Sam and Shaan cover a mix of business ideas and cultural observations. They dig into Friends With Benefits and social tokens, break down the Soho House business model, explore the UGC advertising opportunity, tell the origin story of Sam’s “My boss thinks I’m smart” ad, and examine tele-operated machinery and winner-winner claw machines as emerging businesses.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host), Shaan Puri (host)
Hotel Email Hack and Negotiating With Leverage [00:00:00]
Sam: Our friend emailed hotels for a European trip and got some crazy good deals — a $3,000 room for way less. So here’s what I did. I’m in New York, need a place to stay from September 1st through September 25th. I made a list of 20 hotels, emailed them. These hotels probably would cost $15K to $20K for that period — like $1,000 a night. I’m getting some at $350 to $400 a night. It’s working.
Shaan: What’s the gist of the email?
Sam: I say: “Hey, my name is Sam Parr. I’m in town for three months, need a place to stay from September 1st to the 21st. I need a relatively big room because I record a podcast called My First Million — we have about a million listeners a month and record with video, so it needs to look really nice. I also write a daily email to two million people, so I need a comfortable place to work. My budget is $350 a night — can you help me?”
Shaan: Why aren’t they giving it to you for free? That’s big influencer leverage.
Sam: I don’t want to be a total mooch. I’m happy to pay for it, I just want a discount.
Shaan: Are you going to give them a shout-out?
Sam: No. I would only shout something out if I genuinely thought it was life-changing.
The Law of Reciprocity [00:05:00]
Sam: So actually — there’s a company I’ve been using called Passport, it’s like an international shipping company. If you have a brand and want to ship to France, the UK, Australia, each country has its own customs issues, carrier issues, tax stuff. These guys handle all of it. I emailed the CEO Alex and said this is a great product, how do I invest? He said, you know, we’re not really raising right now — but I think you’ve been helpful already with intros. I don’t want to deal with paperwork. How about I just give you some free shares?
I was like, perfect. But then he sends an email that says: here’s what would make this a win for me — A, B, and C. All totally reasonable requests. And I was like, dude, I wasn’t going to do these things before. But just by giving me something free, I feel the need to reciprocate.
Shaan: That’s the law of reciprocity. There’s been a lot of studies. Robert Cialdini covers it in the book Influenced. If we’re next-door neighbors and I give you a pizza because they gave me an extra one, and then I ask if I can borrow your car — you are actually incredibly likely to say yes, even though those two things aren’t remotely equal.
When I used to buy cars, I would come with two cans of Coke. I’d say, hey, they had a sale — you thirsty? And I’d get discounts.
Sam: That’s great. The Coke can hack. Now I’m so aware of reciprocity that I fight my inner tendency to want free stuff. If somebody offers to send me something, I don’t even want to give out my address. I don’t want to feel like I owe anyone anything. On my internal balance sheet, I only want assets.
Friends With Benefits and Social Tokens [00:10:00]
Sam: So let’s jump into ideas. I want to talk about Friends With Benefits. This is the first time I’ve seen something in this space that actually interests me.
Shaan: Okay, explain what it is and I’ll tell you why I’m interested.
Sam: Friends With Benefits is basically a community — a membership club — created by this guy in LA who was co-founder of a company called Brud. They make Lil Miquela, that Instagram influencer who’s a digital avatar. Disney Pixar style, clearly digital, kind of looks like a real girl.
So he creates Friends With Benefits. Basically: this is a digital Soho House. Invite-only. You buy the FWB token to get in. There’s a million FWB tokens out there. You buy in to get access to the club, which is basically just a Discord group. No physical place, no perks, no discounts — literally just access to their Discord to talk to other members.
When it started, the token was like $100 to join. Now it’s about $7,000 for that same membership. The token has appreciated that much. And this is now a $90 million market cap community.
Shaan: So equinox — the high-end gym in LA, New York, San Francisco — is about $2,400 a year. This Discord is now double that just to get in.
Sam: I’m a little skeptical, I’ll be honest. It seems like it could be run like an art project rather than a real business. Either it’s a fad — the problem with cool exclusive things is when you try to grow them they become less cool — or you’re doing this because you want to be a cool guy, not because it’s a solid business.
Shaan: Here’s the thing: communities are great businesses. Not huge businesses necessarily — hard to get to a billion — but they can make someone $10 to $20 million a year in sales at a good profit margin. With Trends, for example, I didn’t realize it at the time, but had The Hustle still owned it you could have turned that into a paid community, an investment vehicle — it would have been quite profitable, even if not huge.
The thing about Friends With Benefits specifically — they use this software called ColabLand. What’s interesting is that people are incentivized to stay and make the community valuable, because their token value goes up. That alignment is amazing. Instead of a $9.99 a month expense, it’s: I paid $900 and I own this thing. If the community gets better, I win.
Sam: I actually think this model is amazing. Let me break it into three parts: what is this and why is it interesting, how big could it be, and what else could you do like this?
On the “what is this” side: it’s a social token. You buy it to enter a membership club. The membership now costs $7,000. It’s appreciated like crazy.
There’s a guy Ben — I think a friend of ours — he got in at maybe $100 or $200 membership. He never uses the Discord, it’s super noisy, but he holds the token. He’s like, it’s cool — I hold the seat, it’s going up, I could sell it if I wanted to.
Owning instead of renting. Instead of a $9.99 monthly fee, you own your spot in the club. If a thousand spots exist and the community grows, each spot appreciates. These are called social tokens.
Shaan: So let me think about what we could do. Say we create an MFM token. With that token comes access to us — like, one hour with me and Sam. If we mint a thousand of those tokens, each one is redeemable for an hour of our time. And our time gets more valuable as the podcast grows. Elon Musk in 2000 was easier to book than today. Today it’s basically priceless.
Sam: That’s interesting. But for me, the key insight is less about friends with benefits specifically — I don’t think they’re going to run it like a real company — and more about this mechanic. The model of owning your spot in a community.
Shaan: And I’d rather invest in ColabLand — the platform running all of these — than any individual token. Community of communities is better than an individual community. Reddit is a community of communities. Discord is a community of communities. Those are $10 billion companies.
Soho House Teardown [00:22:00]
Sam: Did you know Soho House went public recently?
Shaan: Yes. So Soho House is basically a members-only club — a country club but instead of a golf course you get a library-feeling building with a bar, restaurant, maybe a pool, maybe a gym. In New York, LA, Paris, London — wherever rich cool young people live. Costs about $2,000 to $3,000 to join depending on your age.
They have 100,000 members. Went public at a $3 billion market cap. The reason why their business isn’t great: they took on a lot of debt — $870 million — from buying or leasing real estate in prime locations. During COVID they furloughed 90% of the workforce. But churned only 10% of members, because the members are wealthy and they offered digital perks in the meantime.
The reason I care about FWB is not that company specifically — I don’t think they’re going to run it like a real company. But if I were going to do a Soho-style membership, I would 100% do it with the social token model. It incentivizes me to make it great, and I could use some of that capital to buy buildings.
Sam: The only reason not to do it is if you don’t want more work. Because as soon as somebody becomes a member of your club, my personality means I will not sleep until they feel like they’re getting 10x on the deal. That’s the only reason I’d hesitate.
Shaan: I think if you ran it like a company — real co-working space, using this token model — that’s a very interesting path to building something quite big.
Sam’s Hot Girl Side Hustle: UGC Advertising [00:30:00]
Shaan: All right, I have a little hot girl side hustle for you. I’m trying to identify simple things that anyone in a certain demographic can do to generate $10K to $50K a month of profit with no big upfront costs or specific hard skills.
The dominant way to advertise now is not super high production value content. It’s what we call selfie content. User-generated content, UGC — though I just call it selfie because nobody knows what UGC means.
Brands aren’t just doing this on social media. If you look at a TV commercial for Chime — the digital banking company — it’s the same thing. Digital-first companies, when they finally go to TV, their whole company has been trained on: this thing that looks like a normal person talking — that’s what works. People tune out an ad that looks polished.
Sam: I know this. I see it with Morning Brew. Their TikTok ad is: “My secret to making my boss think I’m super smart… I subscribe to The Hustle, it gives me the news every morning and I look really smart.” That ad crushed.
By the way — I wrote that line. I stole it from an old ad book. There was a piano lesson ad from the 1960s: “He thinks I’m a naturally great piano player — I’m not, I really just use this lesson.” I took that and applied it to the newsletter in 2016. I keep swipe files — digital collections of my favorite old ads.
Shaan: That’s kind of genius because it’s not a word-for-word steal — it’s a completely different thing, but you got inspired by the structure.
Sam: Right. It’s called swipe files. There’s a great one — the famous Wall Street Journal ad from the 1970s, “A Tale of Two Young Men.” Both went to the same college, similar jobs, but ended up in completely different places. The difference: one bought a Wall Street Journal subscription. That ad made them $50 million in recurring revenue. We should run the same ad for the podcast — “one listened to My First Million, one didn’t” — and link to the backstory.
You can go to Swipefile.com — our friend Neville owns that domain — and he’s built a great WordPress digital swipe file.
Shaan: Okay, going back to the main thing. This has created a shortage of people who can create great on-brand selfie content. Every brand is trying to farm this out to influencers or agencies, and the agencies are like: we can manage your ads, but making this creative takes thought, and we don’t have actors or a nice house to film in.
There’s a woman named Savannah Sanchez — Social Savannah on Twitter. She’s basically an ad actress who understands what makes ads work. She and a couple of other women: send them the product, they take a bunch of selfie videos, they’re the actor in your content.
She used to work at an agency called Common Thread Collective. I imagine what happened is they started using her on camera because she’s charismatic and good-looking, she learned how the business worked, and she spun out.
Sam: Here’s why she’s perfect. When we first ran ads — and I’ve run probably $5 to $8 million in ads personally — we tested four types of creative: a good-looking but everyday next-door-type guy, a pretty girl-next-door, a smoking hot model, and a plain everyday person. The pretty girl next door won significantly among both men and women. Not the hottest model, not the guy — the approachable one.
She basically fits this profile exactly. The ad has to get someone’s attention when they’re scrolling, but it also has to look like somebody just posting from their personal account, not a brand.
Shaan: I think she’s making $50K to $100K a month. Why? Because brands need this content. I don’t want to arrange photo shoots. I just want to send her the product once a month, she records a new ad every day, and at the end of the month I have 30 pieces of creative to test.
The other smart move: someone unbundled the ad agency around just the most important part — creative — and skipped all the undifferentiated client services. If you’re good at it, you become the go-to name in DTC.
Sam’s Advertising Origin Story [00:45:00]
Sam: By the way — going back to the ad line — that ad has now reached 300 million people. And then everybody copied it. But you do what you gotta do.
Shaan: Here’s why it works. Most brands say: here’s the product, here’s what it does. You focused on the emotional outcome. You’re not saying “stay informed” — you’re saying “look smart in front of your boss.” That hits people where they actually live.
Sam: One user told me she was in a job interview for Lyft that wasn’t going well, and she brought up a story from The Hustle email. It created a connection with the interviewer, they ended up having a real conversation, and she got the job. I wanted to capture that story in 200 characters. The original ad was something like: “My boss thinks I’m smart (I’m not). The Hustle is my secret weapon to trick them. It’s working wonderfully. Try it.”
That’s the whole idea. Not “get the news delivered” — not the product. The outcome.
Tele-Operated Machines and Human-in-the-Loop [00:53:00]
Shaan: There are a lot of heavy machinery operators on construction sites — forklift drivers, crane operators. Really expensive, skilled, dangerous labor.
Fast-forward 10 to 20 years, I think all of that gets replaced with tele-operated machinery. Not self-driving — tele-operated. Like Deep Sentinel, the security company I invested in: one security guard monitors 100 different camera feeds because they only need to look when there’s someone at the door.
Same with driving. The computer can handle the highway. But for a left turn or parking, the computer isn’t quite there. So what they do is: mostly AI, but when the computer hits a defined situation — like a left turn — it pops up on the driver’s screen. The driver takes over, does the left turn, says “back to autopilot,” and the thing drives off again.
I’ve sat in a car being driven by someone at a computer somewhere else. They drove me around a parking lot and parked perfectly. The latency is low enough.
One driver can work across 10 construction sites simultaneously. The operator makes 3x more than before. The cost of the operation goes down. Win-win-win.
Sam: There’s a company called Phantom Auto doing tele-operation as a service for vehicles. Some people are skeptical — the theory is that every company doing this will just build it in-house rather than using a third-party. But the concept is real.
Shaan: Yeah, I think there’s a question of whether there’s a third-party platform play or whether all the operators do it in-house. But the pattern is real: human in the loop is a viable, sustainable business model, not just a bridge to full AI.
Winner Winner: Tele-Operated Claw Machines [01:00:00]
Shaan: There’s a company called Winner Winner — Joe Spicer, our friend, is involved. They have a warehouse in Las Vegas full of claw machines. You play them remotely from your phone. When you win a prize, they mail it to you.
Sam: I love this. This is like the tele-operated concept applied to something fun.
Shaan: Yes. You buy credits, play the claw machine through your phone — there’s a camera on it — and if you win the toy, they ship it. It’s an arcade you can play from anywhere.
These are actually really popular in Japan and Korea. The numbers for Winner Winner were pretty solid.
The key thing that makes this technically work: latency. If I push right and it lags, and by then I’ve pushed right three more times, I get frustrated and quit. So you have to smooth that out. But that’s getting better and better every day, and it’s a lot easier to solve than self-driving cars.
The whole space to watch: tele-operation, remote operation. Remote drivers, remote arcade games, remote construction, remote cleaning. Wherever a machine can do 80% of the task but can’t do the last 20% — you put a human in the loop.
Pavel Durov and Telegram [01:07:00]
Sam: Do you follow Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram?
Shaan: Yes. So this guy started VK — basically the Russian Facebook. Every country had its own social network before Facebook came and crushed them. Facebook won in every country… except Russia. Zuckerberg has given interviews where he’s like, VK’s engineers are brilliant mathematicians, and the moment we release anything, they clone it pixel-for-pixel within 24 hours.
Then the Russian government basically took over VK. Durov refused to cooperate, had to flee.
He creates Telegram — encrypted messaging, basically WhatsApp but not owned by Facebook. He self-funded it for years, put $50 million of his own money in. He’s been nomadic ever since — Dubai, Paris, Finland, Brazil. Can’t go back to Russia, doesn’t want to come to the US.
He’s 36, worth about $20 billion.
His Instagram is hilarious. You will literally never see another human being in his feed. No friends, no girlfriend, no family. Just him — usually shirtless, ripped, doing model-esque photo shoots. Sitting on a sand dune, riding a horse into the sunset, in a speedo under a waterfall.
Sam: He’s like a hunk.
Shaan: He absolutely is a hunk. Follow this guy. He has this idealistic streak — he writes Telegram update posts like: “Telegram remains 100% free, 100% encrypted, 100% independent.” He cares deeply about privacy and freedom, at least as far as his public brand goes.
They also did an ICO — I think they raised $3 to $4 billion. Then the SEC said this is a securities offering, you can’t do it. They gave the money back. But for like two years they held billions in float. Crazy story.
And they have maybe five open jobs. Telegram runs on what seems like a skeleton crew. One of the most valuable companies per employee ever.
Aubrey Marcus and On It [01:15:00]
Sam: Do you follow Aubrey Marcus on Instagram? The On It founder?
Shaan: I didn’t, but now I do. You said On It sold for $200 million?
Sam: Somebody told me like $200 million. They make supplements — Joe Rogan’s thing. Founded by Aubrey Marcus.
This guy is wild. He goes to rural areas and does isolation rooms — no light, no sound — for four or five days. He reportedly does significant amounts of psychedelics. He had an open relationship with his wife — I think her name is Whitney, like a former Miss America type. And he’s just this huge, ripped, good-looking guy with cool tattoos doing like war paint and steel mace workouts on Instagram.
Shaan: He’s like the most interesting Instagram in the supplement world. And you’re right — if you want interesting founders, look at supplement company founders. Energy drink founders. They are not buttoned up. They are legitimately wild.
The CEO of Bang Energy — legitimately weird. These guys are not corporate. They run big corporations, but they are not corporate people.
Sam: The supplement founders are always like this. That’s how you know the space works — you have to be a true believer, or at least perform as one.
Closing [01:20:00]
Shaan: All right, that’s a good one. Let’s go. We’ll pick up more next week.
Sam: Let’s travel, never look back.