Sam and Shaan react to the news of Elon Musk closing his $44 billion Twitter deal, which prompts a wide-ranging conversation about combustion vs. electric engines, Elon’s psychology around fear and doubt, and the distinction between “vocal minorities” (loud but irrelevant) and “mobile minorities” (small groups that actually vote with their feet). They also riff on niche businesses built on regulatory lock-in — alternative DMVs, online driver’s ed (Aceable), and birth certificate services (VitalChek) — and end with a look at RELX, the obscure UK company that owns LexisNexis and scientific journals and may be one of the most profitable businesses in the world.
Speakers: Sam Parr (co-host, founder of The Hustle), Shaan Puri (co-host, founder of Milk Road)
Elon Just Bought Twitter [00:00:00]
Sam: I just saw — if you go to Bret Taylor, the chairman of Twitter, he just tweeted: “We’ve agreed to a deal with Elon Musk.”
Shaan: Oh wow. Wow.
Sam: So I think saying it’s done is fair.
Shaan: Yeah, that’s fair. Okay. Fifty-four dollars a share.
The Combustion Engine vs. the Electric Revolution [00:00:20]
Sam: So let me tell you something really quick. This is gonna sound weird, but it relates to what we’re talking about. Do you know how a combustion engine works?
Shaan: I look like I know how a combustion engine works.
Sam: No. All right, here’s how a combustion engine works. You’ve got this huge block — it’s called an engine block. It’s this big piece of metal, imagine like a rectangular cube that’s about two and a half feet long, a foot wide, and a foot deep. Got it?
Shaan: Okay.
Sam: When you hear “four-cylinder,” “six-cylinder,” “eight-cylinder,” “twelve-cylinder” — that’s how many cylinders they’re going to drill into that engine block. And do you know how big a cylinder is?
Shaan: I’ve eaten Pringles before, so I could sort of imagine.
Sam: You’re not far off. It’s around like a can of Coke, almost. A little bit bigger — but for the sake of this, we’ll say it’s like the size of a can of Coke. And in those cylinders goes a piston, which is basically like you’ve drilled those holes and you’ve got something almost the size of a can of Coke going back and forth through those holes.
The way it works is you have a shaft that connects to the pistons, which turns that up-and-down motion into motion that the engine can use. And check this out: in order to make this all work, you have this thing called a spark plug in each cylinder, and then you have this other device called a carburetor. The carburetor mixes the perfect amount of fuel and air into the cylinder, the spark plug makes a small spark, and there’s a miniature explosion in the cylinder that creates so much pressure that the piston is moving up and down. Does that all make sense?
Shaan: Okay. I fall — I don’t know why you’re telling me about this, but I understand it now.
Sam: Listen, it gets even crazier. You know how you’re driving and your car will say like 6,000 RPMs?
Shaan: Yeah, sure.
Sam: That means those pistons — they have to be airtight for that explosion to stay in the cylinder, so they’re super tight, and they’re creating a lot of friction. When it says 6,000 RPMs, that’s 6,000 revolutions per minute. Six thousand means you’re driving pretty fast but not crazy fast. That means those pistons are moving up and down 100 to 150 times per second.
And you have oil in your car because those pistons are rubbing against metal. It needs oil, otherwise if you leave it without oil, they’re moving so fast it’s going to fuse together and basically weld the piston to the cylinder.
Shaan: Geez. Okay, okay.
Sam: The reason I’m breaking this down — listen, I can’t wait to hear it.
Shaan: It’s still fresh in your mind?
Sam: It’s still fresh. And the output of all this is carbon exhaust — it’s a gas, there’s fumes, there’s oil, there’s liquid, all types of fluid. And then there’s a transmission, which is like totally even crazier.
Sometimes the fact that this was invented in the early 1900s and it’s still the technology that we have just exploited and made so good — we’ve made this so good that these pistons can move for a million miles. They’re going to go up and down like a trillion-plus times. We have pushed that technology so far to the edge. It’s pretty phenomenal what we’ve done. And it’s such a crude technology.
It was good for what it was, and then Elon Musk comes along — he wasn’t the first one to do it, but he did a really good job of it — and he’s like, “This electric engine, all we’re gonna use is a battery and one motor. That’s all it takes.” And this motor is literally like three parts. There are very few parts, whereas with the combustion engine there’s like a thousand parts. And not only is it simpler in terms of maintenance, there’s basically no maintenance. It’s far better.
I own a car that’s considered incredibly fast and quite expensive — it goes zero to 60 in three seconds. A Tesla that costs $40,000 will crush that. It’s faster in every sense of the word. It doesn’t break. And I had one of those moments where I was like — I wasn’t actually high, but it was like one of those high moments.
Shaan: You just decided to have high thoughts without being high.
Sam: I had high thoughts. I was like, “Dude, we’ve been doing this combustion engine thing for like 130 years now.” And then along comes a couple of people who say, “No, no, we’re gonna do the total opposite way.” And instead of making an engine that just has more cylinders or is smoother or something, they do something totally opposite and it’s levels above in terms of quality.
I find that thought to be absolutely amazing. And it just turns out, today, he bought Twitter. So maybe something crazier is going to happen there. I actually don’t think it will. But maybe.
Isn’t that wild to think about? I don’t know how many people have existed since 1910 — billions and billions — we’ve all been doing it one way, and then along comes a very small group of people, let’s say tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, who said “No, this is the way to do it.” And it changes everything. I find that to be amazing.
Shaan: I agree, that is amazing. A couple thoughts while you were saying this. First of all, thank you for the engine lesson. Did I explain it well? Do you understand how the engine works now?
Sam: A little bit. Yeah. I feel like I’m at that perfect point where I feel like I know — because I don’t know what I don’t know.
Shaan: That’s the Dunning-Kruger effect, exactly. The takeaway here is that it’s very, very crude. You’ve got these metals rubbing against each other and creating — it’s just messy, it’s smelly, it’s crude.
Shaan’s Birthday Eye Appointment [00:06:30]
Shaan: I just did something today that your combustion engine story reminded me of. I went to the eye doctor. Not because I wanted to — I was like, “Just give me my goddamn contacts.” And they’re like, “Nope, you gotta come in, that prescription is two years old.” We gotta do the whole thing where we blow a puff of air on your eyeball.
Sam: What is that even for?
Shaan: I don’t know. But I went in and I decided to have a different attitude this time. I got really curious. I’m talking to the doctor, asking a bunch of questions. She runs this other test where she takes a picture of my eye and shows it to me on a screen. Have you ever seen the inside of an eye? It’s wild, dude. She’s like, “Okay, so this is the nerve in the back of your eye — that’s what’s sending all these signals. Your eyes are just getting light from everywhere, and this nerve is transmitting all these light signals to your brain, and your brain is piecing together the construction of the world.”
Sam: It’s amazing.
Shaan: “These are all the blood vessels keeping your eye alive.” And whenever I see how the body works, I just sort of marvel at it. I’m like, I don’t have to think — but my liver knows how to detoxify my body. I don’t have to think; my heart will just keep beating, reliably, or else I’ll die. Luckily it’s on autopilot. And in fact it’s on so much autopilot I couldn’t stop it if I wanted to.
The way that the human body works is just a true marvel. And today’s my birthday, and seeing that —
Sam: Oh, I forgot to tell you — happy birthday!
Shaan: Thank you, appreciate it. We talked earlier on the phone, but — the thing that amazes me is, like, the best thing to do on your birthday is to go get a scan of your body and just be like, “Wow.” The human body is like an absolutely incredible machine that just works. I don’t know how an engine works. I don’t know how my liver works. I don’t know how my kidneys work. I don’t know how my lungs work. But it does work, and just the fact that it does is kind of amazing to me.
Seeing my eyeball, my retina, the nerves and blood vessels in my eye — it was just a reminder of that humbling feeling. Like the humility of how you don’t even have control of your own body, let alone the world and all these other things going on. So I really appreciated that.
That’s the first thing. Second thing — by the way, are you wearing a Mighty Ducks jersey?
Sam: Yeah, dude. It’s my birthday. I’m feeling like a Mighty Duck right now.
Shaan: Oh my god. That’s awesome.
Sam: The older I get, the more I need to behave like a child. That’s kind of the game plan — get more childlike as I grow, not more adult-like.
Vocal Minority vs. Mobile Minority [00:10:30]
Shaan: Okay, I wrote this down the other day for the podcast. I wrote “vocal minority” and “mobile minority.” I wrote this like a month ago and thought it might come up. And what you just said about Elon — basically a very small number of people changing the way that things work — is a great example of this.
It’s not like Elon is the guy. We can’t say he came up with this. We could just say there were probably a lot of people who came to the same conclusion. He just had the strongest will and is the person who gets a lot of the credit.
By the way, have you seen what he’s been saying lately about the origin story of Tesla? The controversy?
Sam: No.
Shaan: So, Tesla started about a year before Elon invested in it. He’s basically seen as the CEO, kind of like the founder — you don’t really hear about the two guys who actually started it. And he is kind of the founder when you think about it: it’s literally the eighth largest company in the world. At the time it was worth like $10 million — what’s the difference?
But the guys who started it have basically made it their mission — there’s a group of people that are like anti-Elon, a vocal minority, who’ll say things like “Elon didn’t create Tesla, he just invested in it and takes all the credit.” And one of the original guys has really made it his mission to keep telling people how he was the founder of Tesla, not Elon Musk.
And Elon came out recently. Someone asked what his biggest mistake was, and he goes, “Well, certainly the worst business decision I made was not deciding to just start Tesla on my own with me and JB” — I guess the guy he feels was his co-founder. He’s like, “Buying the existing company and then building from there versus just doing it on my own — certainly that was the worst decision I made.” Because financially, that other guy owns shares of what’s now a trillion-dollar company, and that guy has basically made it his crusade to say “F Elon Musk, I’m the founder of Tesla.”
Sam: How much does that guy own?
Shaan: I don’t know the exact percentage. I think his name — there are two guys — Martin and somebody else. And one of the things they say is “we created Tesla.” And Elon has come out and been like, “Tesla was nothing. There was no product. It was basically a shell of a company. Pre-launch, pre-everything. I invested $6.5 million in the first round, knowing I’d have to invest way more after that, took a chairman role,” and he had the guy who designed SpaceX’s logo design the Tesla branding. Like, he created it. It was a dormant company.
Sam: And how is that his biggest mistake? That doesn’t seem like that big a deal — it worked out fine.
Shaan: And one could argue it was worth it just for the name.
Sam: Exactly. Just for the name.
Shaan: I guess his take would be the company was just going to die if he didn’t invest in it. He was probably the only investor at that time.
Anyway. Back to vocal minority. We see this a lot on Twitter and other places — there’s a vocal minority, a small group of people who are sort of unhappy about anything that happens. They’ll be unhappy that Twitter’s being bought by Elon Musk. They’ll be unhappy that he’s a billionaire. They’ll say Tesla’s cars are electric but the electricity comes from coal. They just always have something to say.
So there’s a vocal minority. And I think one of the biggest skills in business today is to correctly identify a vocal majority versus a vocal minority. If you constantly let the vocal minority sway your thinking, you’re letting the bottom one or two percent of people sway your decision-making just because they’re very loud about it.
But what you don’t want to overlook is what I call a mobile minority. A mobile minority is a group of people who actually take their business and walk elsewhere — or they take their lifestyle and just change it. So like, if you’re Safeway, but all of a sudden there’s a small group of hippie people that are buying all-natural produce and shopping at this place called Whole Foods Market in Austin — one or two locations — but all of their spend now goes there. Or you see people who are subscribed to Netflix but all of a sudden they start spending all their time on TikTok and YouTube instead. They’ve actually voted with their feet.
Or — I was just reading about Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. When the whole Rosa Parks thing happened, the Black folks were like, “No, we’re not taking that.” And originally, the bus company was like, “Well, that’s only a certain amount of our population, no big deal.” It goes on for like two weeks and you’re like, all right, something’s happening.
And it’s happening in San Francisco right now. A mobile minority of people have left San Francisco, taken their business elsewhere. Very small group of people. Some of them were loud about it — “I’m leaving because I have this and this beef with San Francisco” — most of them were just frustrated and went to Miami, went elsewhere, went where they’d be treated better, taxed less, get more from their government.
Those mobile minorities are actually the ones you want to listen to, whether you’re a politician or an entrepreneur. There’s a subreddit that’s getting really popular — yeah, it’s only 50,000 people, but 50,000 people have chosen this lifestyle, whether that’s anti-work or overemployed or tracking their fitness and sleep in a maniacal way. That actually is something you really want to pay attention to. It’s a great place to start a business when you notice a mobile minority.
And it’s also really important to notice as a leader of a city or a company: “Huh, how come all these developers are going to this weird Web3 crypto thing? What’s that about?” Yeah, it’s not everybody — but like, 10% of your smartest people all left to go do this thing. They took a pay cut to go do it. I think you should probably pay attention to that.
So: ignore the vocal minority, pay extra attention to the mobile minority.
Sam: I agree with that. I would also challenge myself to find examples where it’s a great term — what’s it called?
Shaan: Mobile minority.
Sam: That’s a good one. Trademarking that. That’s a My First Million original.
So, there are people — like day trading among young people has gotten incredibly popular. I don’t think the majority of people do it, but a lot of people do it. They’re very loud, they’re betting a lot, and I think that’s horribly stupid.
Shaan: Yeah. I’m not saying it’s always a good thing, right? It might be people vaping — 10% of teenagers are vaping now. I’m not saying it’s always healthy, but I am saying it is almost always worth paying attention to a silent, mobile minority versus the vocal minority. The vocal minority is almost always worth ignoring.
Mobile Minority Examples Brainstorm [00:19:30]
Sam: You want to call a few examples off the top of your head?
Shaan: Yeah, you give a few, I’ll give a few.
Sam: I’m just gonna riff off things I’m noticing from Reddit and my interests. Number one: people who don’t want to buy off Amazon because they don’t want to deal with throwing away the packaging. Number two: people who want to use reusable packaging — like a Ziploc bag that costs $20 for one bag, but you can use it over and over. Number three: people who don’t want to eat out of plastic.
And here’s another one that’s related: my wife’s vegan, so anything we do has to be compatible with a vegan lifestyle. And you’d be shocked how much is not compatible. You think about food — that’s where most people go — but leather is the other huge one. We’re about to buy a car, or she wants to buy a nice purse. She’s ready to go to Louis Vuitton or whatever and drop $5,000-$6,000 — but she won’t, because it’s all leather. She’s like, “I can’t believe these luxury companies don’t make even one non-animal-based product.”
Shaan: Right.
Sam: All the vegan people want to buy luxury — go to whichever brand makes it. Gucci, Prada, whatever. And they just don’t. Or if they do, they’ll make the bag but not the handle or strap. She’s like, “Well, if you actually cared about this, you’d care about all of it.”
We see that with cars too — Tesla has all vegan leather and they’re one of the few car makers that lead with that. It’s like these little things that are super easy to overlook. I would totally understand a company saying, “Look, we’re not gonna change our product line for one or two percent.” But as that one or two percent gets big enough — I don’t know how much of the vegan population is now in America, but let’s say it’s two or three percent. That’s out of a base of 300 million people. And those are people who don’t just kind of care about it — they really care about it. They’re the mobile minority and the vocal minority. They take action and they talk a lot.
Shaan: Exactly. So you make a chocolate, make a cheese, make a car, make leather — whatever. That’s an example where I’ve seen a lot of wallet share go to the one brand that just cares about it.
What else is there?
Sam: When I read the TikTok comments, there are so many people who, when they post videos of people from the early 2000s — no one’s on a cell phone — they say, “Oh wow, they must be so happy.” So I think there’s going to be a mobile minority of people who actually don’t want smartphones. The digital detox population.
Shaan: There’s also a group that’s the absolute VR nerds. Most of the dialogue around VR is “it’s not here yet” or “it’s never gonna happen.” But there’s a small number of people who spend an absurd amount of time in VR. They work in VR. There’s a guy on TikTok who says he spends 24/7 in VR — he literally wakes up, puts the headset on, and spends his whole day like that. He even goes to sleep in VR. Some nut.
But close your eyes and imagine what that guy looks like.
Sam: Yeah, the beard touches the chest hair.
Shaan: There is no line. He’s got a rack just for fedoras, basically.
Sam: There are some people spending a lot of time in VR. I’m not sure if it’s a big one yet, but I’m just brainstorming.
I think you’ll see this with pet stuff. And in the gym business right now — the mobile minority through COVID has been home gyms. Those people are never coming back. Once they’ve put thousands of dollars of gym equipment in their garage or bedroom, they’re not going back to the gym industry. They’ve voted with their feet.
Shaan: Yeah, I think mobile minority is a really good term. I’m on board. But what does it have to do with engines?
Sam: Well, it’s about the few people who actually do something different. Like you were saying — Elon and the electric car. That’s a small number of people who just took a sharp left turn and decided, “Nope, we’re gonna get off the oil and gas system. We’re not gonna buy from any of these brands. We’re going fully electric.”
Elon’s Psychology: Doubt, Fear, and the Will to Do [00:28:00]
Sam: Do you think — here’s the thing I think about when I think about him. Obviously he’s right about Tesla. But it didn’t seem that way all the time. It seemed like the total opposite. And there are moments in my own life where I’m like, “I firmly believe this is the future” — like, I firmly believe many homes are going to be bought online someday — but along the way I have so many doubts. I’m like, “Ah, screw it.”
What I’d like to know is: how does someone like him handle that? Because he doesn’t give off the appearance that he ever has doubt. He’s like, “No, no, this surely makes sense.” But then he does say all the time, “I think we’re going to go bankrupt” — that doesn’t mean he thinks his idea is wrong. He just thinks they might run out of money. Do you think someone like him has real self-doubt? Or not?
Shaan: If you listen to him talk, he actually says three things. They ask him, “How did you decide to do this?” No American car company had been made since Jeep — like 90 years ago or something. Nobody had ever made a popular fully electric car. Nobody had ever started a private rocket company. All this stuff.
And he basically said, “Look, I agreed the probability of success was low. But it was worth doing, so I just did it.” He’s like, “I thought it was worth doing. Humanity needs this. So it’s worth doing. Certainly the probability of success is low — certainly.”
And then he said one other thing: “Is it in your nature to give up?” And he said, “That is not in my nature.”
So if you take those three things: he doesn’t decide to do something because he thinks it’s going to work. He decides to do it because he thinks it’s worth doing. He agreed the probability of success was low but not impossible. And he’s just not going to quit. That’s not in his nature.
You combine those three things, and doubt has very little place. It’s like: I’ve already taken into account the low probability of success, I’m not going to quit, and I already decided it’s worth doing. Doubt can’t live in that home. That’s a two-bedroom home, and doubt doesn’t have a room.
So that’s the psychology I’ve seen — not knowing the guy, just from his interviews. But I’m not sure that’s the entire reality, even though he said it. And here’s why.
Did you ever pay attention to boxing in the 90s? Mike Tyson?
Sam: Sure, yeah.
Shaan: All right. Tyson came on the boxing scene when he was 19, and he was the man until his early-ish 30s. When he walked out to the ring, he was famous because he wore black shorts, black socks, and black shoes, came out with no shirt on, gloves already tight — and he was already sweating. No entrance song. Just that sound. His whole thing was about being frightening. “I am a tiger, I am a beast, I am here to kill.” He’d say things like “I’m gonna take out your heart and eat it.”
Sam: Yeah. “I’m gonna eat his heart, I’m gonna eat his children.” The great interview where he goes, “My defense is impregnable, my will is unstoppable, praise be to Allah. I’m Alexander the Great, he ain’t no Alexander the Great, I’m Alexander the Great.” Total bravado.
Shaan: Scary guy. And when he would look at you in the eye, you’d think, “This guy is going to murder him. He’s not just going to beat him up.”
Now I watch interviews with him where he’s older and doesn’t have to act that way anymore. He goes, “People thought I was so deadly — and I was deadly. But I was so afraid. The reason I acted like that was because my fear was at the total opposite end. I had to act that way because I was so afraid.”
And I’ve heard a bunch of UFC fighters say the same thing — Donald Cerrone, Chael Sonnen, Michael Bisping. Every single time backstage, they’re thinking, “Why did I do this? Why didn’t I quit? I don’t want to do this. I’m afraid.” And Michael Bisping has the biggest mouth of everyone — he talks the most trash. When I heard these fighters say this, I was like, “Oh.” You are the toughest guy on earth right now, and even the toughest guy on earth is scared. They go into a cage fight with another guy who’s trying to kill them, in their underwear, in front of millions of people, after talking mad trash. It’s one of the most vulnerable positions you could put yourself into.
Sam: That’s true.
Shaan: Somebody said this about Elon — I think it was an investor who invested in Tesla and SpaceX and has never sold a share and never plans to. You know, this guy’s got the best returns ever because all his bets were on Elon. And he said, “Elon is just a normal guy, but the fear gene got removed.” I actually think it’s not that. Nobody’s truly fearless. Everybody has fears. The extent to which you are fearless is the extent to which you learn how to dance with your own fears.
Those UFC fighters feel the fear, but they learn how to cope with it. For Mike it was getting into that primal state of mind, saying certain things, walking out to that sound. That’s how he was able to dance with that fear.
I’m sure somebody like Elon — even though they have fears of failure, humiliation — three rockets blow up for SpaceX. You’ve basically put all your money in. You have enough for one more launch. You have to rush and do one more launch. I don’t think he was sitting there with a resting heart rate of 46. You could see the relief when it worked in the videos.
But he learned to dance with it. And that’s the difference between people who seem fearless versus the person who lets the fear slow them down or stop them.
Asperger’s as a Superpower [00:37:30]
Sam: Are any of your closest successful friends autistic or have Asperger’s?
Shaan: Sure — they do seem like it sometimes.
Sam: Your closest friends, to be honest. Yeah, I like to get along with people — I tend to get along with more outgoing, extroverted types. But I’ve got a couple who you know too, and I’ve noticed one in particular — very, very successful — and he just approaches things far more logically. I’m like, “Brad” — I’m making up the name — “this will never work.” And he’s like, “Well, why not? Why won’t it work? You see on this Excel spreadsheet this math adds up to where it does work.” And I’m like, “Well, but who’s going to believe you? How are you going to do it?” And he’s like, “Well, why wouldn’t they?”
Sometimes I wonder: is there something in Asperger’s — Elon has studied it, he has Asperger’s — where it’s supposed to be kind of a handicap, but in reality it’s the exact opposite? Like a superpower?
Shaan: I played poker for a long time, and you see this with poker players. Some of the best poker players have these Asperger’s-y type mannerisms. They’re extremely intelligent, but they have an emotional coolness that allows them to be rational under pressure. They don’t get as easily tilted as an emotional player would. They can play with huge sums of money and not change the way they play — it’s all just chips to them. It’s a game.
And they have the ability to focus for very, very long periods of time. Longer than the average person.
So there are some definite superpowers if you have that brain wiring. And I don’t actually know what the clinical definition of these terms is — I’m just reverse-defining it as: a person who has maniacal focus, who stays emotionally cool despite what’s going on, and who is highly intelligent, especially with math, probability, and statistics.
Those people are winners, dude. I’ve seen it so many times. Whenever I sit down at a poker table against that opponent, that is the person I’m trying to stay out of pots with.
Alternative DMVs and Regulatory Lock-In Businesses [00:43:00]
Sam: All right, let me tell you something interesting that happened to me. You said you went to the doctor — I had to get a vehicle registered, you know, all the DMV stuff.
Shaan: Dude, it sucks.
Sam: All right, so — do you know that there are third parties that will do this for you?
Shaan: I’ve heard about this. Some guy told me — he’s like, “Yeah, as like a backup, my buddy and I opened up an alternative DMV in the DC area. It’s amazing, we do like $3 million a year.” I was like, what? Open your own DMV?
Sam: I never looked into it. What are the rules? All right, so I went to the DMV and didn’t know you had to have an appointment. The woman working there was like, “Just go to this place called Fry Title or something.” I looked it up on Yelp, it was like 20 minutes away, I went out there — there was a line out the door — but I got in and out.
It’s a crappy building in a strip mall, exactly like you’d think. Next to like a Marshalls or something. And you can go there to get license plates, title transfers, specialty plates, temporary permits, car registration — basically a lot of what you’d mostly do at the DMV.
And the way you get to operate one of these is: you do a partnership with the motor vehicle department of each state and go through an application process that I don’t think is that hard. The owner was like a 24-year-old, smart but unsophisticated guy. He was like, “Yeah, I just applied.”
And there are signs everywhere that say “No new line people after 4pm, we close at 5.” So I was like, “Are you guys this busy all the time?” He goes, “Constantly.” I was like, “Are you kidding me?” And he’s like, “Yeah.” And I was like, “Well, how do you guys make money?” He’s like, “We charge you like $50 to $100 for the service.” No-brainer. Because the DMV here in Austin — I’ve got to wait four months for an appointment or something crazy.
I started looking into it. There are a few companies in the space.
Aceable: Online Driver’s Ed That Crushed It [00:47:00]
Sam: Have you heard of Aceable?
Shaan: What’s Aceable?
Sam: You’re gonna love this business. It’s in Texas. Just go to Aceable.com. It’s basically driver’s ed online. And they also do — if you get a ticket, you have to go to like a corrective driving course. They’re an officially licensed vendor for driver’s ed and those courses.
They absolutely crushed it. They bootstrapped for a while, I think now they’ve raised like $100 million. I’ve seen their revenue once, way back when I looked into this. They started with like a 32-hour driver’s ed course, and they could do it in like 36 states. They say 13 million people have gone through it.
And they also do real estate licenses — like if you’re trying to get your broker’s license. This is such an amazing business. It’s like a 10-out-of-10 under-the-radar business that just crushes it. And they crush it due to regulatory lock-in. They’re one of the only officially approved vendors that can do this.
They crushed it with Google Ads because people would search “driver’s ed online,” “get my broker’s license” — there wasn’t a ton of competition early on, and they just made a ton of money. I’m pretty sure this is a billion-dollar company at this point.
Shaan: Oh for sure. You know, Blake Mycoskie — the guy who started TOMS shoes? His first business was an online driver’s ed business. And he said he crushed it.
Sam: Oh wow, I didn’t know that. When I read his biography — “buy a pair, give a pair” — yeah. Anyway, this business kills it.
VitalChek and the Birth Certificate Business [00:50:30]
Sam: What’s the other one? So I was about to take a trip with my family and I was like, “Oh, we don’t have passports for the kids.” So I need birth certificates. And when a baby’s born, they don’t just hand you a certificate. It’s like they roll out a Candy Crush map — do these six steps, jump over all these hurdles to get your kid’s birth certificate. You’ve gotta go to the city, do this thing, whatever.
I didn’t want to do all that, so I just searched “get birth certificate online fast.” And the San Francisco — whatever, the Bay Area — the official birth certificate office says, “Yeah, you can either mail in this stuff or go to our partner VitalChek. We’ll do it.” I was like, “Oh, here’s another one.”
Sure enough — VitalChek.com. And you know these businesses crush it by the number of copycats that pop up. There’s yourvitalcheck.com — check is spelled C-H-E-K, that’s how you know. It’s an official California birth certificate you can get online. Government-endorsed. Hundreds of government agencies nationwide exclusively trust VitalChek.
So they’ve cut deals with government vendors, and you go on, pay — I don’t know, maybe $99 per birth certificate — fill out the form, and it’s done.
And here’s what I love about all of these businesses — the alternative DMV, Aceable, VitalChek. The customer isn’t just choosing to go get certified. They have to. They have to do it to comply. That’s why I love these businesses. It’s like a mandatory purchase. And you can build these kinds of third-party things on top of that.
I sent this to Xavier and Sieva, our buddies at Enduring Ventures. I was like, “Dude, this is a beautiful business to buy.” They’re going around buying businesses that are profitable, defensible, and can maybe be improved by rolling up multiple ones or centralizing the back office.
And the other green flag that my “this is a killer company” alarm goes off for is: it’s an ugly website with a lot of traffic, and it doesn’t say who the founder is on the About page. It says “We’ve been in business since 1992, and we do this, this, and this.” And I can’t find a guy on Twitter talking about it. That’s always a great sign.
RELX: The Most Profitable Company You’ve Never Heard Of [00:55:30]
Sam: So Sieva got back to me and said, “It looks like VitalChek is owned by a UK public company called RELX” — like R-E-L-X — which owns LexisNexis. It’s like a multi-billion dollar company. I believe RELX is one of the most profitable companies in the world in terms of margins.
Shaan: Can you see what the profit is?
Sam: They probably have like 33,000 employees. Let me pull up — I think it’s one of the most profitable. How do you spell it? R-E-L-X.
Shaan: Dude, how do you know about this? This is another Sam Parr special — knowing the name of some random British public company that owns scientific journaling companies and is one of the most profitable companies in the world. How did you know that?
Sam: I confirmed it’s one of the most profitable. I knew about it because I had friends getting their PhDs, and they were telling me how it works. I’m like, “Oh, that’s a racket.” Dentists publishing stuff on teeth — they don’t understand how margin works. They’re paying you $500 for that article? You don’t understand.
And second, when we were launching The Hustle, I loved database businesses. I researched database businesses like crazy, and I came across RELX because they own LexisNexis — a total conglomerate of legal records and documents. They own Patent Sight, which has a patent asset index of 135 million patent documents. They own Law360, they own Lex Machina — there’s a ton of database businesses in there. Law360 is kind of like The Hustle but for lawyers — well, they were first, so we were like them but not for lawyers. Basically a daily newsletter for lawyers.
Shaan: “Elon’s like me, but for billionaires.” The problem I have with Elon is he just rips off my style. I was using Twitter way before he was. I do memes, he does memes. I’m impulsive, he’s impulsive. I do podcast, he’s into money, business, and innovation.
Sam: He’s dating celebrities.
Shaan: Doesn’t have a podcast though.
Jake Paul, the Moral High Ground, and Closing Out [01:00:00]
Sam: Dude, I was thinking about Jake Paul. We had Jake Paul on the podcast, and I was thinking: if I got into an argument with that guy, he could just be like, “Well, I’m richer than you.” And I’d be like, “Well, I could kick your ass.” And he’d be like, “I can kick your ass.” And I’d be like, “Well, I’m famous.” And he’d be like, “I’m more famous.”
Like everything I do — he does that, but better. I have nothing I could say to him. He’s just gonna win the argument every single time.
Shaan: So that’s when you have to swerve into the virtue signaling and be like, “Well, I’m just — I don’t chase money and fame.”
Sam: Yeah, so you’re way more famous and rich. Well, I wouldn’t trade places with you. You must be miserable.
Shaan: You can always take the moral high ground on somebody better than you. “I have one thing you’ll never have, and that’s the moral high ground.”
Sam: Elon’s like the Sam Parr, but with money.
Shaan: Good episode. See you later.