Sam and Shaan open with a cold-open tease about LIV Golf, then riff on Nazi drug use, a Wall Street banker who became a legendary high school math coach, and the strategic parallels between LIV Golf and Shaan’s failed plan to topple Twitch by organizing a streamer coup. They close with a framework about what different levels of wealth allow you to say no to, and preview their upcoming Camp MFM events.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host, co-founder of The Hustle), Shaan Puri (host, investor, founder of Milk Road)
Cold Open: LIV Golf Teaser [00:00:00]
Sam: Have you heard of this thing called LIV Golf? I think it’s called “live” — I don’t know how you pronounce it. LIV?
Shaan: Nah. What’s LIV Golf?
Sam: LIV Golf. Okay, so you know the PGA Tour — it’s like the main… yeah, like the NFL of golf.
Shaan: Right. The golf league.
Sam: So LIV Golf is a competitor to the PGA. Just imagine the Saudi Arabia effect — exactly, a Saudi-backed rival. These guys are basically trying to spin up a new league by brute force. They’re investing hundreds of millions. I think they pledged…
Shaan: Yeah, big swing.
Sam: So this is the opposite of SPS, right? This is BDE. Basically, the Saudi Public Investment Fund pledged $400 million to start the league. I think they’ve even committed more than that. I thought they offered Tiger Woods like $500 million or something.
Shaan: Some crazy news came out — yeah, they offered him $800 million and he said no, which is just kind of an insane thing.
Sam: But they have signed other huge stars. Phil Mickelson, Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka — who recently won like four majors — Cameron Smith, who’s a young star, signed a $100 million deal. Dustin Johnson, $125 million deal. Phil Mickelson, $200 million deal. They offered Tiger and didn’t get him yet.
Intro: Nazis on Drugs [00:00:45]
Shaan: All right. What’s going on? How are you?
Sam: Fantastic. So I have something I’ve been thinking about that I’ve been wanting to talk to you about. Have you ever seen that video of Adolf Hitler at the 1936 Berlin Olympics — where he’s watching and he’s rocking back and forth?
Shaan: Bro, you cannot be blonde-haired and blue-eyed and come on here starting off with “have you ever seen my favorite video of Hitler.” You can’t be doing that — we’re trying to go up.
Sam: Have you ever seen that video of him? So he’s at the Olympics and he’s rocking back and forth and he’s very clearly on drugs — like some type of coke or something. So I started getting curious and I started looking into this. Someone in the comments said there’s this really good book called Blitzed. I bought it — it’s right here. It’s called Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich.
Basically, after reading it — Hitler and a ton of the Nazis, as well as just a ton of Germany starting in the 1930s, were on drugs. Morphine, heroin, and meth were being used. They used to think meth was a miracle drug. Doctors were like, “Take this meth, it makes you feel great, you get euphoria, you want to stay up, you’ll eat less — it’s wonderful.” It was a legal drug. Bayer — the drug company — was literally selling this stuff. They would even put it in chocolates. There was a chocolate that had a little meth in it.
And it turns out Hitler was a junkie. He was getting injected with meth for years. That’s one of the reasons why, even at the very last minute when they were getting bombed, he was like, “Oh no, we’re doing great.” He was hallucinating, had thoughts of grandeur — typical meth stuff.
And I started thinking: what other stuff in history was supposed to be one way but turns out happened for a totally different reason?
Shaan: I feel like penicillin — there’s a whole bunch of drugs that were discovered by accident.
Sam: For example: Henry VIII. Do you know what Protestants are?
Shaan: I’ve heard that word a thousand times.
Sam: So there’s Catholics, and then there’s Protestants — basically if you’re an evangelical, a Baptist, or a lot of other kinds of Christians, you’re probably Protestant. Anyway, Martin Luther came up with Protestantism in the 1500s. But the king of England — Henry VIII — basically had like eight divorces because he couldn’t have a kid. He was infertile. And the Pope was like, “Hey, you can’t have these divorces anymore.” And he goes, “Fine, then we’re switching to Protestant — that allows me to get a divorce and I can have kids.” So now there’s a billion Protestants in the world because one guy wanted a divorce.
Shaan: Right. And you know, there’s that urban myth that the king of Spain had a lisp and someone told him it’s pronounced “Barcelona” and he goes, “No, from now on it’s ‘Barthelona.’” Same kind of thing — just the guy’s quirk reshapes history.
Sam: Exactly. Like, you never know. How did we figure out what was food? Like all food discovery was like, “This one kills you, this one’s good for you.” Who were the testers? Who was figuring this out along the way?
Shaan: I actually think that was probably the most fun time to be alive — when nobody knew anything. You didn’t know what was food and what wasn’t. How much soil has been eaten by somebody thinking it had to be food?
Sam: Dude, there are all types of good stories like that. Have you heard about the invention of LSD?
Shaan: No.
Sam: This European doctor was just trying to make some type of antibiotic — just something normal — and he got a little bit of the stuff on his skin, touched it funny, and was like, “Oh my god, this is amazing.” So he starts tinkering with it, gives himself a huge dose. He’s like, “Nothing’s happening, this didn’t work.” He gets on his bicycle to ride home, and then it hits him — and he has the biggest trip of his life. And then it changes everything.
Shaan: Yeah. I mean, I don’t know where you want to go with this topic.
Sam: I don’t want to go anywhere with it. I just thought it was interesting. I’ve been reading this book about drugs and the Nazis and it’s crazy — the book says that at the time, something like 60% of German doctors were addicted to morphine, and they were the ones voting on what the laws around controlled substances would be. It changed my perspective. It’s just an interesting read.
The Wall Street Banker Who Became a Math Coach [00:09:00]
Sam: Let me tell you an interesting story. Have you heard about this math teacher in Florida?
Shaan: These stories can go one of two ways.
Sam: I mean, this could go a bunch of different ways. Is there a funny viral video of him at a 7-Eleven? No. So get this — Brandon was telling me about this. There’s this guy, Will Fraser. He starts as a banker on Wall Street doing bond trading in the ’80s — the heyday of wall street, you know, like Liar’s Poker era. He retires by 27.
Shaan: How much did he make?
Sam: I don’t know exactly, but enough to retire at 27. I’d guess at least $10 million. So he buys a Ferrari, drives down to Florida, dreams of a slower, calmer life. He’s like, “I’m going to play a bunch of golf, play a bunch of basketball, and just hang out.”
He does that for ten years. No income. He’s just chilling — the guy you see on a Tuesday at 1 p.m. at the park and you’re like, how does he not have a job? He plays a bunch of golf and along the way he’s feeling a little aimless, doesn’t have a great purpose. So he reaches out to a local high school and says, “Hey, can I teach golf?” They’re like, “Sure.” He comes over and teaches golf, realizes he likes teaching. He’s like, “What else can I teach? I’m a former Wall Street guy — can I teach a finance class?” And they’re like, “We don’t have finance, but you can become a math teacher if you want.”
So he goes and becomes a math teacher. Walks in on day one and says, “Listen — I don’t need this job. If you guys give me any trouble, this will be my last day.” And they’re like, “Okay.”
One day he’s checking his mailbox and sees a flyer for a math competition. He’s like, “Oh, that’s cool, let’s try this.” So he enters. They go there and get smoked — fifth out of sixth place, second to last. He says he couldn’t even solve some of the problems. But the competitive switch gets flipped. He missed that wall street intensity. So he decides to do it again and again — fifth, then third, and so on. He basically decides: we are going to dominate these competitions.
And that’s exactly what’s happened. They’ve won 15 out of the last 17.
Shaan: Isn’t that the best? When someone just sees a small opportunity and they’re like, no one takes this as seriously as we’re going to. I love it. That’s exactly like that cheerleading movie on Netflix.
Sam: Yeah, they just take it to the highest level. So people are like, “What’s your secret?” He says: “I just took a different level of intensity.” Average math teacher gets 72 hours of classroom time with their students per semester, and then hopes some kids come after school for an hour once a week. He goes, “I switched it.” He took all the good math kids, put them in the same class — so they’d compete with each other. Then he used class time to prepare for competitions. He started summer camps — 80 hours in four weeks, equivalent of a full semester in high intensity.
And it’s not like he’s even the best mathematician. One of his former students teaches the advanced math. He just builds the program. He put high school students with middle school students — the middle schoolers idolize the high schoolers, who teach down, and the middle schoolers rise up. One alumni pipeline where the older kids teach the younger kids, who eventually teach the even younger kids.
Then he started scouting — like Alabama football. He’d look at scores from other schools, find high-performing kids, and recruit them to his program. The reputation built as they started winning, and now parents are coming inbound saying, “Please take my kid.” And it’s gone even further — McKinsey, big banks, Wall Street firms recruit from his high school for interns because they want his students.
Shaan: Where did you see this?
Sam: It was in local Florida news for a while. Brandon sent me an article from the Wall Street Journal — paywalled, so I only got the first paragraph, too cheap to pay. So I found all the local Florida papers that had the rest.
And during COVID, when they told him he had to teach remotely, he said hell no — I resign. He went and rented out a church, said, “Hey, if you guys want to come train here, we can do this.” And 140 kids came and trained daily in his church when everybody else had to lower their intensity. He ratcheted it up.
Shaan: How old is he now?
Sam: He’s in his 60s. So he was 27, took 10 years off, and from about 40 to 60 he’s just been dominating this one thing. Isn’t that incredible?
Shaan: That’s incredible. A few things: one, the intensity. Two, I think a lot of people — including me — want to move to San Francisco or New York or LA and try to become a medium-sized fish in a big pond. There’s so much to be said about being the big fish in a little pond. You can make a name for yourself and have a way better life. This guy is having so much more impact by being the guy for this very small math competition versus being just another $100 million banker. He’s probably way more fulfilled.
I want to get diagnosed with a bad case of SPS — Small Pond Syndrome. I am a huge believer in this. I lived in Houston in high school. Big public school, 5,000 kids. My life was basketball. I remember in ninth grade — the varsity coach was watching our game and for some reason I hit like two threes to start. Then the most athletic kid on their team decided, “This guy’s not seeing the hoop again,” and starts picking me up full court. I literally cannot get by this guy. I’m going left, I’m going right — frazzled. Coach calls timeout, the varsity coach walks over, and I think he’s going to give me epic advice. He just goes: “You will never play varsity.”
Sam: Thanks, Coach Hollingsworth.
Shaan: And he was right! In the Houston pond I was nowhere near athletic enough. But luckily my dad gets a job and we move to China in 10th grade. First day I start playing basketball — these kids don’t get protein, everybody’s scrawny, I’m blowing by everybody. The varsity coach comes over, asks my name. I end up captain of the varsity team. Got a girlfriend. Life changed for the better. I caught SPS.
Sam: The captain of a football team in rural Alabama with 100 students — they live the life. Screw the big city.
Shaan: And that foggy memory of “you ain’t nothing” just got washed away. I forgot. It became like: you’re the man, you’re the man, you’re the man. And that’s what you want in life. This guy’s doing it right.
I actually have this dream — I kind of just want to retire and coach high school basketball. I think that would be a lot of fun. And you know, this small pond thing — I’ve thought about moving back to St. Louis for a minute, but my wife wasn’t down. I was like, dude, I could just be the man there. I could buy a million-dollar house and it would make the news. In San Francisco or New York a million dollars is a studio, but in St. Louis that would be one of the biggest purchases of the quarter.
Sam: All right, I’ve got straight fire today if you want more.
CEO Community Revenue Snapshots [00:24:00]
Sam: All right, I’ve got fire too. By the way — why does someone just give you all their revenue and all their profit? That sounds unrealistic, and it sounds like you kind of tricked them.
Shaan: I’ve got this community I’m running that I’m not going to talk about yet, but it’s a CEO community. When they join, they tell me all kinds of interesting information so we can place them in the right group. I messaged eight of them and said, “Hey, can I talk about you on the pod? Can I reveal the information you gave me?” And they said, “Yeah, sure.” So nothing crazy.
Sam: Which one do you want to do first? Give me the most interesting one.
Shaan: Okay, here’s one that I don’t even think I put on the list. Have you ever seen those pedal taverns in Nashville or Denver? The bars that you pedal while riding through the city.
Sam: I don’t think I’ve seen one. You don’t leave the suburbs of San Francisco.
Shaan: In a lot of cities — Denver, Austin, Nashville — there are these things called pedal taverns. Imagine a bar in the middle, eight people sitting on one side and eight on the other, on a four-wheeled platform that you pedal while you’re drinking — outdoors on the street. The guy who created one of the first ones is in the group. His name is Pete, and his business — bootstrapped from nothing, right out of school — is getting close to $8 million a year in revenue. Just the pedal taverns do about $5 million a year in sales, quite profitable. They’re using the profits to buy the real estate where the pedal taverns park overnight.
Sam: That’s a pretty interesting business.
Shaan: Let me give you another one. Have you heard of The Peak?
Sam: No.
Shaan: It’s a daily newsletter run by this guy named Brett. Like The Hustle or Morning Brew, but it’s Canadian news. Team of 10, 90,000 newsletter subscribers — not that much — and doing about $3 million in revenue with $1 million in profit. 53% open rate, 67,000 monthly podcast listeners. The guys are decent writers, not amazing. They just started writing, cold-emailing people, and hiring writers. After two or three years, already $2-3 million in revenue.
Sam: What are they doing differently? That’s more revenue per subscriber than most.
Shaan: In Canada, there aren’t as many publications, and B2B advertisers — software companies — don’t have as many places to advertise. So these guys have done a really good job getting the banks, telecom companies, B2B software companies — high-end enterprise companies — to advertise with them.
Sam: That’s pretty good.
Shaan: Okay, one more. I want to tell you about a company.
LIV Golf vs. PGA: The Saudi Strategy [00:28:30]
Sam: Oh fine, go ahead.
Shaan: Okay, I want to tell you about a company. You may have heard of it — LIV Golf.
Sam: Wait, LIV? Just… LIV?
Shaan: Nah, what’s LIV Golf?
Sam: The main golf league. It’s like the NFL, right? But for golf.
Shaan: Exactly. Saudi-backed rival. So Phil Mickelson can only be on LIV and not the PGA — it’s a competitive thing. The PGA has like 60 events a year and four majors. What LIV is doing is more like the NFL model — 8 events, and they all matter. Versus baseball, which has almost 200 games a year and you know, they kind of don’t matter, but there’s always something on. The NFL has 17 or 18 Sundays and each one matters. That’s what LIV is going for with golf.
To put it in context: Tiger Woods has earned $121 million in all of his PGA winnings over his lifetime. Obviously he makes more through sponsors and paid events, but just from the PGA, his lifetime earnings are $121 million. So LIV comes out strong and basically gives guys Tiger Woods’ lifetime money as a guaranteed contract. Versus the PGA model, which is: there’s a prize pool for every tournament, $9 million per tournament, the winner gets $3 million, everybody else gets a piece based on how they finished.
PGA makes about $1.5 billion in revenue — 85% of that is from tournaments, media rights, and advertising. LIV needs to generate about a billion to have similar economics.
Sam: What’s the play here? Do Middle Easterners watch a lot of golf? Is that the pitch?
Shaan: I don’t know if that’s why. There’s that weird thing where Russia really loves women’s basketball — if you’re a great women’s basketball player, you play college in the US, you try to make the WNBA, and the WNBA pays you basically nothing — like $70-80K. Then you play the off-season in Russia for $300-400K. And everybody’s like, why does Russia care this much about women’s basketball? Nobody asks questions.
Maybe there’s something similar in Saudi Arabia for golf. Or it’s just that they have a huge amount of money and they see the business opportunity: the PGA basically had a monopoly on this, and if you can create a successful sports league, these are worth billions and billions of dollars. We both love the UFC — the UFC sold for $4.2 billion, which I think is actually undervalued for where it is now. And that’s fringe compared to the NBA or NFL.
Sam: What’s more popular, golf or UFC?
Shaan: Golf generates more revenue. But I honestly hate golf. Any sport where you wear khaki pants to play — that’s not a sport. That’s an activity. That’s a hobby. It’s checkers. You don’t even sweat.
Sam: How much of your thinking at the end of the day boils down to who could beat up who?
Shaan: Most. Because the guy who can kill anyone in the room with his bare hands has nothing to fear. Someone said this in an NFL scouting report — there were four top quarterback prospects and the guy goes: “If they were all on vacation walking out to the car, they would all throw the keys to Mark. Mark’s driving.” And I just thought that was such a perfect analogy.
Sam: Like, if it was Elon, Jeff Bezos, Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates going to dinner — who picks up the check? Who ordered the Uber?
Shaan: None of these guys are driving.
Sam: Anyway. Look, I hate golf. But Phil Mickelson — if you have serious money and Saudi Arabia, who has a lot of human rights issues, offers you this — what do you do?
Shaan: I think you can’t take it alone in a vacuum, because you’re not trying to go sit on an island doing nothing by yourself and lose all your relevance — you lose your future earnings. What I’d do is say to them: “Look, I’m in, if you can get 40 people from this list to join. Tell them Phil’s in if they’re in. You need to sweep a critical mass of us so this is relevant, so this is considered the top class. I’m not going to go play in the B league.” I’d tell them that, and I’d say: “I’ll do it, but you’re going to have to cut the fattest check of your life and go get 40 people from this list.”
There’s a price you’d take. Like, I would take this podcast to SoundCloud or the Google Play Store — but I’d need $7.5 million. That’s my price.
Shaan’s Plan to Topple Twitch [00:38:00]
Shaan: Actually, we were going to do something like this once. I had a startup based on streaming video games. Twitch was the 900-pound gorilla. We were building a tool that worked on top of Twitch, streamers could use it — and it was working. But every day we’d come in, we’d work really hard, and there was definitely a part of us that was like, “Dude, how did we end up here? We’re making this free tool for Twitch streamers and hoping that eventually we can monetize some other way.” We were like that little fish that swims right in front of the whale’s nose.
So I talked to my co-founder and was like, “Don’t you just want to be the whale?” And we went to the whiteboard and were like: how would you actually compete with Twitch? How would you beat Twitch?
We ran the numbers. Twitch has this insane power law — the top 300 streamers make up basically all the meaningful viewership. Any power law, the top one percent makes up a very significant portion. So let’s say the top 300 made up 50% of viewers at any given time. Twitch sold for $1 billion back then, probably worth $5-7 billion now. If we could get half of that traffic, we’d have something worth maybe a quarter of what they’re worth — call it a billion dollars. So how much money would it take to get those people to come over?
At that time the top streamers were making single-digit millions on Twitch per year — between one and five million, plus endorsements and merch. So we basically figured: you’d need to offer them about 10x what they’re making. We ran the math and figured you’d need around $150 million to go pay the streamers to bail on Twitch and come to our platform.
Sam: But I predict that would never work.
Shaan: Tell me why.
Sam: I think for consumers, you need to have brand and magic. It’s kind of like — even if you put all the resources into creating a boy band, sometimes it just doesn’t work. On paper everything checks out: we got the blonde kid, the mixed race kid, the dancer, the singer — this should work. And then there’s some kid who just sings a funny song about wearing a cowboy hat and becomes huge. Like Lil Nas X. It just happens. With consumers it’s challenging to grab their attention. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
Shaan: There have been instances though where people threw money at the problem and it worked. For every Quibi where you raise a bunch of money and it doesn’t work, for every 10 of those there’s one where they did kind of just brute-force their way in.
When TikTok first launched, TikTok was lame as hell. It was pigeon-holed as the lame version of Musical.ly — 12-year-olds lip-syncing. Now TikTok is huge. I remember meeting a guy and he said, “TikTok is going to spend a billion dollars marketing the app.” I was like, “Do they really think this is going to work?” We had this junior guy working for us — he was 19 — and he started mentioning TikTok and I was like, “Is TikTok actually a thing?” He kept hearing about it. They started paying all the top YouTubers and Vine people to just make TikToks, and eventually it just worked. The lame thing fell away and it became mainstream. TikTok really did brute-force their way in. They had a great product and algorithm too, but they didn’t start with brand love and authenticity and loyalty.
So let me tell you how the Twitch thing played out. I had a hunch you might be right. So I approached Discord and said, “Hey, do you want to buy us?” They were like, “Who are you? What do you do?” I said, “We do this thing today, but here’s what we’d do with Discord: we’d help you compete with Twitch. You have brand love — Discord is one of the most loved brands in gaming. But you don’t do streaming today. We will build the platform using this strategy.”
Sam: Who did you email?
Shaan: The CEO.
Sam: You said, “Hey CEO, I’m Shaan, this is what I do, can I come pitch you?” And he took the meeting?
Shaan: Exactly. And at the end of it, his take was basically: “We will acquire you if you want — I don’t know if we’ll pay the most, so I don’t know if the deal will happen. But the fact that you can come in here and whiteboard this on a wall makes me want you to come here and do things.”
Sam: That is like the biggest bull artist move I’ve ever heard. And you almost pulled it off.
Shaan: What was he like? Jason Citron. Young, nerdy guy. And the way he talked about their product and strategy — this quiet, nerdy confidence. I was like, “I don’t want to compete with this guy.” I see why they’ve kicked everyone’s ass. He’s really smart and has a simple, clear point of view.
Why do you think he passed though?
Sam: He just felt like he wasn’t going to do it, I think.
Shaan: I had gotten a warm intro through his lead investor. I went to the investor and said, “We’re thinking about selling — would Discord be interested?” And he said, “You should talk to the Discord guys first.” So I just emailed Jason, said, “Hey, I’d love to come by the office for 40 minutes, sketch out what I have in mind — you can decide if I’m nuts or if I’m a genius.”
He was just like, “Would you want to come be one of the C-suite type people? I don’t think we’re going to do the plan you outlined, but I like you.” I didn’t get the deal. But everyone needs the confidence of a Shaan Puri.
Sam: This is a great story. Proof that you can just create value out of thin air.
Shaan: At my last startup, the best thing I did — out of everything — was I did right by the team and shareholders at the end. I put my best foot forward to get us the most value we could. That was the best thing I did. I tried to find product-market fit, tried to scale, tried to hire a great team — I did some of those okay, some of those poorly. The one thing I did great was this process.
So let me finish the story. I’m like, okay, Discord doesn’t want to do it, but maybe we can still pull it off. And I realize pretty quickly: you have to do this as a coup. It’s a rebellion. You need two things: one, wait until people are pissed off about something Twitch does — because big companies will shoot themselves in the foot, change the revenue split, whatever — and capitalize on that. Two, you need to get everybody all at once. Everything everywhere all at once. You can’t just slowly negotiate one by one. It won’t feel like there’s momentum.
And the streamers — most big streamers don’t leave their house. That’s their job. The one thing they do is go to TwitchCon, because they can meet fans. So I was like, we need to do a dinner the day before the conference. It’s the only time you get them all in the same room. And we’d lay out our case: look, you guys are going to make stupid money if you’re all in. There’s no risk to any of you individually because if you’re all there, this will actually work. You don’t have to play by Twitch’s rules anymore.
Sam: Dude, there’s this famous meeting that happened in Atlantic City in the 1930s — all the mafia guys got together, Al Capone and everyone, formed the syndicate. It’s us versus everyone. That’s basically what you were doing. Your little mob meeting.
Shaan: I didn’t even get there. Here’s why: we ended up getting acquired by Twitch. Emmett — the CEO — was like, “Let’s grab a drink to celebrate.” First time I met him outside the office. We go to this bar, we’re talking, and I go, “How would somebody actually beat Twitch?” He’s like, “It’s pretty hard. These marketplaces, once they get traction, it’s hard to compete against them.”
So I tell him the idea. I say, “We had this plan, got very close, didn’t pull the trigger — always wondered if it would have worked.” He goes, “Yeah… we’ve thought about that.”
The gist of what he said was: “If you’re going to do it, that’s the only way to do it. But we knew that, and that’s why we started signing exclusive contracts with everyone. And specifically, exclusive contracts that don’t line up — one expires in June, another in January, another the following year. So nobody could ever coordinate a simultaneous walkout.”
Sam: Tiny-ass detail. Tiny detail.
Shaan: Right? And then sure enough, somebody did try to do it. Microsoft launched Mixer and went and got Ninja for $20-30 million. Ninja’s like, “If I’m making $4-5 million on Twitch and these guys will give me $30 million guaranteed for two years — I’ll do it. And it’s integrated with Xbox, they’ll drive me new viewers.” And they tried to get Shroud and others, but they did it too slowly. They couldn’t get the critical mass.
The Chinese streaming platforms tried it too. But Twitch had this whole theory about: how many of your favorite streamers need to leave before you leave? If you spend 100% of your time watching Sam and Sam leaves, you’re probably leaving too. But if I can get you to watch four people, the odds of all four leaving are very low. And if one leaves, you’ve got a 95% chance of just staying.
Working at Big Tech vs. Building Your Own Thing [00:58:00]
Sam: How about the fact that Twitch probably hired some MIT grad — this guy’s been thinking for years, “I’m going to help save the world, I’m going to be part of something meaningful” — and he gets the job offer from SpaceX for $135K and from Twitch for $140K, and he’s like, “Twitch has free lunch, the office is down the street from my house, space will always be there.” And then they spend the next eight years of their lives figuring out how to make it so a streamer can click a button and an emoji pops up on their shoulder.
Shaan: That’s not far from the truth. And some people try to use that to their advantage — like Steve Jobs did the thing recruiting John Sculley: “When are you going to stop selling sugar water to kids and come help change the world?” Scott Harrison from charity: water recruited a woman from Adobe who was making four times what he could offer. He said, “I just have to hope she wants to do something that actually matters.” And he actually succeeded.
But yeah, if you work at a big tech company, you’re working inside a slot machine. You’re looking at the person sitting on the stool and you’re like, “Can I get another four quarters out of them? Let me make that light flash over there.”
My wife went to an Ivy League school, was at Facebook when we started dating. She told me what she did. She’s a PMM — product marketing manager. I was like, “Are you the people putting the jet above India so they get free internet?” She’s like, “No, not really.” I go, “Well what do you do?” She says, “I create different products to help people use Facebook.” I’m like, “What do you really do?” She goes, “I’m making it so you can put a sticker on your picture and more people will spend a little bit more time on this app.”
And I was like, “Yeah, you should quit.” Which she eventually did and went to do something she actually cared about.
Sam: At a startup, I can by myself create a product, give value to customers that didn’t exist, and I can capture a huge amount of that value. At a big company, I’m neither the key person creating the value, nor do I capture any of it. Your value capture is fixed — you get paid what you get paid whether your product succeeds or fails, which is why a bunch of products fail or go really slow inside these companies.
Shaan: There is a counterpoint though. I talked to the chief product officer at Twitch, Shaan Khatri. I was like, “Why do you always join big companies? Have you ever wanted to go do your own thing?” He says, “I wanted impact at scale. Here — if I can improve one product that 10 million people use, or at Google a billion people use search every single day — I created the book search feature. Now you can search for books, and a bunch of people on earth do that every day.”
If you’re working on the App Store at Apple and a billion people use it every day — making that better reaches a billion people.
Sam: I think that days is higher impact on paper, but it doesn’t feel the same.
Shaan: No, I agree. You want to do another topic?
Framework: What Money Lets You Say No To [01:04:00]
Sam: Can I give you a framework that I think is pretty dope?
I was talking to somebody about money — like, should I do this, it’ll yield this amount of money or not — and the person said, “The way I think about money is: the value of money is what can you say no to if you have it?”
And I was like, “What do you mean?” I started thinking about it and realized: people always say “I want financial freedom, I don’t care about money, I care about freedom.” And what does that actually mean? It’s not the freedom to do something — it’s the freedom from having to do something. It’s what can I say no to.
So let me walk through my own life. When I had $25,000 in my bank account, I could say no to a really shitty job. I didn’t have to go flip burgers or be a janitor because I could pay my monthly bills for 6-12 months. At $100K you could say no to a shitty manager — I can quit this job, take a gap, find another one, not feel financial stress. At half a million, you could say no to work for a year or two — try a startup, go backpacking, pursue a passion. At $3 million, you can say no to jobs entirely — you’re only going to work for yourself, you can bet on yourself and give yourself enough time to figure stuff out. At $10 million, I think you just say no to working in general — my money makes enough money, I don’t need to use my time to make money if I don’t want to.
Then it goes on from there. Maybe around $100 million you say no to having to be in one location — you own three or four homes and just go from place to place. Around $200-300 million, you say no to wasting time at airports — you only fly private.
Shaan: I’d say those numbers are a little bit less. At $50 million I think you could say no to any inconvenience that money can solve. You could fly private — you’d have to charter rather than own, but you could. You could hire assistants, chefs, drivers. Anything you don’t want to do, you don’t have to do.
I talked to a guy today who owns a jet and he says it’s about $2.5 million a year in expenses just to own it. If you want to charter, you could probably spend $500K a year and get to most places. If you have $50 million, that’s doable.
Sam: And then at a billion, I think you say no to politicians, say no to the police, say no to a bunch of people — because you have the ability to fight back, and there’s just a different level of respect.
I liked this framework of: what does this amount of money allow me to say no to?
Shaan: What hourly rate would you say no to right now for a project you don’t want to do?
Sam: So there’s what you say and then there’s the market-clearing price. Right now I charge $2,000 an hour and I take about two hours a week of phone calls. That’s the exact borderline where I feel like I kind of should — for an hour at $2K, I feel guilty saying no. So I don’t take the calls because I need the money; I take them because I feel guilty saying no. And that’s the same thing — feeling like “I should” means feeling like I want to say no but don’t think I should, so I feel guilty.
What I’ve done is I use the Intro app. I schedule my availability for when I know I’ll be in an Uber — I’m flying to your event, then flying to LA, I know when I’ll be in the car. I make myself available then. So I’m like, “I’ll take this in the Uber” — now I can justify a $200 Uber Black because I’m making $2,000 in that hour.
But it feels weird selling time per hour. I’m actively trying to get away from it. Something came up yesterday and by default I was going to say yes, and I was like, “Should I? Let me recheck what I want to be saying yes to.”
I think one of the most important decisions in your life is: what are the things I’m going to say yes to, and what am I going to say no to? You have your default box — obviously yes or no to these things. Then there are the non-obvious things. I want to say yes to things that I know will be fun, help me grow, and scare me a little. I also want to say yes to tasks I don’t want to do but want to be the person who does — like if my friend is in town, I want to go pick them up from the airport. And I want to consciously move things into the yes or no box.
Shaan: Do you have a polite way of saying no to inbound, or do you just ignore?
Sam: I used to just ignore. Then I realized it’s totally fine to just say, “Hey, this sounds cool but I just have my hands full right now,” or “Hey, thanks for reaching out — I’m not looking to do any more phone calls, but if that changes, I’ll let you know.” People appreciate a response over a blow-off. And I think there’s some level of respect for just being honest: “I don’t want to do that. I’ve decided I want to travel less.”
I had this guy messaging me saying he wants to come on the pod and I just kept ignoring it. It was pretty obvious I was avoiding it, and he goes, “Hey, can I come on?” I said, “This isn’t a good fit, but I really appreciate you listening.” He goes, “Can I get some feedback?” I said, “It’s just not a good fit.” He goes, “But why?” And I said, “Because you’re not that interesting and you’re not that successful.” He got angry at me. And I’m like, dude — you pushed me into a corner, you asked for honest feedback, I told you, and now you’re mad?
Shaan: My Goldilocks thing: I was too cold when I just blew people off — I’d miss opportunities. Too hot was saying hard rules like “I don’t do phone calls with people I don’t know” — that comes off as a jerk. The sweet spot is: “Hey, thanks, but I’m trying to do less of this right now.” Or sometimes I’ll just say: “I haven’t decided what I want to do yet. Let me get clear on what I want and I’ll come back to you if it ever makes sense. It’s not about you — I just don’t know exactly what I want right now.” That tends to work better.
Camp MFM and Upcoming Events [01:18:00]
Shaan: Dude. We went from Hitler to Saudi Arabia to saying no to people.
Sam: Mental models. Good pod.
Shaan: I’m going to be in LA on Sunday. You coming?
Sam: I don’t think so. But I’m seeing you soon, right? For your event?
Shaan: For the New York event I’m hosting — we’ve got like 1,300 RSVPs. I’m eager to see how many actually show up.
Sam: You can’t do a 1,000-person event. You have to cut that down.
Shaan: It’s free, so maybe half show up. But we put up $10K. And it’s all guys, by the way. I scrolled through — it’s all dudes.
Sam: I could smell that event already. So many chads are going to be there.
Shaan: And then I’m doing the same thing in LA — about 500-600 RSVPs. And then we’re going to the Carolinas for the thing you’re organizing.
Sam: Yeah — and so many people have been reaching out about that. They want to come and I’m like, this isn’t my event, but…
Shaan: So I came up with a name. I want to call it Camp MFM. We could do a bunch of these — adult summer camps, basically. Some like this one, which is ultra-exclusive: there were only supposed to be 12 people, it’s expanded to 24. And I think we should do some for the broader community. If you know the phrase “we don’t do public math,” or “Sam wants to own a lake,” or if you know the inside jokes of the pod — that’s your admission to Camp MFM. I think we should do these like twice a year.
Sam: Quarterly.
Shaan: Camp MFM should be the thing. I never wanted to do the work for it, and neither do you.
Sam: It wasn’t that much work for this one, was it?
Shaan: Kind of feels like it. Because as soon as I try to do something I’m like, well, let’s make it awesome. So we got Nike giving us sneakers from one of their players, we got custom swag, we rented these dope Airbnbs, we got a chef — all this stuff coming together. And then I’m like, well if we’re going to have good people, let’s get some exciting names in here.
But look — we could get a sponsor to say: “You get $300,000 a year to do cool stuff, but we get to be at all the events.” If somebody wants to sponsor Camp MFM, all the money goes to hiring a planner to actually run these things, and to the venue and logistics.
Sam: That’s a wrap. I’m out.