Sam and Shaan debate whether Olympic athletes are wasting their lives by optimizing for an arbitrary skill — with Shaan arguing sports transcend competition to represent culture, civil rights, and national identity. The conversation roams from startup ideas (Go Links, paper cut companies, Coolors.co) to a breakdown of consulting.com’s $800K/month profit, the 0.01% wealth rule on price sensitivity, and a full breakdown of the Tinder Swindler documentary with comedic suggestions on how the con man could have run a better operation.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host), Shaan Puri (host)
The Moments Between the Moments [00:00:00]
Sam: Shaan, do me a favor — go to our document and look at the video I posted. The Instagram link.
Shaan: Yeah.
Sam: So I found this over the weekend. I was sitting in the bath just watching this — right before the pod. Does that work? Okay. So I was sitting in the bath just chilling, going through Instagram — you ever sit in the bath on a bad Sunday, you just kind of sit for a few minutes?
Shaan: I have kids, dude. My bath is very different than yours now.
Sam: Well, that’s true. So I was just doing my Sunday bath, chilling, going through Instagram, and I got this video of this woman — I think she’s German — and a guy. They’re running together in a 200-meter race at the Paralympics. She’s blind and he’s the guide runner, and they win the race and they start hugging and she’s crying. Is that the coolest video you’ve seen today or what?
Shaan: I didn’t actually understand what was happening. It just looks like they’re racing against each other. I wouldn’t have even known what this was if you hadn’t said anything.
Sam: So she’s blind — or she might not be fully blind — and what they do in the Paralympics is they put a blindfold on everyone, because some people might be legally blind but can still see a little bit. So they blindfold everyone. And these are really fast women, so another woman can’t be their guide because the men are the ones who can keep up. So they’re all teamed up with a guy who helps put their foot in the blocks, puts their hand in the right place, and then has to run alongside them stride for stride. He’ll say things like, “You’re in second now,” or “You’re in first,” or “We’re on the straightaway.” Pretty cool stuff.
And it seems really rewarding. I’m going to do this. I’ve contacted a track coach.
Shaan: You saw this video, you got emotional — the bath bomb started hitting — you started getting misty, and you just decided this is what you’re born to do? Are you going to be the guide runner, or do you want somebody to guide you?
Sam: So here’s the deal. I am still fast enough that I can keep up with some of these blind women. I’m not as fast as the blind men, but I can keep up with the women a little bit, and I probably have five more years where I can. I was never good enough to go to the Olympics — especially now as I get older. This is my shot. This is my way into the Olympics: be a guide runner for a blind woman.
Shaan: Somebody called you out on Twitter for this.
Sam: They did. The perfect Sam backhanded compliment. You were like, “I’m not as fast as I used to be, and I’m still fast enough to keep up with an elite blind woman.” I wasn’t making fun of anyone. I’m just saying — it’s a fact. This lady runs 23 seconds. I can run 23 right now. This is awesome. I think it’d be way more fun. I’m not making fun of these people.
Shaan: You have to be a good person to do this at the Paralympics. You’re not a good enough person, dude. You’re too rough around the edges. You’re going to get canceled before the race.
Sam: I tip like 50% when I go out to eat. I’m a great guy.
Shaan: Yeah, that’s what you got to ask yourself — where’s that coming from? What are you trying to cover up with those 50% tips?
Sam: I’m a good dude, man.
Sam’s Spicy Take: The Olympics Are a Waste [00:06:00]
Sam: I’m glad you brought up the Olympics. Most people probably don’t even know this — the Winter Olympics are going on right now. Half the people learned that like yesterday. The ratings are the lowest they’ve ever been.
I forgot to tell you something. This is actually the most important thing — I can’t believe we didn’t talk about this earlier. But the Winter Olympics, in general, are less popular than the summer ones. My buddy Trevor — he was my roommate — he loves the Olympics. Whenever they’d come around, he’s like, “Clear the schedule, 24/7, I’m watching whatever’s on.” And I kind of got into it with him.
I do that too, by the way — summer, not winter.
Shaan: Exactly. So you should say that when you’re in the Winter Olympics guide bobsled team: “I can’t wait to do this for a real sport.”
Sam: So I was watching the Super Bowl, and then after the Super Bowl it auto-cut to the Winter Olympics. And I was watching somebody do the luge — or toboggan, I’m not sure which — and I thought of a very controversial take. This was too spicy for Twitter. I was like, I’m going to get so much heat for this.
Our buddy Nick tweeted something during the Super Bowl — because Nick likes to stir the pot on Twitter, that’s like his whole character. He was like, “Watching sports is a complete waste of time. You know what I’m doing right now? I’m working on my business. That’s how you get ahead — when everybody’s zigging, you zag.” And he’d been texting us photos of him partying earlier that day. So yeah, this guy’s not exactly grinding.
But that tweet got people fighting. Here’s my take — the one I didn’t want to get into on Twitter:
The Olympics are an example of how to waste your life.
I know that’s harsh. But here’s the take.
I once heard an interview with Max Levchin — he created PayPal, which is a pretty important internet invention, the ability to send money online. PayPal becomes a huge success. For his next act, he starts a company called Slide. Slide made all these little mini apps on top of MySpace and Facebook — slideshow photos with music, “throw a sheep at your friend,” that kind of thing. They made money through ads. It had explosive growth on top of really fast-growing social networks, but ultimately it didn’t really work out. Google bought them mostly because of Max.
So they ask Max: you did PayPal, then you had Slide — explosive growth but ultimately fizzled out. What did you learn? And he said something that has stuck with me. He said:
“Be careful, because you could spend your whole life optimizing for nothing.”
He’s like, you can optimize anything to infinity. We had brilliant Stanford engineers, and every day their job was to increase the poke-per-user ratio by this much, get clicks up, earn an extra three cents per click. We spent years just optimizing the viral coefficient of how to get Super Poke to spread across MySpace. And his message was: be careful. It doesn’t matter how smart you are — anything can be optimized to infinity. So pick wisely.
And this is the Olympics. This person who’s running and then diving into the luge — they got tricked by society. Society basically told them: devote your whole life, give up everything, train every day to become the best in the world at this arbitrary thing. Are you going to make a lot of money? No. Are you going to develop amazing other aspects of your personality? No. You’re going to go super single-minded to turn yourself into a human weapon of doing this one random thing — sliding your body down a chute for 40 seconds — and your job is to get it from 40 seconds to 39.98 seconds. That is your life.
And then hey, when it’s over — good luck. Go figure out the rest of your life now that you peaked at 26.
So I think the Olympics are an example of optimizing your life on the dumbest thing.
Shaan’s Counter: Sports Transcend the Game [00:14:00]
Shaan: Okay, go. I’m going to make an argument for why you are entirely incorrect. And I’ve got wonderful examples.
Sam: I thought you were going to tell me “you’re right.”
Shaan: Here’s why. Sports represent so much more than just optimizing a few seconds off your time. There are basically only two things that transcend language, religion, and culture: art and sports. Maybe family, but that’s about it. And so what sports represent is so much more than that.
Think about this. In the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, Hitler was in the stands doing a “Sieg Heil” — they were already starting to go down that road. And Jesse Owens wins the long jump and the 100-meter dash while Hitler’s standing there saying the Aryan race is the best. Jesse Owens sticks it to him.
Another example: Kathrine Switzer. Have you ever seen the famous picture of a woman running a marathon and there’s a race official trying to push her off the road? So for a long time, women weren’t allowed to run marathons. She came along — I think it was in the ’60s or ’70s — and she starts running, and there’s this famous picture of this guy literally trying to drag her off the course. And that signals to all women: no, you can do this. You’ve got this.
And then there’s Steve Prefontaine — this guy on my wall. He ran in the 1972 Olympics in Munich. You know what happened at those Olympics? Terrorists took over. They kidnapped Israeli athletes — wrestlers — and the whole thing ended in a tragedy. And the next day, they said: we have to compete. We have to bring this together. And Pre was at those Olympics saying things like, “To give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift.” He eventually inspired Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman to start a company they called Nike. Steve Prefontaine was their first athlete.
And this is all because of the Olympics. Sports represent race relations, women’s rights — look at the refugee Olympic team. In London, I believe it was Sudan or the Congo — a country going through civil war — they created a refugee team. You now have your own country for the purposes of the Olympics. When Taiwan and Hong Kong are going through political issues, it’s a huge deal whether they get their own country at the Games.
A Kenyan swimmer competing in the first-ever swimming event for Kenya at the Summer Olympics — this is beyond sports. This is a really big deal.
Sam: That was good. Okay, but just tell me one thing: who’s the greatest luge competitor of all time?
Shaan: Everything I just said was only for the Summer Olympics. The Winter Olympics are fake. If you need a judge on your sport, it’s probably not a real sport. Track, field, swimming — those are real sports.
Sam: I’m mostly just messing around anyway. I think it’s obviously cool when people excel at things.
My point is more like — if my kid had the potential to be the greatest, you know, third-person in the bobsled in the country, and here’s what you have to do: every day, every weekend for the next 20 years of their life goes into optimizing their body and mind for this one arbitrary game that was made up — that’s a lot of sacrifice. You get character building, life lessons — things you can also get from the Boy Scouts. Potentially a moment of fame if you actually achieve the thing. And the knowledge that you gave it everything.
So would I rather be Steve Prefontaine — good-looking mustache runner guy — or would I rather be Phil Knight? I’d rather be Phil Knight.
Shaan: And where’s Pre now?
Sam: He died three years after Nike was founded. Drunk driving accident.
Shaan: Okay. Joke’s not so funny now.
Sam: Yeah, it didn’t work out for him. Wait — was he actually a co-founder of Nike, or did he just inspire them?
Shaan: He was in their crew. He was their first sponsored athlete, like their fifth or tenth employee. And if you ask Phil Knight who Nike’s mascot is, he’ll say Prefontaine.
Sam: Anyway, my point is — a lot of things that are fun are best done as hobbies versus trying to become the best in the world at them. I can play Call of Duty and have a bunch of fun with my friends. I can even play the competitive side because I like to scratch that itch. But once I try to become the best in the world at it, the level of sacrifice changes everything.
Like people who dedicate their lives to being an average D3 basketball player. Could it work? Maybe. Could you go to the NBA? Sure. But the writing’s on the wall for most people. Maybe you should actually study a real major instead.
And if you’re enjoying every step of the way, fantastic. But a lot of things in my experience are most enjoyable when done as hobbies versus with the competitive pursuit of being the absolute best.
A guy I used to work out with at his dojo said to me — I was like, “I really like this, I might start a business around it.” He goes, “Easiest way to ruin a hobby is turn it into a job.” I’d never really thought about that.
Shaan: Yeah, there are some things that are really fun as hobbies that become really unfun as jobs. Like working at a Cinnabon. You love eating Cinnabon — working at a Cinnabon, smelling Cinnabon, eating free Cinnabon every day? Now it’s not so great.
That’s how I feel about business sometimes. I go to my friend Nick Ray’s meetups, and he’s like, “Say your name and what you do for work,” and I’m like, I don’t want to say what I do. I’m sick of talking about work. That’s all I ever talk about.
Startup Ideas: Sheets.new and Go Links [00:28:00]
Sam: Alright, let’s do some other stuff. I have a couple things.
So I was in a pitch meeting — this founder was pitching me his company, screen sharing, showing me a product demo. It was a data analytics tool. And he goes, “Yeah, so check this out” — and he just opens up the browser. I’d never seen this before. He goes to the address bar and types sheets.new and hits enter. And it just opened up a blank Google Sheet instantly.
I said, “Whoa, what was that?” And he was annoyed with me because I kept going on tangents. He wanted to show me his product, not the fact that you could type sheets.new. But I was floored. I Google “Google Drive,” click through the menus, find “New,” find “Spreadsheet,” click again — this whole thing I do six times a day. And with just that, you just skip all of it.
It reminded me of a whole company called Go Links. Have you heard of Go Links?
Shaan: No. What is that?
Sam: So when I was at Twitch, this guy Dan — he was like the number two guy, kind of VP of everything — he said, “God, we have so many documents. I just have bookmarks and tabs with all these docs open all the time. Why don’t we just use Go Links?”
What Go Links does is it lets you set up a thing like go/annual-plan or go/plan — basically a human-readable link that anchors to any doc. So if you typed go/annual-plan last year and it pointed to the 2021 doc, you just swap the destination. The link stays the same. You can always type go/plan and it takes you to whatever the current version is.
I was like, wow, this is so useful. Most people haven’t heard of it, and I think it’s a pretty expensive enterprise tool — they raised a $27 million Series A.
So I think somebody could build this as a simpler version for the startup world.
Shaan: I just invested in one. It’s called Nira. I told you about it too.
Sam: Is that the same thing?
Shaan: Slightly different. I don’t think they do the link shortcuts — but maybe they should. What Nira does is track who has access to all your company documents. Companies have all these docs, then people get fired or move teams but still have access. Like, a contractor you hired three years ago still has a link to your numbers. There’s no central place to see who has access to what.
Sam: That’s more of an IT security thing though. Go Links feels like something I can adopt myself without going through a CSO. And they have a free plan?
Shaan: Go Links does, yeah.
Sam: I don’t know why this isn’t more popular. This is a real problem.
This also got me thinking — what are the other problems like this? I call them paper cut companies. Death by a thousand paper cuts. What’s something that’s irritating but you do so often that it’s just a constant paper cut?
Screenshots is another one. I invested in a company called Bubbles that tries to make async video sharing better. Loom makes it work better too. Also the clipboard — copy and paste. I’ve been thinking for years: how can I make my clipboard better? A better clipboard manager. That’s always been interesting to me.
Shaan: The problem with these types of products is you have to be really inventive. People who build something like Airtable or Notion — those people are kind of geniuses. They know that if you hover your mouse over this, it needs to feel like that. They sweat the details.
Sam: I’m not detail-oriented at all. If this camera showed my desk, you would see that clearly. Everything is sloppy. My camera right now is slightly crooked and I just don’t care.
But I remember the first time I used Slack in beta — I should have invested, I just wasn’t thinking that way back then. A designer sent me a hex code in a message — like a color code for a logo — and it just turned into a tiny color swatch automatically. I remember thinking: why did they do that? What level of care went into caring that a hex code would auto-format with a little swatch next to it?
That’s what I mean. Nobody does that unless they’re a real product person who’s also a heavy user — who gets so annoyed at the paper cuts that they just remove them.
Coolors.co: Beautiful Businesses [00:36:00]
Sam: Let me give you another example. Colors.
Go to Coolors — C-O-O-L-O-R-S dot co. Whenever I’m building a new product or website, I need to pick a good color scheme. I’m mostly a black and white guy, but you need a gradient of gray, and then you want links to be some shade of red or blue. What goes with what?
Coolors shows you five colors. You can randomly generate new ones, or tell it which ones you want. You see the lock button? Say you like the blue — you click lock on that, and it shows you four more that fit. You lock another one, it shows you three more. It just keeps narrowing until you’ve got a palette.
Shaan: That’s amazing.
Sam: And I love it. I’ve been using this for years and years. It started out as a tiny little project. Now it gets five million monthly uniques. It has a Figma plugin, a Chrome extension, a pro version.
Shaan: How does it make money?
Sam: Ads plus a pro version — $36 a year, which is too cheap. If I owned this, I’d log into the email list, do a control-find for “uber” and “adobe” and any companies that have bought it, and upsell them on something way more expensive. But the point is — this is a beautiful business. The product is data and tooling, you sell it digitally, and the more people use it the more valuable it becomes. And the people who need it, like designers, have the budget.
This is the type of company you could own for 30 years and probably make consistent seven-figure profit every single year.
The 12-Star Experience (charity: water / Airbnb) [00:42:00]
Shaan: Can I tell you a philosophy I heard that explains why some hotels and some products just feel good even when you can’t put your finger on it?
I was talking to Scott Harrison — the founder of charity: water. They put on incredible events. Everything they do is impeccably designed. And he told me his wife Victoria has a phrase for this:
“All the magic is in the moments between the moments.”
He said it’s the moments between the moments. Everybody else puts their energy into the big spectacle — the screens, the reveal, the headline moment. They also care about what happens in between those moments. The walkway between the two rooms, not just what’s in the two rooms.
And now that I’m reading the biography of the guy who started the Four Seasons, he talks about the same thing. Before the Four Seasons, people didn’t necessarily have the best mattresses — so he just got the best mattresses money could buy. You couldn’t get your shoes cleaned at a hotel — he hired a guy to clean shoes. The showers weren’t great — so their showers were just slightly better. He focused on all these tiny things, and it added up.
Sam: Have you read Danny Meyer’s book, Setting the Table?
Shaan: Yeah. Amazing.
Sam: And there’s Chip Conley — he had a bunch of boutique hotels and then was the key advisor to the founders of Airbnb.
Shaan: On Masters of Scale, Brian Chesky talks about how he runs this exercise called the 12-star experience. Here’s how it works.
He sat down with the Airbnb team and said: our product is not the website where you book the place. Our product is the experience you have when you get there. Everyone agrees. Okay.
What’s a 1-star experience? Your card gets charged twice, you can’t figure out how to get in, the listing looks nothing like the photos, there are cockroaches everywhere.
What’s a 3-star experience? A little better on each of those.
What’s a 5-star experience? Easy to book, the lockbox opens smoothly, it looks just like the photos, the host leaves you a bottle of wine.
Everyone thinks that’s the finish line. But he keeps going.
What’s a 6-star experience? What’s a 7-star experience? They picked you up from the airport — there’s someone there with a sign, they drive you home, they hand you a cheat sheet of cool spots in the neighborhood.
He keeps pushing until they get to 12 stars. And he says: now we know what’s possible. We blew the roof off. We took the volume to 10, then we asked “can we go higher?” and turned it to 15. We’re not going to deliver that every time, but if we never thought about it, we couldn’t translate any element of it into our actual experience.
One thing that never came to fruition — but came out of that exercise — was that Brian was tinkering with building an airline. Because the perfect 12-star would be: we fly you there, you’re already on the Airbnb plane, it’s your own plane. They were actually exploring either opening an airline or offering flights.
But other things did come from it — like Airbnb Experiences. You get to the city, and now what? Well, my stay isn’t just the house — it’s what I do outside the house. What if a local person could take you on a wine tasting at a winery, not a corporate tour bus, but someone who actually works there and does this on weekends? That became part of the product.
Sam: To me, that’s how you translate the “moments between the moments” thing into real life. Whenever I do this with a company: what would be the great experience? You get the product and it works, okay. 6-star? Well, the packaging is hard to open — what if it was easy to open? What else? What if inside every package there was this other little thing? What if the founder followed up two days later asking how it went?
This exercise of taking your team through 1-star, 3-star, 5-star, up to 12-star works in any business, not just hospitality.
Shaan: I remember hearing this story — I think it was around 2014 or 2015. It’s always stuck.
consulting.com and Sam Evans [00:55:00]
Sam: Let me tell you about a company I think I could actually start — and knock out of the park. But first, there’s this guy named Sam Evans. Do you know him?
Shaan: Is that the slicked-back-hair guy? Consulting.com?
Sam: Yeah. So this guy rubbed me the wrong way for a long time. And looking back, I think I was wrong. He had this website, Consulting.com — at its worst, it was a two-to-ten-thousand dollar course on how to start a business. At best, it was like a community and accelerator. And he scaled it to about 30 million in revenue, then apparently 50 or 60 million.
Then he vanished. And he just put out a YouTube video that says, “I’m back.” He’s like, “For the past two years, I hated life. We scaled too quickly — we were spending $50K a day on Facebook ads and we weren’t even making that much profit. So I decided to change everything.”
And over the last two years, he crushed it. In January, he made $800,000 in revenue. His expenses — including payroll and all paid ads — were $60,000.
Shaan: That’s an insane margin.
Sam: So basically times that by 10 — $8 million a year in revenue with $600K in expenses. Is that crazy or what?
Shaan: It depends — is it sustainable, and is it growing?
Sam: It probably won’t grow much, but I think it’s sustainable. When I did the All Access Pass newsletter — paid newsletter, making maybe $50K a month — my expenses were like $300 for ConvertKit and $500 for a VA. It looked insane margin-wise. But to grow it, expenses would have had to go way up. It depends whether his ad spend is low because his ads are ultra-efficient, or because he already has a big list. They said they don’t run ads anymore, but they previously spent millions.
Shaan: So the website already had the traffic.
Sam: Exactly. Someone I knew who worked there early on said the company was doing about $30 million with around $10 million in free cash flow. About half of that — $15 to 16 million — came from one product: a $2,000-$3,000 course on how to start your own consulting business. From there, they upsell you into a $5,000 course on how to create a course. And once you hit $500K in consulting revenue, you get to join a mastermind for $25K-$50K that helps you get to a million-plus.
I actually went through the funnel. I did the phone call just to figure out what it was. It’s pretty good, man. I gave the guy a hard time because he just comes off a little… off. But I think that was unfair of me. I don’t actually know the guy. I think he’s just an oddball, which is totally fine.
Shaan: I think it was also just his haircut.
Sam: I watched a lot of his videos and was like, “Something is off here.” But I think my judgment was just wrong.
Boardroom Insiders and Beautiful Data Businesses [01:02:00]
Sam: The second thing — go to Boardroom Insiders. So this company was just bought for $25 million by a company called Euromoney.
What it does: Boardroom Insiders provides executives’ profiles to sales, marketing, and recruiting teams. Basically it’s a database of executives at major companies, and for the big ones, it has in-depth profiles — their personal interests, their career history, what they’re focused on, who they know. And it claims none of the data comes from scraping, which I don’t totally buy.
Whether that’s true or not, the business is: hire editors who monitor the web and manually build and maintain a database of tens of thousands of executives — then sell access for tens of thousands of dollars.
Shaan: I put this in the “beautiful businesses” category. The product is data. You sell it digitally. You collect it through either automated scraping or outsourced phone canvassing. Every bit of data you add makes the whole dataset more valuable. And you can charge a high price because the people who need it — executive recruiters, enterprise sales teams — make a ton of money when they place a CMO somewhere. They don’t have the time to go figure it out themselves.
Sam: There’s also PitchBook, which did something similar. PitchBook is owned by a publicly traded company, does around $200 million in revenue, probably worth over a billion. What they did: they hired huge teams in the Philippines who would basically call VCs and ask if they invested in a particular company. Then they’d triangulate: this company raised this much, at this valuation, from these five people — who also invested in these 18 other companies, which are growing at this rate based on LinkedIn headcount.
Shaan: And CrunchBase is another version of this.
Sam: Yeah. These are interesting because it’s like the office where Michael is reading from his notes about the client — “How is Greg, your 14-year-old homosexual son?” — and Dwight’s like, “It was written in green.” And Michael’s like, “Green means go.” And he called somebody’s gay son.
Shaan: Oh my god. That’s great.
The 0.01% Wealth Rule [01:10:00]
Sam: Can I tell you about something interesting I read? Nathan Barry came on the pod — he’s the founder of ConvertKit — and he pointed me to some blog posts he liked. I went back and read one: the 0.01% rule. Have you seen this?
Shaan: No.
Sam: So basically, the idea is about price sensitivity and how the way you think about money should change as your net worth grows. He talks about a threshold: below 0.01% of your net worth, you become price insensitive. You just don’t really feel it anymore.
So if you’re worth $5 million, 0.01% is $500. Below $500 — you just don’t really care. You can ball out at a restaurant. You book the nicer hotel without thinking about it.
He draws this curve. At level zero — net worth under a million — your 0.01% is under $100. So you care about grocery prices, you notice when eggs cost $2 more. The next jump: you stop caring about restaurant prices. Then vacation prices. Then flying first class. Then buying a house. And eventually — when you’re worth over $100 million — prices just don’t mean anything to you.
I thought it was an interesting framework. And the reason I bring it up is that very few people I know are properly calibrated on this.
Shaan: Like your dad?
Sam: Yeah. My dad — no matter how wealthy he’s gotten, the trauma of not having money is so deeply ingrained that Starbucks prices make him angry. He’s like, “$4.99? I could make this for so much less.” He’s anchored to prices from the ’80s. It hurts him to spend more than some amount regardless of what’s in his bank account.
He’s too far on one side. I’m too far on the other.
Shaan: I’m more like your dad. I freak out about the backsplash in my kitchen — it’s $800 and I’ve been putting it off for over a year. I know it will add value to the home and make me happier. I’m still fretting.
Sam: There’s actually a good business idea here. Financial therapy. Therapy is this broad thing with a lot of stigma. But spinning off specifically a money coach — someone who works on your relationship with money and pricing — that feels like something people actually need.
Ramit Sethi is kind of doing this. He’s got this podcast where couples argue about money. He’s all about: look, you’re worth $3 million and you’re fighting about an $80 purchase.
Shaan: I would try to find a therapist like this, and when I met them I’d be like, “Look — I’m not trying to sound like a douche, but I’m a high achiever, I want to do cool things. I don’t want to talk about processing emotions. I want to talk about getting to the next level.” What were you actually asking her?
Sam: The blunt version: I’ve got rich people problems. I’m mostly insecure about certain things and I want to use that insecurity to go places. I don’t need you to tell me “you made a million dollars last year, isn’t that good enough?” No. I need you to understand what’s at stake.
Shaan: That’s why Tony Robbins gets paid a million dollars-plus per client. His clients are Serena Williams and Ray Dalio. He’s successful himself, and his clients are objectively extremely successful — but everyone can improve the little voice in their head.
The Tinder Swindler [01:22:00]
Shaan: Did you watch The Tinder Swindler?
Sam: No, but I saw your picture with it. What’s the deal?
Shaan: Okay. So it’s a Netflix documentary about this guy. His Tinder profile shows him as a normal-ish looking dude, but clearly living a cool lifestyle — lots of travel, very nice clothes. Girls swipe right. He takes them out, wines and dines them, makes himself look like a total baller — like a prince out of a fairy tale.
His backstory: his dad owns a diamond company. He’s the son of a billionaire. If you Google it, there was actually a real person he was impersonating — he’d kind of created a profile around that.
Then, about a month in, he texts them a picture with his bodyguard and says, “My bodyguard got attacked. They’re tracking my location. I can’t use my credit cards right now. Can I borrow your credit card while I sort this out? Make sure you get your limits raised — I have business meetings.”
These women end up $150,000-$200,000 in debt as he racks up charges. Then he says, “Hey, go get a quick loan and send me the money.” And it’s a Ponzi scheme — he’s using one woman’s money to wine and dine the next woman, running multiple women at once, telling them all the same story.
Sam: Quick reaction — how does it end?
Shaan: The women figure it out and go to the credit card companies. The agents look at each other like, “It’s him. We’ve been after this guy for years.” The women feel cheated on plus conned. But technically — they gave him the money. They called the credit card company themselves to raise their limits. So legally, it’s complicated.
He ends up getting a 15-month sentence — not even for this, for something associated with it — serves five months, gets out. He’s out there right now living his life. New model girlfriend. He went to a plastic surgeon and said, “I want my eyes, cheekbones, chin, and mouth all restructured.” The surgeon said, “I’m not doing this — only a criminal would want this surgery.”
The women exposed him in the Norwegian press because law enforcement was moving too slow. Netflix made it into a documentary. And now the guy’s basically public enemy number one, but a lot of people watching are like, “These girls were stupid. You were with him for the money.” Which is really dumb — they deserve way more sympathy than that.
Sam: What a waste of talent. Like, Leonardo DiCaprio played basically this character in Catch Me If You Can and it was awesome. The problem with this documentary is it’s the real guy, and the real guy has a super punchable face. If it were Matt Damon playing him, you’d fall in love with the smooth con man. But as a documentary, you just want to punch him.
The memes are amazing though. I had someone Photoshop my head onto a photo where it looks like I’m with the guy, and I tweeted: “Me with my sister’s new boyfriend.”
Shaan: Is he American?
Sam: No, he’s Israeli.
Shaan: Screw this guy, man.
Sam: You know, I just feel like he did this all wrong. If you’re going to do all this effort, you should be more strategic.
Critique number one: could have just married rich. Seemed rich, married rich, divorced, took half. That would have worked.
Critique number two: put more wood behind fewer arrows. He could have caught one very wealthy person instead of running this on tons of women at once.
Critique number three: go B2B, bro. Corporate swindling would have worked way better. You heard about the guy who just started sending fake invoices to Microsoft and Apple and just got paid? He was sending invoices to accounts payable and they’d just pay some of them. When they went back to figure out what happened, nobody knew who this vendor was.
Shaan: He should have just started an actual diamond company. Could have made a lot more money. If you’re this good at getting women emotionally invested in your lifestyle — just actually sell the diamonds.
Sam: This guy needs to be on Facebook Ads Manager instead of Tinder. That’s my best take.
Also — you want the full critique? He blew all the money on partying. Bottle service, clubs. You couldn’t pay me to do that. Diversify your assets, man. Buy some crypto, buy a home. Do something with the money.
Shaan: Our buddy Jack Butcher pointed something out: Netflix is going to make a ton of money off this documentary. Pay off these women’s debts. There’s a GoFundMe out there. Jack’s like: Netflix, you need to pay off this woman’s $200,000 debt.
Sam: That’s a no-brainer. If they paid it off, that story should have come out by now. If they didn’t — either fire your PR person or pay the debt. You have two choices.
Shaan: That’s a great point. How many likes did that tweet get?
Sam: Probably not that many. Everyone’s just looking at Jack for NFT stuff now.
Shaan: Alright. That’s a good episode.
Sam: Yeah.