Shaan runs through a list of “dumb ideas” that actually made people rich — novelty foam hats, the International Star Registry, a 10-hour fireplace YouTube video, and an ambient music underground. The conversation expands into sales philosophy via a viral 1983 CBS clip of Larry Jolton, the “world’s best shoe salesman,” then spirals into stories about Michael Burch’s origin of birthdayalarm.com, Rakuten’s culture of small disciplines, feedback as a gift, and Greek immigrant billionaire John Catsimatidis — before closing with Sam’s father-son Warriors game night and the California billionaire tax.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host), Shaan Puri (host)
Intro: Dumb Ideas That Made Real Money [00:00:00]
Shaan: Sam, I have a list of what I’m calling dumb ideas that made a million dollars. These are obscure lists that really only people like you and me would ever even keep. I say dumb not because I think they’re dumb — I actually think they’re genius, because I think being clever and doing simple things is a form of genius. But I think other people would call these dumb ideas. So I want to run through them with you and I want you to give me your reaction to each one.
Sam: All right, let’s hear it.
Idea #1: Cheese Grater Hats (Foam Party Hats) [00:00:30]
Shaan: First one came up while I was watching the NFL playoffs this weekend. I don’t know if you’ve paid any attention, but the Chicago Bears — who have sucked for a long time — are in the playoffs. Chicago has this rival, the Green Bay Packers. The Packers have been great for a long time, and the Bears have sucked for a very long time. So it’s kind of a rivalry by location, but they’re not really close rivals. I’m watching the game and I see a ton of people in the crowd wearing — I don’t know how much you know about football, but do you know what the Packers fans wear on their heads?
Sam: Yeah, cheese heads.
Shaan: Cheese heads. So what do the Bears fans wear?
Sam: I don’t know. Helmets? I don’t know.
Shaan: Cheese graters. I see all these fans wearing this silver cheese grater hat and I’m like, “Oh, that’s clever.” Like, we’re about to shred the Green Bay Packers. We’re going to shred the cheese heads. And I thought, this is really smart. So I started looking into the story behind this.
If you go to foampartyhats.com, this business started in 2017. Grace Rojos and her son Manuel Rojos created this thing. For like 15 years, they had just been making fun party hats for their own daughter’s parties. People loved it, they kind of gave it up, moved, then started again — we’re going to make foam hats for special events, parties, occasions, and sports. They’ve been trucking along. They got on Shark Tank and gave up 25% of their company for $100K — so a deal with Mark Cuban.
Sam: Yeah.
Shaan: Birthdays, weddings, corporate events — they had all these novelty hats. And then came the boom. The cheese grater hat just took off and became this viral frenzy.
The Bears have this coach — Ben Johnson. Have you seen this guy? He’s got a bit of a “Sam Parr if Sam Parr were into football” energy. Young, supposedly really smart, super ripped. After games in the locker room he just rips off his shirt, which old 70-year-old coaches would never do. He gets his team fired up, and he gives the game ball to this wide receiver, DJ Moore, who comes out wearing the hat. And the whole team starts chanting “Go DJ, go DJ.” There’s a Lil Wayne song, he starts dancing, the clip goes viral — 2.2 million views. Suddenly these hats are flying off the shelves.
They did 10,000 orders in one week, which is like half a million dollars in a week. They have a huge waitlist now because they make these by hand apparently. And this idea of team-specific novelty merch — because sports fans, when I went to a Warriors game, I walked out and bought my son a jersey and a little ball, but it’s all so vanilla. Cookie cutter. The same things over and over again. But with social media, teams now have little meme moments. If you can fast-follow those meme moments and create stuff that makes someone laugh or is worth sharing, you get a lot of spread. That’s what this company’s been doing — a million-dollar-plus business off novelty foam hats. Isn’t that wild?
They do a really good job making the story personal. It looks like a Hispanic family, the son is kind of the CEO, and the mom came up with the idea originally.
Sam: It looks pretty awesome.
Shaan: Yeah. And I think if somebody takes this idea — there was another company, a t-shirt company, I can’t remember the name, but they were doing this for sports teams. They realized the drop-shipping infrastructure has become so good that if anything happens in a game, within an hour after the game they can have the store up for that product, that slogan, that moment. Linsanity happens in New York and they have the Linsanity line ready to go.
They’re orders of magnitude faster than the typical merch industry at creating team-specific, moment-specific merch. It’s not the best business, not a business I would want to be in, but it’s a simple man’s business. Anybody can understand what they’re doing. And if you niche down all the way — forget t-shirts, go to giant oversized foam hats — there’s a million-dollar business sitting in oversized foam hats. Pretty wild.
Sam: All right, ready for the next one?
Shaan: That was a quotable last line. “There’s a million-dollar business sitting in oversized foam hats.”
Idea #2: The International Star Registry [00:08:00]
Shaan: So a long time ago I was running a business called birthdayalarm.com. This was a business started by Michael and Zoe Burch. It had been going for 20-plus years, printing millions of dollars a year. It was one of the earliest viral businesses ever. Birthday Alarm has had 50 million-plus members with zero marketing spend because Michael was one of the pioneers of viral marketing.
Sam: How much revenue has this done over the course of 20 years — or 25 years?
Shaan: Probably not $100 million. Maybe $75 million is my guess.
Sam: Wow.
Shaan: And hyper-profitably, by the way. That’s not just revenue — that is like profit for a business like this.
Sam: So $3 million every year for 25 years is—
Shaan: Not exactly, but yeah, average two to three.
Sam: Okay, wow. Amazing.
Shaan: The business model is very simple — reminders for your friends and family’s birthdays. The reminders are free, so you make money when people pay to send a card. And I remember when we were trying to grow the business or revitalize it, I was brainstorming ideas with Michael, and I said, “I try not to be too smart. What’s already working, or has worked in the past?”
And he goes, “You know, at the beginning, these guys approached us with this goofy idea that I thought was a total scam. But I think they’ve actually made even more money than we did without the 50 million members.”
I go, “What is it?”
He goes, “It’s this thing called the International Star Registry.”
Sam: Oh my gosh, I have heard of this.
Shaan: He goes, “They let you, for a special occasion — a friend’s birthday or whatever — gift them their name on a star. You can name a star in the universe after your friend. It’ll show you the star, tell you the location. And for the low price of $25, that star is yours.” Technically, not technically yours at all. Not even officially named. Just named in our book that we’re going to keep in our office.
These guys have been printing millions of dollars for also 20-plus years just naming stars after people. It’s been referenced in movies — it was in A Walk to Remember, where someone is dying and they name a star after her. It’s this emotional, sentimental thing. And I love it because it’s a pure-play marketing product. There is no product. You don’t get to have the star. Nothing changes hands. It’s literally just “we are going to write it down in our book permanently.” It’s like something I would trick my kids with.
Sam: Dude, what’s really funny is if you Google “star registry,” you can see they’re buying ads against each other. There are like dozens of these companies, which begs the question — whose book is the more permanent book? Is this the one founded in 1979?
Shaan: Yeah, 1979, when space was hot — the moon and all that. You get a certificate, a map of where your star is, and you get to have that forever in their book.
The funny thing is the details of this — think about it from a marketing point of view. How do you legitimize a frankly illegitimate thing? What they did was they made their book sound incredibly official. “It’s placed in the Library of Congress. We store the official book in a Swiss vault in a Swiss bank.” Leveraging prestige.
Sam: Like, are any of those things impressive? How do you get a book into the Library of Congress?
Shaan: You probably just donate a copy.
Sam: One of my favorite copywriters, Joe Sugarman, wrote this famous ad for a Casio watch. He asked the guys who made the watch to explain how it was made. They say, “Well, we use a quartz movement and then we use aluminum.” And he goes, “Hold on — did you say quartz movement?” And they go, “Yeah, it’s like a movement that every $10 watch uses.” He’s like, “But tell me more about quartz.” He finds out what quartz means. Then he asks about the metal — “It’s just aluminum.” And he goes, “Oh, it’s just aluminum? Even NASA uses it. Did you say space-grade aluminum?”
So if you read this old ad for the Casio watch, it says: “Made with the same aluminum that is space-grade, because NASA uses it on their rockets, with the quartz movement — the most precise movement, the same thing Rolex uses.” He took a truth and made it sound a lot cooler than it was.
Shaan: He took a fact and made it value.
Sam: Yeah.
Shaan: By the way — I think this is the Rorschach test for this podcast. If there was a speakeasy and we had to decide who gets in and who gets out, I’d tell the Joe Sugarman story and I’d be like, “Do you find that amazing or repulsive?” If they say, “Well, that’s bullshit,” then it’s like, “Cool. You should just head to the next bar.” And if they say, “That’s amazing. How do I do that?” — “Come on in. Welcome to MFM.”
Sam: That’s pretty good. Who owned the Star Registry — do they have a crazy story like Michael Burch?
Shaan: Yeah. It was owned by this Canadian advertising executive, but only for like a year — he passed away two years later. And then this mom of 12 who had gifted a star to her husband, loved it, finds out the business is for sale. She buys it, and they’ve grown it as a family business. Now her son is the operator.
By the way, if you’re a mom of 12, you’re hired. You’re capable of doing anything. I don’t know what Navy SEAL training is like, but it does not compare to being a mother of 12.
Sam: Dude, on their about page at starregistry.com, they explain how they’re “democratizing the cosmos” and all this stuff. And then they have a line that says, “Do not be fooled by the impostors.” And it’s this big paragraph: “In the vast experience of celestial naming… there are also impostors seeking to capitalize on the allure of the stars. Numerous companies have attempted to copy us…”
Shaan: Right.
Sam: Snake oil salesman says other guys’ oil is terrible for you.
The Origin Story of birthdayalarm.com [00:17:00]
Shaan: Did I tell you how Michael came up with birthdayalarm.com?
Sam: No.
Shaan: Michael and Zoe were both working at an insurance company. He told me they were making really good money — computers were new, not many people knew database programming, and insurance companies needed that. Maybe $200K combined. I don’t know exactly, but they were doing well.
Then the internet boom starts around 1998, 1999, and he’s like: what am I doing at an insurance company? I’ve got to be part of this. I’m sure many people today feel the same way about AI and robotics.
His friend sends him a link to some kind of online store and he’s like, “Wow, this is incredible. I’ve got to get in.” So he decides: I’m going to create a self-updating address book. Like, today, Sam, if you move, I don’t have your new address. The idea was — when Sam moves, he updates his address once and it automatically updates for everybody who has access. A great idea. Still a great idea. Sean Parker tried to start a company doing this too. A bunch of smart people have tried. It just turns out people don’t care enough to actually do it.
So he’s building this thing called Lemon Link. No money, so he’s the programmer, designer, product manager, customer service, janitor, everything. He told his wife, “Give me three months to try this internet thing. If it doesn’t work, I promise we’ll go back.” He thinks they were pregnant with their second or third kid, so it wasn’t a super stable time to quit his job.
Well, two years go by. He’s like, “I’m so close. Just three more months.” Lemon Link is not growing. The only thing he’s getting in customer service is basically either “shut down my account” or “hey, thanks for that birthday reminder. You saved my butt.” Because he had added this one feature — save their birthday too, and I’ll remind you when it comes up.
He kept seeing that. This was pre-Facebook, so people didn’t have an easy online way to know when their friend’s birthday was. And he realized — oh, this is a thing. Because he was doing customer service and finally facing reality: nobody wants my idea, but they do seem to want this.
Overnight he creates birthdayalarm.com and within a couple of weeks gets 10,000 members. He figured out a viral loop. He said to this day, even before they made any money, getting to 10,000 members was the best feeling.
Sam: It’s pretty crazy that he had the audacity to stop working on that and work on Bebo. Most people would say, “All right, birthday alarm — how do we make anniversary alarm? How do we scale this?” It was working and starting to make a little bit of money. And his friend Morgan sends him a link to Friendster and he’s like, “Of course people are going to want this — it’s not just looking up information. They’re going to want to talk to their friends and post photos.”
So before Bebo, he created a Friendster-like product. It goes viral because he really understands virality, but he’s losing money because the more members that sign up, the more his bandwidth costs. And at the time, social networks had no way of making money. Nobody had done Facebook ads yet. Nobody knew how to monetize that.
So he goes to a meetup and sells the business to James Currier for like $2 million, works for them for a year, watches what MySpace is doing, and goes, “Okay, I know what I should be doing now.” Then he starts Bebo.
Shaan: And that was the one that took off. Grew it from nothing to like an $800 million exit.
Sam: In like three or four years. What a baller. And now he’s just the sole proprietor of a little birthdayalarm.com.
Shaan: Just a mom and pop shop. Just trying to make Eden’s beat.
Idea #3: The 10-Hour Fireplace YouTube Channel [00:28:00]
Sam: I have one more very dumb idea that I admire for its simplicity. Can you just type in “10-hour fireplace”?
Shaan: Of course. I mean, everyone is a subscriber, aren’t they?
Sam: Describe what you see when you type in “10-hour fireplace” and click their YouTube channel.
Shaan: They have done a very good job of naming it. Oh my god, I didn’t realize it was that big. Holy moly. Okay, so obviously it’s a 10-hour video of a fireplace — with 157 million views.
Sam: Exactly. How many videos on this channel?
Shaan: They posted this 10 years ago. 120,000 subscribers and there is one video. There’s like points in the video — you know how when you scroll over YouTube there are peaks? Why is there a spike at 5 hours and 55 minutes?
Sam: They don’t even add logs. It must be like a 30-second loop done over and over again.
Shaan: Oh, the top comment — “Bro is a millionaire.”
Sam: Bro is a millionaire. Because this channel was started by one person in Romania. One channel, one video. This guy just hit it and quit it. The one-hit wonder of the business world. He posted one video of a 30-second loop of a fireplace crackling, made a million dollars in Romania, and he did not try to follow it up with another video and turn it into an empire. He just put the video up, let it run, baby. I admire this. I admire the restraint maybe more than I admire the ingenuity.
The Ambient YouTube Underground [00:33:00]
Shaan: Dude, have you noticed on YouTube what’s been going on with these types of channels? Let’s call them ambient channels. I love ambient channels. I listen to the weird music.
Sam: Yeah, it started as white noise. There’s this company called Brain FM — do you know Brain FM?
Shaan: I love Brain FM. So they make some of my favorite noise.
Sam: I was a paying subscriber to Brain FM years ago.
Shaan: I was too. But then I started going down the rabbit hole of other music. There’s like lo-fi — for some reason a lot of lo-fi Mac Miller. I like Mac Miller, but not enough that I’d think he’d start populating my recommendations. But what I’m noticing is like this huge graph where it’s like, “Let’s do old money, let’s do 1980s, let’s do this” — and then you pick a country. For example, I keep getting targeted with “Old Money Brazil” or “1980s Finance.” They create the best AI thumbnails. Type in “Old Money Brazil music.”
Sam: Old Money Brazil music. All right, I see this gentleman in a nice suit with a cigar. “Old Money Brazil — Elegant Bossa Nova, Timeless Luxury Instrumental Playlist.” 74,000 views.
Shaan: I get targeted with so many of these. There was another one — “Greedy American Revolution” or something. Like “Locked In American Revolution.”
Sam: You are joking. This is real?
Shaan: 90 minutes of American Revolutionary War music. Liberty Song playlist.
Sam: And they, like — is there a good one?
Shaan: The thumbnails are so funny. I tweeted the other day, “The thumbnail gods have been smiling on me.” It’s an American Revolution AI image and I just keep getting targeted over and over. These guys must be doing well. You’ve never seen these?
Sam: Well, I’ve seen just a normal lo-fi. Like Lo-Fi Girl, for example — probably the biggest channel in this category. 15 million subscribers, 2.5 billion views. Making about $100K a month right now on this channel. That’s just one channel, live right now. There are 30,000 people just listening to this while we’re recording.
Shaan: It’s the best. Look at the thumbnail I sent you.
Sam: Oh, this is incredible. It looks like the Sistine Chapel painting — the naked man reaching out to God where their fingers are about to touch. But he’s got his dukes up like he’s about to fight, he’s a hairless naked man with half a mullet, and it just says “Classical Music That Goes Hard.”
Shaan: Yeah. Or they’re giving the shocker sign. I just get so many of these. There’s this whole weird underground world. And there’s also the underground world of the comments.
If you look at MFM’s comments on the back end — we’ve tried to ban them — it’s like: “I can’t believe no one has blessed me before.” Like they’ve just been blessed after reading a book called “Millionaires R Us.” Or “I totally agree with this video, and it’s so funny that you guys start making these points because I read about this exact thing in the Millionaires R Us book by this total saint.”
Sam: Dude, those guys are the bane of my existence. The worst.
Shaan: I just sit there and manually try to get rid of them. Have you seen this guy Yang Mun on Instagram? Like an AI monk — and he’s got this healing guide, maybe one to two million followers. It’s like talking-head advice videos and he sells a healing guide. Which is, you know, it’s a kid with the broccoli haircut who just moved to Miami and is in a house with seven other guys and they’re all creating these accounts.
Sam: And if you go to Yang Mun’s link in bio—
Shaan: Because that’s what a monk would do, right?
Sam: He’s on some thing where you can buy financial newsletters, and it’s like “newsletters that 10x your wealth with this stock tip.”
Shaan: Yeah, people are doing this with fake grandparents too. Accounts like “wisdom from grandparents” — all AI — and it’s like “What I Wish I Knew When I Was Younger” and “The Love That Got Away.” They’re just printing views.
Sam: Dude, this stuff gets me every time. I love it. I fall victim to this worse than a grandparent falls victim to buying the top listing on Amazon. Like every gift from grandparents at my house right now — they all just typed “kids bike” and bought the exact same thing.
Larry Jolton: World’s Best Shoe Salesman [00:44:00]
Sam: All right, I’ve got to show you one more. I’m on YouTube and the algorithm just has a commission, five-star experience for me. So there’s this clip — “The most intense shoe salesman you’ll ever meet.” It’s a CBS News archive from 1983.
[Clip plays: “Shoe store here in Sharon, Pennsylvania — just a shoe store. Oh no. That’s the playing field of a champion. Here he comes now out of the bullpen. The hottest pitcher of the retail shoe game today. Big number one — Larry Jolton.”]
Shaan: Let me see.
Sam: So this is a video of Larry Jolton, the number one shoe salesman in America. He sold $400,000 worth of shoes at a physical shoe store himself by hand in 1983. It’s in Pennsylvania — Ryer’s or something, a famous shoe store. And this video is amazing.
[Clip: “I wouldn’t go any bigger than that. You got some nice dress shoes, 20% off. I do too, especially for the summertime. Listen to me — you order the two shoes, whatever color you want. If it comes in, if it don’t fit, if you don’t like it, you’re not obligated to take it.”]
Shaan: Big day. Clean it up.
Sam: [Clip: “Larry Jolton is the Cy Young of his time. The best of the big-league shoe pitchers. There are only 38,000 feet in Sharon, Pennsylvania. Last year, Larry Jolton sold $423,000 worth of shoes.”]
[Clip: “It’s going to be busy today, fellas. I can feel it.”]
Shaan: I can feel it. It’s going to be busy.
Sam: So they show him doing his thing. One amazing part: he’s like, the worst thing in the world is someone leaves without a shoe. He’s serving four or five customers at once. It’s about the fit, not the size. He’s got all these go-to slogans. “That’s a good-looking shoe right there on you.” He’ll deliver to your house, to your office. “If you ever have a problem, just come back to me. I’m Larry.” And then he never takes a lunch break — except he’s eating a burger in the back, in the shoe rack where he finds sizes. Just taking bites as he’s running back and forth.
Shaan: This guy’s awesome.
Sam: And his sales philosophy: you don’t want to be the nice guy. Some people just want to be told what they need. They come in thinking their shoe’s a size eight and a half, walking around with cramped feet all the time. You’ve got to give them a size 10. He tells the story about a customer who didn’t know what they wanted: the customer doesn’t always know what they want, you’ve got to help them. That’s the art of shoe sales.
And just his overall energy when he’s walking around the bullpen: “Got to be a big day today, boys. Got a lot of shoes we got to move today.” All the other salesmen clearly don’t care. This is a very inspiring video about being the best — just championship mentality in anything you do.
Shaan: So he died this year. His obituary goes in depth about how he was on that show and a bunch of others. The National Shoe Retailers Association named him salesman of the year in 1983, ‘84, and ‘85. They say he was a larger-than-life figure.
Sam: He’s incredible. I love this man. Larry’s a salt of the earth type of guy. If you’re going to do anything today, you bring that Larry Jolton energy, that championship mindset, to whatever you do. You sell whatever you sell the way Larry sold shoes. That’s the final word.
What Sales Actually Requires [00:52:00]
Shaan: Have you ever studied sales? I imagine — and I think you and I have behaved similarly — we’re pretty charismatic, so we think that’s all it takes. But then I’ve hired salespeople and I’ve seen the difference between a really winning one and a pretty good one. The greats have both the talent and this other thing: process. Where they know that saying this gets that. It’s a mouse-finding-cheese energy. The really good ones just blindly — oh, that worked, no ego, I’m just going to do that again. They follow process.
Sam: Guys like you and me actually suck at sales. The reason we suck is because we want to use charm and charisma. The best people use process. And even the reason we can’t adapt to it is that we’re problem solvers — it’s a puzzle. Oh, I got to do this, then that gets me what I want. We would get bored doing that.
The most impressive thing about this guy isn’t that he sold $400K worth of shoes. It’s that he just kept doing it year after year after year. He never got bored of it.
I have this phrase I say now. Every day when I do my workout, we start with a 10-minute routine where I basically loosen up my IT band — a fascia release, which is painful and boring. It doesn’t look cool. You don’t feel like you’re getting any stronger or more athletic. It’s the opposite of what you want when you go into a workout. But I need it because of knee injuries. You can’t do it once or twice or for two weeks — you basically have to just constantly do this if you want to stay healthy.
Every day when I go in, I say: “All right boys, we’re not getting bored of greatness today. Let’s not get bored of greatness.” The Larry mentality — you can’t get bored with doing the thing that leads to great results, even if it’s the same thing you’ve done a thousand times. You can’t become nonchalant about it. You can’t autopilot through it. You can’t cut corners because you’ve already done it before.
When I’m coaching my team, it’s the same thing. We played a game the other day and in warm-ups I knew we were going to kick this team’s butt because their warm-up was so sloppy. I was like, “If they warm up like this, they’re not going to be able to play at a high level.” Sure enough, we beat them by almost 50 points. Not a lot of talent, but shortcutting the process. Getting bored of what gets great results is a real problem. It’s been a real problem for me. And if you’re smart and talented, you get off on solving new problems and new puzzles — that becomes an Achilles heel.
Rakuten’s Culture of Small Disciplines [00:58:00]
Shaan: Dude, I’m always the biggest victim of stories where a company does the small things right and it levers up to the big things. Have you heard of Rakuten?
Sam: Yeah, I know them well.
Shaan: Rakuten is a Japanese company — like the Amazon of Japan, kind of. Multi-billion-dollar, massive. And for some reason I came across the founder and started reading about him. They have a book because they’re famous for having a cult-like culture. He released a handbook on their culture and values — it was supposed to be internal, but it was a hit, so a lot of people read it. He has like 30 rules.
Rule number one: every Tuesday from 3 to 4, everyone at every office throughout the world stops what they’re doing and cleans. They refuse to have hired cleaners. His reasoning was that if you keep your desk clean, you’ll have a clean mind, it’ll build discipline. Same thing as the general with the “make your bed” speech. Or stories of a basketball coach who turns around a team by teaching the front desk how to answer the phone. Tying your shoelaces. These stories over and over again. I love all of them. I always buy into them. I don’t know how often they’re true, but I buy in. Have you ever tried one of these things with your team?
Sam: Yeah, we try. The hard part is having the courage to actually live by it. You can read the story and say, “That makes total sense.” Then you get into an environment where you’ve got people who aren’t bought in. Are you really going to enforce it? How much of a standard is it? Are you going to let your best player skip it? Are you going to let a meeting get in the way? All the compromises are where things get interesting. I’ve never gone to the extent of being truly hardcore about it because I think it takes a different level of leadership and courage that I personally don’t possess.
Let me reframe it for you. In high school, my freshman year, first practice for cross country — I went to an all-boys school. The coach gets up and it was like a Remember the Titans moment. He says, “I’m not here to teach you how to be the best runner. What I’m here to do this year is teach all of you boys how to become men. And we’re going to do it by learning how to run better.” We’re going to show up earlier than anticipated. We’re going to run when we don’t feel like it. We’re going to go through the pain no matter what. We’re going to stick around until the last person finishes because that’s what you do with teammates.
At the time I kind of laughed, but then I started buying in and it brought us all together. My high school cross country team — a nerdy sport — but we won all the time. We always won. He used to have this phrase: “Tradition doesn’t graduate.” That was like — I still remember it. “You guys are going to graduate, but we’ve been doing this the same way, and it works.” All of these culty lines. We’re talking high school cross country, nothing significant, and yet it meaningfully impacted me. I love that story.
Feedback Is a Gift [01:05:00]
Shaan: My buddy Jason told me a story like this. Jason Hitchcock — I think you know Jason, he used to work at Bebo. I was pretty hard on Jason. I would give him feedback all the time. Maybe it’s because he was one of the non-engineers, so I felt freer to say what I thought. But I noticed he took it really well — always an incredible attitude. So in a one-on-one, I gave him credit for it. I was like, “Man, you have like a 10 out of 10 attitude at life and at work. I give you a bunch of feedback and you take it so incredibly well.”
And he said: “I receive it.”
I go, “What?”
He goes, “I don’t take it. I receive it. Can I tell you a story about where that comes from?”
His freshman year of high school, he wanted to play water polo. His older brother was the team captain, and Jason thought he was as good as him or better. He’s feeling himself. They get in the pool, and during warm-ups he’s being a little sloppy — when he’s throwing the ball, his arm is skimming the water instead of out of the water like you’d want in a game. The varsity coach walks by: “Jason, get your arm out of the water.” And Jason’s like, “Yeah, yeah, thanks coach.” Keeps going. A few minutes later, lazy again. “Jason, keep your arm out of the water.” And Jason’s like, “Yeah, coach. Sorry, I’m just getting warmed up.”
Coach blows the whistle. Everybody comes over. He goes, “Hey everybody, I’d like to introduce you to Jason. Jason is a freshman. Jason is too good for feedback. Jason doesn’t want your feedback.”
He basically pulled him aside and embarrassed him in front of everyone. And then he says: “Jason, feedback is a gift. If I’m going to give you that gift, you’ve got to receive it. Think about what it takes to give somebody feedback — you have to be a little vulnerable, you’re risking conflict, you have to care about making that person better. That’s what it takes to give that gift.”
Sam: And so at the whole company, “feedback is a gift” became a mantra. It’s really important because otherwise you create a defensive mentality and people shy away from saying something. The feedback-is-a-gift thing changed us. And it was a lesson from his high school water polo coach.
Shaan: I love stories like this. They always get me going. I distinctly remember — we did a podcast a year ago where I think you’d said something like “I haven’t done anything world-changing.” And I was like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa — who cares if it’s world-changing? Creating a small game that makes someone just a little bit happier is worth it.”
I’ve grown to believe that. High school sports are very insignificant, and yet it’s a world-changing experience for many kids. We need to take that same energy to work. You’re making a podcast, fine — but even go to something less glamorous, like B2B software. Not that special, but you can learn how to be excellent here. You can learn how to follow through. You can have this unearned pride where you make tough decisions when no one is looking.
Sam: That’s cool. I like it. Sam’s in his leadership arc. That’s definitely the season you’re in. I think you need to rebrand yourself — go by “Samuel” or something.
Shaan: Father. Just father. Everyone calls you Father Sam.
Sam: And the same way that stargazing thing exists — there’s universalministries.com where you can sign up and get ordained as a minister. I’ve actually done that because I’ve officiated a couple of weddings. It’s obviously a crock, but I am a minister. So we could go by minister.
Shaan: All right, Minister Sam.
John Catsimatidis: The Greek Immigrant Billionaire [01:12:00]
Sam: All right Shaan, I want to show you someone who’s in the aviation business, the grocery store business, and actually had a pretty significant character in the movie Marty Supreme, which just came out.
Shaan: Okay, I haven’t seen the movie yet.
Sam: But you know what it is, right? It’s the biggest movie going on right now.
Shaan: Timothée Chalamet and ping pong. That’s literally all I know. Or as Adam Sandler says, “Timothy Shalamar.”
Sam: Okay, so Google John Catsimatidis. American billionaire businessman and radio talk show host. Owner, president, chairman, and CEO of grocery chains — Gristede’s, D’Agostino Supermarkets in Manhattan. $5 billion net worth. Have you never heard of this guy?
Shaan: No. But he’s got a familiar face — like one of those character actors. He’s got that energy where you’re like, “I’ve seen this actor everywhere, what’s his name?”
Sam: So here’s his story. He’s about 80 now. He was born sometime in the 1940s, immigrated as a baby from Greece, came to New York, moved to Harlem. Okay student, went to Brooklyn Tech, actually got into West Point — so clearly smart — but decided not to go. Instead, he bought a small grocery store.
At the age of like 20, he convinced a failing grocery store to sell to him on owner financing — he didn’t have to come up with much money. But do you know anything about grocery stores? They’re like the hardest business to run.
Shaan: Yeah, it’s a commodity. No margins.
Sam: The biggest regional grocery chains do like 3% margins. Incredibly challenging. Food that spoils. Back in the ’70s when he was doing it, you don’t have the best systems. Very hard. But he’s a dog. He’s got that immigrant hustle and he’s able to grow this business. By the time he’s 32, he had something like 12 or 15 locations doing $40 million a year in revenue. He said at age 28 he was paying himself a million dollars a year. Through hustle and grind he made it work.
His grocery stores were called Red Apple. Free cash checking, free delivery, discount store. Not groundbreaking now, but he just provided a simple service and did it really well. Now Red Apple — I think they have like a hundred locations in the city. They own Gristede’s.
Here’s where it gets weird. At age 32, he was like, “Well, I was going to get into West Point. My dream was to be a pilot. I never did that.” So he gets his pilot’s license just for fun. And then — you know what, I’ve heard Richard Branson do something similar — he buys a jet. It’s kind of interesting, kind of fun. But then he’s like, I’ve got to turn this into a business. So he buys one plane, a relatively small Cessna, and starts allowing customers to charter his plane from New York City to Atlantic City. This is in the ’70s and ’80s.
One thing leads to another, grows for eight years, eventually becomes a fleet of like 40 planes and jets — which he eventually sells to Warren Buffett. And that is the beginning of NetJets, which is one of Berkshire Hathaway’s crown jewels.
Shaan: So he was doing private charters, not like a full airline like Branson?
Sam: Private charters. He tried to get into the actual airline business and I don’t think that worked out. But while all of this is going on — he’s still only like 33, 34, 35 years old — he does another crazy thing. He hears about an oil refinery going out of business in Pennsylvania.
The grocery store business: commodity, lots of unions, very low margins, you have to be working 24 hours to make it work. Somehow he made the leap that these are comparable, and he gets into oil refining. Do you know what that means?
Shaan: Not really — they’re a middleman between drilling for oil and selling to the end customer?
Sam: Basically two things. One: they have a massive tank in the ground that can store tons of oil. You drill the oil, it goes to this thing, and it’s not particularly useful yet. Two: they refine it — take parts of that crude oil and turn it into gasoline, kerosene, different products. He bought a business that did that, which is kind of ridiculous. You’d never think that would have been a natural move.
Is he just a gunslinger? Why is he going into all these different spaces?
Shaan: This is why I wanted to bring him up. In his 60s, he does two more wild things. One: he starts an AM radio political talk show that he still hosts every Sunday. You can’t find it on YouTube, you can’t find it on Spotify — literally only on AM radio. And I’ve listened to it. His co-host is this Long Island guy who’s like, “Hey, John, what do you think about this Donnie guy?” Like, he’s a very unrefined billionaire, and I mean that in a cool way.
The second thing: he ran for mayor in 2012, I think, and he almost won. He was like, “I’m going to be the mayor for the people in Harlem and the people on Wall Street.” This very salt-of-the-earth immigrant energy type of billionaire guy.
But the reason he’s interesting to me is that word you’ve been obsessed with: generative.
Sam: He’s very generative.
Shaan: He does this in a way — you know the charm that when Donald Trump is being nice has, where he’s like, “Ah, screw it. Let’s just do it. What’s money among friends?”
Sam: My word is my bond. My word is stronger than oak.
Shaan: He has that energy, but he’s not hateful at all. He’s a Republican, but he talks very fondly of Obama and Hillary. Not a hater at all. He’s got this folksy vibe, thick New York accent, spit-on-my-hand-shake-your-hand energy.
His company is Red Apple Holding Company — about 8,000 or 9,000 employees. His family runs it. Him and his kids all live in the same building in New York City and run the company together. He’s still incredibly active at 80. Very fascinating guy.
And he looks very funny — like an actor. He just had a cameo. Was he playing himself or—
Sam: Listen to this. So Marty Supreme — the hottest thing going right now. I went and saw it the other day.
Shaan: By the way, how is it? Must-see? Did you see Uncut Gems?
Sam: Loved Uncut Gems.
Shaan: Loved it. Then you’ll like this. If Uncut Gems is a 9 out of 10 on the stress scale, Marty Supreme is an 8 out of 10. And for people like me — if you’re in my boat, you’ll hate it. I hated Uncut Gems and I hate Marty Supreme. All the characters are pretty evil and there are no redeeming qualities.
Sam: But this guy John has a pretty significant character in Marty Supreme. So I was like, “This guy is everywhere. He’s a man about town. He’s always doing stuff. He’s sort of in that Jesse Sigler category of people who have fun while winning.” Very fascinating to me.
Shaan: Dude, I’m reading his Wikipedia and I’m going, “Wow, that’s really amazing. Oh, that’s really amazing.” And then it says he gave a speech at the Stern School of Business expressing his unease about his daughter’s graduating class. He said, “480 of the 580 kids are Asian, including Indian. And that’s scary when you think about it — we’re going to deport most of these kids.”
Sam: Did he really say that?
Shaan: I mean, it’s on the Wikipedia page. I didn’t see that one, but I did see other things where I couldn’t tell if he was trying to be funny and it just reads stupid, or—
Sam: Yeah, he does seem like an 80-year-old New Yorker with a little bit of a big mouth. But my read on him was he’s generally an all-right guy, maybe resembling this category of what I’d call capital men — where he just takes money into new spaces, creates new entities in whole new industries, and wins more often than not. You can’t be a capital man if you have a perfect record, because that means you weren’t playing as rough as you should have.
Shaan: I was reading his book and there seems to be a common theme. A lot of these guys have one point in their life where they’re just — what’s the phrase we used? Leveraged up to the tits.
Sam: What’s the scientific term?
Shaan: Derek from More Plates More Dates always says, “This guy’s juiced to the gills.” And when I was reading about old Johnny Cats, I was like, “This guy’s leveraged to the gills.” You have to pay the price to do a lot of this stuff. But I love these young guys who have this gunslinging energy.
Sam: So he’s your Billy of the Week.
Shaan: Yeah. The anti-Indian comments — I didn’t know about that when I started digging. I should have done a little capital journalism. I was going to say we should invite him on the pod, but I don’t think that’s happening now.
Sam: Hey, we can still invite him. Just make sure we do it remote and I don’t disclose my location.
Shaan: I didn’t realize he said that. Did he say anything else?
Sam: Something about Hitler — he compared raising taxes on the wealthy to how Hitler punished the Jews.
Shaan: Oh man.
Sam: Classic blunder.
Shaan: A trap we’ve all fallen into.
Sam: Yeah, I did read that line and I was like — we have seen time and time again that comparison being tried. Not once has it ever worked.
California Billionaire Tax and Who’s Really Powerful [01:30:00]
Shaan: Dude, I might end up being the richest man in California. Have you heard about this billionaire tax?
Sam: Yeah. The gist of it is net worths taxed at 5%?
Shaan: A one-time tax of 5% for billionaires. So all the billionaires are leaving — which will just mean they’ll move to the next class of people. Soon enough I’ll be the last man standing in California.
I think it’s a pretty stupid law. But at the same time — isn’t it crazy how little power a billionaire has if they have to leave their home? Like, do you really have that much power?
Sam: It’s like that Dark Knight scene. Bane is talking to the construction guy, and the little guy says “I’m in control,” and Bane puts his hand on his shoulder and says, “Do you feel in control?” Because Bane’s about to snap his neck.
Shaan: That’s the 850,000 votes it takes to put this on the ballot. That’s the energy I’m feeling right now. These billionaires being like, “We’re the big shots.” It’s like — you don’t look like the big shot. You have to flee your home.
Sam: That said, it is kind of a stupid rule. The analogy I always use: let’s say you buy a Picasso painting for $5 at a garage sale, turns out it’s rare. Now your net worth is hundreds of millions of dollars. How are you supposed to pay taxes on that assessed value?
Shaan: You don’t even need to go to that edge case. You’re a startup founder in San Francisco. Your on-paper net worth is $200 million because your AI company raised around at a hot valuation. That doesn’t mean you have that money. That doesn’t mean it’s anywhere close to guaranteed. But you’d be on the hook for taxes the following year. It’s just going to drive wealthy people out, drive startup founders out — who would want to start here? Strangle the golden goose.
Sam: I read that like 20 or 30 prominent families have left. You should make a public scoreboard — “the 31st.”
Shaan: Oh, what a great idea. That’s like that one time I tweeted that I was buying Bitcoin and it somehow got picked up by all the Bitcoin magazines. “Executive Shaan Puri says he’s moving 20% of his net worth into Bitcoin.” And I’m like, I don’t think y’all know how small that net worth is. Not magazine worthy.
Sam: I saw some guy on there announcing he was leaving and everyone was making fun of him. Like, “You’re not important enough for us to care.”
Shaan: “You own two duplexes. You don’t qualify for the bill.”
Sam: Is it actually a billion as the threshold? A billion. Well, there was a proposal for $50 million that didn’t make it. Then they went to the billionaire tax because who’s going to not vote for that?
But people have done the math — even if you taxed all the billionaires, it doesn’t plug the hole in California spending. It’s kind of like income tax, right? Income tax was supposed to be a one-time thing, like 3% on income. “Don’t worry, guys, it’s okay.” And now everybody pays income tax — 20, 30, 40, 50% of your income every year.
Once they set the precedent that they can tax you on property you haven’t realized gains on, that’s a problem. And once you set the bar at a billion, they can easily change it to 100 million, then 40 million — just continue on from there.
I’ve always found it interesting how people come up with round numbers as thresholds. I think around 1910 or 1920, this idea of a “millionaire” came to be where people were using the phrase like “you’ve made it.” And it’s kind of funny that 100 years later we still use that as a threshold.
Shaan: A millionaire in 1920 would be something like $20 million today — 18 to 20x.
Sam: And “billionaires shouldn’t exist” — okay, but why $1 billion? Why not $800 million? I’ve always found it interesting how we’ve settled on these perfectly round numbers.
Warriors Game: Steph Curry, M&Ms, and a 4-Year-Old’s Questions [01:40:00]
Shaan: Dude, so yesterday I took my whole basketball team — the team I’m coaching — to the Warriors game. I wanted to make it a special thing. After they won their last game, in the locker room instead of just saying “you did this well, you did this poorly,” I was like, “You guys want to go to a Warriors game?” And they got to go courtside and see Steph Curry.
Sam: And you just ruined all of their eligibility for going to NCAA—
Shaan: I accidentally violated like HIPAA.
Sam: Wait, how did you get courtside?
Shaan: I knew a guy who knew a guy. I don’t want to say his name, but yeah — he’s with the team, ex-player. He just literally waved his hand and was like, “Let them come down.” And the security guard was like, “I guess if he’s waving his hand, you can go.” And I was like, “Yeah, me and these other 18 guys.” We all went.
But anyway, as part of this, I had one extra ticket. So I took my son who’s 4 and a half years old. His first basketball game. We had to leave after the second quarter because it’s bedtime, and I’ve got to drive him back home.
I was hoping to have this amazing father-son bonding moment. I’m like, “Watch — that’s the greatest shooter ever, Steph Curry. That’s the closest we’ve ever been to God right here, 5 feet away.” And he’s trying to care, but he doesn’t really care. He’s like, “Can we get candy now?”
So I got him some M&Ms. And I’m like, “Every time the Warriors make a shot, you get an M&M.” Now he’s locked in.
Finally we leave, and the drive home was this amazing moment. I put the Tesla in self-drive and just talked to my son for like an hour — one-on-one, because I have three kids and it’s normally not like that. And he tells me, “You know what I want to be when I grow up? I want to be a builder.” And I was like, “Amazing — builder of what?” And he goes, “Do I have to pick?” And I was like, “No, I guess not.”
So I’m telling him about builders — somebody built this bridge, somebody built this car. And somehow I start explaining who Elon Musk is. I’m basically doing a podcast episode for him. You know, rockets that land themselves. And he’s like, “What did they do before they landed themselves?” And I was like, honestly, I don’t know. Anyways, don’t ask too many questions.
So I’m telling him about Tesla, and he’s like, “Did he start it?” And I’m like, “Not technically, but let’s not get into those details.” I tell him Elon is the richest man in the world — he’s got like $300 or $400 billion. He goes quiet for like 30 seconds. And then he goes, “Can it even fit in his wallet?”
And I was like, “No.” He goes, “So he has to use a grocery cart.” And I was like — I had to stop and explain the concept of banks.
Anyways, I had this long conversation with him about money and about the builders and the prolific people who make things happen. And it just reminded me. You know, it was something.
Sam: Did your son have a take on the simulation?
Shaan: We didn’t get there. That’ll be next time. He does have a lot of questions like that — like, “Where did the earth come from?” And then I’m like, honestly, we’re very much past the edge of my understanding. Like, who’s older — the earth or the sun? I don’t know. There’s a lot of tough questions. But the cool thing is in the Tesla they have AI built in, so if I don’t know, I just turn on AI and ask, and AI tells us.
Anyways, so that’s that.
Sam: All right, that’s the pod.