Sam and Shaan open from Hawaii, where Shaan is vacationing while his e-commerce business faces a tariff crisis — 104% duties on Chinese goods hitting containers already at sea. They discuss the real math for e-com founders, what Shaan’s doing to respond, and why reshoring manufacturing is mostly a fantasy. They then pivot to Shaan’s discovery of Medieval Times’ surprisingly massive business ($150-200M revenue, 10 locations, 80M lifetime attendees), Sam’s book-in-progress on creativity and quantity over quality, and a riff on first-principles thinking — from the Wright brothers to the Yankees’ weighted bat to a restaurant delivery breakthrough.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host, e-commerce founder), Shaan Puri (host)
Cold Open — Tariff Preview [00:00:00]
Sam: For a lot of my friends, this is their only business. This is literally their lifeline. And so I find it very not cool — that is my official diagnosis. Super uncool by the orange guy.
Shaan in Hawaii — Getting Recognized [00:00:15]
Sam: All right, Shaan. Mahalo. My first question is: what’s it feel like to be an extra on the set of White Lotus?
Shaan: As long as I’m not the guy who dies, I’m good. That’s my White Lotus game plan.
Sam: I thought I’d be festive for you. I think you look good, dude.
Shaan: So, as you know, I don’t leave my house — and I took the family on vacation. We’re in Hawaii, and I texted Ben. I go, “Dude, I’m getting recognized left and right.” And he goes, “Really? That’s awesome. Like, how many times?” And I go, “No, dude — two. Left and right.”
Sam: Hey, I got you. Tell me what happened.
Shaan: At the airport. Someone voice-recognized me. I was coming around a corner somewhere, talking to my kids, and some guy runs around the corner and goes, “Hey, are you Shaan?” I go, “Did you just recognize my voice?” He goes, “Yeah, I listen to the podcast a bunch.”
Sam: Dude, there’s been so many times where I’ve met someone and I’m like, we should hang out — and then they text me a week later and I’m like, what are they doing? It’s like going to the grocery store hungry. You’re just making bad choices.
Setting the Stage — Tariffs and the Market Crash [00:01:50]
Sam: Can we talk about tariffs really quick? First of all, I want to let people know I don’t know anything about this. I’m not an economist, which everyone suddenly is. But I want to know — did you go to Hawaii because you were sweating and needed to find peace, or what?
Shaan: Dude, the last time I came to Hawaii — I don’t know if you remember this — was in 2022. I landed and the same day, crypto had its biggest crash. Luna basically went broke and brought down Bitcoin with it. I basically landed and then lost a million dollars, just trying to hang out with my wife and be like, “Okay, cool. I’m not going to mention how expensive this vacation just got.” And the worst part was I didn’t have any of my normal computer hardware or anything. I couldn’t sell anything. Yeah, the cold storage is working out great.
Shaan: And then this time, same thing. Went on vacation. The S&P 500 had the worst three-day losses since the bubonic plague. I was like, great, here we go again. I’m not coming to Hawaii anymore.
Sam: When I’ve been going through stuff like this, I’m heavy on index funds, and I just don’t look. I pretend it doesn’t exist. I can’t log in — it makes me too anxious and it ruins my day.
Shaan: Yeah. I asked myself a simple question: am I going to do anything? Do I have some trade I’m trying to make right now? Some genius move? Am I trying to panic sell? No. Okay. If not, then there’s really no point in looking. It’s just going to ruin my vacation. So I don’t look.
Shaan: But when I landed, there was something I had to look at, which is these tariffs. Not only did the stock market crash — maybe because of this — but Donald Trump has created a new holiday, Sam. Liberation Day.
Sam: Happy Lib Day.
Shaan: Somebody was like, maybe he meant liberation in the Buddhist sense — where we are being liberated of all of our possessions and we just aren’t going to own anything anymore. Thank you. Thank you.
Shaan: So he came out with this giant poster board and basically slammed tariffs on every country. China was first getting a 35% plus a 20% tariff — so 54% total, which was already going to be crazy. And then since then, he added another 50% on top. So now we’re at 104%. And there’s apparently no upper limit, because this morning China retaliated with 80-something percent. We’re in a trade war.
Sam: And what does that mean for you as an e-com owner? When you buy $10,000 worth of goods from China, you’re now paying $20,000?
Shaan: Yes. Exactly. It’s as simple as that.
Why E-Com Founders Can’t Just “Move Manufacturing” [00:05:10]
Shaan: The reason to talk about this is not because I’m a tariff expert — I’m not — but because I have an e-com store and a lot of friends in e-commerce. For all of them, this is D-Day.
Shaan: Most of us manufacture in China not because we’re like, “Oh, I really want the lowest-cost goods from China.” That wasn’t the impetus. When I started my company, we first looked at manufacturing in the US. I was like, that’d be a great story to tell customers, faster lead times, no boat. So I called every manufacturer I could find in the US. Most of them just said no.
Shaan: One guy in LA was like, “Oh yeah, we could do this. Do you want it for double the price, half the speed, at half as good?” And I was like, “Is that your sales pitch?” He goes, “Look, I’m just being honest with you. You’re comparing factories — you’re going to find this everywhere.”
Shaan: I said, “How could it be half the speed? There’s no boat.” And he explained: number one, all the inputs to anything you’re going to make — even if we make it here — we’re still importing all the parts. So the parts are still on a boat for a long period of time. Second, we don’t have the skilled labor to do this. Third — and this is the real one — we don’t have the machines. He said: when we de-industrialized, all the best machinery to do this work went to China. There are only so many machines that do this right now, getting a new machine takes a year, costs a ton. We just don’t have them.
Sam: How does this guy answer the phone? Is it just like, “F you, this is Derek”?
Shaan: Exactly. “Is there anything I cannot get for you?” Like, a great gig, honestly. Maybe he’s a retired guy who just wanted to keep turning people down all day. My dad would love that in retirement.
The Real Damage — A Friend’s Million-Dollar Tariff Bill [00:09:00]
Sam: What are your friends thinking in the industry? You guys just get beat up constantly. It’s like, make America great again — where’s the great part? What’s happening?
Shaan: Here’s what’s happening. I have a friend who was doing really well, business growing. Prior to Trump taking office, he was scaling up. Trump takes office, says 20% tariff. Mentally prepared for 20%. So he places an order.
Shaan: Just to give you context — forget about moving your manufacturing, which is a multi-year process that may not even work. Just changing your sourcing from one place to another is six months to a year to get to scale. This guy operates on a four-month lead time. From the day he knows he needs an order, he has to place it four months in advance.
Shaan: So he placed an order four months ago — before Trump even took office. Now he’s got five containers at sea on a ship, and they’re saying, “Yeah, it’s 100% tariff now.” So he has to pay a million dollars in tariff. He doesn’t have a million dollars. He’s like, “Dude, I literally don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t have a million extra dollars in my business. I also have five containers — thousands of units — just sitting there. They can’t be rerouted. I can’t tell them to go back to China. What do I do? Just shut down my business?”
Shaan: And this is common. A lot of people are dealing with this.
Sam: You and I have a mutual friend who said the same thing — his container, the price changed while it was in transit. There were already so many things — the Suez Canal, the ship that got stuck — and now this.
Shaan: It’s sort of like when a parent is like, “Say another word — five more minutes of timeout.” Oh, there’s five? What? “You just got yourself five more.” Totally. In fact, I’m going to start calling it tariffs with my kids. Maybe it’ll be fun to be on the other side of the tariff for once.
The Math — What Tariffs Do to E-Com Margins [00:12:30]
Shaan: Here’s the thing. Even if this particular shipment doesn’t get hit with the million-dollar tariff — point is, it’s very hard to survive when you’re running an e-commerce business with 10 to 15% profit margins. Twenty percent if you’re really kicking ass, in business a long time, have economies of scale and a large returning customer base. But 10 to 15% — and then your COGS go up 100%? It doesn’t work. They’re going to go broke.
Shaan: The only alternative is you pass it to the customer. Here’s the math: let’s say a unit costs a dollar and now it’s going to cost two dollars. You were selling that dollar thing for four dollars — a 4x markup. That sounds greedy, right? “Oh, you’re marking it up 4x.” But no — you have to pay for marketing, advertising, staff, fulfillment, all of that. You end up with a 10 to 15% profit margin by the end. That’s restaurant territory.
Shaan: So you take that dollar item, now it’s two dollars. That means instead of selling it at four dollars, you have to raise it to five. So all your goods are going up 25 to 30%. That’s inflationary. If you thought inflation was bad before — wait until Christmas season when nobody can buy a toy because all the toys are made in China. All the shirts are made in China. And if they’re not made in China, they’re made in Vietnam, which also got tariffed. There are a few countries that make everything, and this plan really doesn’t make sense to me.
Shaan: Maybe I’m being sensitive because I have a business.
Sam: Yeah. And less so for you because you have a lot of businesses, but for a lot of your friends, this is their only business. This is literally their lifeline. Very not cool — official diagnosis. Super uncool by the orange guy.
Shaan: I think you need to create a Shaan’s Homie private chat lobby, and you guys could literally spend thousands of dollars lobbying the government to change their opinion.
Sam: Dude, I’m going to go to the lobby of this hotel and just see if I can get someone to change their mind. Is that what lobbying is?
Shaan: That is the only lobbying I’m doing. And I’ll declare bankruptcy down there by yelling it.
Why Reshoring Won’t Work — Molson Hart’s 14 Reasons [00:16:00]
Shaan: I don’t know if you’ve read Molson Hart — he wrote a great post on X basically called “America Underestimates the Difficulty of Bringing Manufacturing Back.” He gives 14 reasons why, even if you take the most generous interpretation of this policy — short-term pain for long-term gain — there might not even be long-term gain.
Shaan: We can all agree the short-term pain is pretty unambiguous. Business owners have short-term pain. Consumers who are going to see prices raised — short-term pain. The factories on the other side — short-term pain. The stock market is crashing. The 401ks are going down. Okay, short-term pain is real. The question is: is there even long-term gain?
Shaan: His post basically outlines, very thoughtfully, why there are serious problems with that assumption. Like — even setting aside the years it would take to move a manufacturing plant back to America — by the time a business owner who today is getting hit with these tariffs could somehow survive, spend millions opening up manufacturing in the United States — which probably won’t happen — and get it online over multiple years? There’s going to be a new president by then. You don’t even know what the tariff situation will be. It might be a complete fool’s errand.
Shaan: So nobody’s actually going to make that move. What’s most likely going to happen is what happened during Trump’s first term: we made Vietnam great again. The manufacturer just shifts to one of the other low-cost Asian countries with lower tariffs. That’s not going to magically bring jobs back.
Shaan: And oh, by the way, you don’t want to sit there and knit t-shirts. These are jobs China doesn’t even want anymore. Dave Chappelle said it perfectly: “I want to wear Jordans. I don’t want to make them.”
Sam: There are these memes going around — Chipotle employees hunched over sewing machines trying to make a shirt. Is this what America great again looks like? I’m not sure.
Shaan: Political stuff aside — the tariff situation is really crazy right now. And as a business owner, it is very, very tricky how to navigate this.
How Shaan Is Actually Responding — The SWAT Team Plan [00:20:00]
Sam: Is it going to put anyone out of business, or is it just going to destroy margins? Like, is this a complete risk of closure or just “you’ve made my life more challenging”?
Shaan: It’s going to put some people out of business for sure. Because you had to — like the friend I mentioned with stuff already at sea, or people trying to scale their business — they might not be able to sell their product. Let’s say they had a $100 product. Now it has to be a $140 product to maintain any profit at all. Demand goes down. Costs went up. Cash flow in the business went down, possibly to a point where you need to borrow money just to pay the tariff bills on stuff already in flight. Very, very tricky.
Shaan: What we did in our business — I was like, okay, here’s how you deal with situations like this. You create an immediate SWAT team, open a Google doc, make six bullet points: what are the six levers we could pull?
Shaan: Pricing: we’re going to have to create some sort of tariff surcharge. We think it could be in this range that’ll offset some but not all of the cost — because we can’t pass 100% to the customer. That’ll kill demand. So we’re going to pass a few bucks to the customer this way.
Shaan: Next: we’re trying to source from another country. Maybe Mexico. Maybe India. One of these lower-tariff countries. Someone’s working on that. Next: lower cost of goods — go negotiate with the factory, ask them to share some of the burden. Talk to the lawyers about what’s going on with the stuff already in flight. Bring down the purchase orders — be way more conservative. Go secure more debt, get a line of credit to weather the storm.
Shaan: We created this plan, and I said: we’re meeting every day. These five core people in the company. Whatever other priorities you had — they’re gone. This is your priority now. We’re meeting every day, working on this plan, for however many days until it’s executed.
Shaan: A mistake I made in the past is that when things like this happen, you sort of take a wait-and-see approach. Every day you don’t act could be very costly. When I heard how my team was planning to approach it — like, yeah, this is important along with these other four really important things we have — I said no. You need a public PSA that this is the most important thing. We’re meeting every morning. There’s a name for this team. This is the most important thing you’re doing. Cut some other stuff. Raising the level of intensity is very key in a situation like this, or people will go out of business.
Sam: And this is so funny — you’re on the call talking about raising intensity and there’s just, like, aloha. Calming Hawaiian music behind you. Palm trees. You’re like, “Guys, guys — this is life or death.” And you’re going down a water slide on the Google Meet.
Shaan: I didn’t plan it this way.
Sam: You stop mid-sentence to grab your drink with the umbrella on it, looking for the straw with your mouth. That’s awesome.
Pivot to Something Fun [00:25:30]
Sam: Well, that sucks. Is there anything you can do?
Shaan: Dude, I met with a guy the other day — I never take phone calls with people but he wanted to talk. I thought he was going to end the conversation with like, “I’ve loved watching you grow, be on the pod — is there anything I can do to help?” And instead he said, “Is there anything I could do to be a guest on your podcast and have you promote me?”
Sam: Wait, what?
Shaan: I was like, I thought you were going to ask how you could help me. And he just ended with, “Is there anything I could do to be on your podcast?” I was like, “No. There’s nothing you could do.”
Sam: Hell of an ask.
Shaan: Bold ask.
Sam: Do you want to talk about something more fun?
Shaan: Please.
Sam: All right. I’m going to try to take your mind away from the fact that the company you’ve spent decades building is in crisis. Never send Sam to the cancer ward.
Shaan: We don’t have a lot of time left here, so let’s get to it.
Medieval Times — A Hidden $200M Business [00:27:00]
Sam: I read something interesting. My company Hampton is basically an events company — we host hundreds of events a year. So I’m trying to learn how other event-based businesses operate. And I found one I totally didn’t realize how amazing it was. Have you ever heard of Medieval Times?
Shaan: Yeah, sure.
Sam: No — the restaurant franchise. You’ve never heard of it?
Shaan: Oh my god — what is it?
Sam: Okay, so it basically looks like a small castle — like the Excalibur Hotel in Vegas. Inside, there are people on horses jousting. I always thought this was just a joke in ’90s movies. I didn’t realize it was a real thing.
Shaan: I always thought it was like a Rainforest Cafe but for like more?
Sam: Right. Let me tell you the story. So Medieval Times is dinner theater. They do a two-hour show — you go with your wife and two kids, spend something like $80 a head, and watch people do a medieval show. There are maybe 200 actors. Jousting. Some theater stuff. It’s almost like Cirque du Soleil but medieval, and it’s all like wrestling — it’s all theatrical.
Sam: I did not realize how big this was. The guy who started it — his name was Jose, a Spanish guy — had a small restaurant in Spain where he’d have medieval circus performers doing juggling inside a barbecue joint. In the ’80s, for some reason, he decides to move to America. He convinces a couple bankers to invest $8 million into his first restaurant in Florida. And he creates this thing where the idea is: we’re going to host 20 to 40 shows per month, hire 200 actors, and he spent a year training them how to sword fight, how to joust, how to be legit actors. And he’s going to serve turkey legs and other stereotypically medieval food. That’s what he launched in 1983.
Sam: Fast forward 40-plus years. His son has taken it over. They were recently sued because a bunch of their performers tried to unionize and apparently the company was preventing that, so there were a ton of articles about them and a lot of people were talking about their financials. They’re enormous. It’s estimated they have around two to two-and-a-half million people a year coming in, and they make something like $150 to $200 million a year in just 10 locations. Since 1983 they’ve hosted close to 80 million people at these events. Have you ever been to one?
Shaan: No.
Sam: There are 10 locations — Dallas, Myrtle Beach, Scottsdale — places I’ve never really lived, so I’ve never been to one. Have you?
Shaan: No.
Sam: Say the numbers again — how big is this?
Sam: So just 10 locations. During the union lawsuit, reporters were doing back-of-the-envelope math and figured the company does $150 to $200 million a year in revenue. Each location hosts somewhere between 20 performances a month — the lowest — up to 60 performances a month at the most popular. Two shows a day for 30 days. Insane demand. And on their official website, they say something like 76 million people have ever attended. So, $10 to $20 million per location. They might be making $1 to $2 million of profit per location — or more. That’s my guess.
Shaan: Here’s what’s interesting about the model — it’s not a normal restaurant. You don’t order food. It’s all pre-selected. It’s like an assembly line. At the same time, all 1,000 guests get the exact same food. So there are potentially significantly more efficiencies than a normal restaurant — no whole menu to manage. And get this: their performances only change every five to seven years. They spend a lot of time creating the performance, everyone learns it, and they perfect it over five to seven years. They don’t even change it that often, and it still takes 200 performers per show.
Sam: It’s pretty rough for the performers, right? The step down between Game of Thrones and the Medieval Times restaurant is, like, immediate.
Shaan: The second place is pretty rough out there. Knight’s got to do what a knight’s got to do.
Sam: So — you were looking this up as an analog for Hampton. Are you thinking about getting in the turkey leg business?
Shaan: The way we’re going to grow is through launching cities, and I’m trying to understand: how does that work? How do you have general managers of each city, each region? I’m looking at a variety of unrelated but event-adjacent businesses just to figure out how do they do it. And I came across these guys and I was shocked at how big they were.
Sam’s Book — “Bad Art” and Quantity vs. Quality [00:35:30]
Sam: Can I tell you a goofy story that’s kind of similar to what you just described?
Shaan: Sure.
Sam: I’ve been writing this book on the side. I’m not sure I’m actually going to publish it. I kind of went down a rabbit hole and got interested in it. It’s around how creativity works — how to be a more creative person and ultimately make hits. Like, where do the hits come from?
Shaan: What’s the title?
Sam: Bad Art.
Shaan: Okay. Yeah.
Sam: So one of the key insights — it sounds obvious in hindsight, but when you look at the creative process of the world’s most successful creative people, you’d think: oh wow, the ones who make the hits, the things we all love, the high-quality stuff — they just nail quality, right? But if you listen to any of their interviews, watch their process — they don’t give two shits about quality directly. What they do is focus on quantity. Their belief is basically that quantity is the only way to get to quality. They play a volume game. They’re like, “We produce a lot of bad art, and that’s where the one or two things that are real gold come from. If you just sit down and try to make gold, it doesn’t work. You actually end up not creating at all.”
Sam: One of the things I’ve been looking at is how some of the big breakthroughs came from doing what you were talking about — learning from an adjacent space.
The Wright Brothers, Kitty Hawk, and First-Principles Thinking [00:38:00]
Sam: The Wright brothers — I’ve read their book. They’re amazing. And George Mack summarized their story brilliantly in his High Agency blog post.
Shaan: Yeah, yeah.
Sam: The Wright brothers were not funded. No education, no team, no specialty, no experience. Meanwhile, there was a guy funded by the Smithsonian with $2 million, tons of engineers and scientists, all the press and fanfare. He was clearly the favorite. So how did the underdog win?
Sam: One reason: the Wright brothers owned a bike shop. Because they had no money, they did like 200 prototypes in the time the other guy did two. And their 200 prototypes weren’t even things that looked like planes — they were just testing individual parts. A glider. A wing. The wheels. Different ways to test these things. And even the selection of Kitty Hawk — they thought from first principles. Like, where should we launch this thing? What’s the best spot for the conditions we need? So they weren’t tied to anything. Everything was first-principles thinking.
Shaan: Similarly — I don’t know if you’ve heard this story about the Yankees and their bats. You’ll have to enlighten me.
The Yankees’ Weighted Bat — An Edge Hidden in Plain Sight [00:40:30]
Sam: So, take the physics aside — the story is just kind of interesting. Here you have baseball, this game that’s been around for 100-plus years. And the Yankees were like, hey, can we just make a better bat — within the rules? Not heavier overall. They hired an MIT guy to think about it, and he said, “Oh yeah, you could just move more of the barrel to the sweet spot. If you hit that, it’s going to go way farther, way harder. You’ll have less near-misses because you’ve got the thicker part of the bat right there, and you’ll have more barrels.”
Sam: Sure enough, the Yankees start the season with way more home runs than anybody else. Like 14 home runs already and nobody else was even close.
Shaan: Is it statistically significant, or do they just have ballers on their team this year?
Sam: I think it’s the bat. I can’t say definitively — it’s early — but they jumped out to a huge lead in home runs.
Sam: But the important part — because who cares about baseball — is: if baseball, this hundred-year-old sport where teams spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to find any edge, if there’s still an edge like this to be found — it just proves how much of the world is unoptimized and underthought-about. If you actually bring a lot of focus and intensity to any one problem and you don’t assume people have already figured it out — that’s one of the key things you need to have a breakthrough.
The Sushi Restaurant — A Delivery Innovation Story [00:43:30]
Sam: The way you’re talking about studying other models — I think it’s so important to do that. Our restaurant was my first startup, and we did pretty much everything wrong. Now I look back and I’m like, oh my god, so embarrassing. We wrote a 300-page business plan, printed it out in a binder, and thought that was a mark of brilliance when actually it was a mark of our stupidity. And our marketing — I used to just go door to door knocking on doors trying to sell sushi like an idiot.
Shaan: Door-to-door sushi — I think that’s the worst idea I’ve ever heard.
Sam: Right. But here’s the thing — I was like, let’s just try it. Actually, by the way, who doesn’t want to eat that at 10:30 when it’s 95 degrees in Dallas?
Shaan: No one.
Sam: What I actually did — I went floor to floor. I went into a skyscraper, got in the elevator, pushed every button. 1, 2, 3, 4 — get out and just talked to the office manager of each floor. If I could get her to cater the lunch, that was like 50 orders. And it actually worked pretty well. So that was a bit of “ignorance is bliss.”
Sam: But the other thing we did was look at delivery. We were a delivery-only restaurant — today they call that cloud kitchens. Traditional food delivery: you’d have a driver at the restaurant waiting for a batch of orders. They wouldn’t just take one order. They’d wait for five or six orders to go out at once, because leaving with one is inefficient. Then they’d drive out, go one place at a time, then drive back.
Sam: I was so confused. Like, how is this restaurant one mile away, and delivery takes 40 minutes? The route is two minutes. So we had our buddy Dan get a job at one of these places — essentially a spy. He came back with: “Dude, don’t eat the food at Noodles and Company. So much salt.” And we’re like, “But what about the delivery?” He’s like, “Oh, I didn’t even get delivery. I got the tomato soup. So much salt in this soup.”
Shaan: You were doing the DoorDash move before DoorDash did it.
Sam: We sent a spy. But we figured out a breakthrough. The slowest part of delivery was not the drive. It was the last 200 feet to the door — finding the exact house or apartment, knocking, waiting, the whole thing. That was where the lag was.
Sam: So in downtown Denver, we created something we called the Drop Zone. In between a bunch of skyscrapers, we had one guy stand there — our delivery guy on the ground. The driver just kept going back and forth dropping off orders to him nonstop. Suddenly our delivery times were 15, 16, 18 minutes. We were crushing everybody on delivery.
Sam: The restaurant failed. But the learning was: you can’t take for granted that everything’s already figured out. If you do first-principles thinking — watch, look for the slowest part, then think, what can we do? Even if it sounds a little weird that we’re going to put a dude at the bottom of the building holding orders while the driver just loops — that eliminates all the lag.
First-Principles Thinking Is Harder Than It Sounds [00:49:00]
Shaan: What I found when doing this is there are a few hard parts. Hard part one is knowing what things to question and what things to accept. Like, you’re creating Tesla — you don’t try to redesign the shape of the wheel. That’s an obvious one. But when you’re running a company, it’s very hard to decide what to question and what not to question.
Shaan: It’s also incredibly challenging to get yourself into that first-principles mindset. And even more challenging to get your staff or co-workers to come with an open mind. I found that hard.
Sam: What’s hard about it? And how did you try to tackle it?
Shaan: For example, people saying, “Well, it has to be this way for these reasons.” And you have to say, “I know — but just for a few minutes, let’s have a conversation where it doesn’t happen that way. What would happen?”
Shaan: There’s this book — Six Thinking Hats. The idea is there are six different colored hats. When you put on your green hat, you’re thinking about growth possibilities. When you put on your red hat, you’re being pessimistic, poking holes in everything. Your black hat means you’re open-minded. It’s a way of saying, “Right now I’m going to put this hat on, which means I’m going to — by default — not hate on anything. Because a lot of people default to ‘here’s all the reasons why you can’t do it.’ So I’m going to figure out all the reasons why this could work.”
Sam: Yeah. And you tried that?
Shaan: Yeah. And it helps, but it’s still a challenge to get into that mindset — at least for me. And to convey it to teammates. Getting an open mind and questioning everything is way harder to do than it sounds.
Sam: I found that people actually like it — once you give them permission to do it, they get excited. But you’re right that you have to frame it the right way. If you just go into a meeting and your hope is that people are going to be open-minded and creative and come up with a novel solution, it’s not going to happen. You have to tell a story at the beginning that gets them in the mindset.
Sam: Which is basically the Yankee bat story. Like, that’s a good one. Or something like the IDEO grocery cart challenge — have you ever seen that?
The IDEO Grocery Cart Challenge [00:53:00]
Shaan: Tell me.
Sam: IDEO was this design thinking lab — companies would pay them to come up with novel solutions and designs. I think 60 Minutes, or some TV show, went to them and said: “We want to understand how you guys think. We have a challenge for you. We want you to redesign, reimagine the grocery cart — in 24 hours.”
Sam: So they break into teams and show their process. First they do fact-gathering. They go watch people use grocery carts in a real store. They don’t take anything for granted. They’re observing: “Oh, certain customers use this as a kid babysitter — their kid sits inside it. They need something for the kid to play with. If you lost the kid seat, you’d lose that mom as a customer.” They’re seeing how people actually use it, then stating those observations, putting them on index cards, throwing them on the wall.
Sam: And the guy sets the tone — he basically draws this cone. During the diverge phase, for a predetermined amount of time, the team is in “free play, what-if mode.” You don’t judge ideas during this phase. You’re just trying to riff as many ideas as possible. Then you switch modes — converge — where you’re ruthlessly narrowing down the possibilities.
Sam: You have two distinct phases because you don’t want — in one phase — the one brave person to throw out a half-baked idea and then a smart guy immediately slams them and says, “That wouldn’t work.” Because now nobody wants to suggest ideas again for the rest of that hour. So you have to explicitly say: what you’re allowed to say during this hour is only “yes, and.” During the next phase, it’s “no, but.”
Sam: They end up with this redesigned grocery cart that was — you can look it up — basically designed for a new type of experience. And I thought about that. I was inspired. A, I thought: wow, what a cool job — to be creative for a living. And the top comment on that video, which is now 15 years old, says: “They’re still making us watch this for school — 2024.”
Shaan: Yeah. I actually think there should be a Netflix show of this. Like Chopped, where they give you a random basket of ingredients and you have to make a meal. I would love to see two teams of engineer/designer types given a challenge — redesign the grocery cart, redesign the inside of an elevator — and just see what they do. I would find that super fascinating as a TV show.
Shaan: And I think it would inspire a lot of people to become engineers or designers. Same way Shark Tank — even though it’s totally bogus in terms of how it depicts entrepreneurship — it gets people excited about the idea of entrepreneurship.
Should Sam Publish the Book? [00:57:30]
Shaan: This book sounds pretty great. Bad Art.
Sam: It sounds like a pretty good idea. It’s a great book. I’m excited about it. The only hesitation is — I already got a ton of value out of doing the research and outlining, crystallizing the big ideas in my mind.
Shaan: So you’re going to be like Derek from LA and just say, “F you, reader. I don’t care about you.”
Sam: Exactly. Do I need to go the extra mile of publishing it for other people to benefit? I’m not sure I care about that. I’m not going to make money off this. I’m not trying to get famous off a book. What do I get out of it?
Sam: So I might publish it. The other problem is I’m not sure how many other people nerd out about the creative process — making great art, making insanely great products.
Shaan: What about Austin Kleon? Like, “Steal Like an Artist.” Do you want to just be that Austin guy?
Sam: You didn’t even know it was the guy’s last name.
Shaan: I know the book cover. Isn’t it called Steal Like an Artist?
Sam: Yeah. A lot of smart people whose books I read always mention that one. Jack Carr talked about it. Ryan Holiday talked about it. Mark Manson talked about it. Everyone likes that book. But here’s the thing — it’s really for author and screenwriter types. That’s such a small percentage of the population that I’m not sure it’s worth the pain of publishing.
Sam: But — if the YouTube comments persuade me enough, I might be open to publishing this.
Shaan: If Sahil Bloom can convince everyone on Twitter to share his book, you can too.
Sam: What’s hilarious about Sahil is that Sahil’s great — Sahil is such an achiever. He brought the Ivy League energy to everything. He achievered his way into Stanford, achievered his way into being a D1 athlete, achievered his way into private equity, achievered his way into a six-pack. He’s like, “All right, give me a target. Show me a ladder and I shall climb.”
Sam: And it was like when we told him, “Yo, you should do Twitter, dude. Your posts are kind of interesting. I think you could do this.” He was like, “Cool. Monday through Friday, 6 a.m. — get up, cold plunge, write thread, publish thread — every day for the next 900 days straight.” And he did it. He got like a million followers. He achievered the hell out of Twitter. It’s amazing.
Shaan: And now you’re going to have to do the same with Bad Art. As Elon once said when they asked him if he was afraid of failure: “It is not in my nature.”
Sam: That’s how I feel about achievering. It is not in my nature to do this.
Shaan: That should be the reply to everything now. As the great Elon Musk once said: “This is not in my nature.”
Sam: Dude, how timeless and alpha is that phrase?
Sign-Off from Hawaii [01:01:00]
Sam: All right. Are you going to go enjoy the sand? Do you even leave your apartment when you’re in Hawaii?
Shaan: Yeah, dude. I’m in the ocean. I’m at the beach. I got kids — they want to do everything.
Sam: Are you going to wear that outfit every single day for six days straight?
Shaan: It’s like the same day, but they love it so much that I can’t help but love it too.
Sam: All right. That’s it.