something like that to become.
A lot of life is just about picking a simple idea and taking it seriously. Of course, some ideas are a little bit more impactful or fulfilling than others. But the “take it seriously” part—I spent so much of my life focusing on the “pick an idea” part. Pick a simple idea. And actually, it was the “take it seriously” muscle that needed to be built better. That was the thing I was weak at. And it didn’t really matter what simple idea I picked if I didn’t learn how to take it seriously.
The Amazing Digital Circus and YouTube Animation [00:26:00]
Sam Parr: So, you’re writing this book series. 1hourbooks.co. So, Shaan’s writing a really cool series of books. Go to his website, sign up. Your first one is on creativity. You should really Google MTV and Comedy Central and Nickelodeon and some of the early years because I started going on this rabbit hole and I started reading about the guy named Stephen Hillenburg who started SpongeBob.
This guy basically was a grade school teacher in San Francisco. Then he became a marine biologist and then he quit doing that at the age of 28 or 29 and went to school for animation because he loved drawing comics in his free time. He eventually worked his way up to Nickelodeon and he worked on Rocko’s Modern Life and then from there he got in and he was able to pitch SpongeBob.
SpongeBob was a silly show. It was almost like a show that our parents didn’t want us to watch a little bit because there was something weird about it. But it wasn’t inappropriate, it was just silly. But his passion for marine biology and everything led to creating this and I thought it was really beautiful.
Something that is going on with the world of creators on YouTube is this fiction-style content or in particular animation, which I loved as a kid. I would love to see some of that stuff because a lot of the stuff on YouTube now doesn’t talk about that. I don’t think that’s really a thing, but do you think that there’s room for that? Do you know anything in that space or does this interest you? I know that our friend Dylan Abruscato was trying to do something where he was doing comics and I actually thought it was pretty awesome.
Shaan Puri: We met the guy who was doing this. Do you remember The Amazing Digital Circus? Go to YouTube and look up The Amazing Digital Circus. The pilot, the first episode of this, currently has 398 million views on YouTube.
Sam Parr: Yes. Yeah. Of course.
Shaan Puri: You remember this?
Sam Parr: Yes.
Shaan Puri: So this guy Kevin and his brother, they are based in Australia and they had a passion for animation. They didn’t really know what to do with it, but they just decided, “Look, we’re sitting in Australia. We’re guys who’ve never done this before. The odds of us getting a deal with Netflix or Hollywood is super low, but maybe we could just make something and put it on YouTube.”
And so they worked on this. They basically were using gaming engines, which is not what you use for normal TV shows for animation. So they started using Unreal Engine or Unity. Instead of making a video game out of it, they animated this wild show with a little bit of a dark humor and it’s basically like anime but done for the West. So they remixed the idea which is one of the core creative tools: find a new connection of old dots. And so they connected the old dots of anime and Pixar animation and they created this show on YouTube and it gets hundreds of millions of views on every single episode.
When we were there, I don’t know Jimmy (MrBeast) that well, but I said hi to him and I started talking to him and he goes, “Do you want to meet the guy who inspires me or who I think is even better than me?” He deferred to this guy.
Sam Parr: Yeah.
Shaan Puri: With the Hootenanny, we basically say, “All right, Jimmy, do you have three or four people you want to invite that are not in our network? We’re bringing a bunch of people from our network. Who’s in your network that you think is awesome?” And this was one of the guys. And he was an awesome dude.
They’re doing—and I was like, “So, wait, you spend all this money and time. You make these crazy animated things. It’s kind of like the SpongeBob guy, right? It’s just a guy with an idea and a sketch and then turns it into a show.” And they were making tens of millions on just merch drops, just fans buying the merch of their thing. That was the business model. It was literally selling t-shirts at this point. And I was like, “What?”
Sam Parr: They got merch. I think they got a deal with either Amazon Prime or Netflix and so now they were going to bring their show—now Hollywood wants them basically. And so now they’re bringing their show to one of the big streaming platforms. And they cut a very unique deal where they didn’t have to take it off YouTube because they’re like, “No, we’re keeping it on YouTube. YouTube’s our place where we’re building a giant fandom.”
I mean, you know how few videos get 400 million views. You literally have to have made “Despacito” to get 400 million views or “Gangnam Style.” It’s not a number that a normal YouTube video can get and this is their own original content. There’s also something interesting here going on where I’m romanticizing 80s MTV and then you’re romanticizing this guy now.
But this guy Kevin, Digital Circus, he’s only a handful of years into his journey and when we were with him I thought that was neat but it was just like, “Oh that’s cool.” Now I’m looking back and I’m like, that’s very romantic. That’s very badass. It’s very interesting that you don’t see that at the time when you’re doing it. But I do think that I have to work on—I think everyone does have to work on reframing things because it would make it so much more fun to work on and you could keep going for a lot longer. Now I see this and I’m like, “Oh, this is amazing. Keep going. Keep doing this.” But when I talked to him, he was one of 20 interesting people.
Ben Horowitz and the Art of Noticing [00:31:00]
Shaan Puri: 100%. That’s so true what you just said. I noticed a few people who do this now. In fact, we just had Ben Horowitz on and after we stopped recording, he had told us the story on the podcast about this incredible leader in Haiti, Toussaint Louverture. He’s like, “Read this book about him or read multiple books about him.” There’s a book called Black Spartacus.
He told this story about how this guy who was a slave became the leader of a 500,000 person army and was one of the few places where slavery ended as a result of a successful revolution and they changed the norm. It was just incredible. And so as a guy who’s investing in world-changing leaders, I think he was just fascinated by how somebody pulled this off.
Sam Parr: That’s actually a really good take. I didn’t put that together. That’s a really good insight actually why he liked that. I’m not sure if he consciously did it or not, but yeah, obviously there’s an appeal to it.
Shaan Puri: After the pod was over, we were like—and on the podcast, what was your impression of Ben Horowitz? What’s he like? What would you have said?
Sam Parr: A top 10. We’ve done 750. He’s in the top 10 of wisdom people. But would you say he’s an outlandish personality, outlandishly smart? Is he outlandish in any dimension? Surprisingly good hang. Well balanced. Seemed like a more normal dude than your average tech billionaire type of guy, right?
Shaan Puri: He seemed like a really good father. He’s probably 30 years older than us, so I can say that. But he seemed like someone who I could ask for advice and it wouldn’t be extreme.
Sam Parr: So, I was thinking about that. I was like, “Man, this guy, this was just a great hang with just a great dude, but more on the normal side of the spectrum than I would have expected,” just because I’ve gotten used to it. Every time I meet these extreme outliers of performance, they often come with these sharp edges.
Shaan Puri: I think his partner Mark (Andreessen) has that. His partner Mark seems sharp, polarized.
Sam Parr: His head literally has 30% extra headroom. He can just hold more brain in there, dude. It’s like seeing LeBron James. It’s like, well, okay, I could see that we’re different. We’re both humans, but you’re 6’9” and you could fly and I can’t. So, I get there’s a difference. That happens a lot with tech guys. You’re like, “Oh, you’re literally just super smart. You process information differently.”
He even said it. He was like, “People get confused.” Because he knows Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel and all these guys. And he goes, “People get confused. They think that those guys have low EQ. They don’t understand people because they kind of stutter and stammer and they’re a little awkward.” He’s like, “No, they actually have a pretty deep understanding of people. You wouldn’t be who they are if you didn’t actually understand people, but they’re processing data at such a high rate that it’s a little bit awkward when you hear them try to talk and reply because they’re just literally processing so much information.” And I was like, “Oh, that’s an amazing way of putting it.”
Anyway, back to what I was saying on him. At the end of the podcast, we stopped recording and we asked him, “How did you get into that Toussaint guy? That’s crazy. Where’d you hear about this?” And he said something. He goes, “I was thinking about why slavery ended.” And I was like, “Oh my god, I’m glad we stopped recording because you get cancelled for saying something like that.” Like, “Rich white billionaire wonders why slavery ended.” That’s bad PR for you.
Shaan Puri: No, but then he had a really good answer. He’s like, “Because slavery was not just a human rights issue. It was actually also the economic model of the times.” So he’s like, “Slavery had been around for a long time and in many different places. It sprung up organically. It’s not like one system that was ported everywhere. Different countries each came to the same place.”
Sam Parr: I think he said the aqueducts in Rome were built by slaves.
Shaan Puri: Yeah. Pyramids were built by slaves. The aqueducts were built by slaves. He’s like, “It was the functioning economic model. So it got me curious: why did it ever end?”
Sam Parr: Yeah.
Shaan Puri: And he didn’t mean it—just to be super clear—he was not saying it’s a good thing. He was literally thinking from first principles: “Huh, isn’t that interesting that this thing that was working for thousands of years and then all of a sudden it stopped.” So you’d be curious what stopped it. And he’s like, “Haiti was the only place where it was a bottoms-up successful revolution where they just decided to change the rules.” It was different than the Civil War, for example.
And so he was like, “That’s what got me curious,” and I thought, “Ah, there it is. There’s your weird bone.” I found your special sauce. You asked a question that the rest of us would have never asked. You leaned in and got curious about something that we would have all just accepted at face value.
There are so many of these in life. You realize this when you have kids and they’re like, “Well, how does this building get built?” “So there’s people.” “What? Where do people come from?” And you’re like, “Oh my god.” You realize how shallow your knowledge of the world actually is. Not just scientific, by the way.
My son was like, “Why can boys show their nipples and not girls? We’re going to the pool.” And I’m telling my daughter, “No, no, you need to wear your swimsuit.” And my son couldn’t find his. And I was like, “It’s fine. Just go in.” He’s like, “But why?” And I was like, “Honestly, I have no idea why. That would be horrible if she did it and it’s totally fine if you do it. I have no clue.” There’s all these things we just sort of accept. We just take it because it’s too much mental energy to go try to answer every question. And the great ones get curious about obvious things. They see things on the floor that the rest of us aren’t looking at and they just pick it up and that’s where they become great.
Sam Parr: I love this topic because Eddie Murphy has a documentary on Netflix. It’s so good. It’s two hours. People forget how impactful he was. Turn off this podcast. Go on YouTube, just type “Eddie Murphy Raw” and just go watch that.
Shaan Puri: Yes. And so we talk about that. Basically Eddie Murphy was famous starting at the age of 18. Eddie Murphy was on SNL at the age of 18. It’s a whole documentary about his creative process, but also it’s really interesting. Eddie Murphy was famous at 18 in New York City. When he was 22, he was the star of Beverly Hills Cop. He was the most famous guy on earth and he hung out with all the craziest people. All of those guys now—Prince, Rick James—all these guys are dead because they were drug addicts. And he was like, “I was sober the whole time. I don’t drink, I don’t do drugs.”
Anyway, he talks about being funny and he was like, “I don’t really think of myself as a comedian. I’m an artist and I express myself via comedy but I could do anything.” He’s done serious movies, he’s done action movies. It’s very inspiring. But he has one line that has stuck with me. He was like, “The thing about comedians, I think what makes us special is that we’re actually more sensitive to everything.”
So the best comedian—if I buy a new car and the car comes home and the dealer is standing right in front of me and I can point out a scratch that no one noticed because I just notice it first, that becomes the comedy and that becomes the bit. Or if I walk into a house and there’s this one little tiny smell, I’m going to be the first person that says it because I’m the most sensitive.
The thing that you’re describing with Ben—I’ve always noticed this with good comedians. Shane Gillis does this. He’ll read history and he’ll retell this very funny bit about George Washington, this one little thing. I read tons of history. I would have skipped over that three-sentence story. I think what separates these really insightful people like Ben who asked the right questions is that they’re very sensitive and they find one or two lines and they’re like, “That is very interesting to me. That is the truth. That is the right question.” And I think Eddie Murphy did the exact same thing when he said, “We are just more sensitive to everyone.” And so our threshold of something that grabs us is lower.
Shaan Puri: It’s a great observation. They notice what the rest of us ignore.
Sam Parr: And if you think about great investors, what do they do? They just sort of notice that this company is not being understood properly. It’s mispriced. It’s misunderstood. They go and bet against consensus in a way. Why do they do that? You first have to notice in this pile of stocks which one is the one that’s mispriced.
There’s these great stories about Buffett and he’d read the Moody’s Manual front to back. He’s reading company profiles. It’s 2,000 pages or something like that. It’s like a bible and it’s just company financials and company prospectus. He would read the whole thing and all he’s trying to do is just notice for something that makes him curious. “Hm, that’s weird. Has this much earnings but the price is only this. I wonder why. Oh, it’s because this is believed. Is that true? How does that work? And what if this happens?” It’s very hard.
Shaan Puri: And so you see it in investing. You see it in comedy. Comedy is the art of noticing. I have this running doc on my phone called “Seinfeld Premises.” It’s basically like, what would be the premise of a Seinfeld joke? Seinfeld’s the master of observational humor. And so when you turn this part of your brain on that starts to notice the hilariousness of human life, you start to notice things that don’t make any sense.
For example, Seinfeld talks about this power of observation. He’s like, “When you’re on the phone with somebody and the call drops and they call you back and they’re like, ‘Hey, sorry, I don’t know what happened.’” And he goes, “Of course you don’t know what happened. You don’t even know how this is happening. Does any of us even know how a phone works as if we could know the reason the call dropped?” What a hilarious, ridiculous thing to say. And then he builds off that premise which is like, we all say this thing and what nonsense. Of course you don’t know what happened. You don’t know how a microwave works. You don’t know how anything works. And then he could build off that and turn it into a joke.
I started doing this and so I have this list of just things that I’ve noticed over the past three years. I’ve never done stand-up comedy. I always secretly want to.
Sam Parr: Dude, you’ve been talking about it for years. You just got to pick a date.
Shaan Puri: But I’ll give you one that’s on this list that I just had. I took a flight and right before boarding, they’re like, “Platinum America Global Elites, whatever,” right? And they’re like, “Any military vets?” And a soldier basically walked up and got to board the plane 30 seconds before us. And I looked around and I’m like, “That’s it? That was the perk he got?” This guy fought the war. He still had to go through TSA security. He is security. This guy should be getting a parade on the plane. It’s insane that all he got to do was board after Global Elite, but before Group One. I was like, “What a shame.”
Sam Parr: Dude, I always thought that way about medals. When they give you a medal, I’m like, “All that for a medal?” The same thing my son got after soccer this year: a medal.
So it’s just this art of noticing the things that are just taken at face value. I think as an entrepreneur you want to be doing this. As a technologist you want to be doing this. A big part of technology—the big wave right now is AI. The funny thing about AI is that all the big companies, all the companies that were winning in AI and all the people who are leading those companies, they were not the OGs of AI. AI’s been around and talked about for 50 years and the study of neural networks and all the underlying technology—there were experts. None of the experts are the ones who started these companies.
Why is that? It’s because they were so far in it they actually didn’t notice that something changed. It’s like they were so lost in the sauce that they did not realize this time it’s different. Even the core thing that changed at all was this Transformers paper written by Google. Google had been pouring billions into machine learning and neural networks and all this stuff.
Shaan Puri: Who, Sam?
Sam Parr: No, Sam (Altman) was an outsider to this whole thing. That paper at Google was written by these seven or eight guys. The seminal paper called “Attention Is All You Need.” And “Attention Is All You Need” was this breakthrough, this realization that, “Wait a minute, all you need is this,” and then suddenly the outputs changed.
This was written inside of Google who has spent billions of dollars on this and Google wasn’t the one to use it. They just released this paper, nothing. And then it was others out in the field that were like, “Huh, that’s actually pretty interesting. That’s new, that’s novel. So that means if that’s true, then we could try this and maybe we’ll get a new result this time.” And suddenly the computer could figure out what’s a cat and what’s a hot dog. All these things that were previously hard were now actually very doable. And so then that’s where this wave happened and now all eight of those people from Google have since left and they’re a part of the big AI companies now.
It’s amazing that Google itself, which was looking for the treasure—the metal detector started beeping and they just kept walking down the beach. They just didn’t stop and dig. It takes a beginner’s mind to be able to stop and dig, right? To answer your question of who did notice, I would say first it was DeepMind. So this guy Demis Hassabis—
Shaan Puri: That’s a Google company, right?
Sam Parr: So Google ended up having to buy that company. DeepMind was doing really interesting work. Google buys it for half a billion dollars many years ago. Then Elon notices. He’s like, “Wow, what DeepMind can do is what they’ve been talking about with AI for 40 years, but nobody’s freaking out about this.” And Elon’s like, “I shall freak out about this.”
He starts realizing that Google has a monopoly on AI. And he viewed AI as an existential threat. And he viewed Larry Page, which was his friend at the time, as somebody who does not care about AI safety because he would talk to Larry about AI safety and Larry would brush it off. Larry basically viewed it as the evolution of man. We’re going to go from homo sapiens to this new species of AI plus human. That’s what’s going to happen. And Elon was like, “This is crazy.” And so he decided to help create OpenAI which was a counterweight to Google which had a monopoly on AI talent and research. He’s like, “We will get researchers and we will open source the material because Google would never do that and that will be a good counterweight to this.” So, he noticed the difference there, which is kind of crazy.
Seinfeld and the Importance of Proportion [00:42:00]
Sam Parr: I don’t know what we’re going to call this episode, but this is one of the most interesting ones that we’ve ever had. You had a really good thing in your Five Tweet Tuesday email. You said a Jerry Seinfeld quote. The context of this quote is that Jerry Seinfeld turned down the most amount of money ever in TV history. Apparently, he turned down $110 million for one more season of Seinfeld. The reporter asked him, “Why? Why not do one more season?”
And Jerry says—this is so good—“The most important word in art is proportion. How much? How many words? How many minutes? Too much cake, too much of anything changes the whole feeling of it. Getting proportion right is what makes it art or makes it mediocre.”
Shaan Puri: So good. Right.
Sam Parr: So good.
Shaan Puri: We should end there. That’s beautiful. That’s it. That’s just the best.