Sam and Shaan recap the massive listener reaction to their Rob Dyrdek episode, dig into Rob’s meticulous time-tracking calendar, and riff on calendar philosophy and energy audits. Sam pitches BrüMate as a case study in scaling to $20M with zero employees using Facebook ads and pre-sales, then pivots to a broader drinkware landscape. Shaan covers Shahid Khan — Pakistani immigrant, dishwasher turned $9B bumper mogul and Jacksonville Jaguars owner — as Billionaire of the Week. They also cover FYPM (Glassdoor for influencers), Pump (bite-sized investor updates), rental businesses, and close with Sam’s half-serious pivot to becoming a fitness influencer.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host), Shaan Puri (host), Ben (producer)
Intro and Rob Dyrdek Recap [00:00:00]
Shaan: All right, do you want to do a recap on Rob Dyrdek? Because I’ve been getting blown up about that.
Sam: Blown up?
Shaan: Yeah. This is, I would say, definitely the biggest reaction we’ve had to an episode in a long time. Maybe ever.
Sam: Ever. I’d probably say ever. The one thing I got was basically people saying, “This is not just the best podcast you guys have done — this is maybe the best episode I’ve ever listened to of any podcast.” And I don’t… it definitely wasn’t us that made it great. But he was pretty amazing, right?
Shaan: He was. And I didn’t know how it would turn out. I remember literally being amazed in the moment — the things he was saying were very surprising to me, very interesting. I wanted to know more, and he was very open. That was dope. But you never know how the episode turns out. There’s all these different factors, you know — audio quality, do people care what this person has to say, are they interested in what we’re interested in?
Sam: Well, people definitely dug it.
Shaan: Yeah, you’re right. People were saying, “My top three podcast episodes this year: Naval on Tim Ferriss, Rob on your guys’ pod, and then whatever some Reply All podcast that happened.” So it was like, not just “this is y’all’s best” but “this is one of the best I’ve ever heard.” There were people tweeting, “All right, this is the fourth person that mentioned this to me — I gotta go listen today.” Something definitely happened. I’m curious what the numbers are going to show.
Sam: The numbers are good. I’ve looked at them.
Rob Dyrdek’s Time-Tracking Calendar [00:04:00]
Sam: Okay, so Rob Dyrdek on the podcast mentioned his schedule, and I was curious about it. So I actually asked him to email me what it looked like, and he sent me a screenshot. I sent it to you, Shaan. Can you read what it is? At first glance, what does it look like?
Shaan: It’s a picture of his calendar. So it looks like — well, there’s a few views, but the one I’m looking at — I would say it’s a combination between like a P&L, like a cash flow statement, and or like a research doc put out by Gartner about industry trends. This doesn’t look like one person’s weekly schedule. And if you look at the view of his calendar, every single minute of his day is marked off.
Sam: Every minute?
Shaan: Yeah, it’s blocked off. Now some of it could be like, you know, free time — family and kids. So it’s not saying he’s working all the time. But every minute is accounted for. Every minute has a purpose. And it says here: “I track every hour of every day throughout the day and tag each entry. I have a script written that pulls the time and populates it into two spreadsheets — one is daily time use and the other is monthly averages.”
Sam: So should we look at his monthly average real quick?
Shaan: Yeah. All right, so monthly average — let’s take September. He’s got sleep: 6.9 hours. Health: 1.2 hours. Life — like family and things like that — 7.8 hours. Work: 8.1 hours per day. And it’s pretty consistent. Work never goes below — the lowest month was February at 5.8 hours, highest month was October at 9.3 hours. Sleep is almost always 6.8 or 6.9 hours per day. So this is a pretty meticulous thing.
And by the way, in the work category he’s got TV shows — like here’s his TV shows, here’s how many hours he’s spending on them.
Sam: Not watching TV — making TV.
Shaan: Yeah, making his TV shows. And then there’s like the Dyrdek Machine, which is kind of like his business that builds businesses. And then there’s “other” — random meetings and stuff. In health he’s got gym, meditation, personal care, other. For life he’s got him and his wife, kids, friends and social, and other. This is sick.
Sam: Do you think this works for you? Because you and I joke like — the best days are when there’s nothing on the calendar and when people cancel stuff. That feels like the best day to me. Although sometimes I feel lazy and sometimes I feel meaningless. Do you like to operate with an open calendar or what?
Calendar Philosophy and Night Owl vs. Early Bird [00:10:00]
Shaan: I’ll tell you two things. Do I want to be scheduled or unscheduled? I want to be the complete opposite of this — I want to be completely unscheduled. And I don’t know why that is, because it used to be the opposite.
My calendar used to look a lot like his. I used to block things out at a high level: work block one, lunch, work block two, gym, family time, end of night, hobby, reading, random stuff. I used to schedule out my day like that. And then in a week I’d have one day where I do 90 minutes of random meetings — interesting people, no agenda, just cool people meeting cool people. I still have that.
But for the most part I’ve gone away from a highly scheduled day to an unscheduled day — meaning I don’t schedule it in advance. On the day of, I decide what I’m going to do and how I’m going to spend today. But I don’t decide that two weeks in advance.
So when somebody says “can we meet,” I have a simple rule: do I want to meet you? If I want to do a call, would you like to do it right now? If not, I’ll say I can’t do it right now but I’ll give you a call in an hour or two. And if I don’t want to do it at all, I just say sorry, I don’t want to meet. I don’t schedule it for three weeks from now — which is what I used to do. I’d say “I don’t want to do this, but okay, I’m free two weeks from now.” Then two weeks shows up and I’m like, I gotta do this call I didn’t want to do, and now I definitely don’t want to do it.
Sam: It keeps me up the night before sometimes.
Shaan: Yeah. So I’m much more of an unscheduled person. But on the day of, I decide how I’m going to use today’s time.
Sam: His calendar was amazing. I think it’s going to be quite popular when you post it.
Shaan: Maybe we’ll have to divvy up who posts what, because we both don’t have the gold.
Sam: All right. So let me ask — did you ever do this time-tracking thing? Because I also went through an aggressive time-tracking phase. I wanted to share one learning from that.
Shaan: I was never aggressive about it. I prefer open time. I prefer working from midnight until like 3 AM — that’s when I do a lot of my best work. So if I have to do any type of copywriting, I’ll hang out all day, read, have fun. Sarah’s like “when are you going to do work?” And I’m like, “When you go to bed.” Then from midnight to three, sometimes midnight to four, I can do golden work.
Sam: I have a theory about this. Furhan — who was my technical co-founder of my previous company, he’s been on the pod — he was the same way. He would roll into work at 11, 11:30. He’d start his work day with lunch. You’d think this is the laziest guy ever, but he was massively hard-working. He was just up till 5 AM on average.
So he sleeps six hours, wakes up at 11, comes in. And even when he was at work we’d take like an hour just to play video games, and I was like, “Dude, why do you use your time this way?” He said, “I figured this out for myself early on — the time I spend during the day, I’m basically just trying to exhaust myself. I want to have conversations, manage other people, read stuff, eat lunch, go work out. I’m basically just trying to get my brain to slow down.”
He wanted to get into this almost half-sleepy state — not sleepy meaning you can’t function, but that point where you’re kind of loopy. And for him, that’s when he could do creative work. Programming is creative work. From midnight to 4 AM he wrote his best code. Nobody bothers him, nobody talks to him, he doesn’t have to meet anybody, he just goes into flow state.
Shaan: That’s exactly what I’m describing.
Sam: And I think through Furhan I figured out that if you’re trying to do creative work, you need to be more relaxed, less distracted, and a little loopy — because it adds a bit of serendipity into your brain. Your brain’s willing to play with different ideas and go in different directions.
Also, I believe 23andMe has a line item on one of their attributes about whether you’re a night owl or an early person. I think a lot of this stuff is genetic. Whatever it is, you should just go all in on it.
I mean, the world is set up for early risers. If you get up at 5 AM and get stuff done, you win. So if you’re a night person, you’ve got to go against the grain, which sucks.
Here’s a good example: the founder of Box — Aaron Levy. I was friends with his assistant and she told me he has no meetings until 11 AM, because he works until 5 AM.
Bezos is the opposite — he wants all his meetings from 8 AM to noon. All important decisions by then because his brain is functioning best. After that, no heavy topics or key decisions.
And Rob Dyrdek on his calendar — 4:30 AM wake-up call pretty much every single day. So it’s just whatever works for you, and you want to play to that. I spent many years trying to wake up at 5 AM to be more productive. Waking up three hours earlier was way harder than just staying up three hours later. Why fight what’s easy for me?
The Calendar Audit / Energy Audit [00:19:00]
Shaan: Here’s one thing that is worth doing. I tried to track every hour to see how I’m using it — time is your most precious asset, so I wanted to see how it gets spent. That was a little exhausting. Hopefully someday there will be tools that make this easy passively.
But one thing that is amazing: a calendar audit. Some people call it an energy audit. Basically you take one week, keep track of roughly how you used each hour. Then the next week you pull up last week’s calendar and you take three colored markers — green, red, and yellow. You go through how you spent your time: which blocks gave you energy, mark those green. Which felt like it sucked all the energy out of you and you felt like your soul had been sucked out, mark those red. Neutral things, yellow.
Then you look at the painting — your color spread — and you’re like, “Wow, that’s a lot of red,” or “hey, that’s actually pretty good, that’s a lot of green.” And you just audit. All you’re doing is trimming the fat. This week I’m going to do less of the red stuff — by avoiding it, automating it, or delegating it. You improve it by one week at a time.
If you do that, it’s an amazing way to manage not your calendar for efficiency, but for maximizing your energy. When you feel your best, you’re going to perform your best.
Sam: I think Bezos said something similar — the stuff you should eliminate, you can answer by asking: will this work just fine if I don’t make this decision? If life will be okay without it, eliminate it.
Shaan: You want to talk about some ideas?
Sam: Yeah, let’s do some other stuff.
BrüMate: $20M Revenue with Zero Employees [00:24:00]
Shaan: Have you heard of BrüMate?
Sam: No. And I’m not a coffee drinker — is it a coffee thing?
Shaan: It doesn’t have to be. So BrüMate — spelled B-R-U-M-A-T-E — their first thing was basically a koozie. And now they make tumblers. You know, like a thermos. They make koozies, water bottles, cups for cold and hot stuff.
The reason this interested me: my company, Trends — trends.co — we did a story on BrüMate. They interviewed the founder and got a picture of the revenue. Check this out.
Jacob, who’s the founder, grew BrüMate to $20 million in revenue without a single employee. The company launched in 2016. Revenue was basically nothing in 2016, single digit hundreds of thousands maybe close to a million in 2017, getting close to $20 million in 2018, over $25 million in 2019, $100 million in 2020. And he did most of this with agencies and contractors — not a single full-time employee until after $20 million in revenue.
It got me thinking: one, that’s amazing. That’s like the greatest thing ever. And two, these water bottle and cup businesses — if you told me you were going to start that I’d be like, “Dude, that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of.” But there are so many examples of these becoming huge.
For example: there’s a business called S’well. Water bottles. Over $100 million in revenue. There’s Corksicle — over $80 million in revenue. There’s one called bkr — they sell a water bottle for $185. It’s glass with rubber around it so you don’t shatter it.
Sam: Who would have thought?
Shaan: Yeah, crazy. How’d he scale?
Sam: So he created a landing page, drove Facebook ads to it, got a pre-launch email list of 6,000 people, sent those folks an email to buy it, they bought it, and he used that money to go build the product.
Shaan: Classic.
Sam: And working capital is always very hard for e-commerce businesses. He couldn’t get a line of credit early, so he did pre-sales. Then through pre-sales he got an expensive line of credit. He got an SBA loan, Shopify Capital, PayPal Working Capital, Amazon Lending — he’d use one to pay the next. After doing an audit, he got a $2 million line of credit and now raised $20 million.
Shaan: In a way, I think these people are so audacious. If this guy Jacob came to me and said, “I’m going to launch a water bottle,” I’d be like, “You’re an idiot, this is the stupidest thing ever.” You know who else I would’ve said that to? Movement watches. This guy Jacob Kassan — he launched this company called Movement. Watches from China. He starts selling them, makes them a little better. Sold the company for $200 million.
I’ve talked to him and he’s like, “Well, why not? People buy watches. Why won’t they buy mine?” That confidence is awesome.
Sam: It takes guts. And I think you want to go on one end of the spectrum or the other. Either hyper-niche — “for a specific type of toe fungus, this is the best cream” — or everybody-everyday problems. Keeping beverages hot and cold is everybody-everyday. Your ads apply to everybody.
I’ve been looking at different water brands — Waterloo, which Lance Armstrong invested in, they’re at $50 million in sales. There’s a brand called Ugly Water — the founder sent me a case, by the way, thank you. Crushing it, doing millions in sales. Liquid Death — probably $100 million in sales. Just canned water. You know, my trainer was talking to me yesterday like, “Bro, let’s start a coconut water brand.” And I was like, yeah, we should. Coconut water is a massive market.
Shaan: And by the way, if somebody wants to start a coconut water brand with me — just email me at shaan@shawnpuri.com. Because I want to start one. And by “start” I mean I want you to do most of the work and I’ll do virtually nothing.
Billionaire of the Week: Shahid Khan [00:37:00]
Sam: Can you talk about this Khan guy, the NFL owner?
Shaan: Yes. Oh, by the way, before we get there — we got a new producer, Ben. Ben, come on. One of the things I’m going to ask him to do is make sure we do our segments like Billionaire of the Week — people love that segment. And we gotta have a little jingle whenever we go to that segment.
Ben: We’ll try out a sound on this episode and see how people feel about it.
Shaan: And you gotta replace Abreu at the end when we ask how we did. He gave us the straight talk. “A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A billion dollars.” Anyway, back to the Billionaire of the Week.
So this guy’s name is Shahid Khan. He’s from Pakistan. His story is kind of insane. He moved to America at age 16. First job was a dishwasher, making $1.60 an hour. Today he’s worth $9 billion personally.
Sam: I know him. He’s incredibly recognizable. He looks like a badass — like someone who’s built respect because they seem formidable, but also like they like to party.
Shaan: He’s got a sick mustache. It’s like almost twirled at the ends. Amazing.
So he starts off as a dishwasher, sleeping at the YMCA. Now that he’s super rich he donates millions to the YMCA because he’s like, “Dude, I used to hide in here and sleep because it was so cold outside and I couldn’t afford where I was supposed to live.”
He got rich by building custom bumpers for cars. Truck bumpers, car bumpers, that sort of thing.
Here’s how it all worked. He graduates as an engineering student, gets a job at a manufacturing company that does car bumpers. Works his way up over maybe five to seven years, eventually leading the engineering operations. And he’s like, “This is so inefficient. We get all these different parts and jam them together to make a bumper. It’s really heavy, clunky, kind of ugly.” He tries to convince the company to change the design, but they’re not listening. So he says, “Screw it, I’ll spin out my own company.”
He quits, takes $16,000 in personal savings, gets a $50,000 SBA loan, and starts his own bumper company. He’s getting some small customers, making progress. And then he gets sued by his previous employer — “You stole trade secrets, you’re competing with us.”
He can’t afford a lawyer. The company’s bigger, they have deeper pockets — their strategy is just to bleed him out. So he comes up with a plan: he hires the cheapest lawyer he can find just to stall the case, costing him almost nothing while costing them a lot. Then he goes to the library every night after business operations and starts studying law so he can actually defend himself.
Sam: Saul Goodman type.
Shaan: Exactly. He ends up winning the case. And along the way, that company — which I think was called Flex-N-Gate — was losing like $50,000 a month. Their business wasn’t healthy. So after he wins the case, he takes his money and buys out the company that was suing him.
Sam: A consolidation and a move.
Shaan: Total move. And he had designed this bumper that was like a slick, continuous piece — not a bunch of parts jammed together. Way more lightweight. The car companies loved it. Better for fuel efficiency, easier for manufacturing, cheaper. They start going to him. He lands Suzuki, then Toyota. And as of today, I think something like 30% of all cars use his bumpers. His personal net worth has ballooned to $9 billion.
And then he bought the Jacksonville Jaguars. He tried to buy the Denver Broncos, but at the last minute the minority owner had right of first refusal and exercised it. That was Stan Kroenke. But he became friends with the Jaguars ownership and bought that team instead.
Sam: The Jaguars are kind of one of the bottom-of-the-barrel franchises. Never really a high-profile team, small market.
Shaan: Right. So he’s like, “How do I play this to my advantage?” Ticket sales are low. He digs into why — it’s just too expensive for the average fan. So he does something pretty radical: he lets any fan bring their own food to the games. The opposite of every other stadium, where the ticket is cheap but the hot dog is $30.
Sam: Yeah.
Shaan: And what ends up happening is ticket sales go up and food revenue actually went up too once people got inside. Counter-intuitive. He put a fantasy football tracker on the scoreboard. He pimped out the locker room for players — very similar to what Mark Cuban did with the Mavs.
He now owns AWE, which is like a head-to-head competitor with WWE — a wrestling promotion. He’s got this crazy yacht called Kismet. To rent it costs $1.2 million per week, and that excludes food, fuel, and dockage. Beyoncé and Jay-Z rented it for their Italy vacation. I think it’s like a $200 million yacht.
Sam: What’s your biggest takeaway from him?
Shaan: I love this rags to riches story. There are a lot of people who could do this — you’re in a company, you see things done inefficiently, and if you had the guts you’d basically be able to spin out and know your competitor inside and out because you were there as a leader. You know where their weaknesses are, what the customer needs are. And if you start to chip away, you can make a lot more than you’d ever make climbing the corporate ladder there.
I also loved some of the atypical bets he’s making, like going into wrestling. Most people would say, “There’s no way that’ll work.” But there’s always a perpetual number two to WWE. He doesn’t need to become WWE. There’s always been a number two — WCW back in the day. And WWE tends to buy out all their competition. So he might end up flipping it to them someday.
Sam: I’m reading this old New York Times piece from 2011 — “Jaguars buyer had his eyes on franchise ownership and the dream has come true.” And he talks about how to him, owning a team was an American thing. He gets a lot of racism too — there were ticket holders in Jacksonville who canceled because “an American didn’t own the team.” And he’s like, “We are Americans.”
Shaan: Of course. Still fighting certain battles. But I dig this. And it’s interesting — I feel like every Billionaire of the Week we’ve done features an immigrant. There’s definitely a recurring theme.
Sam: We’ve got to do an American-born Billionaire of the Week.
Shaan: No, I like the immigrant stories. I prefer those.
FYPM and Review Platforms for Niche Industries [00:51:00]
Sam: Let me tell you about a cool website I found. It’s called F-You-Pay-Me — fypm.vip. It’s kind of like Glassdoor slash Yelp for influencers. If you’re an influencer, you can log on and see which brands are easy to work with, how much they pay, and whether people want to work with them again.
I think this is cool for a couple reasons. The biggest one is just the product itself. But also — these types of businesses are actually incredibly easy to set up. It’s probably WordPress with a login or something. You could build this in two or three days.
There’s another one called vcguide.co — same model but for venture capitalists. Most basic looking website you’ve ever seen, just a list of names where people leave reviews on VCs.
I think there’s a lot of really cool businesses that could be built with this model. For publishers like Bustle — they pay freelancers by the article or by the word. You could build a price-per-article database for publishers. Basically “how much does anyone pay for anything” in terms of freelance work.
Shaan: I think this is a great niche business to start. It was started by a couple of influencers, right? Scratching their own itch — at some point you get tired of working with clients that don’t pay up or try to renege on deals. You band together. You already have a network of friends who do this, you have trust, you know the problem.
And if you’re in any industry — like automotive manufacturing — and you have 50 friends who work in that business, you could pretty easily get this going. These are addicting. You start checking your name all the time.
Sam: You want to know what people are saying about you.
Rental Businesses and the Moving Bins Update [00:57:00]
Shaan: Actually, speaking of ideas — someone emailed me. He goes, “Thank you for that idea,” and screenshots $10,000. We had done an idea, either here on the pod or on Twitter, about moving bins — basically renting out heavy-duty plastic bins for people when they move. You pack your stuff, move to the new place, unpack, return the bins. He emailed: “It’s been a long slog, I’m not saying it was easy, but I’ve made $10,000 from these bins. Thanks for the idea. It’s been great side income for me in my city.” I’m like, oh, this is cool.
Sam: Have you ever been to the grocery store and seen one of those carpet cleaner rentals? Not a vacuum — like a deep clean machine. You push it around, it’s meant for heavy-duty carpet cleaning.
Shaan: Oh yeah, like you rent it for $200 a day.
Sam: Those things can last 10,000 to 15,000 hours and they rent out for like $200 a day, or about $20 an hour. So I looked at this one day and I asked the store people how often they rent — and they’re like, “All the time. It’s always being rented out.” It costs like $800 to buy. I’m like, this is brilliant.
This goes back to our teenage side hustle idea. If you’re a teenager, or you have a teenager, just get one of these. Then teach your kid how to make a simple one-page sales letter and Yelp ad. Drop the letters under everyone’s door in the neighborhood: “Hey, I live over here. I bought this cleaner — here’s the before and after of my carpet. I’m not going to use it again. I’ll rent it to you for 40 bucks. Text me, I’ll bring it to your house. If you want me to do it for you, I’ll do it for $150.”
That’s such a good teenage side hustle. You learn sales, marketing, a little unit economics. Making your first dollar as a business is massively underrated. I didn’t make my first dollar — like not a job, but me creating a product and selling it to someone — until I was like 22. I wish that 22 was 12.
Shaan: If you’re 29 or 39 and you’ve just never done this, I really encourage you to go make your first dollar as a side hustle. Make a product or find a product and sell it. It’ll change the way you look at things.
Sam: That’s what I told Sarah when she was doing her course — I’m like, if you just make one dollar, it’s going to change your life.
Pump: Private Twitter for Investors [01:06:00]
Sam: You wrote great investor updates. I used to get them even though I wasn’t actually an investor in The Hustle. It was just like — clear, right mix of info, not too much and not too little, clear ask if you needed something.
Shaan: I see a lot of companies using that same template now. Kevin Lee from the Ramen Company — his updates look exactly the same.
I wish more of the founders I invested in would do it. Mine are either like ultra-detailed — “we hired this engineer who used to work here” — and I’m like, okay, I’m glad you did that, but what does that matter to me? Too in the weeds. And then they’ll leave out: how many customers do you have, how much money is in the bank, what do you need, what are your goals.
Sam: Anyways. I think investor updates are a really healthy practice but they take a lot of time to write and read.
Shaan: I saw this company called Pump. Basically: take your cap table and let you do Twitter-sized updates about your company. Post a photo of something cool that’s going on, or a chart. More frequent updates, more transparent, easier to read, easier to write, more interaction between investors and founders because I can just hit like or write a quick reply.
It’s basically a private Twitter feed for just you and your investors. I was looking at it as a potential investment because I really like this idea.
Sam: I actually think this is cool. There was another company called Cabal that was supposed to be for collaborating with investors. This seems way better. I’d invest in that company. If you’re the founder, hit us up.
Sam’s Fitness Influencer Pivot [01:12:00]
Sam: You want to talk about my influencer update?
Shaan: I was going to start with this because I found it hilarious and awesome. Sam texts the other day — and I’m like, okay, are you joking or not?
Sam: I was not joking. More serious than joking.
Shaan: Sam texts: “I’m thinking about stopping trying to be a business influencer and just becoming a fitness influencer. I don’t know if my face is good enough though.” Then you sent me this link to a Reddit post where you’re like, “My fitness journey, here I am at 12% body fat, here’s my photos.” I’m like, oh, he’s actually trying to do this. So what is this? What are you doing?
Sam: Did you see my Instagram video?
Shaan: Yeah, I saw it.
Sam: Here’s why I think it’s cool. I love exercise, I love to work out, and I’m a little bored of just business content. Late at night I go to Instagram and I love watching videos of ripped guys stretch. There are these dudes who do calisthenics — they’re on bars, they do the splits, they move their legs above their head. They’re not jacked, just skinny and very flexible. And I’m like, this is the way to live life. Just stretching all day and filming it? That seems awesome.
Shaan: You can do that.
Sam: That’s how I want to live right now. I also — once I sold the company I got a little depressed because I live such a soft life. I don’t have any real threats. I never have to fight, never have to hunt for food, never afraid of getting eaten by a lion. I need some action and adventure.
Shaan: Too comfortable.
Sam: So the fitness thing seemed cool. Let’s just learn how to box or do something interesting and document it. And I’ve loved it.
I love Nick Bear — he’s this huge beast of a guy who came on our podcast. He just runs marathons and lifts weights all day and I’m like, that sounds awesome.
Shaan: When you say “might do this” — what does that actually mean? You’re going to literally become a fitness influencer?
Sam: I think I could build a large following. I’ve barely posted on Instagram and I have like 5,000 followers. I think I could build this reputation as a fitness-slash-business type of guy.
Shaan: Fitness and business, but specifically about stretching?
Sam: Any fitness. I’m going to focus on boxing and weightlifting right now because that’s what I love. But I think stretching is the way to go — this whole mobility movement is huge.
Shaan: How committed are you to the influencer part?
Sam: I haven’t decided. The reaction to my Reddit post — someone said “your body fat is probably X” and I was like, “oh my god, someone recognizes us.” And the Instagram thing got popular. But here’s my thing: getting famous on social media is really cool, and it will also make you very unhappy. That’s my biggest fear — do I actually want to spend time going down this hedonistic path dedicated to something that maybe isn’t that important?
But it does seem kind of neat. So anyway — that’s my rant. I’m becoming a fitness influencer. I think I could have, like, girl-next-door energy. Not intimidating, but impressive.
Shaan: Like you can do it too.
Sam: Yeah, exactly. “He’s just a regular guy.” I’ve got girl-next-door abs.
Also, the accountability is good. I put it out there — right now I weigh 203 pounds, I’m probably 12 to 14% body fat. I said publicly I want to weigh 185 in three months. A lot of people saw that. Now if they see me eating like an idiot they’re going to confront me. My in-laws saw me and they’re like, “We can’t go to that place for dinner anymore.”
The ChopFit Axe and Outro [01:22:00]
Shaan: Okay, I want to post the ChopFit thing. Do me a favor — tonight or tomorrow whenever you work out, do it shirtless outside in the sun and take a video of you doing this and post it on Twitter. I promise it’ll get at least 25,000 views.
Sam: I work out with no shirt every day in the sun. It feels amazing.
Shaan: Then record the whole thing.
Sam: I take snippets because… I’m going from fat to fit, not fit to really fit. You’ve got to be strategic. You don’t want to post a bad before. I’m storing up ammo for the epic montage. Right now I’m like a good “before” photo, but I had a “way before” that I’ve been working away from. I’m not “after” yet.
Shaan: That’s a bad move. Maybe you should be posting everything.
Sam: I think it has a bigger impact if I do the before and after when it’s actually impressive.
Shaan: Fair enough. All right, this is the episode where we’ve both decided we’re going to become fitness influencers.
Sam: You should post a picture with that axe, by the way.
Shaan: I don’t want to be a fitness influencer. I want to do it for myself. I’ve never been someone who’s ripped. One of the reasons I’m doing it — I said it out there, so now I have accountability. You start posting, the reason another reason I’m doing it is I said it out there — so when my in-laws or whoever sees me, they know.
Sam: All right, Ben — how did we do?
Ben: This one was weird but I think people are really going to like it. I think people like weird. Eight and a half out of ten overall.
Sam: I’ll take that. What was the weakest part?
Ben: The weakest part — probably the middle, talking about water bottles and stuff. Interesting but the weakest. The strongest was the energy audit and time tracking, sleep talk, when you guys work — that started super strong. And it ended super strong with the fitness journey.
Shaan: The “Sam Hose Water” thing was by far my favorite part of the whole episode.
Sam: Is that a real thing — people used to call you Hose Water?
Shaan: No, but I love it. Dude, are you considered funny? Because I find you really funny. You’re funny in a surprising way. I feel like you think you’re funny but that other people don’t give you credit for it.
Sam: I think I’m not that funny, and I think most people don’t think I’m funny. I have like a Norm Macdonald humor — you’re either into it or you’re not.
Ben: Just so everyone has the background — that joke Shaan told about Sam saying “I’m going to own a lake someday” — he posted it in Slack and then badgered us like five times afterwards. “Did you guys see that joke? Was it good? Anybody read that?” And we were like, “Yeah, it was good.” Then Ben comes in and says, “Shaan, it was really funny when you said this thing.” And Sam was like, “What the hell, dude? My lake joke was way better than that.”
Sam: This makes our life sound cooler than it really is.
Shaan: Future owner of the Lakers. Future owner of a lake.
Sam: All right.