Sam and Shaan do a solo debrief episode, going back and forth on the most interesting people they’ve each spent time with recently. The conversations span a Mormon billionaire family with massive Instagram followings, serial side-quester Sheel Munjal, VR true-believer Furqan, wild James Altucher stories, and a cowboy boot maker who moved to Mexico for three years to learn the craft but hasn’t put any of it on his website. The episode closes with a riff on the “tortilla principle” — how great businesses fail to tell the stories behind what makes them special.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host), Shaan Puri (host)
Opening: Just the Two of Us [00:00:00]
Sam: Not going to lie, I haven’t heard a word since you said “leverage to the tits” and I’ve just been waiting for us to talk about that.
Shaan: It was like, you know, today I’m going to wear a turtleneck and I might try to say “leverage to the tits.”
Sam: Like Sam, it’s just me and you — no guest. This is nice. It’s like a date night for us, the kids are out of the house.
Shaan: Well, let’s debrief. I have done a few things. Do you want to go back and forth on the interesting people we’ve hung out with? I’ve got like two or three.
Sam: How many do you have?
Shaan: Yeah, I’ve got three or four. But I have a theme with mine. I don’t know if yours would fit this, but the theme with mine is: all people who are contrarians in some way. And what I mean by that is not like the annoying kind of contrarian — not that. Like, if you call yourself a contrarian, you’re not contrarian, right?
Sam: Correct. Exactly.
Shaan: They wouldn’t say this about themselves. I would say it about them, which is what makes it kosher. The way I would say it is they’re all independent thinkers. When I hear the stories of what they’re doing, I don’t even want to ask about the thing — it’s like, how did you even think of doing that thing? How did you even get into that situation? Why were you even looking there? Why were you even deciding to do that?
Sam: Okay, I can fit within that framework. Yeah.
Shaan: I’ll go first.
Shaan’s Dinner: Justin Caldbeck on Snapchat vs. iMessage [00:02:00]
Shaan: So I hosted this dinner in San Francisco and invited maybe fifteen or twenty people.
Sam: You did a dinner? Yeah?
Shaan: Yeah. I know your boys growing up — friends hosting things — so I drove to the city and did it. Yes, this is true, true facts.
So we go there and there’s a guy there who I’m friends with. His name is Justin Caldbeck. Justin is a tremendous investor. He was early on GrubHub, Snapchat, Stitch Fix — just a bunch of companies that have done really well.
So let me tell you the story. I was talking to him about some of his big wins. I’ll give you a quick one: the GrubHub one. I was like, “How’d you get into GrubHub?” He said, “Oh, GrubHub — it was a funny story. They were doing well but nobody knew them. I don’t think they’d raised much money. I tried to cold email them, cold call them, called the office, couldn’t get a hold of them. So I just flew to Chicago. I hung out in the lobby until I bumped into the guys and said, ‘Hey, I’m really a believer in this thing, sorry to ambush you, but I just really believe in this.’” He ended up doing the deal.
Sam: Classic meet cute.
Shaan: So then I was like, “How’d the Snapchat one happen?” And he told this great story. He said, “I met Evan, and I will just never forget meeting him. I walked out of that meeting thinking: this guy is one of them. He’s one of the people who’s going to build a legendary company.” At the time I think Evan was still a student at Stanford.
Sam: Was Snapchat taking off? Was it like a rocket ship?
Shaan: No, no. It was really small. Maybe one hundred, one hundred fifty thousand users, not growing fast. And everybody on the outside viewed it as this silly little thing — oh, it’s disappearing photos, must be for inappropriate pictures, or it’s just a stupid college thing.
So he’s like, “I met Evan, heard him out, and Evan shared the story that people think Snapchat is about photos — and when they hear photos, they think about Facebook and Instagram, permanent public photos for your memories. But actually, we use photos for communication. It’s back and forth.”
And Justin goes, “Hm. So it’s like messaging?”
He goes, “Yeah, it’s messaging.”
Justin goes home, does some research, and thinks: I think everybody’s been comparing this to Instagram and Facebook, and because of that the metrics don’t look as good. But if I compare this to iMessage, what does it look like?
So he hustles and gets in touch with someone and asks: if somebody sends an iMessage, what percentage of them send another iMessage every day for the next seven days? They run the query for him. He asks someone at WhatsApp the same question. Then he gets in touch with someone from Instagram: if you post a photo, what are the odds you post another photo in the next seven days? Well, super low, right?
Sam: Yeah — if you use iMessage you use it every day. That’s just how messaging apps work.
Shaan: He goes back to Snapchat, asks Evan the number. Evan looks it up. He’s got the iMessage number. And he’s like, “This is communication.” And nobody else was that eager to invest. He was like, “I’ve got to go all in on this thing.”
Sam: And you hung out with him and he told you that story at dinner?
Shaan: Yeah.
Sam: That’s a great story. Was this like a career-changing deal?
Shaan: Yeah, man. That’s badass.
Sam’s Turn: Steve Hilton, Mormon Billionaire [00:11:30]
Sam: All right, you want me to tell you about someone I hung out with?
Shaan: Yeah, give me one.
Sam: All right. So we had this guy on the MoneyWise podcast like a month ago, and he’s in his 60s. His name is Steve Hilton. He’s a billionaire.
Shaan: A billionaire from what, by the way?
Sam: So he is worth — he says it on the podcast — something like two billion dollars. He made his initial money doing door-to-door sales. Made about a hundred grand. Then the Savings and Loan crisis hit — do you know what that was, in the ’80s?
Shaan: I don’t completely understand it.
Sam: Basically a bunch of cheap land became available. He got leveraged to the tits and bought all this property, and that made him three million. The three million he used to buy some storage units, that turned into nine million. Then he used that to buy oil and gas properties — lease rights basically — and from there it just compounded up.
Shaan: Not going to lie, I haven’t heard a word since you said “leverage to the tits” and I’ve been waiting for us to talk about that.
Sam: Well done, yeah. I’m trying it on. It was like — you know, today I’m going to wear a turtleneck and I might try to say “leverage to the tits.” Like getting a new haircut. It’s like this is my version of having bangs, you know what I mean?
Shaan: All right. So he makes a bunch of money, oil and gas, land. Got it. And then you didn’t just talk to him on the podcast — you did an absolutely normal human thing and invited yourself to his place?
Sam: After the podcast I was like, “Can I come over? Can I come and just hang out with you?” And he was like, “Yes, absolutely.”
So he lives in Dallas. He has this huge mansion. He also has a ski-in ski-out house in Utah — I know because of how I look a lot of people think I know about skiing, but I don’t. I’ve never skied in my life. I had to figure all this out.
We went to Utah at his huge mansion, ski-in ski-out, which if you ski, is a fancy thing. I learned a few things.
First thing I had no idea: his wife and two daughters are famous. His wife is Jen Hilton — she’s got an Instagram called Turtle Creek Lane. I think she has 1.5 million followers. Basically what she does is she decorates their home in the most crazy over-the-top way. So for example, for Christmas it looks like a Christmas dollhouse, but that’s her real house. She got famous doing that on Instagram and then brought the two daughters in to do their own thing.
Shaan: Were they just like snapping content constantly?
Sam: That’s funny — they weren’t. I mean, they did a bit, but it wasn’t any different from someone with like a thousand followers. Not obnoxious. And they actually mentioned that they worked with a company you invested in, and they were like, “His company did a great job.”
Shaan: Yeah, one of them — yeah for sure.
Sam: I didn’t know they were like these famous people. The second thing I didn’t know — I didn’t know they were Mormon. But they weren’t just Mormon. He was like King Mormon. He’s on the board of BYU.
So the first morning, Sarah and I get up at 7 a.m., go hang out, everyone’s sitting around the kitchen, and we’re patiently waiting for the coffee to get ready.
Shaan: And you’re just vaping rosé in the kitchen.
Sam: I’m just sitting there and I was like, “Do you guys do coffee? What’s up?” They had to tell me they don’t drink coffee. But they were like, “We went and bought coffee beans to accommodate you. We have this coffee machine — we don’t know how to use it, but it’s right here.” They had never gone through this experience. Like, do you get the beans, do you get the grounds, what device do you need, is this the right machine? They didn’t know, and they went to do it to accommodate us, which was hilarious.
But what I learned with the Instagram stuff: Middle America moms who they’re following are so much more profitable than, like, doing comedy bits for Millennials or Gen Z. They kill it. They would post like these gummies or this candy or some widget that someone sent them, showing me how many products they sell — it was the craziest thing I’ve ever seen. Like, people listening to this podcast, they’re like “I want to do things for the creator economy” — no, just do it for Lisa in Oklahoma. Mother dot com. That’s who you want to sell to.
Shaan: Oh my god.
Sam: It was crazy. They were super Mormon, and I’m not into religion particularly, but I learned a lot. The one thing that struck me: they explicitly stated their values. You know when you’re with your family and you’ll make jokes with your sister, like “You said you’re on a diet, why are you eating that?” — there was not one bring-them-down joke. Not one. And I asked them about it. I said, “You guys haven’t made fun of each other once.” They were like, “Well, we’re taught in this religion to be Christlike, and he doesn’t make fun of people, so we don’t.”
And they had like very explicit answers to everything. I would ask, “Why don’t you do this?” And it was never “ah, it just feels good” or “I don’t know, we just kind of do it.” It was all well mapped out. When I asked why they don’t drink coffee, they said, “We’re taught not to be addicted to things, not to overly rely on stuff.” I was like, all right, that’s a good reason.
Here’s the last thing I learned from this family. It was a fifteen-thousand-square-foot house. You’ve heard me say on this pod that owning a huge house is a lot of work. But dude — it’s such a life hack for being around your family. It’s the greatest thing ever.
I’ve noticed this among this family and a bunch of other really wealthy families: if you can acquire a home big enough for your grandkids where everyone’s super comfortable, they will want to stay there, and thus you will spend more time with your family. We didn’t have a private chef, we didn’t do anything fancy. Almost the entire weekend we were just sitting around a kitchen table, cooking our own meals, hanging out. That was it.
Shaan: Was it awkward being at their family reunion?
Sam: They were so — and this is maybe more awkward — they’re so nice. I just think these guys are nice all the time. I asked them, “Why are you so nice? Why do you guys have so much fun?” They were like, “We just want fun to be the center of everything we do.” They had activities planned — cold plunge, hot tub, all kinds of things they all did as a family.
This is like the opposite of when you’re a bad kid in school and they take you to jail for a scare-straight thing. This was the opposite: hey, you want to see what a really healthy family dynamic looks like? I’m going to take you there for a weekend immersion. It was the healthiest family dynamic I have ever seen.
Shaan: And they have a subreddit.
Sam: Yes! There’s a subreddit dedicated to making fun of them. Do you know why there are so many Mormon influencers? Mormons are explicitly told that journaling is a good way to reflect on life and slow down. That led to Mormon mommy bloggers. And they’re inherently interesting because they’re really into preparing for the end of the world — amazing content, right? Talking about your packing system, all your nuts and bolts. Parlayed that into Instagram.
So because of that they have a whole subreddit — Turtle Creek Lane Snark or something — and every time they post something people make fun of them for the silliest stuff. Like one time we were in the house and one of the kids was eating a piece of cheese and that became a post — someone was criticizing the two-year-old for eating cheese. Or there was a time where my wife Sarah made it into the background of one of their photos and they were Googling her and listing out her name like she was a new cast member.
I asked them, “Does this stuff bother you?” And they were just like… no. What they care about us is their business, it doesn’t bother us at all.
The most positive outlook on life. It did wear off on me, to be honest. I’m not about to become a Mormon or anything, but I want to hang out with them a whole lot more.
Shaan: This is wild — didn’t he get in like a helicopter accident the next week or something?
Sam: Yeah. On the MoneyWise podcast on Monday he had talked about how much he loves flying helicopters. About three days after I visited, they were flying — I think in this particular case he was a passenger — and they got in a wreck. It was not good. He survived, he’s going to be fine, but it was a bad wreck. If you go to their Instagram you’ll see all ten family members surrounding him at the hospital.
The kindest, sweetest family I’ve ever been around.
Shaan: Do you know Raleigh Williams? He came too?
Sam: Yes. It was me and Raleigh Williams and the Hilton family. And Raleigh’s kid was amazing — she’s ten years old, the most articulate little girl I’ve ever talked to. I said, “How’d you learn to talk like that?” She said, “For the church, they teach us to give a homily — I don’t know what Mormons call it — we talk in front of five hundred people at church. And doing that, I learned I need to…” and then she told me all the principles of speaking confidently. I was like, you’re the greatest person I’ve ever met.
This family felt like I was in a reality TV show with zero drama. It was like the happiest thing I’ve ever seen.
And the husbands, by the way, are the managers of the two daughters. One guy was like, “I used to work at Amazon, helped create Alexa or something. But when I saw the potential for the influencer stuff, I quit right away.” He told me how much money they make. Astronomical. Crazy.
So that was my weekend with a billionaire Mormon family. It was awesome.
Shaan’s List: James Courier on Network Effects [00:33:00]
Shaan: All right, where can we go from here?
Sam: Let me rapid-fire my list and then you tell me which one you want to talk about. Hung out with my friend James Courier — we did a podcast together, it’s coming out soon. He has this one bit that I really liked.
His fund is called NFX — as in network effects. He’s all about network effects. Nobody on earth knows more about network effects than this guy. He has this great blog post called something like “Your Life on Network Effects.”
The contrarian thing he said: he was talking about leaving San Francisco. We had a bunch of friends who moved out during COVID because everything was online. And he said, “Look, personal choices, do whatever, but if you wanted to be here and you left because of taxes and because you thought Zoom was the same — that’s idiotic. You could save thirteen percent on taxes and lose thirteen times. You’re going to make thirteen times less money on that same decision.” When someone tells me they moved for taxes, I think that’s a foolish decision. Do you agree or disagree?
Sam: I kind of agree — it’s why I’m still here. But don’t you think the point of succeeding is to do what you want? Not to feel like you have to move to Puerto Rico? If taxes is the number one reason, you can’t see the forest for the trees.
Shaan: I kind of agree. I mean, that’s why I’m still here. So James’s idea is basically: if you could take all your decisions and instead of thinking of them as things you did or events in your life, you looked at it as you either joined a network or you left a network, you either added to a network or subtracted from one.
For example, where you choose to go to college — it’s not just an education. You’re picking a network to join. I joined the Duke Alumni network, and that network is going to have certain benefits down the road. It’s also going to lead me to certain careers, like Wall Street or finance.
Where you live — same thing. If you join the Hollywood network you’re joining a certain lifestyle and career opportunities. When you leave, you’re opting out of that network.
Even skills. If you want to learn marketing, you’re actually joining a network of other people who know marketing. That’s who you’re going to hang out with. That’s where your opportunities come from. Your initial network decisions are going to heavily influence every next decision.
Sam: Did that make you reflect on a decision you’ve made?
Shaan: I moved mostly because of family, but I do wish I was in my own network, right? You opted into your family network, which is going to be great for raising kids, but you opted out of the tech network of San Francisco. If family weren’t a thing, I’d want to be in SF or a suburb twenty minutes away. In a heartbeat.
Sam: I mean, you live near BART, right?
Shaan: I do. But BART is a network I don’t want to be part of.
Sam: You’re opting out of that one.
Shaan: Yeah. Um, he kind of points out: there are some things you don’t choose, like where you’re born. But after that, it’s a lot of what you start to choose. Even language is a network. If you’re in China right now, choosing to join the English network is actually a really powerful decision that’s going to completely change the trajectory of your life. English is not just a language — it’s a network of people who can all communicate with each other.
Money is a network. Joining the Bitcoin network early turned out to be a really profitable decision. A bunch of people agreed this thing was going to be valuable.
And it made me more aware. Why did I host that dinner in San Francisco? Partly because James said one of the big mistakes he made earlier in his career was that he got successful and kind of siloed himself. He wanted to do his own thing on the edge of the network. Great for creativity, but terrible because he turned down a lunch with Travis Kalanick when Uber was starting, and he was too egotistical to take an early job at Facebook when Mark tried to recruit him. He went too extreme with it.
So for me, I moved forty-five minutes out of San Francisco. That reduced a lot of the serendipitous meetings. But I’m like, I could drive into SF twice a month, host a dinner, do a couple of live podcasts with interesting ambitious people. Keep one line connected to the white hot center of the network.
James Altucher: $130M Newsletter, Never Leaves His House [00:44:30]
Sam: All right, I have another one that’s less weird but more side-questy.
Actually wait — I’ll give you James Altucher first. He was at the newsletter conference.
Shaan: Yeah, he’s been on the podcast. What’s his title in life?
Sam: I think James might be the craziest person I’ve met in the last six months. If you Google James Altucher, the thing that sticks out is his hair — he’s got this crazy haircut. In real life he sort of looks like a rock star. He’s not trying, but he looks so different that he looks super cool.
James is the type of guy who… he’s created startups, made a bunch of money, blew it all on stocks or bad investments, did another startup, made a bunch of money, lost it all, and now I think he’s on mountain three. He has a newsletter called Choose Yourself Financial. He sold a portion of it to Agora — a large newsletter business that does something like one or two billion a year in revenue. His newsletter, Choose Yourself Financial, did a hundred and thirty million in revenue last year. And he said all this on stage — everything I’m saying is public.
Shaan: That’s crazy.
Sam: So I hung out with him and his wife and had a great time. He said one thing to me in passing. He was like, “Yeah, you know, I love DoorDash because I don’t leave my house for like three to six weeks at a time.” And I was like, “What did you just say?”
He goes, “Yeah. Sometimes I just get so into something that I literally will not step foot outside for like four weeks at a time.”
You know how in Peter Thiel’s book Zero to One he says there’s like a bar chart where extreme success means you’re likely going to have extreme personality traits, and those extreme personality traits come off as weird or undesirable in many settings — you could be like Elon, which means you’re going to be kind of mean sometimes, or you could be like Albert Einstein, which means you’re forgetful and wearing two different socks. James is that guy. He very much has the brilliant-but-quirky-scientist vibe. Seeing him just have normal conversations was wild, because his opinion on the most mundane things was one hundred percent fresh and different.
When he said he didn’t leave his house, I was like, “That’s horrible.” And he was shocked I was criticizing him — which is pretty funny. He should live his life and be happy.
In the green room he was playing chess the whole time with Steph Smith, who was also there. I was like, “You guys know each other?” And they were like, “Well, we’ve never actually met, but we play chess online constantly.” He meets a lot of his friends playing chess online.
Shaan: Do you know Agora? They’re famous for these long-form sales pages and incredibly aggressive advertising.
Sam: Do you remember in like 2019, James’s face was everywhere?
Shaan: Yeah.
Sam: He was like, “I hate that. I hated it. I hate our landing pages. I hate how long they are. I hate how aggressive they look. I tried to write differently, make my own landing pages.” But none of them could ever convert nearly as well as the crazy stuff they would write. So did he make a ton of money off the Agora thing?
Shaan: Yeah.
Sam: And still is, I think.
Sheel Munjal: Epic Side Quests [00:53:00]
Sam: All right. So Sheel Munjal came on the podcast recently — the episode crushed it.
Shaan: He did really well, yeah.
Sam: So he was at the dinner too. Sheel tells these stories and you’re just like — wow, this guy’s fascinating. You would never know his day job, because his day job is he’s a VC who invests in fintech companies. But the weird thing is if you listen to him talk, it’s like: “Oh yeah, I’m taking courses, getting certified to be a travel agent so I can access all these travel discounts.” Or: “I actually looked at buying the ambassadorship position for a small country because it has these perks.” He’s basically like your friend who’s really good with credit card points — but for everything. Including credit card points.
His side quests include: he got married in the metaverse and Taco Bell sponsored it. He started an auction company to buy and sell domain endings — like .app and .photography. These aren’t even normal businesses. They’re just weird side quests that made money.
One story he told: he was interested in the food delivery space. It was getting really hot — Sprig, all those. He was ordering from all of them, but he thought there’s no way this thing is making money. So as a side quest, he signed up and became a driver for a month. Drove around, met all these people, learned the model, realized it would never work. He was right — Sprig and all the others went out of business. But he was like, “We could do this other thing,” and got his friend to start Thistle. I think Thistle is a hundred million plus in revenue now.
Shaan: Yeah, something like that.
Sam: And he’s always on side quests. He was telling me about this thing where Mr. Beast posted a video saying “I’m on this abandoned island, I’m the only one here, there’s nothing here.” And Sheel was like, “Hold on. I’ve been to that island. There’s a bar like three minutes away from where he was. There’s a motel. It’s not abandoned.”
He tweeted about it. Then Jimmy called him. He was like, “Hey man, that is an abandoned island.” Sheel was like, “No, it’s not. Three minutes away there’s a pub.” They went back and forth. I think technically there was something about the border or the designation — I don’t know the details. But I just thought it was amazing that there are people who do things purely for their own amusement.
I’ll bring this home with a TikTok I saw. The TikTok had gone viral. It was like: “Shout out to my boy Willie for spending all of our bachelor party weekend trying to learn this dance.” There’s this awkward-looking white guy, and there are two friends trying to show him how to do this dance. Everywhere they went during the bachelor party, he’s just practicing this dance just to see if he can learn it in a weekend. He starts off really bad. By the end he’s actually pretty good. Then they cut to the wedding and he’s doing the same dance — just for fun, on the side of the dance floor, not as a performance. Just doing his thing over there.
I respect that. I think I respect that more than I respect someone’s achievements in life. I respect people who value their own amusement as the highest order bit. Sheel is an example of that. The stuff he does — he’s not doing it because there’s some outcome he’s seeking. He’s amused by it. He follows it. He ends up in situations that become really good stories.
We’ve done close to seven hundred of these episodes and Sheel would be in my top ten of people I admire most.
Shaan: Do you know that he’s in a Justin Bieber music video?
Sam: Of course he is. Why wouldn’t he be?
Shaan: During COVID, Sheel created an online version of The Bachelor — The Zoom Bachelor or something. And he was The Bachelor, with a bunch of women popping up and he’d give out roses. He picked someone, they went on a date. And somehow there was a video of him where it looks like he’s making out with someone, and then he turns around and smiles, looking so happy. That clip made it into a Justin Bieber music video.
Sam: What was the song?
Shaan: I think “Love Yourself” or something? If you go watch the video, his clip is the best clip.
Sam: What was it? He turns around and he’s got a huge mustache and he’s just cheesing?
Shaan: Yeah. Play that.
Sam: Oh my god, this is so funny.
Shaan: Do you know another crazy thing about him? I think he created the podcast Startup on Gimlet Media. Or had his hands in it.
Sam: Yeah, I think so. He’s just had so many weird things happen to him.
Furqan and Time in Market [01:03:00]
Shaan: Let me tell you another one. Another person who I think is doing their own thing: my buddy Furqan, who you know — he’s also been on the podcast.
Furqan and I were co-founders, we tried to start a bunch of companies together for like six or seven years. I know Furqan super well. One thing about Furqan is that he is a grinder. It doesn’t matter how successful or wealthy he’s gotten. His last company AppLovin is like a hundred-billion-dollar company. Absurd.
Sam: Why is it taking off so much by the way?
Shaan: So Furqan has been early into a bunch of tech things. He’s a hacker’s hacker. He was really into crypto before crypto was cool. I remember literally being at the office and he was not paying attention because he was buying into the Ethereum ICO at like seventeen cents or something. I was like, “Ethereum? That’s the dorkiest name, never gonna work.” So I didn’t buy. Because your boy is a genius and that’s why I’m a podcaster now and he’s a billionaire.
Sam: Is Furqan a billionaire?
Shaan: He’s not like three zip codes away. Maybe two. Something like that.
So he got into crypto early. Then when Web3 happened, he was building a company in that space — his company was called Thirdweb — really into the actual technology. He once spent like forty-five minutes explaining Raspberry Pi to me and he knew everything about it.
The second thing he got really into was VR. He bought me an Oculus just because he was like, “I don’t want to tell you about this and hope you go try it. Here’s the new Oculus — go home and put this on.” That’s the type of friend you need.
So I go home, put it on, I’m blown away. He bought me another one when it got better. I started buying them myself. But you know how it goes — I pay attention when things get hot. And Furqan is great because he doesn’t pay attention when things get hot. He’s in the hardcore nerd bucket. He’s like, “I pay attention because it’s interesting to me. I don’t care if it’s popular. I want to be on this train the whole time.”
He was telling me about his lab — it’s called Effing — and how Thirdweb was growing, had real revenues now. Then he’s telling me about VR. He said, “Sam, how many people do you know that are interested in VR right now? Everybody who’s interested in tech is interested in AI. Where’s your Oculus sitting right now?”
Sam: Dude, where is the biggest pile of dust in my room. It’s back there.
Shaan: Same. We all did the thing — this is awesome, this is going to change the world — and then, I don’t know where the charger is, it’s in a drawer somewhere.
Sam: Let’s go back to scrolling on our phones.
Shaan: He didn’t do that. He would hang out with me and say, “I’m working in VR today. Once a week I go co-work in VR.” And guess what? His continued interest in VR — it’s not popular right now. They went to a VR conference and it was crickets. He sends me a message: “Is VR the new ocean?”
Sam: It’s the old ocean — that’s the problem. It doesn’t have the “new” tag.
Shaan: And so our buddy Hubar, who works with him, goes to this conference and wears an all-black t-shirt that just says “I Invest in VR” huge on the front. He said it was like being the only person everyone wants to talk to. Because he’s like the only guy left investing in VR.
And he goes, “You know, if you look at the top fifteen apps in the Oculus store, these three guys own three of the top fifteen. They’re printing money right now. It’s not the hot thing, but if you can make ten million dollars as a small team building these apps and you’re the frontline, specializing in this technology — good things are going to happen.”
It just reminded me: all the money is made by being sort of right on time. But timing is super hard. The same way Warren Buffett says don’t try to time the market, focus on time in the market — Furqan is doing the tech engineering version of that. Once he’s interested in something and believes in it, he doesn’t let his interest go in and out based on popular sentiment or VCs or exits. It’s based on: is the tech getting better?
Shaan: I think that’s going to help them be super successful. For all the young people listening who are looking for a thing to do — that story might be life-altering.
Sam: I’m on board with this premise. VR is actually — and this isn’t a secret — Mark Zuckerberg, who has a really good ratio of getting things right, has said this is the thing. And also the Meta Ray-Bans — do you have them?
Shaan: No.
Sam: I’ll go buy them right now. What do they do?
Shaan: The first easy thing is they’re basically AirPods. People don’t realize this. At worst case you just bought a pair of AirPods you’re probably not going to lose. The audio from the part that goes behind your ear — it’s not in your ear, but you can hear music, podcasts, whatever, super easily.
And then the camera. Hands-free camera. If you have a kid, this thing is incredible. I wear them to my daughter’s soccer games. The moment passes so quickly with kids, and if you’re fumbling to get your phone out, unlock Face ID, type in your password, get the camera app open — it’s over by then. But with the glasses, you’re already looking that direction. You just tap the thing and it starts recording. And the video looks great.
If you’re traveling, out and about, with kids, at a sports thing, at a concert — this thing is amazing. These are the future, I think.
Sam: I think Meta has this kind of uncontested right now. Maybe Apple will get in the game. Snapchat has fallen out, Magic Leap died, the Humane Pin died. I remember when Leap Motion got bought by Facebook. They were doing hand-gesture control — never found product-market fit because not many people want to sit in front of their desktop doing Minority Report hand gestures.
But being the best team in the world at gesture control is like another example — they got bought for a hundred million plus without ever hitting product-market fit. Being at the leading edge of a tech gives you two shots to win. If you make the breakthrough app that actually gets product-market fit, you win in the billions. If you’re just the most hardcore team at building that functionality, your team of ten strong engineers has a floor of like fifty to a hundred million dollar company.
Right now if you were working on the Meta Ray-Bans platform — today there’s no app store, there’s nothing — but there’s going to be. That form factor is for sure going to exist and there are for sure going to be apps built on it. If I was a hardcore tech team, the smartest thing you could do is spin out with your five smartest friends and say: “The floor of this company is fifty to a hundred million. The ceiling is a billion or two. All we’re going to do is live at the cutting edge of this, survive five years, work out all the kinks on spatial recognition and gesture control. Either we crack the app or they buy us.”
Crypto Riff: Bitcoin Origins, Satoshi Theories [01:22:00]
Sam: Speaking of crypto, I have three crypto things for you.
I’m reading this book called Digital Gold. It’s about Bitcoin and the founding and the early community. There’s not actually that many books written about the early characters, which is why I wanted to read it. We had Nick Bilton on to talk about American Kingpin about Silk Road — those stories are really fun. And now I know a lot of the early characters of Bitcoin.
Stories about going to their first conference with like fifty people in a shitty restaurant. All the stereotypes of an early crowd of just nerds regarded as freaks. Nobody takes them seriously. Then one legitimate financier is like, “Okay, there’s something here.” Then another one. A controversy they overcome. It’s just the pattern over and over again.
Shaan: And it’s the same with what you’re describing about VR and the metaverse glasses and the ocean — it’s the same pattern. “This product is dumb. Oh my God people are using it, they’re dumb. Oh my God everyone’s using it, I’m dumb.” That’s the process.
Sam: Number one: James Altucher tells this story on the podcast about his blog post called “One Currency to Rule Them All” — about creating a digital world currency. Him, Philip Rosedale who started Second Life — by the way, Second Life is probably still the best execution of a metaverse, they had millions of players, they lived their lives in there, their own currency, Linden dollars — so him and Philip Rosedale were interested in this. There was also a famous VC — I’m forgetting the name — and they used to meet once a week to talk about: okay, how are we going to build this world currency? Here’s what it needs to do. And all the things that Bitcoin eventually did, they were mapping it out.
They went to the Lobby conference — about a hundred to a hundred and fifty people, all internet OGs. Their little breakout conversation was about this: “I think there’s a need for this world currency.” James bought the domain bl.com. He was going to launch it, call it Blue — the dollar is green, this would be Blue. The whole thing was sort of planned out. But they couldn’t figure out: if this ever becomes a thing, the target on our back would be too crazy. And they had already talked about it at the Lobby conference — fourteen other people had now heard them be interested in this.
They realized this thing would need an Immaculate Conception. It would need to be totally anonymous from the start. And they were like, “We blew it. We said it at Lobby.”
When the Bitcoin white paper came out years later, Philip called James and said, “Dude, I can’t believe you cut me out.” He said, “Have you seen Bitcoin?” He’s like, “Yeah.” He said, “That’s you, right?” And James is like, “No, it’s not me.” Philip said, “If it’s either of the two of us, it would be you — you’re way more technical.” James said, “No, it’s not me. Who the hell is this?”
Shaan: How cool is that?
Sam: That is one of the greatest stories I’ve ever heard. And it’s weird that multiple groups of people started working on the same thing independently at the same time. And they had the same conclusion — that it had to be an anonymous creator.
Shaan: You know what the other crazy thing was? Jack Dorsey — there was that whole deck claiming he might be Satoshi.
Sam: Did you see that? I thought it was ridiculous.
Shaan: I didn’t think it was that bad actually. Some of the points were compelling. What I didn’t know before: Jack was in those early Cypherpunk communities when he was like fifteen years old. Whoever started Bitcoin was likely in that really small community of about fifteen hundred people on those early mailing lists. And Jack was in that.
Sam: Okay, that’s interesting.
Shaan: There were also a lot of timing things — when he was starting Twitter, when Satoshi was active, when Jack left Twitter, when he tweeted “someone needs to create this thing,” and then Satoshi was creating that thing. Weird coincidences.
But then there was other stuff like: look at this code, it sounds like the name of Jack’s favorite restaurant in San Francisco. Or Jack said he wants to be near the US Mint for his office, and Twitter was therefore there. Those were huge reaches.
Sam: I don’t think it’s true. But wow, there’s a lot of stuff about Jack Dorsey I didn’t realize. Like, strings in transaction IDs being like “D2M dude” — someone saying “see, that’s his address.” Just cuz d2m showed up in the middle of a string doesn’t mean that. But I would go read the deck — it was very entertaining and presented in a very serious way.
Shaan: By the way, Two Man Plaza is where we were for the dinner. And the same day that deck dropped, I was like, “Hey, this is — maybe I’m the creator.” Maybe you’re Satoshi.
Sam: That was my takeaway.
Chisos Boots and the Tortilla Principle [01:38:00]
Sam: I’ve got one more thing for you. Go to chisos.com — c-h-i-s-o-s. You see the boots?
Shaan: Incredible craftsmanship. Cowboy boots, yeah.
Sam: So I own a pair. I have no stake in this company, nothing. I just think it’s cool.
The founder is part of my friend group in Austin — friends with Nick and I met him through Nick. His name is Will Roman. The company does like low seven figures in revenue. The way it started: he worked at a normal tech company, quits his job, moves to Mexico to learn — because Mexico is where a lot of great boots are made — and spends years there apprenticing. Learning the craftsmanship. His dream was to make bespoke boots. He’s a Texas guy, he kind of looks like a cowboy. He creates this company called Chisos.
He was telling me the other day — I got this read on him that he’s a little burnt out. He was like, “The company’s growing ten to fifteen percent a year. I own the whole thing.” He was explaining his vision: there’s Tecovas, which are kind of cheap but do hundreds of millions in revenue, and then there’s bespoke boot makers who are just mom-and-pop stores. He’s like, “I want to be closer to bespoke than Tecovas. I don’t want to be cheap. I need the highest quality and I refuse to sacrifice that. But I want to build this into a huge company.”
I was like, “Do you spend on marketing? Do you do anything?” And he’s like, “No, we don’t do anything. I just make the greatest boots.” And I Google “chisos boots” and Reddit and all these other forums are talking about this being the best boot on earth. And it starts formulating in my brain — I’m like, this is it, my friend. You have it. The hard part is done. Surely there’s some type of nerd out there who could help make this company big.
Shaan: This is really cool. Great branding too — very clean website, like this sawed-in-half video thing. What I love about this is the story of moving to Mexico to apprentice and actually learn the craft. I kind of want that to be a TV show.
But the second thing is — sometimes the people who are really good at making the product can’t show it. Ben’s brother bought into a restaurant in Phoenix. We go there for lunch and he’s like, “The chef is amazing — recognized as one of the best. I really believe in this guy’s product and I thought we could turn it into a business. The problem is, when you partner with these artists, sometimes they A) don’t know anything about how to convey or show that, and B) they just won’t compromise on price or quality.”
He holds up these tortillas. “You know these tortillas? They cost this much — let’s call it two bucks. Most people get their tortillas for twenty cents.” I was like, “Well, why?” He goes, “Because he demands that every morning we get fresh tortillas trucked in from Mexico.”
I was like, “Wow, that’s awesome. Why don’t you tell anybody that?” And he was like, “What?” I was like, “Yeah, tell people you truck your tortillas in fresh from Mexico every morning. I’ll gladly pay two bucks if I knew that. Your problem isn’t that the chef won’t compromise. Your problem is that you’re not marketing this in a way that tells the story of why this food tastes better, why this is fresher, why this is more authentic, why this is priced higher.”
And that became one of our core things on my little team — me, Ben, Diego. We call it the Tortilla Principle. When we look at businesses we’re going to buy or own, we ask: where are we trucking tortillas in fresh from Mexico, and are we doing a good job of telling that story? Almost always the answer is no. The things you do in your business that are blood, sweat, and tears — you take them for granted because they seem like table stakes to you. And you’re not telling the world why you’re different, why you’ve gone the extra mile.
Shaan: Joe Sugarman — one of my favorite copywriters — he was talking about how he sold so many Casio watches. Casio was explaining to him how they make the watch because he wanted to learn everything. And they said, “We use space-grade aluminum.” He said, “Wait — this aluminum is strong enough for spaceships?” They said, “Yeah, but every watch company uses the exact same stuff.” And he was like, “Space-age aluminum. Precise quartz movement.” And that became the thing that sold a ton of Casio watches. It’s called the Knowledge Complex — when you know too much about something, you think it’s not interesting. And Joe Sugarman as an outsider copywriter was like, “No, this is so interesting.”
Sam: That’s what someone needs to do with Will Roman. I started my story by saying: this guy worked in tech, had an everyday job, wasn’t for him, quit his job, moved to Mexico for three years to learn the art of boot making. Guess what? Not on his website. Three years of life. Three years of marketing collateral that he’s not using. A thousand days of his life that he’s not putting on the website. Even if you click “Our Story” — it’s like “true small business, I’m a hardworking guy passionate about craftsmanship.” Guess what? Everybody says that. Guess what everybody hasn’t done? Move to Mexico for three years and apprentice in a boot factory.
I was like, “Will, do you use Reddit?” He goes, “I don’t really know how to work it.” I said, “Let me show you something.” I Google “most comfortable cowboy boot Reddit.” The top post: someone asked that question. Top comment: “Chisos. This is the most comfortable boot I’ve ever worn.” One hundred and seventeen comments agreeing with that top post. He was like, “Oh, that’s awesome.” I’m like, are you insane? You have it.
And also: this guy doesn’t have a TikTok. Does he not know that every niche nostalgic profession is now the coolest kid on TikTok? Like if you have a beet farm, there’s a whole community for that. The weirder and more physical real-world the better. Go look at Epic Gardening. If he wants to do this — go teach people, show them the process, show them how the factory looks, show them cutting a boot in half. That would be fire on TikTok.
I only brought it up because the story was amazing, and I also want to go on record: this might be another one of our “we called it” moments. I love their boots, and I love meeting people where eighty percent of the hard work is done. A lot of people can help you with the other part.
Shaan: It’s like a great product — they did the one hard thing that others aren’t really willing to do.
Sam: Yeah, exactly. Like, the product is good.
Closing: Dan Ariely, Sushi, and AB Testing Menus [01:50:00]
Sam: Let me do one quick story because it connects. When I started my sushi restaurant — we started it as a virtual restaurant, right before DoorDash and Uber Eats. We created a website, drove people to it, you’d order sushi and we’d make it in a commissary kitchen and deliver it in under twenty minutes.
We went and met with Dan Ariely — do you know who that is?
Shaan: The author, yeah. Predictably Irrational. Behavioral economist.
Sam: He was a professor at Duke and we were Duke students, so we got in with him. Normally companies pay him six- or seven-figure contracts to consult. He was willing to meet with us because we were just three dumbasses in school.
We go: “Dan, we want to drive more sales. You’re the guy. What should we do?” He goes, “Show me your menu.” We show him. He goes, “Oh, okay. You want more people to buy from you? Raise your prices.” We’re like, “What?” He goes, “When somebody looks at this, they just see cheap sushi.” And guess what people don’t want?
Shaan: Cheap sushi. The worst type.
Sam: Exactly. So he’s like, that’s not what you want. And since we were an online restaurant, we could actually AB test. We weren’t smart enough to know what an AB test was, but we would switch by day — day one show menu A, day two show menu B — and look at the numbers at the end of the day.
We raised prices. Not only did revenue go up, but conversion rate went up. We actually converted more customers and made more money per customer. We were like, “Okay Dan, what else can we do?”
He said: “The sushi industry and the wine industry create their own language around their products.” We said, “But that’s why it’s so inaccessible — I don’t understand any of that stuff.” He goes, “Exactly. And if you do know what it means, you feel smart and feel like an insider.”
So we tested three models of language. We had our current version: “Philadelphia Roll — salmon and cream cheese wrapped up, tastes great.” Then we had the version he suggested: “Do you freeze your salmon?” We said no. “Fresh, never-frozen, Atlantic hand-caught salmon.” Same roll. Same salmon. More words. Conversion went up. We’re like, “Oh god, it works.”
Then we kept doing the same thing with the whole menu. It showed me two things: one, restaurants should really AB test their menus and I don’t think they do. And two, you get this multiplier on success based on how well you do marketing. It’s not just a ten percent improvement — it was like a two to three X improvement by stacking these on top of each other.
Shaan: What was your cute way of explaining cream cheese?
Sam: I think we might have just not even mentioned it. Just put it at the end — “and a smooth finish” or something.
And the funny thing was with salmon, we were so excited about fresh, never-frozen salmon. That was our calling card. We even went further: “We don’t even have a freezer in our restaurant, that’s how fresh this is.” And then we met the chef and he was like, “You need to freeze the salmon — it kills the bacteria.” We were like, “Oh no.”
Shaan: Flash frozen salmon to kill all the parasites — if you’ve seen documentaries on the Japanese fishing boats, they drop the salmon straight into a freezer as soon as they catch them.
Sam: I remember learning that and thinking, “Everything I’ve been told is a lie.”
All right, that’s it. That was a good pod.
Shaan: Yeah. I mean, this was good. It’s fun to hang out and talk, and I feel like — I don’t know if other people feel this way, but just debriefing on interesting people we’ve met and the way their minds work or the little schemes they’ve got going — that’s kind of my favorite thing.
Sam: Well, I stole it from you where I actually started writing notes right after I meet someone. Even if you don’t refer back to them, it’s pretty good.
Shaan: It’s good. All right, that’s a pod.