Religion: The Greatest Business Ever Invented [00:00:00]
Shaan: Let me walk you through the criteria for the greatest business of all time — before I tell you which business it is.
Shaan: High LTV — customers who stay for a long time and pay you for a long time. Long operating history — ideally a thousand-plus years without going out of business. No taxes. Essentially no cost of goods — volunteers do all the work. Franchisees pop up everywhere and pay you a royalty. A balance sheet with hundreds of billions in assets and no liabilities. A product beloved by millions with insane product-market fit. And not only does it spread by word of mouth — some people literally leave their homes, go door to door, and tell strangers about it. The product addresses core needs: morals, ethics, community, self-development. It guarantees you a good life today and a good afterlife when you die. It touches every part of your life cycle from birth to funeral. It has the number one best-selling book of all time. And the TAM is every human being from birth to death.
Shaan: Religion is the greatest business ever invented.
Sam: I was born and raised Catholic. I catch what you’re throwing. Billions in revenue, tax-free, basically no customer acquisition cost, super high LTV. Product spreads by word of mouth and people are willing to die for it. Has a franchise model. Lasts a thousand years.
Shaan: And there are five big religions that all share these same characteristics. The specific one I want to talk about today: the Mormon Church, because there’s been a news story kicking around since 2019 that I think didn’t get enough attention.
Sam: Oh yeah — the hundred billion dollar fund.
Shaan: Ben Wilson, you’re on here as our resident Mormon. Have we offended you yet?
Ben: Not yet.
The Mormon Church’s $100 Billion Hedge Fund [00:08:00]
Shaan: Explain the fund and your reaction to the whistleblower story.
Ben: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — popularly known as the Mormon Church — tithes its members at 10% of income. On top of that, the church has owned a portfolio of businesses since roughly the early 1900s, when it basically controlled Utah. It doesn’t run most of those businesses anymore but it kept the proceeds, which got invested. Because of its association with the church, the investment fund doesn’t pay taxes. And that fund has grown to over $100 billion.
Shaan: They own $40 billion worth of U.S. stocks — Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Tesla. They also made eight million on the GameStop squeeze. They own two percent of all land in Florida. They outbid Bill Gates for $200 million of land in Washington. They own a $100 million hotel in Maui. They invest in hedge funds. And they donated $64 million to charity since 1985 — which is the number that created the controversy, because that’s pretty small for a $100 billion fund.
Ben: Right. The complaint from former members was: why am I giving 10% of my income when this money is clearly not being redistributed? And then the church called it a “rainy day fund.” Which is the all-time PR line. You have a hundred billion dollars and it’s a rainy day fund.
Shaan: They also used 13 shell companies to obscure what they were investing in. The explanation was: “We didn’t want our members to try to copy our portfolio — they might mismanage their own funds without our information.” Which is an insane answer given that it’s public company stock.
Sam: I just love this response. You have all this money, nobody can see where it’s going, it went through shell companies, and the answer is: “Rainy day fund, and also we didn’t want members to feel bad and stop contributing.” That’s the whole thing. I give them an A for consistency.
Ben: The perspective from inside the church is mostly: good, more money for when we need it. One guy famously sued for his tithing back. The leaders’ salaries got leaked too — $170,000 a year with a Toyota Highlander.
Shaan: Which is actually remarkable. The people running a $100 billion fund are making $170K. That’s below market.
Sam: There’s also Ministry Brands — the PE firm that has bought up 30 church-related software businesses. Does $100 million in EBITDA. So not only is religion itself the greatest business model, there’s a whole software ecosystem running on it.
Team Jorge: Psyops as a Service [00:22:00]
Shaan: Okay, next topic. I found a story that blew my mind and was totally underplayed.
Shaan: Summer 2022. A bunch of journalists from different newspapers teamed up and went undercover to find this Israeli company called Team Jorge. The guy who runs it — Tal Hanan — runs what he calls a “private intelligence agency.” Their pricing: $50,000 to hack into someone’s phone, $400,000 to put them on retainer, $6 million to get involved in an election.
Sam: Six million dollars to meddle in an election. That’s shockingly low for how much chaos that can cause.
Shaan: Their three-step process: gather intelligence, construct a narrative, deploy maximum impact. Here’s how the pitch meeting went. These journalists posed as representatives of an African government. Tal shows his phone to prove his capabilities: “Look — I just sent your mom a message from your Telegram account.” He was already logged in before the meeting started.
Shaan: Their main tool is called “Profiler” — it creates fake social media accounts. They have 39,000 of them. They figure out what narrative they want to build, use the fake profiles to amplify it, and then bribe journalists or seed fake blogs that the accounts then share.
Shaan: Real example: They claimed to have sent an Amazon package — a sex toy — to a politician’s home with a note that made it look like he was having an affair. They then sent a film crew to capture the fallout. The wife got the package. The politician slept in his office for two days.
Sam: The most unhinged part of this: to demonstrate capabilities to the journalists, they asked Team Jorge to make “Emmanuel the Emu” — a TikTok emu with a large following — go viral as dead. For no reason. And they did it overnight. The owner woke up to see “RIP Emmanuel the Emu” trending and had to post: “I just ran outside to check — he’s completely fine.”
Shaan: This is why I believe in fake news as a real phenomenon. I’ve seen a tiny version of this myself. I used to write made-up net worth articles and watch them propagate across other sites — the same wrong number would show up everywhere. If you can do that with a small operation, imagine what $6 million buys you.
Sam: This connects to Steve Bartlett’s Thunderclap. He owned a network of fan pages — Hermione’s Favorite Books, Freshman Problems, Things I Overheard in Manchester. If you were 14-21 and British, you probably followed four of his pages without knowing they were connected.
Shaan: When we wanted to grow Bebo, he said: “We’re not going to say ‘this is a great app, download it.’ We’re going to say ‘my mom’s reaction when she sees me checking Bebo for the 43rd time’ — with a photo of a mom slapping her kid.” I said, “That seems like a bad ad.” He said: “When someone sees an app with 47 notifications and someone complaining about it, they want to know what it is. It doesn’t look like an ad. They’ll search for it.”
Sam: That’s the Thunderclap — all the accounts start talking about something on the same day and it feels like everybody’s already talking about it.
Parallel Live: Fake Celebrity Status App [00:40:00]
Shaan: Quick one. There’s an app called Parallel Live. It’s a fake livestream simulator. The screen looks exactly like an Instagram Live — “LIVE” badge, 50,000 viewers counter, flooding fake comments. You’re not actually streaming. It just looks like you are.
Sam: Why.
Shaan: The video ad shows this guy walking up to a girl at a bar and she goes: “No way — 50,000 people are watching this right now? Oh my God.” And she goes from uninterested to immediately engaged because he seems famous.
Sam: This is genius and I’m genuinely mad I didn’t think of it. I did a version of this in my twenties — we hired a guy to follow us with a camera on his shoulder like a reality TV crew. Just to see what would happen. We didn’t need to approach anyone, pay for things, or wait in line. It worked perfectly.
Shaan: I looked at the developer’s other apps. There’s a productivity app, a relationship tracker (2 stars, 17 reviews), and then Parallel Live. You can see the evolution: starts with things he thinks people should want, ends with things people actually want.
Meeting with James Currier (NFX): Five Takeaways [00:48:00]
Shaan: I went and met James Currier in Palo Alto. He runs NFX — a $1.2B fund focused on network effects. Before that, he built Tickle in the early internet era (sold to Monster for ~$100M), then helped incubate Bebo (which my former boss Michael Birch sold for $850M).
Shaan: First observation: his office is directly on University Ave in the middle of Palo Alto. I noted that as intentional — proximity is power. More on that later.
Shaan: My five takeaways:
Shaan: One: his lifestyle. He spends four months a year with his kids — structured time, spread across the year. He’s writing a TV show for fun. He’s 55, I’m 35. I’m always hunting for blueprints. What does a great life at 55 look like? Cherry-pick the best pieces from people you respect.
Shaan: Two: the content spectrum. He drew a line. On one end: Gary Vee, 500 Startups, Tony Robbins — mass market, high volume, motivational, broad. On the other end: NFX’s blog — extremely niche, written for A+ founders building network effect businesses. He doesn’t need a million views. He needs the right hundred people to read it.
Shaan: He said MFM is in the middle. His advice: don’t slide toward mass market to chase views. Your content defines your network. The deals you get, the people who reach out, the room you end up in — it all flows from who you’re creating for. Going mass market for views gets you a mass market network. Stay in the middle or move upmarket.
Shaan: Three: Stan’s four rules for a 20-year business partnership. Stan is James’s co-founder and has been his partner for 20+ years. He got recruited by Mark Zuckerberg to run Facebook Messenger — James’s reaction was “no problem, go, I’ll run NFX.” That’s the relationship.
Sam: What are the four rules?
Shaan: Rule one: make it a giving contest. When James sold their first company, Stan had a small equity stake. James evened it up right before close even though he had every right not to. Stan’s framing: “I never feel like I’m trying to get more. I feel like we’re both trying to give more.” It’s not about who’s contributing more — effort, sacrifice, credit — you turn it into a competition to be more generous.
Shaan: Rule two: the sleep test. When you have a deadlock, don’t use logic to decide. Ask who’s more emotionally invested in this outcome. If you care more, we go your way. If I care more, we go my way. “Who can’t sleep at night if this goes the wrong direction?” — that determines who gets the call.
Shaan: Rule three: think in 20-year increments. What decision would I make today knowing we’re going to be partners for 20 years? Not: what’s the best move this quarter. The long frame changes every decision.
Shaan: Rule four: Stan’s personal superpower. He said he’s not that talented but he doesn’t have the bias most people have — needing to be right. Most people look at data and already have a story they want to find support for. They search until the data confirms it. Stan asks: “What story is this data telling me?” No prior story. Just: what’s actually here? He attributes his business success mostly to that.
Sam: And what makes Zuckerberg great according to Stan?
Shaan: He was sitting with Zuck when the WhatsApp decision came up. Everyone said $19B was too much — WhatsApp had no revenue. And Stan said: “What’s great about you Mark is you’re smart enough to know you got lucky once and found lightning in a bottle. And you’re smart enough to recognize when somebody else got lucky too. You knew messaging was the winner of this era and these guys had it. You needed to pay whatever price to get it. There’s only one winner, the way there was only one Facebook.”
The Network Density Argument [01:12:00]
Shaan: Last thing from the James meeting: why his office is on University Ave.
Shaan: He drew a circle. White-hot center of Silicon Valley at that time — Sequoia, Benchmark, the founding-era Facebook and Google people. One ring out — James and his network. They knew those people, had overlapping relationships. Then he and Stan went off to do their own thing. Built their own island. It felt entrepreneurial. And when they did:
Shaan: He had a meeting scheduled with the Uber founders. Travis was doing something cool. A mutual friend set it up. He was busy with his own thing, canceled the meeting. He would have invested. Would have been a small check because it was in the network — not because of insight. He missed it because he stopped paying into the network.
Shaan: His thesis: Silicon Valley is a network. In a network, value concentrates at the core. The closer you are physically and relationally to the center, the more serendipitous value you capture. YC works because Paul Graham immediately moved the second batch from Boston to Silicon Valley. Every other accelerator copied the exact blueprint in other cities and got 10x worse outcomes. The mechanism is network density.
Shaan: His advice: “Be an API.” Make it clear how people can interface with you — how they can give you help, how you can give them help. Andrew Wilkinson buys internet businesses. When someone mentions a company for sale, people route it to him because he’s made his interface legible. That’s what the network runs on.
Sam: I live where I live for family reasons. But if I were single I’d be in Palo Alto tomorrow. 100%.
Shaan: I think about this a lot. I know the thesis. I’ve lived in Silicon Valley for 12 years. And I realized sitting in that meeting that I’ve been building my own little island — creating content, doing my thing — and not maximizing the network I spent 12 years building. The meeting itself was a reminder that going belly-to-belly is almost always worth it.