These AI-proof businesses can make you $10M/year

Sam Parr 0:00 All right, Sean, I'm gonna make the case that if you're not an AI person, which I'm not, there's still a lot of money to be made by building businesses that will grow with AI, and they won't actually be AI. And what are those businesses? Communities. So here's two different communities I wanna show you that crush it. [upbeat music] Okay, I wanna talk about two businesses that I think are AI-proof, and they fascinate me. Hard F on that, on that fascinate.

Shaan Puri 0:25 [laughs] That's a PH almost. [laughs]

Sam Parr 0:29 Um, all right, let me give you the first one. So I was talking to a friend. One of my buddies has a company that is selling to, uh, auto dealers, and he's been telling me all about the auto dealer, like, industry. And they're kinda like, as you'd expect, cowboys a little bit. Like-

Shaan Puri 0:43 Mm-hmm

Sam Parr 0:43 ... they're like... Think of, like, an auto dealer. Midwestern guy wearing loafers and, like, baggy jeans, and he, like, probably makes $5 million a year, but he's, like, you know, kinda got hillbilly energy a little bit.

Shaan Puri 0:52 Yeah.

Sam Parr 0:52 And so I enjoy hearing these stories.

Shaan Puri 0:54 Not only can I see his face, I can see his crack also, just in my mind's eye.

Sam Parr 0:58 Yeah, yeah. Like, have you, have you seen that picture of the guy in the airlines where he's, like, sitting down with both hands on his, on his big jeans-

Shaan Puri 1:04 [laughs]

Sam Parr 1:04 ... and he's got this fat Rolex, and he's kinda fat and overweight?

Shaan Puri 1:07 [laughs]

Sam Parr 1:07 And it says, like, "You know this guy's about to win the negotiation."

Shaan Puri 1:10 [laughs]

Sam Parr 1:10 That's, like, sort of how I think about them. But let me tell you about this, like, interesting company. It's called NADA 20.

Shaan Puri 1:17 NADA 20 Group. "Learn from the best, your peers, supported by t- world-class 20 Group consultants and NADA, driving you to your dealership success." Okay.

Sam Parr 1:25 Yeah. Horrible marketing.

Shaan Puri 1:26 What does that mean?

Sam Parr 1:27 Just absolutely horrible marketing.

Shaan Puri 1:28 [laughs]

Sam Parr 1:28 Okay, so NADA, I think it stands for National Automotive Dealer Association. It's a big association for auto dealers, and they do this thing called NADA 20 Groups, and it started, I believe, in the '70s to where if you are an auto dealer, you wanna grow your business and, and, and get better. And so what they do is you apply to join, and you pay something like six or eight grand a year to get in, and then they put you in groups of 24. And all the groups are non-competitive, meaning people who aren't in your region, and you fly to the same city three times once a year, and it's very simple. It's the most simple peer group ever. All you do is you bring a P&L statement of your business, of your dealership, and you sit down with 20 others, and you go line for line, and you explain your profit and loss statement. And other people can look at you and being like, "Oh, you're killing it. I'm gonna copy that," or-

Shaan Puri 2:16 [laughs]

Sam Parr 2:16 ... "You suck. Have you thought about doing this?" And eventually, they've, uh, started letting in, uh, founders of HVAC companies, people who own, like, uh, marinas or boat repair shops, and the whole premise is very simple, just share their P&L. If I had to guess, it probably does, like, $13 to $15 million a year in revenue because they kinda say what the member dues are, and they say what the, um, price is. But as you saw when you go to the website, looks horrible. It's horribly marketed. And I think if I'm listening to this and I w- and I'm not, like, an AI nerd, I would do one of two things.

Shaan Puri 2:46 By the way, the NADA guy was so excited that he's getting featured on the podcast today. Out of nowhere, his friend sent him this clip. He's listening, and then he g- just gets the, "Looks horrible, ugly, terrible." [laughs]

Sam Parr 2:57 Well, I think it's like a, I think it's like a nonprofit, isn't it? It's either an association or a nonprofit.

Shaan Puri 3:01 Okay, okay. [laughs]

Sam Parr 3:02 And I would do one of two things.

Shaan Puri 3:04 With all due respect. [laughs]

Sam Parr 3:05 Well, [laughs] yeah.

Shaan Puri 3:08 No offense, but [laughs] here's the next five minutes of insults.

Sam Parr 3:11 Yes. As long as you say that, you can say anything. I would either copy this and just do it a little bit better and run ads 'cause I don't think these guys are ever gonna run ads.

Shaan Puri 3:19 Dog, it says for 100 years they've been running.

Sam Parr 3:22 Yeah, that's why it's interesting. They, they, they, they could last forever.

Shaan Puri 3:25 Ripe for the taking. [laughs]

Sam Parr 3:26 I think that you could do this. Do you remember how you had this thing called Club LTV? It was like a community for e-com owners.

Shaan Puri 3:33 Yeah.

Sam Parr 3:33 I wouldn't... I mean, you could do e-com, but I would do something a little bit less competitive. It's like dentist practices, lawyers, whatever is, like, boring, where, like, the average person makes a million dollars a year or, like, in take-home income. Whatever is one of these boring things where it's just someone in South Dakota who is just a normal guy, millionaire next door type of energy.

Shaan Puri 3:52 Yeah.

Sam Parr 3:53 And I would create one of these, and I think it would be a great, great, great business that could last for decades.

Shaan Puri 3:58 This

Shaan Puri 3:59 is like, um, like White Coat Investors is kinda like this in the doctor space, right?

Sam Parr 4:04 I love White Coat Investors. Do you wanna explain what that is?

Shaan Puri 4:07 Uh, yeah. It's basically, like, it's a community of p- of doctors, maybe dentists also, but I think it's mostly doctors, but it's for them to talk about more of, like, their finance side of their life. It's not about sharing, you know, the latest and greatest research and how they're applying it in their practice or anything like that. It's more so like, "Hey, I, I'm thinking about buying a rental property, and, you know, the cap rate is this. Like, what do you guys think?" And, you know, there's a lot of that going on. They do media. There's Facebook groups. There's like a... It's been going for a long time.

Sam Parr 4:36 It started as a blog.

Shaan Puri 4:37 Yeah, it's a successful business, and there's many... There's actually a few others in the doctor space. I, I think, like, I think I might have talked about this on the podcast before. I think there's a pretty big opportunity to just do that but new age model 'cause media has changed a lot, right? Like, what blogging was, well, today there's a whole new set of media tools and a whole new set of doctors and dentists that you could reach and build, like, a, a 2.0 version of this. But basically every profession kinda has these. There's even another

Shaan Puri 5:03 one. Uh, you might know the name of it more than me, but it, there's a version of this that's not for the same job. Have you seen this one? It's like local chapters in cities.

Sam Parr 5:11 BMI. Wait.

Shaan Puri 5:12 No, that's body mass index.

Sam Parr 5:14 Body mass index. [laughs] Uh, BNI.

Shaan Puri 5:14 It's BM something or it's B... What is it?

Sam Parr 5:16 BNI, Buyer Network... By the way, they were just acquired, and I heard rumors it was in the billion dollar plus number.

Shaan Puri 5:23 And so explain what they do. So they bring together folks with different jobs, so you'll get, like, the, the local accountant with the HVAC guy, with whatever, and it's like a... It's kinda like, "Hey, we're all local business owners. We have some shared problems, but we also have shared opportunity, which is we can share leads with each other. Oh, you're, you could be my guy I refer people to when it's landscaping, and I'll refer you people when it's about, you know, whatever, legal services."

Sam Parr 5:46 Yeah, basically. And I, I used to go to the YMCA, and I would see them have their BNI meeting, and, uh, there'd be, like, 30 people in the room, and everyone has to go through and say Some type of like lead. So like for example-

Shaan Puri 5:57 They wouldn't meet at the YMCA. Where do they meet? Like in the yoga room? Like what do, what do they do?

Sam Parr 6:01 Yeah. They like-

Shaan Puri 6:01 The YMCA is not a co-working space [laughs] Right. Like [laughs] what's going on?

Sam Parr 6:05 Yeah. They just like figured it out. But that... 'Cause it's like a community-based thing, and so it'd be like a realtor with a garage door, uh, service, with a lawyer, with a landscape business. So things that are non-competitive and they share leads, and they just go in a room and you have to like say like, "Uh, this person just moved here. Uh, we're doing the garage doors. You know, who wants that?" And they just sold... I think they have 800,000 members, and it costs-

Shaan Puri 6:28 Right

Sam Parr 6:28 ... low digit thousands of dollars a year to join. Um, I hung out with the CEO of it, really nice lady from Texas, and, um, it, they, they just got acquired.

Shaan Puri 6:36 So are you gonna do just Hampton for every vertical, or are you just keeping Hampton as what it is and you're saying, you know, that's not the move for you? But, but basically there is some version of peer group for, for most professions where people have enough disposable income and, you know, you get the dynamics right where either it's they can share because it's, it's fundamentally not competitive, or you match people, like you said, from other geographies where it's not gonna be competitive.

Sam Parr 6:58 So the reason why I've been learning about investing is because I think that over the next handful of years, no time soon are we gonna do this, but I think that what we'll eventually do is buy other communities 'cause I think we know how to operate them well. And I think that the way... Like, my goal is to build a multi-hundred million, or sorry, a multi-billion dollar company, and I think that we can get there by owning a variety of communities.

Shaan Puri 7:18 Was that a Freudian ambition slip right there? V- being like, "My goal is to lose five pounds. No, no, no, 50 pounds. 50 pounds." [laughs] You know what I mean? Like [laughs]

Sam Parr 7:26 Well, hundreds of millions a year in profit, and-

Shaan Puri 7:28 Steve Jobs didn't get on stage and say, "100 songs in your pocket." No, he said 1,000, Sam. You can't do that. Can't vest that out. [laughs]

Sam Parr 7:34 We, we want to do, um, I... When I say hundreds of millions, that's the profit, and billions is the revenue.

Shaan Puri 7:40 Gotcha. Gotcha.

Sam Parr 7:40 And so we do say like-

Shaan Puri 7:41 Classic

Sam Parr 7:41 ... we think we can do like hundreds of millions in profit. Is that a classic slip? Um-

Shaan Puri 7:44 [laughs]

Sam Parr 7:45 But because there's a few businesses in our space, and like the threshold of like you're killing it is, do you cross nine figures a year in free cash flow? And, uh, so yes, I, I think that there's a bunch of these businesses that can be combined and-

Shaan Puri 7:58 Right

Sam Parr 7:58 ... and be awesome, and so I'm interested in it. Do you wanna hear another one?

Shaan Puri 8:00 Yeah.

Sam Parr 8:01 Okay. This one-

Shaan Puri 8:02 Same industry or different, different thing?

Sam Parr 8:03 To- totally different. Okay. So type this in.

Shaan Puri 8:06 Hey, I wanna tell you about something pretty cool. We have a database of all of the business ideas that have been discussed on this podcast. So hundreds of episodes the team at HubSpot went through, they pulled out all the simple, relatable, interesting, profitable, uh, ideas that we have brainstormed, and they're all available for download for free. Just click the link in the description below. Thank you to our friends at HubSpot for sponsoring this podcast and putting together this free resource for you guys. Back to the show.

Sam Parr 8:32 So it's called MODA Communities.

Shaan Puri 8:34 Okay.

Sam Parr 8:34 So

Sam Parr 8:35 the story is basically this. There's this guy... Well, tell me what you see first.

Shaan Puri 8:39 Buy right, sell better. MODA runs 23 Facebook communities where a bunch of people buy, sell watches, cars, gold, and jewelry.

Sam Parr 8:46 So I was talking to this guy, he's based out of, uh, Sioux Fall. Is that North Dakota or South Dakota?

Shaan Puri 8:52 I'm gonna plead the fifth on that question. Not, not strong on my Dakotas.

Sam Parr 8:55 Yeah. I'm sorry, guys. Uh, South Dakota. Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Okay? And he, in 2018, he was like buying a watch or selling a watch. He, he, he was doing both, and he thought, "I don't really have a good place to do this." And so he created a Facebook group of buyers and sellers of watches, basically like a, a, a community of watch enthusiasts. And at this point, he has grown it to where he told me, I, I messaged him and asked him, he has over a dozen full-time employees, and they have 600,000 members across like 20 or 25 different communities. They have communities for watches, and they have it broken down into watches under 10 grand, watches above 10 grand, and then there's also a community for like the super fans, which is above, uh, like 100,000, I believe. Then he has groups for collectible cars, he has groups for, um, gold and a bunch of stuff. And in order to get in, it's all trust-based, meaning you have to talk with him if you're a dealer, and you have to like do like a, a vetting interview, and then another person in the community has to, uh, vet you, and then you pay one to five to $10,000 a year in order to be a dealer on there, and then you could list the watches that you have for sale. And people love it. And what's interesting is I think that they probably do somewhere between five and $10 million a year in revenue.

Shaan Puri 10:07 How do they make money? You pay to be a member, or you-

Sam Parr 10:10 A dealer pays to be a member

Shaan Puri 10:12 ... they take a cut? Okay, 'cause they're accessing this buyer pool of s-

Sam Parr 10:14 Yes

Shaan Puri 10:14 ... super enthusiasts.

Sam Parr 10:16 A dealer pays to, uh, post there. And i- in order to post there, you have to do a vet check. And I think it's awesome, A, because Facebook communities, Facebook groups, have built this guy a huge business, and this can be applied to so many different ways of, uh, of selling stuff on the internet. And I think that when, um, when it comes to moats, Peter Level's been talking about like what moats are gonna go away with AI, and previously technology was a moat. That's not a moat anymore. And I think communities, networks, and marketplaces are still a really good moat, and this is a really interesting business that this guy started on Facebook groups.

Shaan Puri 10:55 Yeah. This is fascinating. I mean, it's always dangerous to build a business on Facebook groups just because you, you know, the platform, Facebook platform has changed so many times where you lose reach or you lose, you know, um, the ability to add new members. You know, things like that. Like, they change the rules quite often. But at the same time, you get the benefits

Shaan Puri 11:12 of plugging into such a huge network, right? So kind of giveth and taketh away. But I, I really like this idea of aggregating super enthusiasts, whales. Whales drive just a shocking amount of the economy. If you've ever like been on the inside of any of these businesses that are, especially a collector's business, but even not a collector's business, like a, a mobile game, right? You might see like Candy Crush or something, and it's got like millions and millions and millions of players, but the bulk of the revenue, 80, 90% of the revenue, will come from a, just a tiny sliver of those players who are spending thousands of dollars a year each and make up for all the free players, the players who will play $2.99 to remove ads, that type of thing. And so whales, whether it's in video games, it's Pokémon card collecting, you know, any kind of marketplace. Like when we were at, when I was at Twitch- Same thing. You know, Twitch has these whales, and the whales go through and they have subscriptions to tons of channels. They, they'll go and they'll just make it rain like the club. I don't know if you've ever seen this, but one of the best features they launched at Twitch was not a very fancy feature, but it was called, uh, Gifting Subs. So you could, you could basically say, like, go into someone's channel, and from the chat, you could give away 200 subscriptions. So that'd be like $1,000, right? Your $5 a month subscriptions. You're giving away 200 to random people in the chat, and everyone thinks you're the man, and it's literally like buying a bottle at the club. Uh, but, but... And the, you know, the streamer shouts you out. You would get this whole thing. And it dramatically drove, like, you know, revenue up per channel because it just turns out that the whales were ready to spend more. You just needed to give them new ways to spend. And this is true with, like, pretty much all luxury products, uh, but, but also a lot of gambling products, where there's certain people with a certain level of, you know, addiction and, um, you know, disposable income that makes for an incredibly lucrative customer.

Sam Parr 12:59 That's awesome. How much did that sub cost?

Shaan Puri 13:01 Five... Uh, well, like, I think the average is, like, five bucks or six bucks a month.

Sam Parr 13:05 Have you ever worked with a gaming company? Because I know that you were around those guys.

Shaan Puri 13:10 Um, what do you mean? I didn't work for one, but, you know, I-

Sam Parr 13:13 Work with. Like, did you have, like, insight? Like-

Shaan Puri 13:15 Yeah

Sam Parr 13:16 ... what percent of people drive the bulk of revenue?

Shaan Puri 13:20 Candy Crush has 82 million monthly actives, and all the revenue comes from 4% of the players.

Sam Parr 13:24 Wow, that's crazy.

Shaan Puri 13:24 So 96% of the players are just kind of the cost of doing business. Just the cost of finding those whales. And so, like, for example, you know, my co-founder at Bebo, Furkan, he was the CTO of AppLovin. AppLovin is the biggest advertising network for mobile games. So he saw under the hood, basically, you know, these games are paying to acquire players. So he knows how much they make off the player, he knows how much they pay for the player, and he knows what types of targeting gets them to spend more. And really, what you want is essentially a whale. You want somebody who spends a bunch of money in Candy Crush 'cause they're highly likely to spend a bunch of money in Block Blast. It's the same player, and FarmVille, and all those things. So if you... You know, I, I talked to the guys who started FarmVille and, uh, you know, the, the guys who, who make the big kind of, like, Candy Crush style games, and they would explain to me the game economy and how it works, and sources and sinks, and hard currencies and soft currencies, and how you nurture the whales, and, like, all this... It's a f- total science, right? Like, it's literally like talking to a slot machine operator when you talk to them. It's like they... But, but there's no rules. It's not like a slot machine where Vegas says, "You must have this kinda 89% payout rate." It doesn't matter. You know, [chuckles] in mobile gaming, you set the payout rate to be whatever you want it to be, and there's a trade-off of churn and growth versus... You know, f- frustrating the player versus whatever. There's a- actually a very interesting guy who... He basically looks at the source code of various apps and will be like-

Sam Parr 14:42 So good

Shaan Puri 14:42 ... "Here's how Tinder's matching algorithm works."

Sam Parr 14:44 Oh, I love that kid.

Shaan Puri 14:45 And, but I-

Sam Parr 14:46 Yeah

Shaan Puri 14:46 ... I don't know exactly how he's getting the code. Like, the, the code's not public for some of these. So, so there's something a little bit... My understanding is either off or he's a little bit off. I don't know exactly what's going on. But he's explaining, like, you know, for example, in these games, if you're a player who's paid before but you haven't paid in 30 days, it'll optimize you to have this, like, run of success, and then you'll hit a wall, and that wall will be so frustrating for you. But it's optimized to get you to ge- you know, click the button to pay again, right? Th- this is, like, when people say the greatest minds of our generation are sitting inside these companies trying to figure out how to get people to click ads. Like, you know, this is kind of what they're talking about. It's like some of the smartest engineers and builders in the world, and designers, spend their life trying to figure out how to get people to, you know, put a little more f- put a few more coins in the slot machine. Sad in a way, but also just from a pure business point of view, it is fascinating.

Sam Parr 15:36 I was just looking at... When I'm-- I DM'd the guy who ran this community business. It's the same thing, whales fund it. He goes, "Virtually everything we do for is for free, and the top 1% or even the top .001% pay to keep everything running."

Shaan Puri 15:48 [chuckles] There's

Shaan Puri 15:50 a, uh, a huge trend growing right now, uh, right now. Have you seen, uh, this trend around ripping?

Sam Parr 15:56 No.

Shaan Puri 15:57 It's like going to a store and you would buy a pack of Pokemon cards, and you would open the pack, and you would hope to find a holographic Charizard inside 'cause that's gonna be really valuable, right? That's the, the kind of the brick-and-mortar way of doing this. Well, these guys just reduced friction. So, you know, the Ev Williams quote of, "You wanna build a billion-dollar business? Just find a, a universal desire, ideally one that's been around for a while, and remove friction." Well, this behavior already existed amongst collectors, and what these apps have done have make it where you open the app, there's a pack on the screen, you tap it to open the pack, you open it up, you didn't get anything, maybe you got some junk. So let's say you paid 50 bucks for the pack. Then it'll say, "You wanna sell back the pack for 43 bucks right now?" You're like, "Yeah, yeah. Give me my 43 bucks 'cause I didn't get what I wanted. Let me buy again." This app has done a billion dollars in revenue in, like, the, you know, last, like, [chuckles] last year. And so there's, like... I mean, just a, an app you've never heard of, an app you've never heard of that's doing a billion dollars.

Sam Parr 16:53 How does revenue calculate it? 'Cause that's not... That... Would that be considered as a marketplace? So would that be, like, real revenue?

Shaan Puri 16:59 It's a bit of a mix. So it is like GMV in that, that they're spending to buy the cards and, and, you know, obviously the cards have a cost. You have to fill the cards.

Sam Parr 17:06 But they're reselling it.

Shaan Puri 17:08 But the genius of the thing was the buyback. The buyback changed everything. And so the, the, the trick with the buyback is people want the... It's, um, they want the treasure hunt, right? They're looking for the treasure, and what they realize is if I spend 50 bucks and I get nothing, I feel like I'm out 50 bucks. But if I get $43 back, I'm kinda just like, I just got 43 bucks of store credit. Should I buy another pack for 50? Yeah, it's only seven bucks more. Let's go again. Let me give me another shot. And for the company, what they did was they booked... So they got 40, 50 bucks of revenue. They give 43 back. Seven is free. They never had to sell to give you the card. They just put the card right back in the deck. It's shuffled. They'll sell that same card again to somebody else. So imagine-

Sam Parr 17:47 Dude, the guy who started it was a quant at Citadel in Bridgewater.

Shaan Puri 17:50 [chuckles] Yeah, no, no surprise. But there's a bunch of these, dude. Like, Logan Paul r- launched his own called Rip it. There's, like, a mega, mega, like, you know, fad right now. Collector's Crypt, what he did was- He, he kind of was... I think him, they might have been the first, but, uh, definitely they, they benefited from this, uh, what they call the vending machine, uh, thing where they, they buy it back. They were doing something [laughs] like 50 grand a month, and now it's 25 million a month now.

Sam Parr 18:16 H- how did you hear about this?

Shaan Puri 18:19 I was at a dinner, and somebody was talking about Triumph doing a billion dollars in revenue. Now, for an app to do a billion dollars in revenue is extremely rare, especially an app I've never heard of. You know what I mean? Like Snapchat does what, like, 4 billion, something like that? You know, it's, uh, th- like, this is, like, the size of the m- social apps that you can count on your, you know, on two hands that you've, uh, we've all heard of, household names. And so I was like, "How is this app I've never heard of doing this in a year?" And then when I heard, oh, they're basically doing the gotcha mechanic. So have, have you ever heard of gotcha games?

Sam Parr 18:50 Mm-hmm. No, but-

Shaan Puri 18:51 And, and it's not gotcha-

Sam Parr 18:52 I don't... I, uh [laughs]

Shaan Puri 18:53 ... like, ha, gotcha, but it kinda is. It's g- gotcha, G-A-C-H-A. It's a Japanese term.

Sam Parr 18:59 Oh. [laughs]

Shaan Puri 19:00 And so basically what they would do is they had these kind of mystery unboxings. So you would buy, like, a mystery ball, you would unbox it, you would get something, and then you would kind of go again, and you'd try again. And it, it's a sort of like toy form of gambling. And gotcha got so popular in Japan that they had to ban it. I think it's, like, outlawed by law at this point. Now, American games started to steal this. So if you've ever played, like, Overwatch or d- different things like that, they would have loot boxes. Same thing. You open up a box, you might get the rare skin, you might get the common skin, but it's very easy to, very addictive to just put in some credits into the machine and start opening up a bunch of packs. And FIFA started doing this, a bunch of people started doing this, all these games started copying this gotcha mechanic. Well, the mobile games have figured this out even more, and the, the thing with the collectors is they attached real money to the other side. Because if you happen to get a real thing, it's not like getting a skin in Overwatch where it's this purely aesthetic, like, you kinda know just some part of your brain that this is somewhat stupid, right? There's no real value to it. But when you do it with collecting, and you say, "Well, I could get this rare card that's worth," you know, like, I, I... Like, the top Pikachu card will sell for, like, $15 million, right? Like, they, these cards can be worth a lot. And so they attach the kinda gambling mechanic of I might make money to the very addictive gotcha behavior. And so that's, like, the, you know, the underlying psychology that's worked in many, many different form factors. Toys do this now all the time. Uh, LOL Surprise doll, right? What is it? It's a, you know, all of the squishies that are super popular right now. I don't know if you've, I don't know if your kids are old enough to be in the squishy craze.

Sam Parr 20:32 Oh, my God. No, but my wife is.

Shaan Puri 20:33 The dumplings and the, the squishies and the mystery boxes. Like, my daughter just loves to open these dumplings, right? And, like, you know, tries to get a rare dumpling, right? It's, like, this crazy thing. But it's the mystery ball mechanic that gets you to spend way more. I actually have a friend who's in the toy business and was showing me the data of before, when they're in Walmart or Target, they were just selling where you pick what you want. And, um, like, here's a shelf, here's all the different things. You could pick what you want. And then they just took the same things and put it in a mystery box, and it was 7x the revenue. And l- literally, like, with, which sounds like the opposite, right? Like, well, the consumer gets less choice, they might get something crappy. And I heard him on the phone. He was talking to one of the major IP holders in the world.

Sam Parr 21:16 Wait, this guy just called you while he was negotiating?

Shaan Puri 21:18 I was hanging out with him. He's like, "Just join." He's just like, "Just listen in. Like, sit right next to me. It's fine. Like, no problem. They don't know who you are. It's, it's... They'll assume you work with me."

Sam Parr 21:24 [laughs]

Shaan Puri 21:25 And, um, he's, he's talking to them, and they were like, "Yeah, well, like, our customers really like choice." And he puts up on the screen, he's like, "Yeah, I know, like, everybody thinks they like choice, but here's what the data shows across category one, two, three, four, five. Like, over and over again, this overperforms, this, this kind of gotcha mystery

Shaan Puri 21:43 box mechanic."

Sam Parr 21:44 Can I give you one quick app update before we move on from apps? Do you remember about three years ago, you and I, maybe you brought it up, I don't remember, talked about this thing called Private Photo Vault? It's basically where you hide photos. It's like, to put it bluntly, it's, like, where people hide, like, nude photos on their phone, and you have to, like, lock it. So hide it-

Shaan Puri 22:05 Yeah, I think this was one of my drunk ideas, right? Hiding it behind a calculator.

Sam Parr 22:08 We talked, either you brought it up and I said, "This is a thing," or somehow it got brought up. Well, look at the reviews. Do you see how many ratings it has? A million.

Shaan Puri 22:17 [laughs]

Sam Parr 22:18 So [laughs] it has a million.

Shaan Puri 22:20 A million reviews? [laughs]

Sam Parr 22:22 So it's called Private Photo Vault. Also, it, then it says, like, dash Pic Safe, like a safe for pictures.

Shaan Puri 22:30 [laughs]

Sam Parr 22:31 And, uh, I met the founder. He, uh, came to a Hampton event, and, uh, I started talking to him, and I was like... He's like, "Yeah, you guys talked to me, talked about me, like, three or four years ago." And I was like, "How's it going?" And I can't... This is gonna be, like, such a tease. I'm sorry. I can't reveal the numbers, but he told me the numbers and how many people work there. It's a behemoth.

Shaan Puri 22:51 This, this-

Sam Parr 22:52 It's-

Shaan Puri 22:52 ... private picture sending thing?

Sam Parr 22:54 Yes. Yes. It's a b- it's not a picture sending thing. It's, all it is is storage. It just stores pho- photos that you can delete off your photo roll and keep in this photo vault.

Shaan Puri 23:04 Right.

Sam Parr 23:05 And you need it-

Shaan Puri 23:06 So why do people want that?

Sam Parr 23:08 For nudes.

Shaan Puri 23:08 But they're not sending them.

Sam Parr 23:10 If you are sent to them and you want to store them. Ari, do I have to walk this guy through this?

Shaan Puri 23:14 I'm just trying to understand the me-

Sam Parr 23:15 Yeah, thanks

Shaan Puri 23:16 ... the mechanism here. You receive one. You save it here. You delete it off your pho- photo roll. That's it? Or you're taking it-

Sam Parr 23:21 That's it

Shaan Puri 23:22 ... saving it here?

Sam Parr 23:23 The first one.

Shaan Puri 23:24 Okay.

Sam Parr 23:24 The first one. It's, all it is is a place on your phone-

Shaan Puri 23:27 I don't know if you can tell, I've never received a nude. [laughs]

Sam Parr 23:30 [laughs]

Shaan Puri 23:31 I'm unfamiliar with your game. [laughs]

Sam Parr 23:33 [laughs]

Shaan Puri 23:34 I've always been curious. Always wanted to.

Sam Parr 23:36 Yeah, you always wanted to participate. [laughs]

Shaan Puri 23:38 There was a brief time when I wanted to. [laughs]

Sam Parr 23:39 And I don't think it's ever gonna happen unless I've got a rash. [laughs]

Shaan Puri 23:43 [laughs]

Sam Parr 23:44 Uh, but, uh, this app has [censored] and is doing over [censored] in revenue and has been doing it that for a long time.

Shaan Puri 23:52 That's impressive. Are, are they also Eastern Europe? I feel like these are all Eastern Europe.

Sam Parr 23:55 Nope.

Shaan Puri 23:55 No?

Sam Parr 23:56 Just a guy.

Shaan Puri 23:56 American?

Sam Parr 23:56 Just a nice guy. Just, just-

Shaan Puri 23:58 Ah.

Sam Parr 23:58 He's, it's just dude-

Shaan Puri 23:59 I'm proud to be an American if that is, that's an American doing that. This is normally the, the, the work of, you know, somebody in, in Czech Republic or something

Sam Parr 24:07 Nope, just a guy, just a nice guy. He does live in Vegas, but he's a nerd. So he was raised there. He didn't move there.

Shaan Puri 24:13 By the way, the Collect Crypt thing that I was talking about, uh, I just pulled up the data. They do $100 million a month right now. And this is like a, it's like a blockchain thing, so you can see, like, the actual fees that are generated out of this thing.

Sam Parr 24:25 Do you think the, um, are the crypto guys, like, are you, you know, you, you, you're formerly known as, but you still are a little bit-

Shaan Puri 24:32 Folk?

Sam Parr 24:32 Are you, are you people, like, the, are you guys, like, emo now? Like, you're so pissed off at AI for taking your, taking your thunder?

Shaan Puri 24:38 No, we, we're AI guys now. [laughs] What are you talking about?

Sam Parr 24:40 Is, is the same guy? You transitioned? [laughs] You guys are, you're trans?

Shaan Puri 24:43 Yeah, exactly. [laughs] Seamless transition to becoming an AI guy, don't worry. [laughs]

Sam Parr 24:48 I would have thought that you would have been like, "Shut up. Everyone needs to pay attention."

Shaan Puri 24:51 The only people left that are, like, true crypto only are the incredibly smart, high-conviction diehards who deserve to get rich, and the idiots who still think, like, the Vietnam War is still happening and nobody told them. Like, "Hey man, we all moved to AI. We're gone. It's over. You know? [laughs] We, we can, we can move on now. There's a new thing that, to be excited about." [laughs] So there's, like, the idiots and the geniuses that are still there.

Sam Parr 25:13 Yeah, like, are, are the, are the meetups, like, empty now?

Shaan Puri 25:15 I don't know. I, I, honestly, I, I, you know I don't go to meetups, so I can't say for certain.

Sam Parr 25:19 [laughs]

Shaan Puri 25:19 But, um, there's a lot of talk right now that, that, uh, you know, AI hacking/quantum is gonna, like, basically break the encryption protocols, and so that's kinda scary. 'Cause, you know, for Bitcoin, you know, it's like, Bitcoin started with, like, 100 risks, and is down to kinda, like, just a couple left. You know, if, uh, if Satoshi woke up and started moving the coins, or we, or, you know, or the actual encryption gets hacked, you know, it'll cause, like, extreme panic. Like, Binance got hacked for $5 billion last week.

Sam Parr 25:50 Yeah, I saw that it said they're, they're just gonna pay it. They're like, "We're just gonna give you the money back."

Shaan Puri 25:54 Well-

Sam Parr 25:54 That's how much money they have, that they said that they-

Shaan Puri 25:56 He's trying. They have a two... So, so they had a hack in 2018, and after that ha- there was a smaller, much smaller hack, like maybe, I don't, I don't know exactly how much, but no-nowhere near a billion dollars. And they created a fund called the, the S- the SAFU Fund. I don't know what it stands for. Safety of Funds for Users, or something like that. And they started taking 10% of all the trading fees that they were collecting, and started putting it into this, like, kinda rainy day fund in case they ever needed it, and that was up to about $2 billion, which was the 10% of the funds collected by the company since 2018. And this hack was for $5 billion, and so they need to cover the spread.

Sam Parr 26:37 And who got it? Like, a, a, no- obviously no one knows, but was it, like, one wallet?

Shaan Puri 26:42 Last thing I read was, uh, North Korea took it, and the way they did it was they had a, a woman who was in a romantic relationship with an engineer, and just physically got his laptop. [laughs]

Sam Parr 26:52 Nice.

Shaan Puri 26:53 And they had t- they had two, they had enough in their hot wallet to be able to transfer out, like, you know, that amount. And so I think, like, y- you know, a certain amount is, a certain amount is gone, a certain amount got frozen. Uh, they g- they got the other protocols to, like, freeze it, to, like, don't let them withdraw. But it's like, you know, the thing with crypto is the, uh, the ethos and the, the premise of the whole thing is it's like gold bars or dollar bills. Like, once you have it in your possession, it's yours.

Sam Parr 27:20 But, but it's tr- it's trackable, so, like, it seems like, uh, someone who does a heist or, uh, like, it, it's kind of hard to get that into actual money you could spend.

Shaan Puri 27:28 Yeah. Yes and no. So there's all kinds of things. There's these, like, tornado cash, which lets you kinda, like, wash the money a little bit. Um, there's, you know, there's, like, offense and defense, right? So there's, like, ways that they can split it into a bunch of different wallets, transfer, transfer, transfer. You don't know what's going on. Like, there's... O- one of the things they did is they immediately took the money, put it into, like, a DeFi protocol. So the way that DeFi works, which is kinda like a... DeFi, by the way, is awesome, and I think people are completely overlooking this, and it's gonna come back with a r- like, a vengeance, in the same way that, um, prediction markets were a very, like, common thing in crypto that people were working on, and lots of money got raised, and smart people tried to go build prediction markets back in, like, I don't know, 2015, 2016, 2017, and it was called, like, Augur, and there, there was a bunch of prediction markets that are now all dead, and you never heard of them. But then Polymarket and Kalshi broke out, you know, eight years later, doing the exact same thing. I think the same thing's gonna happen with DeFi. But what they did with D- what you do with DeFi is, like, it's like a bank, but you don't, there's no physical bank you need to go to. It's like a permissionless thing. So you put money in, just like you would a bank, and then you can borrow some percentage of that. Not, like, five times more than you have. You can borrow, like, up to 50% of what you put in as collateral. And if the price of that thing ever dropped, it'll automatically, like, sell it so that you're, like, you know, um, you're, you basically cover your, whatever you borrowed. You can't, like... You, you, you, it c- it can, like, self-sustain that way. So what this hacker did was they put the money in a... Right away, they took the money, put it in a protocol, and borrowed a stablecoin, and got the stablecoins out, and left it. So now, even if that money's frozen, you know, cool, take that. You can take my collateral. I got the, I got the stablecoins out on my side, and I, you know, watched it, you know, uh-

Sam Parr 29:08 Dude, we gotta interview the guy and figure out if it was worth it.

Shaan Puri 29:11 The North Korean guy?

Sam Parr 29:13 Yeah.

Shaan Puri 29:13 [laughs]

Sam Parr 29:13 What was she like?

Shaan Puri 29:15 Yeah. Oh, oh, the engineer. [laughs]

Sam Parr 29:19 [laughs] Yeah.

Shaan Puri 29:20 He needed a PigSafe account. [laughs]

Sam Parr 29:22 Yeah. [laughs] This did not go well. Um, all right, that's it. That's the pod. [upbeat music]