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How Kid Rock Makes +$30M/Year Using Redneck Business Strategies

Episode 575: Sam Parr and Shaan Puri talk about the weirdest things they’ve seen this week in business.

Sam ParrhostShaan Purihost

Apr 19, 202446mWatch on YouTube

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Transcript

55 min read · 10,584 words

0:00 – 8:13
Kid Rock, our honorary Billy of the Week
1. SPSam Parr
  Shaan, uh, I wanna show you three things, things that I've read in the past week or two that have inspired me. You want me to start with the s- I'm gonna start with the strangest one. I'm gonna get it out, uh, out the way. [upbeat music] Do you listen to Theo Von's podcast?
2. SPShaan Puri
  Uh, not the full. I listen to clips.
3. SPSam Parr
  All right.
4. SPShaan Puri
  Do you listen to the full thing?
5. SPSam Parr
  I listen to the full thing sometimes, and there was one that w- happened the other day that I sat and watched the entire thing. I think it was two hours long. You're gonna laugh when I tell you who it is, but his episode with Kid Rock was awesome.
6. SPShaan Puri
  [laughs]
7. SPSam Parr
  So do you know anything about Kid Rock?
8. SPShaan Puri
  I'm gonna say I don't know anywhere near as much as you know about Kid Rock. [laughs]
9. SPSam Parr
  [laughs] Dude.
10. SPShaan Puri
  I can safely assume that, uh, hands down. I'd bet my life savings on that.
11. SPSam Parr
  I have been a fan of Kid Rock's forever. I've been a Kid Rock fan for a very long time, and Kid Rock is a very fascinating guy. So he's, like, born in Detroit, had this whole, like, rap thing. It's kinda rap, whatever it was, whatever you wanna call that genre. Uh, but the reason he's fascinating is the guys who sold a lot of records in the late '90s are some of the richest musicians out there, because CDs were, like, $22. How much were, how much were CDs when we were kids? Like 20 bucks, right?
12. SPShaan Puri
  Yeah. CDs were, like, really expensive. [laughs]
13. SPSam Parr
  Really expensive, and they cost, like, a dollar. They cost, like, a dollar to make. And so Kid Rock has sold something like 40 million albums, which is a shitload of albums. And he went on Theo's, Theo Von's podcast, and about halfway through, he start talking, he starts talking all about business, and he's done some amazing things. So let me tell you a few amazing things [laughs] that Kid Rock has done. Kid Rock, at this point, he's kinda like Nickelback, where people make fun of him, or they make fun of you for even kind of liking him, and it's kind of a joke. Dude, he's a super savvy guy. So listen to a, listen to a few things that he's done. Have you ever heard of the, uh, Kid Rock Kruise?
14. SPShaan Puri
  No.
15. SPSam Parr
  So Kid Rock has a cruise that he does every year, and you pay, like, [laughs] you, you pay, like, $3,000, and you go on a cruise for, like, four or five days, and he goes on the cruise with you, and he plays music every day for the cruise. It's an amazing, like, thing for-
16. SPShaan Puri
  By the way, you butchered the name. It's the Kid Rock Chillin the Most Kruise. [laughs]
17. SPSam Parr
  Yeah. [laughs]
18. SPShaan Puri
  I feel like you needed to say that.
19. SPSam Parr
  It's so funny what he does. And so he's been doing this for, like, 10 years now or 15 years now, I think since the 2010 or so, and so that kills it. Listen to a few other things that he's got going on. He has the Kid Rock Rodeo. That's his new thing. And so do you know anything about rodeo?
20. SPShaan Puri
  [sighs] I mean, you're just embarrassing me at this point. No, I don't know anything about ro- I don't know anything about Kid Rock. I don't know about his cruise. I don't know about his rodeo.
21. SPSam Parr
  [laughs]
22. SPShaan Puri
  You can, you can skip the questions of do I know about Kid Rock's extensive business portfolio.
23. SPSam Parr
  Do you-
24. SPShaan Puri
  I do not. [laughs]
25. SPSam Parr
  You've ne- you've never been to a rodeo b- uh, you've never been?
26. SPShaan Puri
  I lived in Texas for, uh, 10 years and I did not ever go to a rodeo.
27. SPSam Parr
  No, I used to go to them in California at the, the, The Cow Palace. Do you remember The Cow Palace outside of San Francisco?
28. SPShaan Puri
  Oh, yeah. That's a great name, by the way. [laughs]
29. SPSam Parr
  [laughs] Dude, The Cow Palace, it's this venue, like, literally two miles outside of the city of San Francisco, and you go just two miles outside of San Francisco, and you're at the rodeo for the night, and you're in redneck heaven. And so I used to go there, go to it all the time. It's so fun. I used to go to dog shows there. They have dog shows. I used to go and watch, like, the, the dog shows and just look at all the Swiss Mountain Dogs and shit. It was so fun. And so anyway, Kid Rock now has the Kid Rock Rodeo, which freaking kills it because rodeo is up and coming. Do you know who owns the PBR? It's the same company that owns-
30. SPShaan Puri
  Endeavor. Yeah
8:13 – 9:05
Shaan's *new* rules for content (Partial list)
1. SPShaan Puri
  Um, all right. Amazing. Uh, I'm tempted to just end the podcast right there and, uh, and just go try to book Kid Rock as a guest, but I'll, I'll give you a couple things that I'm, I'm into. Nowhere near as entertaining as that right now. But you... You know, my understanding was kind of like what you're saying is I'm watching some different content, weird content, new info diet, and I wanted to tell you some of the things I'm doing with my info diet. So I'm gonna give you the, the chapter titles of this, and then you get to pick which one you want me to explain. So here's the chapter titles of how, how I'm consuming content. Number one, Older is Better. Number two, uh, Look to the Left. Number three, More with Less. And number four... Oh, actually I have five. Four, Pay for Learning. And five, Early Arbitrage Exploit. Which one do you want me to talk about?
2. SPSam Parr
  Number one, number five, number four.
9:05 – 13:07
Rule 1: Older is better
1. SPShaan Puri
  All right. Number one is Older is Better. Okay, so older is better. Um, in general, I'm trying to get away from the news feed, right? The news feed is in many ways like the actual, like, news. I don't watch the news for, for the same reason, which is, you know, the news is a entertainment program designed to basically just, like, find random problems in the world and then just shove them in your face. And Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, th- these are all kind of the same way, where people are like, "Here, here's my life." And you just throw, you know, "Here's what I'm thinking r- right now." And it's useful to a degree, but it's more addictive than it is useful. And, um, my solution is not to just go detox and be like, "Oh, I just put my phone on silent and leave it in the other room, and I just, you know, enjoy nature." That's not really me either. I gotta substitute it with something else, right? And so my substitute is I've found, uh, I was like, "What do I wanna read that's shorter than a book, that's as informational as, like, you know, reading an annual, um, uh, you know, like a S1 or, like a, a, a, a annual report for some company like, like an investor would, like a Warren Buffett would, but still has some juice, still has some story?" And I found that annual letters, annual shareholder letters or annual reviews of people is just a really fascinating place to go look. I get, like-
2. SPSam Parr
  What's the difference between a annual review and a annual letter?
3. SPShaan Puri
  So one is typically when you have shareholders or LPs. That's when you're writing an annual shareholder letter, right? 'Cause y- you have your, your investors or you have your shareholders that you are looking out for. So this is like B- Buffett's letters, Jeff Bezos letters. I'll give you a really good one that I found, the Nick Sleep letters. You've probably never heard of this guy.
4. SPSam Parr
  Who's this guy?
5. SPShaan Puri
  Fascinating guy. Uh, when I, when I did the podcast with Mohnish Pabrai, he mentioned Nick Sleep. And, like, I don't know the full story. I just started looking 'cause I found like 10 years of this guy's annual letters. But the short story is him and his, him and his buddy basically started buying stocks, started r- uh, investing on behalf of other people. Did so well over, like, a 10 to 15-year period that they ended up just, like, you know, retiring. And his portfolio at the end was, like, Amazon, Costco, and Berkshire Hathaway. He had three stocks by the end. And I just love somebody who can absolutely crush the market. He absolutely crushed in terms of performance and did it without, like, going, like working really hard or going into some obscure rabbit hole. He just identified correctly early on that Amazon, Costco, and Berkshire were good bets to be, to be in, and he just stayed with those, rode those ponies till the end. It's, it's pretty, pretty insane. Uh, he did other things, but, like, that was where he ended, and I found that fascinating.
6. SPSam Parr
  How big was the portfolio?
7. SPShaan Puri
  Dude, these guys got filthy rich. I, I don't know exactly how much, uh, how much in assets they have off the top of my head, but, um, you know, basically i- in a, in a very short period of time, you know, got filthy rich. So I've ju- I just started these letters. I just read the first one, uh, last night, so I'm-
8. SPSam Parr
  Y-
9. SPShaan Puri
  ... pretty, it's, it's fresh right now.
10. SPSam Parr
  Wow. All right, that's cool. I like Nick Sleep. When you Google him, the first thing that comes up, by the way, is, uh, his legendary letters.
11. SPShaan Puri
  Exactly. The letters is what... And I think some people have, like, maybe bound it into a Kindle book as well. Like, and you know, whenever it's something like that, like the last time it was like this, it was the Boron Letters.
12. SPSam Parr
  Yeah.
13. SPShaan Puri
  It's like, "Who's the Boron Letters?" Well, this guy was, like, one of the best copywriters. He wrote a bunch of letters from jail to his son. It's like- Dude, I'm in.
14. SPSam Parr
  Yeah.
15. SPShaan Puri
  This sounds like, you know, Season 2 of "Prison Break" mixed with, you know, my copywriting course. I'm in, you know? Like, give, give me that. And so I, I'm really into these annual shareholders or, or annual reviews. So we have a few friends, um, Saeed Balkhi does this. Every year he posts a annual review on his blog.
16. SPSam Parr
  That's great.
17. SPShaan Puri
  And he just goes back and he just says, "Here's what I did this year. Here are some of the highlights, here are some of the lowlights," whatever. Nathan Barry from ConvertKit does the same thing. He po- posts this on his blog, and he'll be like, uh, you know, "Thing one, my family. Thing two, ConvertKit. Thing three, I bought some Airbnbs. Here's the occupancy of my Airbnbs. Here's how much money I made. All bad, but this was a pain in the ass." And I just feel like people who are sharing that type of information is just very interesting to me, and it's a very quick read. And to me, I'm like, I'd rather spend 30 minutes reading that than 30 minutes aimlessly scrolling on Twitter. So that's my older is better. That was my number one.
18. SPSam Parr
  All right. What's number-
19. SPShaan Puri
  You said the last one
20. SPSam Parr
  ...
13:07 – 17:58
Rule 5: Early. Arbitrage. Exploit
1. SPSam Parr
  five?
2. SPShaan Puri
  Early arbitrage exploit. [laughs] So I tried to put all my power words in there to hook you 'cause I wanted to talk about this. Have you seen AirChat?
3. SPSam Parr
  Uh, I don't know exactly what it is, so all I know is that Naval has some type of new social media thing and it's invite only. That's all I know.
4. SPShaan Puri
  It's not invite only anymore. So as of, I don't know, two days ago, they just opened it up to everybody, and they pivoted it. It, they've had a kind of AirChat in beta for a few months. Um, I checked it out. I was like, "This is okay." It wasn't super engaging. Like, it was kinda confusing, UX, and it was just a little bit slow to consume. Um, so-
5. SPSam Parr
  Is it like T- Twitter but better?
6. SPShaan Puri
  [laughs] Okay, so the, the new one... I'll tell you about the new one, 'cause forget the old one, it's gone anyways. The new one is basically, like, imagine Twitter, but it's voice first. So you, to post you just talk into your phone, right?
7. SPSam Parr
  Okay.
8. SPShaan Puri
  So you don't type, you just talk. But it auto transcribes it using AI, and it speeds it up, like 1.3x or something like that. So when you s- like, when you're scrolling the timeline, it just starts to play somebody's audio. Or you could read it, but it plays it a little bit faster, so it's actually pr- it's like you're almost listening as fast as you could read, in a way, which is kind of interesting. And you get to hear their voice, and then people reply or whatever. So it's [laughs] the, the generous version of it would be, oh, this is a really cool new, like, social media format, and new formats are interesting, right? Twitter was a short form format. Um, TikTok was a, you know... Or Vine was a six second looping format. TikTok was a different short video format. Like, formats mean things, um, and that's where the big, the big breakthroughs come from. So maybe it's one of those. The other side of it is, like, it's kind of like if you turned on, um, accessibility mode [laughs] on your phone and then opened Twitter. It's like, "Hey, can you just voice to text? Like, can you just read me my timeline?" Which is not great. So I'm not sure if it's gonna be a hit or not, but here's what I do know. Just like in the early days of Clubhouse, when an interesting person in Silicon Valley starts a new interesting thing, and they invite only their interesting friends, that place is a very interesting place for, like, the first 90 days. And-
9. SPSam Parr
  For the first 90 days
10. SPShaan Puri
  ... who knows if it's gonna be successful or not, you get a call option on that. And so I'm like, "Fuck it. I'm all in on AirChat for the next, like, seven days. Let me just go, let me just throw full force. Let me completely ignore Twitter, completely ignore YouTube, podcasting, et cetera, and let me just AirChat the hell out of myself." Why? Because it's Naval's friends, which is probably the most interesting group of human beings, um, in my world, in the business and tech world. That's who's using it. Um, so all the content is interesting 'cause the people are interesting, and there's not that many people on there. So if I'm even remotely interesting, I'm like in the top .1% of interesting people on this app.
11. SPSam Parr
  [laughs]
12. SPShaan Puri
  And the same thing happened when Clubhouse came out. I didn't think Clubhouse was gonna be there forever, but I had told my buddy Jason, who I always thought Jason's an interesting guy, and I was like, "Jason, quit your job and just be on Clubhouse, like, 10 hours a day for the next 30 days. Watch. You're gonna build, like-
13. SPSam Parr
  Didn't he work at your company? [laughs]
14. SPShaan Puri
  We had gotten acquired, so I was like, "Just check out. You're at Twitch? Just check out now. Who cares? No, nobody will, nobody will know. Trust me."
15. SPSam Parr
  [laughs]
16. SPShaan Puri
  "Uh, there's 2,000 people at this place. Nobody does anything. Uh, just stop doing work and just get on Clubhouse 24/7." And he's like, "Well, you know, like, I gotta..." "No, no, no. Trust me. You'll get more value out of this than you will your job." And that's exactly what happened. He went there. He was on it all the time. He's an interesting guy, so he made a bunch of friends. He ended up raising, like, a $4 million crypto fund out of it, made a couple million bucks doing it, returned their money, and, like, none of that would've been possible. Like, he raised money from a bunch of Clubhouse friends, and he made, like, you know, lifelong friends. They go on trips together in real life now. And it's these early arbitrages when somebody awesome curates something. In many ways, Hampton was like this. You're an interesting guy, you had an interesting idea, and then you curated an early group of people, and you were, like, hell-bent, like, "I'm gonna make this a great experience for them." And so that, those first 100 days were gonna be, like, the best 100 days of this whole product forever just because of what ha- that early day exploit.
17. SPSam Parr
  Well, I hope not. I mean... [laughs]
18. SPShaan Puri
  No, it's okay. It's just like in dating. Like, there is a honeymoon period for products, for people, for relationships where, uh, you know, "L- l- let me get that door for you. Let me ta- let me take out the trash for you. Let me... Well, look, it's Wednesday. Let me send you a little gift," right? You behave a little bit differently at the beginning of a relationship than you do seven years in.
19. SPSam Parr
  Do you think AirChat's gonna be better than Clubhouse and it's actually gonna work?
20. SPShaan Puri
  Too early to say. I've only been on it for, like, two hours, so, uh, let me, let me not do a hot take conclusion just yet. But, um, it's interesting for sure. Hey, real quick, as you know, we're big on ideas here. We love bringing new ideas, business ideas, brainstorming ideas for the podcast. Well, a lot of people ask, "What do you do with all those ideas? Can we go find them? Is there a list somewhere?" The great people at HubSpot have put together a business ideas database. It's totally free. If you just click the link in the description below, you can go download a collection of over 50 plus business ideas that are from the archive, listed out for you, curated. And so, uh, what are you waiting for? Go download it. It's free. Check it out. It's in the description below. All right, back to the show.
17:58 – 19:45
Rule 4: Pay for learning
1. SPSam Parr
  What's the fourth thing?
2. SPShaan Puri
  Pay for learning. I don't know if I said this one. Pay for learning. So this is [laughs] instead of me going out there and trying to get smarter about something, in this case AI, I was like, "Wait, uh, why is it that as, as adults, we don't ever go to school, go to class, or have tutors?" And so I told you this before. I hired an AI tutor.
3. SPSam Parr
  Yeah
4. SPShaan Puri
  And the guy w- you know, people were like, "What, what is an AI tutor?" And I was like, "Dude, AI is changing so fast." Literally every three weeks, there's a new mind-blowing paradigm shift in AI. Okay, great. There's thousands of companies getting funded. I can't even keep track of them. There's new models being released. There's n- a new talk that drops, a new interview that drops where Sam Altman says this interesting thing. I couldn't possibly keep up with it. It's a full-time job to keep up with it. So one way is you go read a newsletter or you join maybe a group chat or something like that. That's good. Um, but what I decided to do was, like, how do I use-- how do I spend money in an interesting way here? How do I... I basically pay this guy 500 bucks an hour, and I say, "Your job is every week you're gonna come to the table and you're gonna tell me here's the four mo- most interesting things that blew my m-" I live in AI world. He lives in AI world. He has to bring to me three or four of the most interesting things he's seen, and then I usually ask him a question like, "Hey, I saw people talking about this. What is it?" Or, "Chamath said this thing. I didn't even really understand it. What the hell is he talking about?" Or, um, "Hey, in my business, I have this problem. Is there an AI tool that could actually solve this?" And then he'll go do the research, and he'll come back to me, and he'll, he'll answer it. And so this has been just, like, such a hack to be smart about AI but shave my time commitment. Like, you know, yes, I'm paying this guy $500 for one hour of his time, but I'm kinda saving eight to 10 hours of my time because I now literally don't have to think about it. I put it out of my brain. I'm gonna have a focused 60 to 90 minutes with him, and he'll tell me everything
19:45 – 23:57
Sam's cheat code for better alpha
1. SPShaan Puri
  I need to know.
2. SPSam Parr
  Have you ever used GLG? Do you know what GLG is?
3. SPShaan Puri
  [lips smack] I know what GLG is. Yeah. I was, I was on G- I was, uh, on the other side of GLG as a-
4. SPSam Parr
  You're an expert. I did it too. I remember, uh, basically GLG originally was started because it was, like, bankers who were going to either take a company public or, uh, wanted to invest a large sum into, like, uh, let's just say, let's just say MailChimp. MailChimp's gonna get acquired by Intuit, and they're hearing rumors about it, so they go, they would go and find people like me who use MailChimp-like services and ask us questions like, "If MailChimp raised the prices, what would you do?"
5. SPShaan Puri
  Right.
6. SPSam Parr
  Uh, "How would you react?" Just so they can get, like, an idea for the market. Well, there's GLG. Now there's Tegist. There's also Intro. And I also have been an expert on those, and you could charge, like, two or three or sometimes $5,000 an hour, like crazy amounts of money to be an expert. Dude, I've been using it on the other end, where I've been paying money to, like, get insights.
7. SPShaan Puri
  Yeah.
8. SPSam Parr
  It f- it kind of feels like it's cheating. So, like, you can, you can tell GLG or Tegist or whoever that you wanna talk to your competitor or someone who works at, uh, or worked at your competitor, and y- you can get so much information from them. I read this-- I think I told you about Steve Cohen. Do y- I read this book, uh, about Steve Cohen. He basically is one of the largest, uh, hedge fund guys out there, and one of his guys went to jail, went to prison for many years because what they would do is they would use GLG so much that they would befriend the experts and fly out to the expert's home and get them to reveal a bunch of confidential information that they weren't allowed to reveal, and then they would go and trade assets on that information, which is insider trading. It's so powerful that I've been able to do this. It, it's, like, been really amazing to be on the other end of paying these people. I'm shocked I haven't done this for years. Have you ever paid money?
9. SPShaan Puri
  I have never done, I've never done it on one of those networks 'cause to me I'm like, paying somebody $2,000 an hour, right? Like, it makes sense for most of those customers 'cause they're making very large investment decisions. So if I can get better alpha, better information for, you know, 2,000, 5,000, 10,000, $20,000, doesn't matter when I'm taking a $10 million position or a $80 million position on a company. I've never been in that, that position where I needed to do that. That's not what I-- It's not what I do.
10. SPSam Parr
  Well-
11. SPShaan Puri
  It's not the scale I play at. So, like, how do you justify paying, you know, for yourself? Like, what are you, what are you paying for, and how, how are you justifying paying that much money?
12. SPSam Parr
  I'll give you an example. So, uh, let's just say that, uh, uh, let's just say... All right, so Hampton. Hampton's a peer business, a community business. There's like five competitors out there. A couple of them are quite huge. I'm curious how they're acquiring users. So you could just sign up and say, "I wanna talk to the director of marketing at this company," and they go and find a former marketing executive or a marketing leader at these companies and be like-
13. SPShaan Puri
  Right
14. SPSam Parr
  ... "So," you know, h- and you don't have to, you don't tell them your background or what you're doing, and you can be like, "So how are you guys, how are you guys acquiring customers? Like, could you just do LinkedIn ads?" "Oh, LinkedIn ads didn't really work, and so instead we did X, Y, and Z."
15. SPShaan Puri
  Right.
16. SPSam Parr
  And you can just ask all these questions and hopefully save yourself a year of time of making the same mistakes that other people in your industry. So for e-com, you could be like, um, [lips smack] well, I, I'm not well-versed in e-com, but I guess it could be like, you know, what about, uh, shipping from your own warehouse versus hiring another person's warehouse? You know, things like that. Uh, you could just ask them all these questions, and it's made my life so much easier.
17. SPShaan Puri
  Right. Yeah. I, I think it's more of like a scalpel than it is like a blunt force hammer, where it's like you really-- It's a, it's a very precise instrument. You only wanna use it for very specific types of questions where the, the trade-off makes sense, and there's many jobs where that makes sense, and then there's many-- Like, in the e-com example, you'd almost never do that realistically as an e-com per- person. But if you are-- Like, I've been on there, and people would be like, "Hey, um, you use Triple Whale, and, uh, we're looking to talk to an expert who uses Triple Whale, and we wanna know, did you evaluate three or four other competitors, and why did you choose Triple Whale over the competitors?" And it's like, "Yep, I did that. I used Triple Whale. I evaluated the competitors. Here's, here's the difference," blah, blah, blah. They really couldn't do that 'cause they're not an operator, so when they're making a big investment decision, they have to, they wanna, they wanna go in with, like, real information versus random theories on their side where they, they weren't actually an operator in the space.
18. SPSam Parr
  Right.
19. SPShaan Puri
  Um,
23:57 – 29:48
How Kirk Kerkorian Became the Greatest Deal Maker in Capitalist History
1. SPShaan Puri
  [lips smack] all right, let's do another one. Do you have anything else?
2. SPSam Parr
  I've got a book that I, I think you should read. So I read this book years ago, and I just recently reread it because it's so good, and I bet you've never heard of this person. I'm, I'm gonna ask, but I know the answer is no. Kirk Kerkorian. That doesn't ring a bell. Kirk Kerkorian, does it?
3. SPShaan Puri
  That kinda does ring a bell. Who is Kirk Kerkorian?
4. SPSam Parr
  All right. So Kirk Kerkorian, he's born in the early 1900s, like 1920 or something. He's an Arm- Armenian immigrant or born into an Armenian family where he, like-- He was born in Fresno, California, but spoke Armenian. Didn't even speak English. He eventually drops out of, like, eighth grade, so he's like this, like, you know- He's not the riches yet, but he's the rags part of the story where he's comes from nothing. I think his parents were like farmers or something, grew up poor. Learns how to fly a plane because World War II is coming up and he doesn't wanna be, uh, shooting guns, so he goes into the Air Force and learns how to fly planes and he spends the war flying planes. After the war, he's able to save up enough money to buy a Cessna, one plane for $5,000. I think he saved up like $2,000. He buys a plane, and his first business is flying people from California to Las Vegas. This is in the '50s and '60s. Las Vegas is like not really a thing yet, but gambling is legal there and all these rich Hollywood folks wanna go to Vegas for the weekend. He's their guy. He flies them out there. So he flies them out there and he starts getting into gambling while he's there as well. And so through his gambling, as well as his very small business of flying people out there, he starts buying more and more planes. And over the course of like 15 years, he kinda has a meaningful business to the point where he's like 43 or 44 years old and he's making the equivalent of like $2 million a year in profit, and so he's got a good business. Well, he sells this airline business for $10 million, which is like the equivalent of $90 million today. He sells it in his 40s, and that's really where things start taking off. With that money, he buys a plot of land and he turns it into the p- uh, Pink Flamingo Hotel, which is one of the first big epic gambling hotels in Las Vegas. Then using the p... What's, what's so funny?
5. SPShaan Puri
  Just the flamingo. I just... That's hilarious.
6. SPSam Parr
  Yeah, that's his thing. Uh, and by the way, while there, one of the waiters who worked for him has a son, and Kirk always treated this waiter really nicely, and so he eventually names his son Kirk Agassi, his first name being Andre, so Andre Kirk Agassi, uh, the famous tennis player-
7. SPShaan Puri
  Wow
8. SPSam Parr
  ... is named after-- Yeah, it's Kirk Kerkorian, 'cause he's known as like a, he's a good employer, he's a good guy. Takes his, uh, small little casino, parlays it and keeps on growing, and by the time he's in his 50s and 60s, he starts buying other companies. So he buys MGM, which at the time was a li- it was, it was a, a production studio, movie studio. And then h- after years and years of doing this, he just parlays all this to eventually he's like 85 years old and he buys 10% of GM, and then at 88 years old he tries to buy the entire Chrysler company, and he almost gets it done at like $30 billion. But what's interesting about this guy, Kirk Kerkorian never had formal education, so he's, I guess he's a, a Wall Street guy who's not actually on Wall Street. He's a banker type, but he buys all these companies with no education. He's very private, so there's like three or four interviews ever about this guy, and he's got balls of steel. He just like, he's a nice guy, but he's a hard negotiator and he's just puts his money where his mouth is, and he does this until the age of like 94 when he dies. To the day he's die. The, till the day he dies he's making deals, and he's really low-key, but he dies with like a net worth of like $15 billion. And if you like, you know, you and I have be- kind of been into the whole capital allocation type of thing, this is the guy, and he's done it without any background, no pedigree. Very fascinating guy.
9. SPShaan Puri
  I have to apologize to Kid Rock. I thought you were the Billy of the Week. Actually, it's this guy. [laughs] This guy is the Billy of the Week. Wow, this is a incredible story. The Andre Agassi thing just was the cherry on top for me, I gotta say. Uh, thank you for adding that one in. It seems almost impossible to me, when it's... By the way, I'm clearly wrong, but it seems almost impossible that a guy could just like start chartering flights for people. He's like a pilot, pilot turned billionaire. That sounds so, like the, the amount of-
10. SPSam Parr
  Well, here's-
11. SPShaan Puri
  ... capital he had to amass to end up owning 10% of GM, try to buy Chrysler for $5 billion. Like, how the hell did this guy compound at that rate for that long?
12. SPSam Parr
  So-
13. SPShaan Puri
  That's so insane
14. SPSam Parr
  ... the book is called "The Gambler." It's a really good book. But basically he's like, "I'm a gambler at heart. I love gambling." He's like, "I, I'm in it for the thrill." But basically he caught a couple trends, the first being obviously airlines weren't popular, and so like his airline was kinda ricky-dink and he just kinda bootstrapped it for like 15 years, and so it's kind of inspiring. He started the airline when he was like 32, right when he got out of the war. It wasn't really a hit until 44, and it wasn't that big of a hit. It was a good business, but it wasn't like some epic, epic thing. But he sells it for $10 million, and then two years later he buys it back, runs it for three more years, and then sells it again, this time for $100 million. And the, the trend that he caught was that airlines just weren't a thing, and so they were kinda bootstrapped things. They weren't, they didn't have these massive barrier to entries like you would think of today, where you have to have tens of billions of dollars. I mean, starting an airline today seems just like insane.
15. SPShaan Puri
  Right.
16. SPSam Parr
  It wasn't like that. And then the same thing with Las Vegas, where gambling, it wasn't exactly like that, where, uh, it wasn't like that big of a thing. Las Vegas was-- I think he, the plot of land he paid for, I think it was $800,000, and then he spent another like couple million dollars to build the Pink Flamingo, and he just got these hits early on where he caught these trends. You know, Vegas, airlines, things like that, and he caught them all early on. But here's the inspirational part, in my opinion. He wasn't really a baller until his mid to upper 40s, um, and he was in the game for literally 95 years when he died.
29:48 – 34:11
Three rules of wealth. Compounding rate, length of runway, and…
1. SPShaan Puri
  Yeah. I think, uh, uh, you know, Mohnish Pabrai, when I was talking to him, he was like, "You know, there's three variables that matter, uh, when it comes to wealth." He's like, "It's all about compounding." So he's like, "It's either the rate that you're compounding, so the percentage gain every year, it's the length of the runway, or it's the amount you started with." And you could pull any of those three levers. You either start with a huge amount, then you don't have to have a high rate or a long time. If you start with a low amount, which is where most people start, then you need a high rate and a long time. Um, or you need to like expose to a high rate and not that long time. Uh, those are your variables to play with. And, you know, if you look at Buffett, Buffett's thing is that he compounded for the longest time. So he basically, you know, bought his first stock when he was 11 years old. And yes, at 95 now, he's, you know... If he hadn't given his money away, he'd be the wealthiest man in the world. Um- Or, you know, what number one, number two, number three, somewhere up there. And it's because he had an 80-year runway. So it's not that his rate was that absurd, it's that the rate was consistent and it was 80 years. And, and so it's like, you know, one of those things for compounding is like how, how long of a runway do you get? And for most people, you know, like for Buffett and for others, it's like the bulk of their wealth is always kind of in the last, the last two or three turns of compounding because that's just how compounding works. If you're doubling every 10 years, then doubling, you know, when from 70 to 90 is gonna be doubling a huge number at that stage.
2. SPSam Parr
  And people say that and, and you're right when you say that, but it almost discredits Buffett. If you read his biography or read any of his, his early reports or his annual letters, man, even when he was like 35 or 38, he had something like $50 million in assets. And people are like, "Well, he didn't actually make-- He, he-- The billions didn't come until his 50s or 60s." He was killing it for a long time. Like, like he started-
3. SPShaan Puri
  But both can be true, right? 50 million is still killing it, and 50 million is not the same thing as 90 billion.
4. SPSam Parr
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's for sure. But if you, like, read about him, he was-- Like, I think he said when he graduated college, I think he had $100,000 of his own portfolio, which in the '40s, that's like having like $2 million. And he was killing it from a re- like a really early age, and then his early compounding was like 30% to 50% for like six or eight years in a row. I mean, he was kind of the man from the beginning. If you ever read about him-
5. SPShaan Puri
  When that episode comes out, you'll like it. It-- That guy, uh, Mohnish is basically like a Buffett historian and a Munger historian. He knows year by year what he was doing, what he was investing in, how much he had. He, like, has charted it out. He gave me like an oral history of Warren Buffett in a way that I've really never seen. And I loved it because I've met a lot of people who are super successful, and then they... It's like they're not kinda like students of the game in the same way that I am, where I'm like, "Oh, did you ever go back and read all the letters and kind of deconstruct them?" They're like, "No, I was just doing my thing." Um, right? Or like, I know a great investor. I'm like, "Do you do like detailed kinda models? Or like do you write memos that like you-- Did you go back and review them? Do you track your hit rate?" Like nerdy stuff that I like to do. And often, very often, I would say more often than not, the answer is actually, "No, I don't do any of that shit. I just like, I just focus on what's in front of me and I just do that thing." So it's really nice when I see somebody who wins with the same play style I have, where they, they kind of are a nerd about it, and they do like to go back and kinda chart things out and break things down and, and kind of analyze it a little bit themselves and other people and, and try to use that to kind of reverse engineer, you know, some lessons. Um, so it was pretty cool to see that.
6. SPSam Parr
  What was your takeaway, uh, after he said that?
7. SPShaan Puri
  Like I said, I think it was reassuring in a way. It sounds silly to say, but it's true. Like, whenever I meet a more successful person than me who does things the way I do them, I feel good inside, right? [chuckles] Like I, I feel a little reassured, like, "Oh, that's cool." Like this person... Like it, it reassures me that my method can work, right? I already believed it could work, otherwise why, why, why else would I be doing it? But it's even more conviction that this works. I don't need to shift what I'm doing in order to make it work when you see somebody who's very similar to you, maybe similar demeanor, similar philosophy, similar approach, similar work habits. Um, you know, I, I like finding people who, who have a match because it's very hard for me to change my nature or to change my work style or change my habits. So it's actually better for me to double down, make them super strengths, and find other people who've won, use it with those same strengths and look and learn from them and what they do versus-
8. SPSam Parr
  Right
9. SPShaan Puri
  ... try to become some different guy playing some other play style that I'm not familiar with, that I'm not good at, that I haven't done for 15 years
34:11 – 36:28
Must Listen: Business Untitled
1. SPShaan Puri
  already.
2. SPSam Parr
  Let me wrap up by telling you one last thing, and this one is gonna be short 'cause I'm not terribly well-versed on it. You would know this guy better than I would, actually. Uh, what's his name? Mike Nov- uh, Novogatz, the crypto guy.
3. SPShaan Puri
  Yeah.
4. SPSam Parr
  What's his name?
5. SPShaan Puri
  Mike Novogratz?
6. SPSam Parr
  Novogratz. So I think he started or helped start Fortress, which is a massive hedge fund, right?
7. SPShaan Puri
  Yeah.
8. SPSam Parr
  He's got this new podcast called Business Untitled. Right now on YouTube, I think it has 3,000 subscribers, even though they're like 30 or 15 episodes in. His podcast is so good. It's him and-
9. SPShaan Puri
  Is it? Interesting.
10. SPSam Parr
  Dude, it's so good. It's him and this other guy named Mike Barry. Mike Barry, I believe, is a real estate guy, and he owns a chain of hotels or something like that, really high-end hotels. It's sort of like the All-In podcast where it's like billionaires talking about stuff, and that's one of the reasons why it's exciting. But these guys have like a li- like All-In is not even remotely... I wouldn't even use the word blue collar at all to describe those guys, uh, or what they think of themselves. This podcast, they kind of do have that vibe where they're like born, they weren't born wealthy and they still remember where they co- came from, and they're talking like they're small business owners except the numbers are absolutely massive. It's a beautiful, wonderful podcast. You gotta listen to a few episodes.
11. SPShaan Puri
  I'm so jealous of this thumbnail style. Oh man, I see this and I just wish this was our thumbnail style. This is so good.
12. SPSam Parr
  Is it like dollar bills?
13. SPShaan Puri
  It's, it's just fucking awesome, dude.
14. SPSam Parr
  It's great, man. It's a really good-
15. SPShaan Puri
  I wish you hadn't said this. I wish I could just steal-- I wish I could have just... You could have just shown this to me and I'd be like, "Let's steal this," 'cause this is so, so damn good of a, of a thumbnail style.
16. SPSam Parr
  Well, they only have like 3,000 or 4,000 subscribers. How many subscribers do they have on their YouTube? I think it's like 3,800 or something like that.
17. SPShaan Puri
  Yeah.
18. SPSam Parr
  Uh-
19. SPShaan Puri
  Yeah, so you're saying we can steal it. Nobody will ever question it.
20. SPSam Parr
  Yeah, we can steal it. It's really good. This podcast is so good. I, like... And they have amazing guests. Like they even had, they've had Snoop Dogg on recently, or they'll have the founder of, uh, Equinox or, uh, a bunch of like really big names, and they just shoot the shit and it's wonderful. It's so good. And they tell stories about starting Fortress Capital and, uh, I guess Wes Edens, who started Fortress, I think he eventually like bought railroads or something like that. And they tell the stories, but they have this weird blue collar, down to earth kinda style that I've been digging. It's really good.
36:28 – 46:38
LeBron James is now a podcaster?
1. SPShaan Puri
  All right. That's a big, uh, big endorsement. I like that. Um, I gotta ask you, h- what do you think about the fact that so many people have podcasts? Like, uh, it's pretty remarkable. When we started this was four years ago- Um, roughly four years ago, I think. And we were not early to the podcasting game. We were like a decade plus late to the game.
2. SPSam Parr
  Felt late.
3. SPShaan Puri
  Felt late at the time. But I would say since we started, it's now, like, incredibly common. If you're anybody... Like, the, the number of people who start a podcast is, is, that are kind of like interesting people from other, other walks of life, right? Like investors, business people, athletes, whatever, um, it's kind of amazing. Like, one of the content one I was gonna talk about was Jay-Z and Reddick has a new pod with LeBron James.
4. SPSam Parr
  I know.
5. SPShaan Puri
  Have you seen this?
6. SPSam Parr
  I saw that. It's awesome, right?
7. SPShaan Puri
  It's, it's like LeBron is podcasting? This is amazing. What the hell is going on?
8. SPSam Parr
  I love the athlete ones. A lot of the UFC guys are doing them now too. Kamaru Usman has one. I love them.
9. SPShaan Puri
  So what's your take on this? Like, what, what, where does this... Kinda like, where does this go? Or like what, what do you think is gonna happen with, like, everybody starting a podcast now?
10. SPSam Parr
  A, I love it as a fan, like I enjoy listening to them. B, I don't think they're gonna last that long. I think it's a lot harder than people realize to do it for a really long time. Um, I think when you and I, or when you first started this, the common thing was, "You guys are gonna run out of stuff to say." I hadn't really felt like that much. There's some times where I'm like, "What else can we talk about?"
11. SPShaan Puri
  [laughs]
12. SPSam Parr
  But in general, that's on- that's only happened 10% of the time, and I don't think they're gonna run out of things to say, but I do think that it's, it could be a lot harder work. I mean, you're signing up for something. I'm shocked that Tim Ferriss has done it for 10, 10 years. I think that it's, it's a lot harder to do it for many years than people understand. Do you agree with that?
13. SPShaan Puri
  Yes and no. I think that, uh, I, I think there's a problem with it. I don't think that's the problem. I'll tell you what it is, but, but on the running out of things to say, I think most people will choose interview, which is a kind of infinite runway format. It's like, oh, you just bring somebody on, then you talk to them, then you ask them questions, then you bring another person on, you ask them. What we do when we don't have guests on is a lot harder for, to, to have longevity with, 'cause it's like, how many interesting things are me and Sam gonna be able to say of original content versus an interview or reacting to news? So I think reacting to news, an interview, or reacting to TV shows, like that's always gonna be a format that has like infinite runways. I think most people will do those, and they won't run out of content. I think the problem is that how many podcasts on average are you listening to at any given month?
14. SPSam Parr
  Five.
15. SPShaan Puri
  And you're a power user of podcasts.
16. SPSam Parr
  That's funny. Yeah, I mean, maybe less. Three to five, right? Not, not a lot.
17. SPShaan Puri
  The, the shelf space is just really goddamn small, and I don't think, I don't think most people realize this. I th- I think they think it, uh, uh, I don't even think it's a discovery problem. I think it's a discovery problem because people cannot consume that many podcasts. So for example, I think what a lot of people do is they're like, "Oh yeah, I use Twitter, I use Instagram. Oh, TikTok comes out, I'll, I'll use TikTok." Like they kinda think everything's social media, and your, if your experience before was, "Well, if I'm just interesting, like people can, people will follow me." But it's like I can follow literally like 5,000 people on Instagram. I can scroll through in one Instagram sitting, and I can see content from 200 people in that like, you know, that 30 minutes. But my shel- so the shelf space is huge on every other social media, but the shelf space is tiny on podcasts. People will listen to one, two, three on average in rotation. And so the question is, can you break into enough people's top one, two, or three podcasts?
18. SPSam Parr
  But-
19. SPShaan Puri
  And you're going up against a habit they might have had with other podcasts for five years. The g- hope would be they expand the, the market, that new people start listening to podcasts, and I'm sure that's gonna happen to some extent, but I think just like the supply-demand is so off. The demand is so small of the number of podcasts somebody will regularly listen to that it doesn't matter how many new people create a podcast, it's gonna be very hard because the shelf space is too small.
20. SPSam Parr
  But you do realize that it's over two times the amount of people listen to radio than podcasts. I mean, if you go to where I'm from and you talk to some certain people, they don't, they're like, "What's a podcast?" Like it's still like-
21. SPShaan Puri
  Yeah, 'cause they're listening to music, dude.
22. SPSam Parr
  Yeah, but like-
23. SPShaan Puri
  Right? It's not like AM radio
24. SPSam Parr
  ... but there's still a lot of market penetration for podcasts, particularly amongst like a general population, like someone who cares about LeBron. Like I bet a, a, an athlete will get significantly more new-
25. SPShaan Puri
  But, but what I'm, what I'm saying is I think pod- the best podcasts in every category are gonna grow, like you're saying. Like there's still 10X more headroom for them to grow, let's say. However, it's just that there's on- like the number of winners is very small in podcasting versus on Instagram. There's so many winners, so many people who have followings, either small, like just enough to keep you hooked, enough to keep you engaged. It's very hard to be a winner in any category. Like let's say I wanna start a true crime podcast or a business podcast or a sports podcast. The w- the ones at the top are gonna keep getting more and more and more and more and more downloads because-
26. SPSam Parr
  Like you, you have an audience now, so it's easier for you to do it. To do it from scratch when you don't have an audience, I think it's basically impossible.
27. SPShaan Puri
  Yeah, even people who have an audience. Look at, like even people who are, who are successful or have some audience, it's very hard to, to boot a, boot a podcast up. I don't know. I think, I think it's the shelf space problem is, is my, my take of like what, what the limiting factor here is, is just that there's only so many number of humans who listen to podcasts. That number's growing, but the number that's not growing is how many different podcasts they're gonna regularly listen to, 'cause they only have so much ear time that they're gonna dedicate to ear entertainment, right?
28. SPSam Parr
  Is it good, the JJ and LeBron one?
29. SPShaan Puri
  I would say it's amazing, and I mean that in the literal definition of the word. Not like the content is amazing. It's just like I am amazed that this is happening. I am amazed that LeBron James is sitting down and explaining to me like the m- the Marcin Gortat screen. It's like, oh, what's the Gortat screen? And he's explaining what this is, what, how it works, whatever. I think they really need to work on getting the, uh, like, like they need overlay. It's like way too X's and O's. Like they need the overlays where you're gonna be able to see an actual clip of what they're talking about, 'cause it's like so abstract that the average person's not gonna be able to follow. Um, the other thing is I think it's gonna be hard for them to resist. So what's, what's happening now already you can see is the clips where he- it's just LeBron talking about the turning point where he, you know, when they, before winning his first championship. It's a story time with LeBron. Story time with LeBron is always gonna get 10 to 100X more views than LeBron and JJ Redick explaining this defensive coverage and how to, how to, how they make adjustments to it, right? 'Cause it's like one is just a juicy story, and the other is, like, really hard math that you need to learn. The bas- the basketball, basketball equivalent of math. And so I think what's gonna be hard is their editor's gonna be like, "All right, cool. We should just like, 'Hey, uh, ask LeBron, like, if he thinks he's better than Jordan.' 'Cause that's gonna get 10 million views." Like it's just so there for them, and it's gonna be interesting to me to see do they stick to the spirit of what they wanted to start with, which is X's and O's real basketball talk, no hot takes, no, no... It's not an interview with LeBron James, which would always do well. It's like them talking about, you know, um, spacing on the wing, you know, like random, like basketball X's and O's tactics. It'll be very interesting to me to see like six months from now what's happening. But you know what? Even if it's just a miniseries, even if they just did like 12 of these, still phenomenal. Amazing for JJ Redick, amazing for LeBron's brand. 'Cause I watch this, I'm like, "Oh, shit. I get why they say this guy's got crazy basketball IQ." Like JJ Redick will bring up some play that happened four years ago, and LeBron's like, "I remember it."
30. SPSam Parr
  And JJ's the man too, right?