Shaan recaps a seven-day trip to Austin where he hung out with and interviewed some of Texas’s most interesting and wealthy people. He shares lessons from relaxed billionaire investor Manish Pabrai, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, comedian Hassan Minhaj, party-host Nick Gray, and others — pulling out key insights about contrarian investing, focus, curiosity, and the art of connecting with people.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host), Shaan Puri (host)
Back From Austin [00:00:00]
Sam: All right, you’re back from Austin. You were there for seven days. How was it?
Shaan: It was great, dude. I had one conversation I got to ask you about first. I got put on the spot — I was talking with Tim Ferriss, doing an episode with him, and he said something in the middle of the interview. He goes, “I wanted to ask you this: what do you think is the brand of your podcast? If you’re not in the room and someone was just telling their friend about it, how would they describe it — ideally, to you?”
Shaan: You actually did this before, and I thought it was great. You said, “Hey, look, if you’re the type of person who goes to a restaurant and wonders how could they make this more efficient, how much money do they make per meal, how can they expand this — and you also like to joke around — you’re perfect for MFM.” That’s the person who’s into it.
Shaan: I would say we’re this weird combination of making silly dumb jokes and deconstructing interesting companies and pointing out different trends.
Sam: Okay, that’s pretty good. Yeah, I like the restaurant thing — like, if you went to a restaurant with four friends and three of them would be looking at the menu trying to figure out what to order, and you’d be looking around counting the tabletops and trying to figure out how much money the place makes. That’s us. We are that friend.
Shaan: What did I say on the air? Well, luckily he let me off the hook. He asked it, then said, “I want to ask you this, you don’t have to answer,” and just kind of kept going. In my head I was like, the master of podcasting is asking me what my podcast is about, and it’s sort of like if Leonardo DiCaprio comes up to you and asks your name and you’re like, “I have one — I just don’t know what it is right now.” The panic ensues.
Sam: I had to go out of town, so weird timing — I wasn’t able to make it. But you interviewed three or four people and hung out with a ton more. How were they?
Manish Pabrai — The Relaxed Billionaire [00:05:00]
Shaan: I always take notes when I go. I take a little journal and I’m only writing down new epiphanies — new golden nuggets, the one phrase somebody said that I’m going to remember. I’m looking for a high rate of revelation. That’s actually a good metric for the podcast too — RPM, revelations per minute. This was a very high-RPM trip.
Sam: Tell me about Manish first.
Shaan: So Manish Pabrai — what I know about him is he’s a kind of Indian Warren Buffett. Started maybe in the 80s investing in companies, made some money through his own business first, and now he’s got this huge following. If you like this podcast, if you like Andrew Wilkinson or Syed Balkhi — both of them look up to and learn from Manish. When I was going out there I texted Andrew, like, “What should I ask him?” And he said, “Dude, he was my first value investing man crush.”
Shaan: His story is basically: he’s working at a company, his dad — who was an entrepreneur — says, “Son, it’s time to quit.” And Manish says, “Dad, I don’t want to do what you did. Your life was crazy — ups and downs. Don’t you remember as kids we were being brought into the living room at 12 or 13 years old trying to figure out how to let the business survive one more day? I’m traumatized from that. I just want to work here, save money in my 401k, and in 35 years I’ll be set.”
Shaan: His dad said, “Okay, you’re not wrong, but you took the wrong lesson from what you learned. You actually got a crash course in how to do business and how not to do business. Maybe you should just take that and do it better than I could.” He told him, “At this company there are 2,000 people. You’re just a cog in the machine. You could die tomorrow and no one would even know.”
Shaan: So Manish goes, “All right, you’re right,” starts a company — an IT consulting company during the dotcom boom. Mark Cuban also had an IT services business he sold for around $6 million, same era. So it was enough to be comfortable but not enough to do nothing.
Sam: Exactly.
Shaan: So he takes that money and starts investing his own money. He had about a million dollars and turned it into $13 million. He knew the Indian tech scene well through his consulting work, invested in one company that went 40x, pulled out a couple million — that was his first million. He started reinvesting, and along the way friends are saying, “Manish, we can’t just follow your tips because you’re not telling us when to sell. Can we just give you the money?” So he takes a million bucks from friends, puts their money in alongside his.
Shaan: He had $13 million of his own — the million from friends was the side thing. He didn’t really care about it. But he proceeds, over the last 20 or 30 years, to run that million up to just under a billion dollars of assets under management.
Sam: That’s a long story about Manish, but what was actually interesting about him?
Shaan: What’s interesting about him is I call him the relaxed billionaire. I go to this guy’s house and he’s just chilling. He’s in his bath shorts, no shoes, just walking around like, “Sup.” Because I went the day before to hang out — I was like, we’re doing the podcast tomorrow, but I want to get to know you first. Can I swing by for some tea? He calls it “chai with Pabrai” — he said, “I do this from time to time. I make really good chai and I’ll have it with random interesting people. One out of every ten proves to be someone I want to hang out with more.”
Shaan: So I’m at his house and I ask what he’s doing today, because there’s nobody there — no team, no assistant tapping him on the shoulder saying he has a call. He goes, “I don’t have any of those things.”
Shaan: He told me a couple of interesting things. First: investing is not a team sport. He goes, “I have a few analyst-type people and they’ll do specific things, but they don’t make investment decisions. I make the investment decisions.” Why? Because to be a great investor, you need to make a contrarian bet — you have to believe something is good when other people believe it’s bad. That’s fundamentally how it works. If you think it’s good and everybody thinks it’s good, the price is too high. The only way to make money is you think it’s good and other people think it’s bad. He calls it: I look for things that are hated and unloved.
Shaan: He says coal was his last big bet. “Nothing is more hated and unloved than coal.” And he says if you invest as a team, everybody centers around the safe picks that everyone can agree on, and you’ll never find the truly contrarian things. So it’s not a team sport.
Shaan: Number two — he’s showing us around his house and he goes, “That’s my nap room.” I said, “You’re a nap guy? I’m a nap guy.” He goes, “Oh yeah, nap been. I take a nap every day for the last 30 years.” He said, “I love it. Just knock out in the afternoon — 20, 30 minutes, an hour. It’s good for my brain. I don’t make good decisions if I’m not well rested.”
Sam: Did you guys high-five over it?
Shaan: Yeah, I was like, finally, this guy’s my people. He said he used to live in Dubai — that’s how they do it there, it’s too hot during the day and you just nap.
Shaan: Overall he was like, I have a clear schedule. I read, I think, maybe I’ll go teach or talk to somebody. He goes, “I teach not because I want to be a teacher, but because if I want to learn something, the best way is to go try to teach it.” He’ll give talks at universities or to groups of aspiring investors.
Shaan: I go to his library and he’s got thousands of books — this section is biology and science, this is investing, this is business. Recommending different books to me. It was high contrast to all the other people I met on this trip who are go-go-go.
Joe Lonsdale — Focus and the Billion-Dollar Question [00:18:00]
Sam: What about Joe Lonsdale?
Shaan: Joe Lonsdale co-founded Palantir, which is now a $50 billion company. But his actual claim to fame when I was talking to him — he said, “I’ve created more billion-dollar companies than anyone else in America.”
Sam: Bold.
Shaan: Right? I was like, okay, I’ve got a podcast, so, what’s up. And it’s true — he’s done at least five billion-dollar companies. His background: he went to Stanford, somehow got into Peter Thiel’s orbit when Joe was around 21, still in college. He was basically Thiel’s right-hand man, his protégé.
Shaan: The story is hilarious — someone asked him in an interview what he was like as a kid. You know what the typical response is: “I sold stuff growing up, humble origins, had a reading impediment but that led me to really working on something.” There’s usually some rags-to-riches element. Joe said, “I grew up, had great parents, great family. Stuff came pretty easy to me. I was really good. I aced all my tests — 99th percentile math, 99th percentile science. I was a programmer. There were smarter kids than me, but school was pretty easy, I focused on it, I did well, I got into Stanford.” That was his story.
Shaan: Which I found hilariously candid. Most people virtue-signal their awesome upbringing to focus on some one bad thing. He’s like, no, my parents loved me and put me in a position to succeed and I was super competitive and I won. That was his story.
Sam: What were the revelations you got from him?
Shaan: I’ll give you five. Number one: some people actually just want to save the world. I’m very suspicious when people say they just want to help people, improve society, fix America. But Joe is that guy. He actually is. That is what drives him. I went back and read his early blog posts and essays from 10 or 15 years ago — he’s been saying the same thing the whole time. That’s the giveaway: not somebody who changes their tune once they make it, but somebody saying it before they make it.
Shaan: We’d hung out all day — went to his workout at 8 AM, worked out together, cold plunged together, got breakfast together, then did the interview. And on our way out — when Elon Musk was walking in. So that was happening.
Sam: Wait, what?
Shaan: Yeah. Pretty insane. Okay, number two: he’s still wrestling with the idea of focus. He said — and this is a guy who’s created more billion-dollar companies than anyone else in America — “I’m not sure if that was right.” He brought up a lesson from Peter Thiel: you should be really careful putting effort into new things. Almost always it’s better to put energy into your main compounding thing that has a lot more room to run. There’s more area under the curve to fill in something that’s really working than to go start something from zero.
Shaan: He said, honestly, if I had just done one of those companies, I probably would have built a bigger thing than all five combined. Which I thought was a pretty interesting thought. But he was also at peace with it — he said, “If I was optimizing just for money, yeah. But I thought these companies needed to exist. It’s more fun to do multiple things, and those were problems that needed to be solved.”
Shaan: Do the math though: Palantir is now $50 billion. Taking Palantir from $50 billion to $53 billion is a lot easier than starting a new company, and he probably would have taken it to $70 or $80 billion if he’d put all his entrepreneurial energy there.
Sam: But he also had an interesting rule about focus, right?
Shaan: Yeah. He said, “I only do six things.” That was his definition of focus. He’s like, “I can only do six, and they’re not all equal — I have my main one or two.” For his general managers and partners, the limit is three things on their plate at any given time. And his rule: if you’re the CEO, you have one thing, and it’s your company. That’s it.
Sam: This guy’s only 41 and he’s this prolific. I’m so excited to listen to that episode.
Shaan: Right? And by the way, Next Level lifestyle — baller house, full staff, private chef, all the good stuff. I’m somebody who plays the money game and it’s interesting to see what the final level looks like for these people. He’s got a basketball court in the house. A gaming room — like a LAN room with six computers, his cousins come over to play.
Nick Gray’s Two-Hour Cocktail Party [00:32:00]
Shaan: At the end of the trip, we had a list of like 100 interesting people in Austin we’d love to hang out with but no time. So we did a small 15-person house party and asked Nick Gray to organize it.
Sam: Nick Gray is one of my favorite people on Earth.
Shaan: Right, so I got to see Nick Gray — the legend — run one of his famous two-hour cocktail parties. Go buy his book, by the way. This guy is such a legend.
Shaan: He does all the normal Nick Gray things. I walk in, he puts a name tag on my shirt. The name tags are color-coded — yellow, blue, whatever — and after the mixer he goes, “Okay, look at the color of your name tag, join that group, and I want you to talk to those people.” He stirs the pot to mix you up. Playing his harmonica to get everyone’s attention.
Shaan: Then at the end, he pulls me aside and goes, “Shaan, can you call my phone? I want to do a gag.” I was like, “A gag? What?” He goes, “Call my phone.” I call it, and he reaches into his bag and pulls out this giant handle — it looks like a butcher knife — but it’s a phone case, and his phone is on the other end of it. He holds it up like, “Hello.” And he goes, “This is my gag.”
Sam: That’s hilarious.
Shaan: And I was like, not only is that funny, I’ve never heard someone say, “Hold on, I want to do a gag.” That is so him. He’s great. He makes his parties fun.
Sam: Did he do the introductions where he cuts people off if they go too long?
Shaan: Yes — we did a thing at the end where he’d been walking around the party listening for interesting things, then pulls out his notebook, gets everyone in a circle, and goes, “Shaan, you were saying you discovered this amazing hack for your business — what was that?” And it gets you to share the thing. He had four or five people do it. It’s definitely like being in second grade and your teacher says, “Put up your bunny ears, everyone quiet, we’re doing a structured activity.” But honestly, it’s such a relief, because I hate social gatherings. He’s really got this down to a science.
Hassan Minhaj — Curiosity and Presence [00:40:00]
Sam: You also hung out with Hassan Minhaj?
Shaan: Dude, I do not like hanging out with him because he is so smart and so funny that I get intimidated.
Sam: Really? I had the opposite reaction. I walked away thinking that is one of my favorite people on Earth to hang out with.
Shaan: I mean, I love it — I love seeing it. It was a breakfast before I caught my flight. I basically missed my flight because I was having so much fun. I’ll give you three reasons what stood out.
Shaan: Number one, obviously: humor. It’s unfair — he’s a ringer. Hanging out with a professional comedian is sort of like bringing a gun to a knife fight. He just makes these small comments and you’re like, you’re so much quicker and funnier than me. It’s like a JV athlete hanging out with a pro.
Shaan: Number two: present. He is so present when you hang out with him. Not looking at his phone, not thinking about what’s next, not eyeing the room. Fully locked in.
Shaan: And the other thing — he asked a ton of questions. I had a different breakfast with a different billionaire-type guy on this trip. Nice guy, had a great time, but this guy literally asked one question in a two-and-a-half-hour hangout. It wasn’t difficult because I had tons of questions for him. But it was hard to sit there and think: does this person just not give a damn?
Sam: Here’s what I think it is. When you host MFM meetups, you go there thinking you’re going to get peppered with questions and you ask others questions to be cordial. But when you go hang out with someone who’s above you in status, you’re the one asking all the questions. And when you’re as successful as this person, you’re just used to being the one with the answers. You’re the open book. So you become the one who just says, “What do you got?”
Shaan: It is kind of an alpha shift. Totally understandable but uncomfortable. I almost wish I’d said something about it — because it’s a good reminder to self, never make other people feel that way. Hassan was the opposite. His cup is not full — he’s asking, “Pour some water into me. Give me something to think about.” That’s such an attractive trait in people.
The Peachy Babies Founder and Competitive Gamers [00:48:00]
Shaan: Can I tell you about the Peachy Babies guy?
Sam: No. What?
Shaan: His name’s Tyler. There’s this company called Peachy Babies and they sell slime on the internet. Not just a little slime — tens of millions of dollars worth. They’ve got 10 million followers on TikTok because they create awesome content that drives sales. Great engine.
Shaan: I was talking to this guy at the house party. He said, “Before doing this I was a poker player. And before poker I was the best Yu-Gi-Oh player in the country.”
Sam: What’s Yu-Gi-Oh?
Shaan: It’s like a Pokémon-type thing. So he goes from top Yu-Gi-Oh player to one of the top poker players. Then he meets this girl who tells him about a slime business she used to have but shut down. He asks some questions and goes, “Hmm, that actually sounds kind of promising. What if we revive that?” They tried it and crushed it.
Shaan: The only takeaway I have from this guy: he totally pattern matches to what I’ve been saying on this podcast so many times. People who have a background as a competitive gamer — Yu-Gi-Oh, poker, spelling bee, League of Legends, Fortnite, whatever — they know how to win that game. As soon as they pick a better game, they’re going to win that too.
Shaan: And that gets me to something I really want to do: organize some kind of event that pulls together people who are young and doing those types of things. The mathletes, the best Pokémon players, the best League of Legends players. It’s just a matter of time till they get the spark to shift their game.
Sam: Like the Unphysical 100?
Shaan: Yes! The Laptop 100. I need a name and a frame, and someone to organize it. I’ll put up $100K to pay for the event. I want to expose these people to 20 others who have the same background and then shifted their game and are now doing amazing things. And I want to scout that talent — “Whenever you’re ready to go do something new, I’ll be your first investor.”
Sam: You can get a cargo shorts company as a sponsor.
Shaan: Watch, Sam. You’re gonna be groveling to these people in a few years. I still get to tease them.
Pay Attention to What People Pay Attention To [00:55:00]
Shaan: Quick last lesson. I was talking to a guy who’s doing tens of millions on TikTok Shop. I said something in passing — I mentioned a TikTok I saw that had this great hook, a really good opening three seconds. I thought I’d said 50 interesting things to this guy by then. He didn’t flinch at any of the 49. But on that one, he immediately goes, “Wait, wait — what was that again?” Takes out his notebook, writes it down. Says, “Did you tell your friend they should do this? You should definitely tell them. One hook like that can make your whole company.”
Shaan: And I was like — wow. It was a great lesson. I saw it five times on this trip: when you meet a really interesting or successful person, pay attention to what they pay attention to. He leaned into that one thing. Manish would have leaned into something different. But if you start to pay attention to what people lean into, it teaches you a lot about what matters in their game and how their brain works.
Sam: It makes sense you’d be someone who collects beautiful lines and phrases, and now you write for millions of people.
Ben Levy — The Art of Being Useful [01:01:00]
Shaan: Last one. I got to watch Ben work. Ben Levy, my business partner, is the secret to anything I’m able to do. His superpower is connecting with people.
Shaan: Every time we’d go to a meeting, I’d be like, “Who are we meeting?” I felt like the president — just showing up wherever he scheduled. But Ben’s focus was always: what’s the one thing we could connect with them on? Every time we’d go meet somebody, Ben would have his one thing. He’d bring it up, and the person would immediately crack open like a pistachio shell — all of a sudden they’re excited, talking, opening up. Ben probably wouldn’t even say anything else for the rest of the meeting. He talks less than 10% of the time, but it’s the one thing he says that cracks the person open.
Sam: What’s an example?
Shaan: We hung out with Joe Gebbia, the Airbnb founder. Instead of asking about Airbnb, Ben said, “You’re really into microplastics, right? Like you’re really trying to figure out a way to eliminate them — what’s that about?” And Joe, who has told the Airbnb story a million times and was kind of going through the motions when I asked about Airbnb, all of a sudden lights up. Because he’s really into this right now. He’s learning things in this area. So Ben finds that one thing — the passion that’s not the famous thing.
Shaan: And then after the meeting, while I’m thinking about where to eat, Ben’s like, “We should connect him with this person” or “We should send him a link to that thing he mentioned” or “You talked about that — you should send him a note.” He’s just trying to be useful. And when we talked to Manish, Manish mentioned that on Charlie Munger’s tombstone it’s written — or he wanted it written — “He tried to be useful.” And I’m like, that’s what Ben does. He just keeps trying to be useful to people.
Shaan: The other thing about Ben is he’s always happy. I’ve never seen him in a bad mood. So when he asks things that are pretty personal or direct, it’s okay — because he’s always so happy about it, it feels like a safe space.
Shaan: And the last hilarious thing: he never turns it off. We’ll be playing pickup basketball, it’s 10-9, game point, and he’s guarding some guy and he goes, “So, what was revenue last month?” or “I saw you tweeting about this thing.” The guy is totally thrown off. Just so endearing.
Sam: He was in on-mode at a family birthday party once.
Shaan: Right! I was like, “Ben, let’s not talk about revenue in front of this new lady’s 12-year-old.” And he’s like, “So what’s churn?” Like, Ben, now is not the time. There’s no off mode. I hang out with the guy 24/7 and I’ve never seen him turn it off. It’s amazing.
Takeaway from Austin [01:10:00]
Sam: I could listen to these stories all day. I’m going to go listen to the podcast. I don’t usually listen to our own episodes when I’m not on them.
Shaan: I do listen to yours. But if I’m on it I will never listen to it.
Sam: I’m excited about Joe Lonsdale. I know Tim Ferriss a little, so I’m less excited about that one. But Manish and Hassan and Joe — I’m happy you got to hang out with them. Seemed good for you personally to experience that.
Shaan: Yeah, the funny thing is — most things in life, you think the payoff is over there, but it’s actually over here. Every time I go into these episodes I think the payoff is going to be, “Oh, I’m going to make a great episode.” But by the time I’ve done the research, gotten to know these fascinating people, hung out at their houses — that was all the value. The episode is gravy.
Shaan: I think that’s a principle of most things in life. You have some goal, some idea you think is the reason you should do it. But something along the journey is actually the valuable thing. You just couldn’t have known that. You have to pursue it with full force and then it happens.
Sam: All right, that’s the pod.