Sam and Shaan open during the 2022 crypto crash — Shaan’s Milk Road portfolio down from $950K to roughly $250K — and spend the first half of the episode working through how to mentally and practically navigate a recession as entrepreneurs and investors. They argue that bear markets reward those who can stay calm, build lean companies, and dollar-cost-average into conviction. In the second half Sam breaks down a fascinating conference-business playbook: the founders of Money 2020 and ShopTalk have now launched a third trade show (HLTH), each time using the same real-estate-and-foot-traffic model to scale to $25-30M revenue and sell for $100M+.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host, co-founder The Hustle), Shaan Puri (host, founder Milk Road)
Cold Open: Intentionally Out of Touch [00:00:00]
Shaan: I am trying to be intentionally out of touch — in the same way that I intentionally avoid the news.
Milk Road Portfolio Down, Crypto Crashing [00:00:10]
Sam: All right, we’re live. What’s going on?
Shaan: Well, yeah — My First Million has become My First Hundred Thousand.
Sam: Yeah, your “first my last million.” On a good day. What — you took something out of the Milk Road. I texted you this but you didn’t reply. So in the Milk Road, my favorite part was you had — what was the starting amount? A million? Five hundred? What was it?
Shaan: You had your portfolio. It was actually a little bit less — it was $950,000. So $950K portfolio, and every day you would say what it’s at compared to what it was. You took it out. What’s it at now?
Sam: Correct. Why’d you take it out?
Shaan: I don’t even want to look. We took out the prices today because — or what did we do? Today we did a little different thing. The crypto prices crashed over the weekend, so we were like, okay, people are definitely going to want to know what’s happening. So — not Saturday, Monday — we sent it today.
Sam: No, you sent a weekend version.
Shaan: Yeah, that was just a different — that was just like a special edition. That was nothing. Today we sent like, “Why is crypto crashing?” The weekend one was about Jack Dorsey, because Jack Dorsey announced something called Web5, which is hilarious. It’s just a hilarious thing because people are debating whether it’s even a thing. He just skipped Web4 and went straight to Web5. People were like, what the hell is this? So we explained that. But today, crypto’s down like 20%, something crazy.
Sam: It’s brutal. The million-dollar portfolio — we basically started it right when I started the Milk Road. I was like, what will be entertaining to get people hooked to subscribe? And I was like, oh, I know — I’ll put up a million dollars and I’ll say, watch, I will publicly invest this money and let’s try to turn it into ten million. It became a mission: turning $1 million into $10 million through crypto investing.
To be honest we didn’t even do that much. We didn’t make very many moves. It just started with a million dollars worth of ETH, and I think we made like two investments maybe since then — just because I’ve been busy building the Milk Road and the podcast and my other business. It’s not like I’ve been super active.
But ETH is down like 66%, and all of crypto is down like that or worse. So the portfolio is brutal — a million dollars is currently like $250K or $300K is my guess based on where we’re at.
Where’s your head at? Are you freaking out, or are you still calm like you always are?
Shaan: I’m still calm. So this is a funny little story. I don’t know why I said it’s funny — there’s actually no humor at all in it. It’s interesting how I feel about it.
Ben flew in last night — not producer Ben, business partner Ben. So business partner Ben flies in last night, and basically from the time he took off to the time he landed, our whole business has changed. And what has changed is: aside from our own personal net worths going down and the Milk Road public portfolio going down, we have just entered — the whole economy has entered — a recession. And crypto has entered what’s for sure a big downswing, bear market, crash — whatever you want to call it.
And it’s not going to just bounce right back and be fun and dandy again. Think about six to twelve months ago: it felt like money was raining from the skies. I invested in a bunch of tech stocks, everything was up every day. Zoom tripled in price. Amazon was up because everybody was ordering everything online. Every company we invested in — private startups — was raising at crazy valuations. NFTs were selling for ridiculous prices. And it’s so crazy that on a dime the whole world has changed, and everybody’s mindset has also changed. Now it feels almost impossible to make money. The stock market is down brutally, crypto has crashed, every business is laying off people or freezing hiring. Companies are cutting their ad budgets — so if your business relied on ads, that’s getting cut.
Sam: You’re seeing advertisers run. I tweeted out “what’s going on in the ad world?” because I’m not in it anymore. It’s going away. Not this fast, but — the first to drop were consumer brands, D2C brands. They were the first to start reducing spending over the last three months, whereas before it was “how do I spend more?” Then companies that are doing hiring freezes or layoffs — their ad budgets are certainly tightening up.
We don’t see it this month — this month is an all-time high in ad revenue — but in the next three months ad budgets are going to constrict. They’d be crazy not to.
In our ecommerce business, sales this month are good, but you can see the tightening. People aren’t getting stimulus checks to go spend on electronics and toys and clothes. Consumers are starting to slow down, and all these things are interlinked. When the consumer spends less, the business makes less money, has less money to hire, less money to advertise, the platforms get less revenue — and they do the same thing. It’s all just interconnected.
First Bear Market as Professionals [00:05:20]
Shaan: This is interesting to me because I have not lived through a bear market as a founder or investor. In 2008 I was basically a sophomore in college — I don’t know.
Sam: You graduated high school in ‘08? So basically, this is our first time as money-earning professionals that we’ve experienced anything like this.
Shaan: Yeah. So I’ll give you my mentality. You said, are you freaking out? My mentality was — definitely I’ve had thoughts of like, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. But then I sort of like — well, the thought can arise but I’m not consumed by it. I had a day where I kept checking prices, kept doom-scrolling Twitter. But I pride myself on mental fitness. This is the time to be fit. When hard stuff happens, this is the time to use all those tools you’ve been building up, all those muscles about seeing things in a way that actually serves you.
So Ben flies in, and last night at midnight we basically wrote this thing — I don’t know if you can see this — it says “How a loser’s brain would work right now.” It’s like a loser’s brain winter brain. We basically wrote down all the scary thoughts, then we rewrote them from a winner’s brain perspective. We did this exercise to reframe our thinking.
Fear of Losing It All [00:07:30]
Sam: I’ve always been, you know, conservative, and it’s kind of working out right now. But even still I’m down a huge amount. And my fear is always rooted in: I’m gonna run out. I’m gonna be homeless. Do you have those fears — like, I’m gonna run out?
Shaan: No. Because if I actually asked you, do you actually think you’re gonna run out?
Sam: No.
Shaan: There’s no way Sam Parr thinks he’s going to go broke. Which is the combination of: you’ve got a lot of money still, and secondly, your core skill is the ability to make and sell products that people want.
Sam: I’m not saying it’s logical. It’s like my fear of flying — I understand I’m far more likely to fall off a set of stairs or get hit by a car going to the plane. But I’m still like — it’s such a deep-rooted thing. And I think it’s actually deep-rooted in a lot of people: I worked so long for this and it’s gonna run out.
Joseph Kennedy — JFK’s dad — I read his biography. He was like the eighth or ninth richest person in America when he was alive, worth about $100 million, and he said he would give away half his money if it meant the other half would be guaranteed to grow at a very conservative but consistent rate forever. Because he was just so afraid of losing everything he worked for. That loss aversion is often like that — it’s way harder than the alternative.
Shaan: Would you take that trade?
Sam: No. I wouldn’t. Because I think that over the next hundred years, it’s going to average seven or eight percent a year and I’ll be okay. I’m still bullish on America.
And everyone talks about America like — oh, empires only last 250 years and we’re there. In my head I’m like, but do you think we’re going to go to zero? England has been around for two thousand years and they’re not number one or two, but being number seven is pretty good. Germany and France were the best for 2000 years and now they’re not number one — but you know, I’ll be the Red Sox, it’s okay. The Spaniards are still taking naps in the middle of the day. You don’t need to be number one to live a very sweet life.
The Main Topic: What to Do Right Now [00:12:00]
Shaan: So I want to describe — I think this is the main topic. Our audience is heavily entrepreneurial and/or works in tech. Let’s go through both scenarios.
If you work in tech, you likely have a lot of your net worth invested in either the stock of the company you’re being paid in or in crypto or the stock markets. You’ve taken a bath of something between 30 and 60% of your net worth. Whatever plan you had for buying a house — your money is gone and interest rates have gone up. Or you wanted to have another kid and now you’re thinking twice. You start to reassess a bunch of things.
Especially because the last 10 years — if you’re around our age, early 30s — all you’ve seen since you graduated was numbers go up. So it’s jarring to suddenly see numbers go down.
Sam: Yeah. And then you have business owners who are like: great, this thing I’ve been working so hard at for the last X years. Here’s the bad news: your valuation is cut in half, your customers are going to start tightening up and paying you less, you’re probably going to have to do some layoffs. There’s a 30 to 40% chance you go out of business in the next year and a half, on top of whatever your normal risk was.
So on both sides you have this stressful, depressing thought. And you’re either in a puddle of despair, or you’re going to say: okay, the environment has changed and I need to change with it.
It’s not enough to just close your eyes and think happy thoughts. You need to be realistic — a lot of shit has changed and you probably need to change with it. But do you want to sit here feeling depressed or hopeless? No. So you’ve got to reprogram your brain to operate in this new world.
My reaction isn’t quit, or even spend less. My reaction is: yeah, it might all go away — let’s get after it. Let’s go get more. I do my best work when my back’s against the wall.
Shaan: I think I said this a while ago — I think you’re more likely to become a billionaire in five years or lose it all. You take a lot of risk. So I’m interested in hearing your perspective, because you’re all in on a couple of things that just so happen are getting hit the worst.
Shaan’s Three-Step Mental Framework [00:17:30]
Shaan: So kind of three things I said to myself.
Number one: this is a good chance to remember what I truly believe. First I needed to calm my nerves. If I’m in fight-or-flight, in a state of panic, anxiety, and stress, I already know my decision-making is not very good — at best it’s rushed, at worst I’m operating from fear, just trying to minimize pain in the short term.
So my first step: get out of fight-or-flight. And to do that I just checked myself. What do I really believe? I truly believe — and I don’t mean this arrogantly — that if I look at my life over a 10- to 20-year period from here, in my early 30s, by the time I’m 40 or 50 I’m going to have more money than I’ll ever know what to do with. That’s like the spoiler of my life. If I flip to the end of the book — oh, it ends happily ever after. I truly believe that.
So if I know that’s the ending, there’s no real reason to panic. It doesn’t really matter what happens in the first quarter if I know what the score is at the end of the game. I should be playing and doing my best, but if I fall behind for the next 12 to 18 months, that’s okay.
Sam: Wait, wait. Let me be the huge pessimist here. I believe that’s true about you — and about a bunch of people we know. But here’s the thing: I don’t want to have more money than I know what to do with when I’m 70. I want it now, when I’m young and can experience all this stuff and enjoy life. I don’t want it then. I want the freedom now, when I’m healthy.
Shaan: It’s sooner the better, not now or never. Those are very different. Sooner the better means we take a bunch of shots, take a bunch of action now to increase the odds it comes sooner rather than later.
The second thing: does it matter? Did my day-to-day actually change because my stock portfolio and crypto portfolio changed? Your net worth isn’t a figment of your imagination, but it’s sort of a figment of your perceived sense of safety. The stock market going down doesn’t actually change my day-to-day lifestyle or comfort — based on where I’m at. For some people it will change that, but for me it won’t. That helps take the edge off, which allows me to think with a clear head.
Sam: Are you changing your spending pattern at all?
Shaan: Oh, in a small way. But nothing that changes my happiness on a day-to-day level. I went to Trader Joe’s yesterday instead of Whole Foods.
Sam: Wait — you were gonna get another car. Did you actually do that?
Shaan: I guess I’ll hold off on that.
Sam: You’re doing Trader Joe’s. Trader Joe’s.
Shaan: Literally. But again — Trader Joe’s is sick, you know? Those sorts of things don’t actually sway how I feel. I’ve always kept myself honest, which is: what I want is to have a fat mansion, eating a feast with all my friends and family at the table, laughing and joking. That’s my ideal.
But what’s even better than that? What’s even better than the sick mansion with the feast and all your friends around? You’re the type of person that can get stuck in an elevator and have fun — because then you’re invincible. You can put me in the shittiest situation and I’m still going to be laughing. Now I don’t really have anything to fear, because my feelings weren’t dependent on having all those items.
So yeah, I make some shifts in my lifestyle, but it’s like — okay, cool, it’s a new season. It’s tightening-up season. It’s like getting shredded for the summer. I’m going to cancel a bunch of subscriptions I don’t care about because it’ll make me feel good. It’s spring cleaning. Where am I spending that I don’t really want to be spending? Where are we advertising that’s inefficient? Who’s on our payroll that’s not pulling their weight? Get rid of all that weight now.
Sam: I’ve been using this app called Truebill — this is not an ad. It basically looks at your subscriptions and suggests what to cut. Me and my wife Sarah both had Amazon Prime subscriptions — apparently I thought I cancelled one of them. It catches that. And if you need to cancel something that requires a phone call, they’ll do it for you. It’s pretty cool.
Planning for 18 Months of Hard Times [00:24:00]
Shaan: So me, Ben, and Saffon — we were hanging out this morning. We were like, let’s just make a real list. Assume these market conditions last for the next 18 months. The stock market will find some low and bounce back a little, but it’s not going to be “everything just keeps going up, we’re all printing money.” Same with crypto. Companies aren’t giving raises or hiring as much. Customers tighten up, revenues go down across the board.
Now: some things are going to die, some things are going to survive, and some things are going to thrive.
Truebill is something that thrives during a time like this — it’s helping you bring financial discipline into your life. Short sellers are going to thrive. The guy who’s been sitting on a bunch of cash on the sidelines is like, oh, there are businesses like Facebook and Amazon trading at all-time lows over the last decade — now is the time to dollar-cost-average into them.
Sam: How about assets? How about Moist saying in the interview you did with him that he had $50 million in cash? He was just waiting. Oh, okay, now I understand what you were doing.
Shaan: Exactly. And I remember — like seven years ago I bought Bitcoin for the first time. I think I bought $10,000 of Bitcoin when it was like $700. The next week it goes up to $800 and I’m like, there we go baby! Buy the thing, price goes up — love it when they stick to the script.
Two weeks later Bitcoin crashed to like $200. So my $800 was now — I don’t know, I lost like 75%. And at that time $10,000 was significant to me.
Sam: I remember you told me you made $150K a year in salary and I was like, oh my god, you’re the richest person I know.
Shaan: You were the richest person I knew at that time. And I was underpaid for what I was doing, but in my head I was like, don’t say anything, they might realize how much they’re paying you.
Anyway — I walked into the office bitching about the Bitcoin crash. I’m very public when I invest in things, which makes me often look like a dummy but occasionally look very smart. I was like, guys, my Bitcoin — I forget if it was $10K or $20K — it’s like all gone now.
And Furcon was like, do you believe less in Bitcoin than you did two weeks ago? Did you learn some new information that makes you less bullish? I was like, no — I barely knew anything to begin with and nothing changed. He said, cool. So if you bought now you could bring your average cost basis way down.
I went home and did it. I lowered my cost basis to $400. Bitcoin today is trading around $22,000 or $23,000, but last year on average around $30K. So that’s the difference between basically an 8x and a 4x in your return — from one conversation during one hard moment.
I’ve heard this many times: fortunes are built during bear markets. For two reasons. Number one, if you start a company you’re going to be the lean, mean cockroach — not too much competition, building up your team and consumer base now. As the tide lifts all the boats, you’re the biggest boat. That’s what happened to you with The Hustle, and that’s what happened to many companies that started during recessions.
The same thing happens with investing. If your strategy is to only buy when things are going up and sell or do nothing when prices go down, you’ve inadvertently subscribed to a buy-high, sell-low strategy. The opposite is: if you have conviction, if there are good assets that are temporarily underpriced because of panic and fear — those are the times you’re supposed to buy in. It’s very hard because your mentality is, I just lost a ton of money, I don’t feel like putting more at risk. But if you can pick assets properly, that is the right thing to do.
Building During a Downturn: Sam’s Approach [00:32:00]
Sam: What I’ve been learning — I tweeted this out — is I’d rather just earn more income and build more companies than worry about these losses.
Let me tell you what I’m doing, and then you tell me what you’re going to do.
I don’t have a real business business yet, but I have a small version of one that might become a proper business. My reasoning — and keep in mind I feel so stupid when it comes to finance and economy stuff — my belief is basically that now’s the bottom. I discovered this with The Hustle: I was creating something people kind of dismissed or thought couldn’t work. But it takes four, five, six years to get to a substantial business. By that point you’re the biggest and best, and therefore you can get acquired or you’re making a lot of the revenue.
So with the thing I’m working on now, my logic is: now is the time to work really, really hard. It might suck for one or two or three years, but when things start changing, that’s around the time I’m going to have a team, have processes, have systems, have product-market fit. And then we can accelerate hard because we’ve already done the work during the hard times.
Is that how you’re looking at it?
Shaan: Yeah, definitely. That’s definitely the case.
Zero Hedge and the Problem of Predicting Crashes [00:34:30]
Sam: I don’t actually want to go into why it’s happening. I was thinking about this — we’re in this text group with all those guys and they’re all like — it’s a bunch of supposedly smart people, and they don’t agree on the cause or the solution. They can’t predict what happens.
That’s kind of interesting to me. America has been around for hundreds of years, capitalism for thousands of years, and the smartest people still don’t agree on the cause or the solution to a lot of these problems. At your business, you have a pipeline, a funnel. When you build a good business you can say, there’s a 90% chance that this is going to happen. America is kind of like a business with 330 million people and a weird corporate structure. And isn’t it fascinating that we still don’t entirely understand the cause or solution?
Shaan: It’s like — did it rain today because I did this dance, or because the clouds had heavy precipitation? It’s very hard to separate the people who think things are happening because they did a funny dance from the people who actually understand the mechanism.
We can predict certain human behavior reliably — Pavlov’s dog type stuff — but applying that to a whole economy is incredibly hard. And the narrative-making is backwards. There wasn’t necessarily no cause, it’s just not easy or clear to see what the true cause is among the many possible explanations.
Sam: Do you follow ZeroHedge on Twitter?
Shaan: Yeah. ZeroHedge is like this pretty hardcore — libertarian is probably the best way to describe it — and they’re pretty much always doom and gloom. Every article is written by Tyler Durden from Fight Club, and every tweet is in all caps — the scariest stuff all the time. And it’s incredibly easy to believe, for some reason, because emotion makes you automatically assume the worst is actually the truth.
Sam: I would not unfollow it — but I totally get what you mean. If you follow ZeroHedge, you’re just like, wow, all the big people in charge are sort of idiots, and everything that’s going up is overvalued and overinflated, and no matter how bad it is it could get worse.
People say about the guys who predict crashes — this guy’s predicted a recession 13 out of the last three times it’s happened. If you predict a crash every year you’ll eventually be seen as a genius. You’ll be right after three years of being “early.” And then all the years things are going up — well, you were just early.
Somebody said the other day: in a bear market, it pays to be a pessimist. In a bull market, it pays to be an optimist. Somebody who’s always a pessimist or always an optimist is not going to have long-term success. The ability to shift gears between optimism and pessimism, and knowing when to do what, is a highly underrated trait that very few people have.
Conference Business: ShopTalk and Money 2020 [00:40:00]
Sam: Can I tell you about a company I found? You remember how I find these things that are kind of interesting and weird? I found another one.
Have you heard of a conference called ShopTalk?
Shaan: The name sounds familiar.
Sam: It’s a conference I think you would have been involved in because it’s for e-commerce people — but not just D2C entrepreneurs. It’s like Shopify as well as every Shopify plug-in, as well as retail brands. The CEO of J.Crew might go and talk on a panel with someone at Stripe. It’s online commerce but for the retail ecosystem. B2B trade show.
Shaan: Got it. So who goes — if I’m an e-com store, should I go?
Sam: Probably not. But if you were speaking there, executives at the Gap would be like, these young startups here’s what they’re doing, maybe we should consider changing our strategy. Or if you’re making apps for this ecosystem, you go talk to other apps and maybe do business together.
Shaan: Got it. It’s more like a trade show.
Sam: Exactly. But here’s where it gets interesting. The guy who started it — his name is Jonathan Weiner — and he has a co-founder. So listen to their background and what they’re doing now.
This guy Jonathan and his partner — they had an ad tech company as well as a payment software business that they sold for hundreds of millions of dollars. Then they went and started a conference called Money 2020 — a fintech, payment processors trade show. Within two years they scaled it to $25 to $30 million in revenue with $10 million in profit, and sold it for $100 million.
Right when they sold it, they went and started the same thing for commerce — called ShopTalk. Sold that for over $100 million. They sold both Money 2020 and ShopTalk to two different publicly traded companies. You can actually go verify the acquisition prices and revenue.
Now one of the founders spun off and is doing something called the Fintech Meetup. The other is doing one called HLTH — hlth.com — a trade show for healthcare. They’re basically doing the same strategy every single time. And if you go to all three of their conference websites and click the About page, they have these really cool cartoons instead of headshots of each employee — same graphic designer, clearly, for all three companies.
They’re building conference and trade show businesses — not software — and they’ve crushed it. No outside funding. Every three years, start something, sell it for $100 million. Same playbook. Two or three times now. Isn’t that crazy?
Shaan: This is amazing. I love these. I remember you telling me about Money 2020 a little while back. You’ve always been interested in conference and trade show businesses from the HustleCon days. I’m consistently blown away by how much money these make.
What do you think is the playbook? Because there are already a lot of conferences in this space, right? What are these guys doing that’s better or different?
The Conference Playbook: Real Estate and Foot Traffic [00:46:00]
Sam: The misconception about conferences is that you need cool speakers and people come to watch content. As I’ve studied these guys, read their quotes, figured out how they do it — and I ran a conference business that made millions of dollars a year — I’ve realized that the real money, the $20-30-40 million a year money, it’s not really a conference. It’s a three-day transactional event.
You’re creating eBay. You’re creating a main street with stores on the street and renting it out. That’s what’s happening — it just takes place over three days.
Your speakers are just the bait to get the right people to come. Once the right people are coming, the rest of the right people will come. And they’re justified in being there for two reasons.
First: “Our competitor is there — we have to be there.” That’s a really big one. I talked to my friend who runs Blockworks, that other crypto media site, and he said: if blank company’s coming, the other company is like, we’ve got to come, and can we get a better booth than them? That’s extremely common.
The second, more logical reason: if we’re going to buy this $100,000 booth, we’ve got to close deals. Who are the shot callers that are going to be there? How do we make transactions happen? That’s the core of it — you have to realize you’re essentially in the real estate business.
There’s this guy named Sheldon Adelson — do you know who he is?
Shaan: Yeah, the Vegas casino guy.
Sam: He’s a mean old billionaire worth like $20 or $40 billion, known for being a huge anti-weed guy. He started an event called Comdex, which was eventually acquired for a billion dollars by SoftBank and became CES — the Consumer Electronics Show.
I read all these old articles about him. Someone asks: you’re in the conference business, but now you’re building up the Las Vegas Strip — what are you doing? And he says, the conference business is the real estate business. What I learned early on was I’ve got to get people and foot traffic to my event. Then I’m just selling real estate at a crazy high price per square foot. Same thing. And that’s why I’m in real estate now.
So these events are rooted in real estate and foot traffic.
The second thing: it’s got to be B2B. A TED Talk is the coolest thing out there, but people coming to hear about why sleep matters or how to cure malaria — that’s unfortunately not where the money is if your name is anything but TED. Do boring-ass B2B. We’re here to get some deals done and sell each other stuff.
Shaan: At least 40% of participants must have a tucked-in button-up shirt or polo, half the jokes need to be about their wife, and if someone says “old ball and chain” you get a default smirk from anybody. That’s the audience.
Sam: You have to have a tucker in your crew. There’s like a bomb-sniffing dog that’s just looking for tuckers in line. Not enough tuckers in this queue — shut it down.
Shaan: That’s where the money is.
Sam: So in terms of revenue model — in year one it’s like $2 to $3 million, year two $12 million, year three $30 million. Based on that growth and their headcount on the About page, I think what they do is: in year one you’re just trying not to lose your shirt. They only give away a certain number of tickets, and for the rest of the people to come, you have to purchase it. Once you get a certain amount of sponsors, each sponsored company automatically brings a small crew. It’s like the spider-man meme — all the sponsors at their booths pointing at each other saying, buy my stuff.
Shaan: A circular economy of just buying each other’s crap.
Sam: And one key thing: they host the event in 2022, and by the end of 2022 they already have 90% of the revenue for 2023. Because you upsell the attendees right away for the next year. You can even sell multiple years.
The second thing they’re doing: charging for online communities. You met at the conference, you can keep this community going online. That’s a business they’re starting.
Shaan: What I would do — if I were outside the US — I would study these guys and do the exact same thing in Europe. Then Australia. Then India. Then China. Then South Africa. Wherever you are, there is a version of this that can be built locally and it’s not going to be competitive with them. This is a clonable template. You can go to more than one conference a year — it’s not winner-take-all.
Sam: Interestingly, all the companies that have bought these guys have been European. And I noticed one of the big things they’re doing now is: they’ve gotten really good at selling so far in advance, and they’re launching online communities alongside the event.
Shaan: This is great. I really like this one.
Recession Closing: Everybody Gets Hit [00:57:00]
Sam: I know I spent like 40 minutes of this podcast on the mindset of a downturn. But I do think it’s the most relevant topic — whether you’re an employee, an employer, or an investor, nobody is going to be spared. The economy going into a recession, the stock market tanking, crypto crashing, global inflation — it’s like Oprah: you get a disaster, you get a disaster, you get a disaster, everybody gets one. Nobody is going to be untouched. Some people’s businesses are going to go under. Some people are going to declare bankruptcy. But I don’t see anybody getting a stack of problems like this and coming out completely clean.
Shaan: Man, I remember when Biden was saying Putin was going to invade Ukraine, and I was like, reading about Putin, listening to Ben’s podcast “How to Take Over the World” — I was like, hey Putin, why do you want to mess this up for everyone? Like things are pretty awesome right now. What are you thinking? You’re gonna blow this for everyone.
That’s like the kid in class who raises his hand and says, “Hey miss, you forgot to collect the homework” with seven minutes left. Dude, what are you doing?
Sam: Okay, so this sounds like a very yuppy thing to say, but I don’t really look at gas prices because I don’t drive that much. But I was driving up here from Austin to Brooklyn — I’m living in Brooklyn now — and I was listening to the news talking about gas prices. I was like, oh man, I haven’t even looked at gas prices while I’ve been driving up here. And it was like $5.50. Crazy.
What’s the gas in California where you are? Are you paying like $6.50, seven dollars a gallon?
Shaan: How are normal people doing this? That is crazy. Seven dollars. When you said $5.50 I was like, wait, you’re saying you found a good deal? But you were trying to say that’s bad? I’ve lived in California two years — I remember when it was five dollars.
Sam: Yeah. And I just was not paying attention. I need to get places, I’m buying it no matter what it says.
Shaan: Seven dollars — how is this… we are really selling fools right now. How much does it cost to fill up a car?
Sam: Like $150, I guess, if you’ve got an SUV. I’ve got a BMW X5.
Shaan: Asking for a friend — my boy has been putting in the low-grade gas for a while. Does this matter? Is this marketing, or do I pay a price later?
Sam: I don’t know, but it doesn’t sound great. Seems like a recommendation not a rule.
Shaan: So I’ve been going with the 87 instead of the top-end stuff. And I’ve just been like, okay.
Sam: The most expensive thing is basically like eating McDonald’s — but seven dollars a gallon in California. That’s every 18 miles is seven dollars for you. Crazy.
Pent-Up Demand and the Range of Human Resilience [01:01:30]
Shaan: You remember how we were talking about the economy crushing people for years? I’ve got so many friends saying, man, I’ve been in my apartment for a year and a half. I’ve got money burning a hole in my pocket. I haven’t bought anything out. I have all-time high savings, I’m ready to spend.
And now a lot of people are going to run out of that savings, right?
Sam: I mean, you just gotta cut back. You cut back down to the low-end gas, you save the 30-40 cents a gallon. Other people are going to drive less, take public transport, carpool. People will find a way — that’s my general mentality.
I spent a lot of my life living in Jakarta or Beijing, and you just see people adapting. In Beijing, right next to our house, there were people just shucking corn all day — sitting in a squat removing husks from corn for 10 hours straight in the heat, taking their break to smoke a cigarette and play mahjong. That was their life and they were fine. In Jakarta, in India, people burn trash on the side of the road because there’s no waste removal — so you burn it and it’s gone. And yeah, it smells awful all day. But the range of how humans can live, survive, and thrive is so much wider than the average person thinks.
Shaan: Most people aren’t resourceful though. That’s what I’ve learned. I actually think that our audience is not typical — most people are just going to be screwed. That’s really what I think.
Sam’s Book and the 1-3% Who Actually Do the Work [01:03:30]
Sam: So I’m writing a book right now. I don’t know if I told you this. I’m using that Scribe Media thing where they write the book for you, after you say it to a guy on a call for like two hours every week.
Shaan: Is it all your content? They just write the words?
Sam: Yeah. I’m loving doing it. I’m like, oh cool, I get to put something down on paper. I’m not going to sell the book — I’m going to do something different with it. But basically, the start of my book is this:
Everybody wants the same things. Everybody wants to be wealthy, in great relationships, great family, great shape. You’d think: if everybody wants that and it’s all achievable, certainly most people are doing it. No. Most people have the exact opposite result. Most marriages end unhappily or in divorce. Most people in America are overweight or obese. Most people don’t have more than $10,000 in savings for a rainy day.
Everybody wants to be rich, fit, and madly in love. And in fact, everybody has the opposite. So if you think like most people think, you’re going to do what most people do and get the results most people get. And the results most people are getting are not very good.
Shaan: What’s the controversial thing you say from there?
Sam: The controversial thing about me is I am totally okay not taking into consideration most people’s situation. And I said that purposely provocatively — I did not want to soften it.
What do I mean? I always talked about loving to teach and be a teacher. Most people see that as some Mother Teresa, save-the-world educator thing. I’m like, no. I do not want to try to educate everybody. Most people are horrible students. They don’t want to learn anything, they’re not going to learn anything, they’re not going to do anything with it even if you told them the exact right answer. So why would I waste my energy on that?
My preference is: in a population of 100 people, there’s like 3% who really want to know the answer, and of them maybe 20% can actually take action on it. I’m only going to try to teach the driven, motivated, and capable. That is not a socially acceptable point of view. But it is my operating philosophy.
I focus on controlling the things I can control. And even when I’m talking about what most people should do, I know that most people are not going to be able to do that or want to do that or choose to do that. That’s okay. I’m not talking to most people. I’m talking to the 1 to 3% who want to thrive.
I hope everybody else listens and says, this guy’s a jerk, he’s so out of touch — and unfollows me completely. Which brings me back to what I said at the beginning: I am trying to be intentionally out of touch in the same way that I intentionally avoid the news. It’s actually part of my core strategy.
Shaan: I know that all of that sounds completely awful to some people. But I’m okay with it. I do believe — even if you disagree — that I’m allowed to have that choice. If you don’t think I have the choice to do that, then I disagree with you and all your ways of living.
Sam: If you think my opinion’s wrong, I get it, I’d expect that from a lot of people. But if you think I shouldn’t be allowed to have my opinion or act on it — there’s a difference between “I disagree” and “that’s not allowed.” You know, you can disagree without trying to cancel someone.
Shaan: They’re going to cancel me. I hope people get our voices mixed up and just think this has been Sam talking the whole time.
Sam: Yeah, this is Sam. P-A-R-R. You can find him — he’s affiliated with HubSpot if you want to go get him.
Shaan: I still get people messaging me saying they confuse us. I don’t understand that.
Sam: I think people watch the YouTube video and go, I’ve been mixing you up for a year. I think what they’re saying is you look beefier but talk nerdier, and I look nerdier and talk beefier.
Shaan: You look dumb and talk smart. I look smart and talk dumb.
Sam: All right, we’ll talk soon.
Shaan: Peanut butter and jelly, baby. Perfect combo.