This episode of the My First Million podcast features Sam Parr and Shaan Puri discussing the unique business model of a man in Japan who gets paid to “do nothing,” as well as the broader societal implications of loneliness and the rise of “rent-a-friend” services. The hosts also explore the concept of “blue-collar side hustles” and share personal anecdotes about their own experiences with community and unconventional business ventures.
Topics: Rent-a-friend, loneliness epidemic, Hikikomori, Kodokushi, side hustles, community building, marketing stunts, business models.
The Do-Nothing Man [00:00]
Sam Parr: All right, Sam, I got to tell you about this. There is a guy in Japan who I read about who is making $80,000 a year for doing nothing. And they call him the “do-nothing man.” Have you ever heard of this guy?
Shaan Puri: No, where’d you read about this?
Sam Parr: Well, I originally saw it, I don’t even know where, I saw it somewhere, and I was fascinated because what happened is this guy was at work and his boss called him a “do-nothing man,” and he, like, was insulting him, as like, “Dude, you just do nothing, you don’t really add anything, you don’t provide any value.” And he says that he thought to himself and he goes, “Hmm, is there value in society for a man who does nothing?” And he went online and he posted a tweet saying, “I’m starting a new service. It’s called ‘Rental People Who Do Nothing.’” And it’s basically was like, “I will be a companion, a friend who will do nothing.” So what this guy does is you rent him out and he’ll go hang out with you and he says nothing. It’s pretty much a silent companion, completely non-physical, non-sexual, basically an introvert for hire. And so what people do is they will either they have a task they need to go do, like an errand they need to run, or they just feel really lonely and they just want somebody to have some tea with them, and he’ll come and he’ll sit, and he won’t really say anything, and if you ask him a question, he’ll give you a simple answer, but it’s really just the presence of another human body. And this guy made $80,000 in a year renting himself out. And he then he wrote a book, a memoir called “Rental People Who Do the Man Who Did Nothing” or “Rental People Who Do Nothing.” And he’s continued to do this now for years. So he did it before COVID, then COVID hit so he couldn’t do it, and then he started it back up again. And now he doesn’t even charge for the hangout. He used to charge $68 for a session, and now he just says, “Just cover the food and travel, and then I’ll hang out with you for free.” And so he travels around and he gets paid to go, he gets paid for his food and his event tickets and all all the things that people want to do with them. And this is what this guy does. Isn’t this fascinating?
Shaan Puri: What, I’m I’m reading the comments on his Goodreads account for his book. What were the reasons why people wanted to hang out with him?
The Loneliness Epidemic in Japan [02:23]
Sam Parr: Well, so this was pretty fascinating. So I was wondering this too. I was like, “Why is there a need for this?” And I guess in Japan, there’s a loneliness epidemic. It’s kind of crazy. They have words for this that we don’t even have words for. So have you ever heard this term like “Hikikomori”?
Shaan Puri: You know, I haven’t. I’ve not heard that term. Has it come up in Connecticut?
Sam Parr: No, I’ve not heard that word before. That’s a new word for me.
Sam Parr: So it’s a word that they have for severe social withdrawal. It’s total withdrawal from society. So typically, it’s kind of like incel in the States. So typically, it’ll be a it’s mostly men who are living at home, still in their parents’ home, but they are completely recluse. They don’t work, they don’t socialize, and there are like estimated 2 million men in Japan that are in this category. For six months, they basically have not engaged with anybody in society. So that’s like kind of one problem, is this growing trend of Hikikomori. And then there’s another word, I think “Kodokushi,” which is, uh, it’s basically death without being cared for. So it’s like older people who are dying and then they find their bodies like five months later because they were so socially isolated that nobody knew that they passed away. And this is like a number that the last 10 years has doubled. Like, I think 70,000 people died this way where they’re found weeks or months later. And this trends are all like very concerning. So like in Japan, single-person households, so you know, no no wife, no no family members, no friends, just living alone by yourself, is now 38% of the population, which is it was that’s like triple where it was like in a five or seven years ago. They appointed a Minister of Loneliness in Japan because this has become such a big problem. And so this guy doing this is almost like a an art statement in a way about this to bring awareness to this huge problem that people are just really freaking lonely in Japan, everywhere, but really in Japan, it’s even more heightened.
Community and Belonging [04:19]
Shaan Puri: Dude, let me explain something to you that’s very similar to this. And I’m going to I want to hear your opinion of this premise that I have. And I also I think it’s a good premise that I think a lot of people can learn from. So I don’t live in Austin anymore. I went and visited it again for a wedding, and I realized how lucky I was to have a community there of just the the best people on earth. They I consider them family.
Sam Parr: Dude, I saw your “Live, Laugh, Love” post where you posted a picture with your friends and you said, “This is wealth.” And I saw it. He’s not wrong. He’s not wrong, but he’s also not Sam Parr. What is going on? What this is wealth? What new era have you entered?
Shaan Puri: I’ve I’ve entered a very special era. Let me listen. It’s weird. Ever since having a kid, the things that I thought I cared about, I don’t care about as much. And so I realize I’m kind of like going all in to this like emotional side of like caring about others, whatever, all that stupid shit. But listen. So, we like can’t even say it. It’s like hurts to say the sentence, but we we believe it. Yeah. So, before uh so I basically lived in San Francisco and I moved from San Francisco to Austin. My best friend at the time, Neville Medora, he lived there. And I had this conversation with him before I moved. I go, “Neville, I’m thinking about moving to Austin. One of the big reasons I’m moving is because of you. I want to be with you. I want to be near you. Would you be willing to want to be in you?”
Sam Parr: I want to be in you, you could say. You could say.
Shaan Puri: I didn’t know where you were going with that one. Yeah. It goes a better way than than that one way. Uh and so, uh if I do this, would you like commit to like us like living a life together like with our families and like and that sounds weird, but I did that and it worked wonderfully. So we had there was about four other couples where we had this conversation where we’re like, “Let’s live life together, like you can count on me, I’ll count on you, whatever.” And when you think about that, that’s strange, but if you really dive deep, it’s actually not that weird because that’s what you did with your girlfriend probably. Like you’re like, “Hey, so uh should we put a label on this?” You know what I mean? And you do a girlfriend or boyfriend, and then you make a huge ordeal to where you uh get engaged, you get down on one knee, and there’s like a a there’s like a big like epic thing where like you were boyfriend and girlfriend, now you are officially a fiancé, and then you get married where you basically, you know, talk about a vow. You take a vow in front of people who have flown from around the world to witness this vow. And that’s normal. But we don’t really do that with friends. And so I have recently moved in order to be closer to family, and so now I’m trying to like develop friends in a new town, and I’m starting to go to them and I’m having this formal conversation, and it it it really weirds people out uh right away. By the way, obviously. But after a few minutes, the men in in particular, they’re like, “Oh, I kind of get this and kind of feels nice.” It kind of feels nice to like talk about how we’re going to do life together, how we can count on each other or like to set uh you know, to define the relationship.
Sam Parr: What is it that you’re saying? Let’s let’s let’s let’s make this real. So what what are you actually saying?
Shaan Puri: So here’s what I’m saying. What I’m saying is what this guy about uh in in in Japan is experiencing is this lonely thing. And you’re talking about people living by themselves, uh 38% of the time, you’re talking about people dying and for weeks not being found. What I’m saying is, I think a lot of people experience loneliness, and I think one key way to uh get over it, particularly men. Men in particular, once they approach their 50s and 60s, you basically never make a new friend again. Uh just like you never go to the doctor, you don’t go to the dentist, and you don’t make new friends. But I think there are ways around this, and it’s around having these formal conversations, and in particular, one extreme example is to move places just for for the sole reason of like this friend being there. Do you know what I mean?
Sam Parr: I do exactly what you mean. Uh but I guess what I’m saying is, what is the conversation you’re having with people, especially new people? So I get the the Neville one because he was already a really close friend from San You guys, he was in San Francisco, right? That’s where you guys originally became friends?
Shaan Puri: No, he would spend his summers in San Francisco, uh and we would like hang out and then he would go back to Austin because Austin was unbearable.
Sam Parr: So you guys were already really close and then you’re like, “Hey, I want to move there.” And I really like, I’m kind of moving there for you or I want to move right really close to you and like let’s do life together. And I’m a big fan of this. I I’ve I’ve said this before, one of the most impactful things that’s come out of this podcast was a guy named Mike Brown came on the pod and he said, um, I was asking about going into business with his brothers and he goes, “That’s to me, that’s the point of life. You find the people you love and you do life with them.” And that became like a a very simple operating philosophy for me. So I I’m a definitely believer in that. What are you doing now with new people? Because I’m curious how that conversation goes when it’s not somebody you’ve already been friends with for for 5 or 10 years.
Shaan Puri: I’ve only done it uh once so far, and I just kind of like I hope they’re listening. Dude, it it’s weird. Like it’s definitely like it’s definitely weird. But I’m like, “Hey, so um you know, I’m looking to like have like close friends who I can rely on, and I want to let you know that like you are that to me right now where uh I hope I can rely on you for important things, and I want to let you know that you can rely on me for stuff, and like whatever I have, it’s you can use whatever I have, I got your back no matter what.” And I know this sounds weird and everything, but I’m looking to do life with someone, and it seems like you and your wife might be that person for me and my wife. And I make jokes about it, and I realize how silly this sounds. But it was actually really great. It made me feel really good.
Blue-Collar Side Hustles [10:31]
Sam Parr: All right, so a lot of people watch and listen to this show because they want to hear us just tell them exactly what to do when it comes to starting or growing a business. And really, a lot of people who are listening, they have a full-time job and they want to start something on the side, a side hustle. Now, a lot of people message Sean and I and they say, “All right, I want to start something on the side. Is this a good idea? Is that a good idea?” And again, what they’re really just saying is, “Just give me the ideas.” Well, my friends, you’re in luck. So my old company, The Hustle, they put together a 100 different side hustle ideas, and they have appropriately called it the “Side Hustle Idea Database.” It’s a list of 100 pretty good ideas, frankly. I went through them, they’re awesome. And it gives you how to start them, how to grow them, things like that, gives you a little bit of inspiration. So check it out. It’s called the “Side Hustle Idea Database.” It’s in the description below. You’ll see the link. Click it, check it out. Let me know in the comments what you think.
Angel Investing and “Rent-a-Friend” [11:22]
Sam Parr: All right, what were we saying about angel investing?
Shaan Puri: So I was I was trying to do an angel investment. This was maybe, I don’t know, 12 years ago or something. And I had no money, and I wanted to invest in this company, and I’d finally realized like, “Oh, I have friends who have money, and I could probably go to them and I could probably pitch them a deal, and if they do the deal, they’ll probably give me a little piece of the of the of the upside if it works out.” And so I go to a friend, I go to my buddy Suli and I say, “Um, hey, I want to invest in this company.” He’s like, “All right, great, let’s do it.” I mean, he’s like, “Cool, so for the economics of this, like how do you want to do this?” And I was like, “I don’t really know. What’s the norm?” He’s like, “Well, the norm is probably this where you would get, you know, like 10-15% of my carry, but, you know, we could do whatever you want.” And I was like, “Well, you know, I just want to make sure you’re you know, it’s fair.” I was kind of thinking transaction. I was like, “I just want to make sure this is fair, like I don’t want to I don’t want this to be, you know, one-sided or the other.” And he goes, “Let’s make it one-sided in your favor.” And he goes, “I don’t care what happens on this deal. What I care about is us doing deals together for the next 20 years.” And first of all, it was not just hollow words because he was giving more action on the deal to me that he did not need to. Uh I wasn’t asking for it. He just, you know, did that on on on his own. The second was the way he signaled that like, “Hey, I’m looking for 20 years of doing stuff together,” was kind of intentional and new in a way that I hadn’t really uh heard. And then I started doing that with other people. So when I met up with Ben and I was like, “Ben, hey, you want to do this project together?” He’s like, “Yeah, we did a project together, it went great. Want to do another project together?” We did another project together, it went great. And I was like, “Hey, let’s start a business together.” But I what I told him was I was like, “I think you’re awesome and I think we work really well together. I want to like I want to be in business with you for 20 years. So let’s basically only make decisions that will increase the likelihood of us doing this together for 20 years.” And that really changed the game. So that one little way of being intentional that this I want this relationship to go beyond this transaction, this this moment in time and saying like, “I think you’re awesome and I want to be doing stuff with you for a long time,” that has really uh helped me or changed the way that I viewed things, but also the way that other people receive it. Because then they know they they know that I’m putting my foot forward and saying, “Yes, I think you’re awesome and I could see us doing plenty of things together. Let’s do this for the long haul,” which I think settles everybody down and gets everybody out of a sort of selfish or short-term uh mindset.
Shaan Puri: Dude, it’s a bunch of guys being dudes. You know? That’s what it comes down to. We just it’s just a bunch of us guys, we want to be dudes, you know?
Sam Parr: I’m a dude, baby. Tomodachi, okay?
Shaan Puri: Let’s just be bros. You want to be bros?
Sam Parr: I’m celebrating that. Okay, so here’s some, I guess like related things to this. So, uh, so back to this guy by the way, this Shoji Morimoto. So this guy, 39 years old, look at his Twitter. His Twitter has 420,000 followers. He’s gotten like very famous off of this. He said that before COVID, he was making $300 a day, so he’s doing this $68 a session, whatever whatever. And he was just going to coffee shops and playing video games and doing, you know, random stuff with each other.
Shaan Puri: Dude, he’s hard. His Twitter is hard to These Japanese, I tell you what, they got a different word for everything.
Sam Parr: Okay. So, uh, his service is called “Rental People Who Do Nothing.” So I started thinking, do we have this here? Because loneliness is not a only a only a Japan thing, obviously, it’s everywhere. And actually, there are some things like this. So go to rentafriend.com. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this.
Shaan Puri: No, you know what, Sean, I’m proud to say I haven’t actually been on this website yet.
Sam Parr: Friends seeking friends. Okay, so now type in like just type in San Francisco and click search. And then you’re going to see just like a huge list of totally platonic friends who are down to hang out and just have a day together. It’s pretty wild that there’s this whole I didn’t even know this existed. It’s Craigslist for friends. It’s pretty pretty cool, right?
Shaan Puri: And it actually has a lot of traffic. You know, this is a little sus. There’s a lot of pretty women with full body shots on here.
Sam Parr: Yeah, this might be like I found a laundromat and I’m like, “This place is doing a huge amount of business.” And it’s like, “Well, it’s not just a laundromat, right?” Like they’re laundering other things besides clothes here. So I I don’t know exactly the the social norms here, but I’m going to take it at face value that this is rent-a-friend, that this is truly for for friendship. And I’ve read some articles of people doing this, and what they said was they were like, “You know, it was actually in some ways kind of nice to have just someone on demand that I could go do this thing with, maybe a plus one for an event or to go to a concert together or whatever it is. Didn’t want to go by myself, but I still wanted to go.” They’re like, “But the other side of it was it was like this weird dynamic where it was like Wait, by the way, does rent-a-friend mean I pay them money?”
Sam Parr: Yeah, you pay the money to hang out.
Shaan Puri: Sean, this is like where you get a hooker. This is like there’s Valerie on here is like in a bikini and she’s 20 and like really good looking.
Sam Parr: It might be, but I read this article on like whatever, Vox or whatever. Somebody went and they did this. So they rented a friend on this site. And so they what they said was they were like, “Yeah, it was uh, you know, I paid for this person to come hang out with me.” They’re like, “You know, one of the things and they talked to them about like the other jobs that they’ve done, they’re like, “Yeah, it’s a lot sometimes for older people or it’s for you know, somebody who’s, you know, just sort of been very busy with work, hasn’t really developed their social life.” And one of the things that they talked about was like, “It made me a more rude person because they’re like, “Oh, if I’m paying you, then this is all on my terms. I’m going to we’re going to do what I want, we’re going to and they’re like, there was some downsides to like there was upsides of wow, this companionship on demand and on the other side there was some downsides which was like the power dynamic was off. It it you know, I was too aware, at least the journalist was like, “I was too aware of the the the the the differentiation here.” So that’s one one business. There’s another one that you’ve probably heard of called Papa. You know Papa?
Shaan Puri: No, it’s Papa.
Sam Parr: This is for your grandparents. So it’s basically a lot of people have, you know, grandparents who are alone, both they’re both lonely, but also kind of need help, like maybe a little errands that they can run or somebody to help them when they’re going to the store, just in case anything happens or to make, you know, a little easier to move around. And this was a Silicon Valley startup that was basically like you pay for uh yeah, I remember this. You pay for a basically like a task rabbit specifically to help the older people. And it’s something less than kind of like a live-in live-in care, but it’s more than, you know, me once a month calling my grandparents. And so that’s uh this company was I remember when this came out, it was sort of this crazy idea and it was backed by some investors. I remember Alexis Ohanian and the guy who created Reddit, he backed it. He said something like, uh, you know, there’s 11,000, you know, boomers that are are retiring like every day or something crazy like that. Some some huge number. And he’s like, the, you know, our our aging population is growing very fast and we’re going to need services that are going to help them. And this company is valued over a billion dollars.
Shaan Puri: Holy shit. I’m looking at their funding. They’ve raised hundreds of millions uh $250 million. $250 million, yeah. Softbank put a bunch of money into it. And they were valued at 1.4 billion. And it’s literally a sort of like on-demand companionship for older people.
Shaan Puri: Dude, have you ever met a sugar baby?
Sam Parr: Have I ever met a sugar baby? I think I have, but I I don’t know if it was like official or if it was just like a uh like you know, there’s like the the website where it’s like this is an official arrangement and then there’s like, you know, just the the it just happening in the wild. So I think I just met someone who is happening in the wild.
Shaan Puri: So there’s sugardaddy.com where you like go and you meet someone and it gets a lot of traffic. And I was talking I got to go incognito for this one. Let me just make sure I don’t get targeted for ads for the rest of my life. I was talking to my wife about this the other day because she uh uh somehow knew someone who was a sugar baby or or and I think there’s like reality TV shows about it too, which Yeah, yeah. You definitely have seen because you guys have like the same TV taste. Uh but but I actually think that this is like a fairly fair trade. Uh as long as it’s consensual, obviously, but I’m I’m shockingly on board with having a sugar baby. Like if you’re if you’re an old guy and you just want to and like a lot of these guys, they literally just want a companion. They just want someone to be there for them and things like that. And it’s not always like, you know, as weird as it sounds. It’s no different than wanting to rent this Japanese guy to come hang out with you.
Sam Parr: Yeah, and you know, I don’t really have any judgments on this. Like I don’t I’ve never experienced this, I don’t really know the lifestyle. I try not to be, you know, too judgmental of things I don’t really understand. What I’m fascinated by is just this phenomenon. And again, like uh I remember when I first moved to Silicon Valley, I met the guy who was the first PM at Twitter. Um and he I asked him, I was like, “Man, that that’s amazing. You picked Twitter really early on. It was only 14 people there or something like that at the time. How’d you know? Like, was was it obvious that Twitter was going to be a big deal?” He goes, “No, everybody thought Twitter was weird, stupid, useless, just like a strange thing to do.” And he goes, “Well, I remember when I joined, somebody asked me, ‘Why did you join?’ He goes, ‘Because you can’t deny the phenomenon.’” Meaning, when you observe people doing a behavior that kind of makes no sense or seems odd, seems strange, seems weird to you, the natural inclination is to push that away and be like, “Oh, that’s that’s stupid, that’s weird,” and you sort of resist it. And he goes, “As an investor or somebody, you know, in in where where we worked in the technology space, you want to lean into the phenomenon. You want to understand, wow, why is it that people are watching other people play video games?” Twitch, right? Why is it that people are just texting out to a random group of strangers what they’re having for lunch? Twitter. Why is it that people are getting into strangers’ cars instead of taxis? Uber, right? Like, why are people sleeping on other people’s couches instead of hotels? Airbnb. All of the biggest winners tended to be these weird behaviors, things that, you know, either broke a social norm or sounded a little sketch. And once you sort of wrap that into, you know, a more safe and acceptable behavior, it unlocked a pretty big market. And so I’ve always tried to have I’ve I’ve tried to learn to have a more open mind about this stuff. And so, would I be surprised if the way that getting into people’s, you know, sleeping on couches or getting into strangers’ cars, like would I be surprised if companionship as a service, like totally non-sexual companionship as a service was a big deal? I would absolutely not be surprised because I think that probably by default, most people are are lonelier than they want.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, and I actually think that this is not a new phenomenon. I think that the it’s a phenomenon that it’s a thing that’s always existed. Now, let me get let me get biblical on your ass. I was I was uh raised Catholic, so I went to Catholic school my whole life. So I had to read the Bible all the time. Did you ever read the the story about Jesus and how he was like carrying the cross up like the hill or something to like, you know, to be executed?
Sam Parr: No, I didn’t read that one.
Shaan Puri: Well, yeah, yeah, I don’t know. It’s like part of culture a little bit. Uh but like there’s a at one point, there’s like a line where like these professional women, or these women who are professional, uh I think they call them wailers, but basically these women who are hired to come cry at a funeral to grieve to make you feel like you’re not the only uh one there to grieve for this person. Um and like he like dismisses them and he’s like, you know, don’t don’t give me get this out of here. Uh get his direct quote was like, “Get that nonsense out of this out of here,” something like that. Uh no, but I actually think that is a thing at funeral home, by the way, uh at funeral homes where like you have like a griever who will come and and make and fill the room. You know what I’m saying? But these types of things have been around forever. And so I don’t actually think it’s particularly a new phenomenon. I think we’ve always felt this way. Now there’s just interesting platforms to help solve the problem.
Sam Parr: Right, right. It’s like those uh there’s like these marketplaces now online to rent a crowd. It’s like, “Oh, you need a a crowd? People who either love you or protesting you? Push this button, you’ll I’ll get you 30 30 people in a crowd today, right?” And, you know, politicians use this and brands use this. Like it’s a it’s a it’s a easy technology made it easier to coordinate. Um, by the way, there’s a great tweet. Have you seen it where he’s like, “Uh, hey, I’m willing to show up looking like a mob boss at anyone’s funeral just so your friends and family feel like, man, you really had some shit going on that they didn’t know about.”
Shaan Puri: Dude, I bet you the uh rent-a-friend CEO or like company, they’re listening to this podcast and they’re like, “Oh, that’s so cute. Sean thought that we were just so you could meet friends and not have prostitutes.” It’s like, you didn’t see that. Friends is in air quotes.
Sam Parr: Aw.
Shaan Puri: Yeah. By the way, if it’s not friends, that’s just me being me, naive old me, just sucker for for for uh for whatever you tell me, okay? I I believe in humanity.
Shaan Puri: There’s hundreds of thousands of people right now collectively saying, “Aw.”
Sam Parr: Can I um can I tell you about another thing that I saw that I think you might have seen as well because it happened at a UFC event a few weeks ago, and I’ve been meaning to talk to you about this.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, what?
Sam Parr: Did you see at the recent, I think it was at the Sphere event, did you see a very interesting advertisement on one of the uh on the post during the UFC? Are you familiar with what I’m talking about?
Shaan Puri: I saw what you were talking about, but I don’t know enough to like riff on it. I mean, explain it and then maybe I’ll remember.
Sam Parr: So, I’m watching the UFC pay-per-view and it’s their first event at the Sphere uh in Las Vegas and I heard you bought tickets for it.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, that’s another story, how I uh I actually ended up paying $15,000 to not go to the Sphere event, which is a a big L for me.
Shaan Puri: Wait, you paid 15 grand for tickets?
Sam Parr: So, speaking of friends, uh I was like, “Hey, let me buy tickets for the Sphere event.” I heard Dana White talking about it, and I was like, “Oh wow, he says it’s a one and done, it’s going to be something like you’ve never seen before, blah blah blah.” So months ago, I just go online and I buy six tickets to the Sphere. I think it was like after the Ticketmaster fees like 25, 27 grand or something like that. Oh my god. All right. And then I emailed a bunch of people who I haven’t hung out with, uh either ever or recently, and I was like, “Hey, uh do you want to come to this event?” And they were like, “Yeah, this is awesome.” And so some some of them said, “Yeah,” some of them said, “Oh, I’ll try. Let me let me see if I can make it work.” Because it was still months out. And then a bunch of things happened. Uh two of the people couldn’t make it for like medical reasons. Um the card for the Sphere got way worse than it was supposed to be. It got way worse. I myself had just gotten sick like the two weeks prior to it, and so I like had just come off of like not being helpful at home to like, “Oh wait, now I’m going to go on a trip to Las Vegas after this.” Not really the best game plan for me. And the ticket prices dropped like crazy. So we ended up selling the tickets for like, you know, a third or something of whatever I paid for them. So yeah, not not a good win for me, but uh a great story that I got to tell here. So that was that.
Shaan Puri: Expensive.
Sam Parr: So then I’m watching it on TV and I see on the post behind one of the fighters it says, “Invest like a politician.” And I was like, “Invest like a politician? What is that? That is a kind of an amazing hook.” And I realized, “Oh, this is that app that um I’ve been following for a little while. This guy, Chris, he’s behind this app called Autopilot.” And he came and he he went on Twitter and he explained this thing that they were doing, this stunt that they did around the UFC. So they they sponsored the “Invest like a politician,” but they did a lot more than that. I just think it’s a badass marketing stunt that I want to share. Yeah, he did like the the Tesla, the Cybertruck uh stunt. So the so check out this thread. So uh look at the photos in this. And if you’re listening on audio, go to YouTube and watch this thing because you’ve got to see the clips of this. All right, so what they did was they hired, so I guess the the premise of Autopilot, I should say, is it’s a investing app, but it’s kind of like you basically pick who you want to follow their portfolio and you will invest. It’s like let’s say I wanted to just mimic Warren Buffett’s portfolio, or I want to mimic, you know, some famous trader’s portfolio, I could do that. One of the traders that they follow is Nancy Pelosi, who everybody kind of knows is uh, you know, a legendary legendary uh trader in her own right. And so what they did was for the Sphere event, they found a fake Pelosi impersonator. Do you see her there? Uh they find her on TikTok and they hire her and they put her through hair and makeup and then she she goes to they fly her to Vegas and she goes to the event. And before the event, she starts interacting with all these influencers. So they go get Mike from uh, you know, the Impulsive podcast, and she’s hanging out with, she’s playing Blackjack with Mike. And then she meets up with the Nelk Boys, and the Nelk Boys are like, “Holy shit, it’s Pelosi,” and they’re playing Blackjack with her. And then she gets um then she’s in the crowd when Sugar Sean O’Malley walks out and she’s in this hot pink pantsuit, power power pantsuit like Pelosi, and it gets freeze-framed and everybody’s like, “Holy shit, is Nancy Pelosi at the UFC?” And all these people are tweeting about this. And then on top of that, she doesn’t look like her at all. This model or actress is way better looking. It’s like hot Pelosi. Yeah, she’s like, kind of like Sarah Palin and Pelosi together. It’s kind of what they got. Because Nancy Pelosi is like 80 years old or something, so you know. Yeah, this woman looks is like legitimately a model. But go ahead. So then they got a a cyber truck and they wrapped it and it says “Pelosi 2024” and it says “Invest like a politician Autopilot.” And they drove this around Las Vegas getting just honked at and there’s all these like TikToks of people taking videos of this Pelosi 2024 thing. And if you look at their Google trends, they go from like nobody searching for them to like, you know, it spiked and hit 100% interest on that day of the event. And basically they were like, “Yeah, we just took a risk, we spent a bunch of money on this and uh let’s give it a go.” And I just thought it was a amazingly well-done marketing stunt.
Shaan Puri: Did he say how much he spent on it?
Sam Parr: Uh, I didn’t ask him that. So I did talk to him. He goes, he said, “We pulled it together in three weeks. We had the Pelosi idea, we came up with a bunch of research, they searched through TikTok for impersonators, went through agents, found an actress, they hustled their way into, you know, getting kind of like collabing with the Nelk Boys and Mike during that event because they knew where they like to gamble, so they kind of arranged for them to bump into each other. And they’re like, “We got a bunch of downloads.” It’s more they what he said was he goes, “It was more expensive than just if we had just run, you know, Facebook ads, but um, you know, our view is that we’re trying to like build the brand and make a statement about what are we all about and that we believe that over time this is going to pay off.” And if you’ve seen, they’ve done this actually in a bunch of bunch of interesting marketing things. So they did the Pelosi tracker on Twitter, which has, I don’t know, hundreds of thousands of followers. They have a Instagram account called Politicians Politician Trade Tracker, which has 730,000 followers. And they’ll post, so like, you know, like the last post was they had called out weeks ago that Debbie Schultz, who is a politician, had made a $15,000 trade in her son’s name of one random small mining stock, a silver mining stock. And they had flagged it as like, “Hmm, here’s a politician trade that you want to be aware of.” We, you know, they don’t give financial advice, but they just tell you what the politicians are doing. And sure enough, in uh a month, it’s gone up 30%. This like random small mining stock, Helca Mining Company. So, you know, called it and and and so they they follow these politicians and that’s what the whole account is. And I think they’ve they’ve tapped into some feeling of like outrage or wrongness that people have about what’s going on, like why why Nancy Pelosi, you know, outperforms hedge funds and Warren Buffett in her, you know, her trading track record. Um, they tapped into this feeling that like this is wrong and they should not be allowed, and they’re using it for their own growth, which I think is great.
Shaan Puri: Dude, have you um uh AOC and uh what’s Parker or Palmer Lucky’s brother-in-law? Do you know who Palmer Lucky’s brother-in-law is? Matt Gates? Yeah. Him and uh AOC have like joined hands for this for like the one thing that they’ve come together on is the fact that they want uh politicians to not be able to trade or at least have all of their money in like a political ETF or something like that. And uh it reminds me of um have you seen that uh video go viral of AOC and Elon Musk flirting? Yeah, so good. We got to play that. We should play that right now. On YouTube, just play that clip. It is whoever made this, you’re an absolute genius. I’ve looked I’ve tried to look up who made this. This is like some anonymous account. I watched that video, like I’ve seen it a bunch of times and I re-watch it all the time and it’s so funny. It’s one of the funniest things and they need to do they need to do one with AOC and this guy Matt uh of them like fake flirting because this is the one thing because I think he’s pretty far right, she’s pretty far left, and they’ve come together on this one like idea that politicians should not be able to trade uh from individual accounts. And I think it’s pretty funny. Yeah. That’s uh that’s pretty wild. Do you want to do uh one more thing? What’s this blue-collar side hustle?
Sam Parr: All right, so I’m bringing back an old segment we used to have called the “Blue-Collar Side Hustle of the Month.” And this is the goal here is these aren’t the biggest businesses, but they’re straightforward businesses that anybody could do if you were just willing to work hard. And so the blue-collar side hustle is I saw, I forget who it was, Chris Corner, somebody like that. They were talking about this woman in Dallas who has this business called Awesome Porch Pumpkins. Have you seen this? Yeah, the best. The best.
Sam Parr: Wow, you’re really into this. Tell me tell me more. All right, so so the the business idea here is uh every fall for, you know, sort of Halloween and Thanksgiving, people like to decorate their front porch uh with a bunch of pumpkins. Um and what she does is she will do that as a service. So she’ll bring to your house a package. I mean, you can go to her website and you can see she’s it’s popped up currently sold out. But you can see like three or four packages. There’s like the luxury package, which is 1350, so you know, a $1,300. There’s like kind of the medium one, $750, and there’s a smaller one for like 300 bucks. And what she’ll do is she’ll come and she’ll decorate your front front porch, the doorstep, all that with a bunch of really cool variety of of, you know, fall, you know, harvest type pumpkins. And this is all she does. And the the numbers that came out was that basically she’s done 900 jobs that range, you know, from this 300 bucks to, you know, 1,500 bucks. And the estimate was that she might have done a million dollars in revenue in a year off of uh off of those 900 jobs. And how cool is this? Just a, you know, a mom in Dallas who is going to people’s porches and just putting out pumpkins and wow, you can kind of hustle your way into a pretty cool business for a very small window of time. I think that’s the other cool part about this is that um it’s only going to take place in a few months out of the year. And then she posted on Instagram and that kind of drives the flywheel. And then people like us talk about this and it gets on the local news and then she’s built a kind of a cool business here. And we talked about this last year. I think one of my blue-collar side hustles last year was the guy who came and did Christmas lights at my house and he did it for, you know, half the houses in our neighborhood. And I realized like, wow, in kind of a six to 10 week period, you know, this guy probably pulled in, you know, 60 to 100 grand of side income just by putting up lights, him and and he had one one guy working with him. And I think this is the extension of that. It turns out that it wasn’t just Christmas lights, you could also do it with fall pumpkins, and I’m sure you could do it with Halloween decorations as well, if you wanted to expand into that. So to me, this is an example of a blue-collar side hustle. Now, to be clear, I don’t think she made a million dollars. I think she might have generated a million dollars in revenue. Apparently, she’s got like 15 delivery guys and like a bunch of other stuff. Yeah, but even if she made $200,000. I would bet it’s like, you know, 100 grand is my my guess. Being conservative, I would sort of assume that. But that’s still pretty great for what’s probably a you work, you know, two months out of the year or three months out of the year. Straightforward business that you could do that doesn’t require, you know, any special skills and it’s pretty fun, you know, for somebody who’s got, you know, a little bit of design taste, I think this is great. Or or like uh my wife’s uh um not working right now, you know, she we had a kid and she’s uh quit her job and like she’s thinking of these things that she can do. She’s like, “You know, I don’t I can’t commit to a 40-hour work week or 50 52 weeks out the year, but I I I would love to have a project, you know, something that I can do.” And when I see projects like this, I’m like, that’s awesome. That could be perfect. Do you know what I mean? Uh and and so she’s like looking for projects, but you know, you can’t like you can’t commit to a 9 to 5, or at least you can’t commit to a 9 to 5 for the entire year, but you could for little sprints. And so I love ideas like that that can satisfy that need. Yeah, yeah, exactly. My wife works only on Wednesdays. So she works one day out of the week, she works kind of like an eight-hour day on that day, and it’s a super creative kind of job. I I I can’t go into all the details, but it’s very creative, so it’s fun. Um, it’s with somebody she really likes, so a coworker comes over, they work together for eight hours a day. She’s no long then she doesn’t have it doesn’t spill over, so like the next day and the next day after that, she doesn’t have to like follow through on all the deliverables from the meeting or anything like that. And we didn’t plan for that, but that’s we kind of stumbled into what what is basically the perfect amount of work for her, because we got three little kids and she wants to be a stay-at-home mom, but also it’s pretty easy to just go nuts, you know, like to just be the because it’s Groundhog Day. When you have three little kids, you are doing the same routine every single day. And as much as you love your kids, like it is nice to have a small break, some project you can put your creative energy into, a person that’s not your family member that you can get to talk to that day and you know, not have to deal with the kids for, you know, eight hours is is a huge win for her. Dude, after this pod, I’d be like, “Babe, what are you what are you doing about pumpkins? Open the trunk.” Like I love the homepage everything. It’s a trunk full of like 65 pumpkins. I love this shit, dude. I think this is fantastic. And I’m sure that there’s like some type of like artful like aesthetic or, you know, like you got to have like some type of eye, but uh and and it would be silly of me to like be like, “Anyone can do this.” But it definitely seems learnable. This seems very learnable. Anyone can do this, not anyone will do this. But but I do think this is not like above you know, most people’s means to be able to do to be able to pull this off. You know, what what I would do, let’s say I wanted to do this, how would you how would you approach this? You know, I would not go into the pumpkin business right away. What I would do is I would just go door-to-door and I would have basically like three photographs of what the front can look like. Uh what what packages you have, and I would just go to door go door-to-door and I would say, “I’m going to knock on 100 doors. I’m going to knock on 100 doors in my neighborhood and I’m basically going to say, “Hey, um just wanted to let you know, I do this for families in the area. I can make your porch look really great. Is this something you’d be interested in? Um and then try to see does anybody is anybody interested? Basically, if people are interested, that’s your pre-order. And then you basically go buy the inventory you need to go fulfill just that demand. And then as soon as I get some, I would take photos of that, I would ask them, can I uh you know, would you mind if I use this for my website for my marketing? They would say yes. And if they say yes, then I would go to I would now have better marketing material that I would go to the next door with and I would say, um, you know, we did this there and I would try to have something if I could, maybe one branded pumpkin that’s kind of like this was done by the, you know, the local pumpkin queen or whatever it is, right? And like have my my my domain on one of them if I if I could to try to get people to be able to go find me from there. And then going up charge them when they fucking start to rot and you got to get rid of them. Well, there is a there is a pickup or like a clean-up fee, right, that you do at the end. Uh same thing with the Christmas lights guys, like yeah, then you pay me I mean you pay me to put them up and you pay me to put them take them down. And so you get both sides of it. I also think that this is one where you could, if you ever go read like these PR books, like we’re like local PR newsjacking. So like local news is pretty much devoid of good stories. And so you can see this if you ever turn on like your local news channel, they, oh, this restaurant got flagged for this thing. They’re looking for, you know, good local feel-good stories. And so as soon as you get a little bit going and then you could say, whatever, single mom who’s making thousands of dollars decorating their, you know, their neighbors’ porches. And so as soon as I get just enough momentum, my goal would be to get to the local news and I would go there and I’d make my pitch for the story and I would try to get it uh, you know, try to get my story on air for that local news. And then what I would do is I would take that that new story, right? You’re stacking the marketing chips and then you could even run ads uh on that local news story, that article uh in your area. Dude, I grew up um like with a big steep driveway and then after there was a small street and then there was like a park. And it was it was as if I was like the park was like a canyon. And one month after Halloween, it was a tradition at my house and my parents, this was one of the more redneck things that my father has ever done, which was we would take all 20 of our pumpkins and we would let them roll down our hill straight running of the bulls. Straight to the middle of the park. And I up until like uh I was like 25, I thought it was okay to just if you have like a banana peel or something, I’m like, you just like fucking toss it into the street. Like it doesn’t matter. Like we used to put our pumpkins like in the street. Like it it doesn’t matter, right? That’s not littering. Turns out that is littering by the way. Like you can’t like there’s like but we’re all of like November or whatever, there’d be like the 20 rotting pumpkins in the middle of the in the middle of this park. And like if you’re going to go play flag football that month, like look out for the rotting pumpkins at the pars through in the middle of that fucking park. Yeah, you needed the opposite of the news story. It’s like local family terrorizes park with rotting pumpkins again. Dude, I thought it was like acceptable to like it’s like, oh, I’m just putting it back to its home. I’m just throwing this throwing this fucking banana peel and all our garbage right in the middle of a park. Um, where do you want to go from here? Uh, I think we wrap this one. So, we got the do-nothing man, the loneliness epidemic. We have uh the autopilot marketing stunt, and then we got the blue-collar side hustle that anybody could do door-to-door. All right, let’s do it. That’s it. That’s the pod.