Shaan and Sam each spent time with several high-profile founders and entrepreneurs over the past week and share the one thing that stuck with them from each encounter: Hayes Barnard’s “play full out” energy, Buck Mason’s Sasha Conn compounding 12 years of quiet focus, Hormozi’s “student of the game” framework, Wade Foster of Zapier’s unassuming nerdiness, Eric Glyman of Ramp’s combination of radical kindness and intense precision, and Sam’s brother-in-law’s asymmetric bet that became a billion-dollar real estate portfolio. Central theme: the money is secondary to energy richness, and Costco-sampling other people’s lives is faster than running experiments on yourself.
Speakers: Shaan Puri (host), Sam Parr (host)
The Costco Sample Method [00:00:00]
Shaan: In the last ten days, both Sam and I went and did podcasts — in person, hanging out at people’s houses — with guests who are either billionaires or soon to be. Not just recording a podcast. Actually spending 12-24 hours with each person.
Both of us are students of the game of life. One way you do that is to run experiments on yourself — slow and painful. The faster way is to get a Costco sample of somebody else’s life. Try the fig. Try the almond butter. Is this something I actually want?
There are maybe 4,500 billionaires in the world. Every year we get to hang out with maybe 30 of them. The money is almost the least interesting part. What’s interesting is how they live and how they think. And it wears off on you.
Sam: I want to do one thing from each person — the takeaway that didn’t make it into the actual episode.
Hayes Barnard: Play Full Out [00:04:00]
Shaan: Hayes Barnard. Most people don’t know who he is. The short version: grew up in Missouri with a single mom, flunked first grade because of dyslexia, became a top sales guy at Oracle in the ’90s when Larry Ellison was the richest man in the world. Saw Mark Benioff leave and start Salesforce, thought: maybe I can do something like that.
He left and started a mortgage company — didn’t know anything about mortgages but figured he could sell them over the phone the same way he’d sold Oracle databases. In 2008, he survived the crash because he’d been underwriting conservatively when everyone else was writing subprime. Then he branched into solar — a business that sold clean energy and lower utility bills to homeowners. That solar company made up something like 50% of Solar City’s revenue at its peak. Solar City got acquired by Tesla for a few billion. Hayes walked away with substantial Tesla stock, which went on a crazy run from there.
He’s now a self-made billionaire, running a $10 billion company, and lives on Lake Tahoe.
When I asked him to do a podcast, he didn’t just say yes and send a calendar invite. He called Ben, my producer, two or three times to discuss: “How do we make this amazing?” Not “what should we talk about” — how do we make this amazing. He kept calling back because he wasn’t satisfied.
He also didn’t just invite us to record. He said: “Be at my house at 5am.”
Sam: Oh my god.
Shaan: Yeah. We show up at 5am. He’s already awake, fully energized. We get in a boat, go two minutes out into the middle of Lake Tahoe in complete darkness, cut the engine. He does this 15-minute breathwork routine he learned from a guru on some island. Then he says: “All right boys — stand up.” We jump in the lake. Cold plunge in Lake Tahoe.
Then he’s like: “You see those rocks? I always see those rocks during my routine but I’ve never gone out there. You guys down to swim out there?” And so we’re swimming from rock to rock like little kids. This is all before 8am.
Then he told us about the time hack. He’s like: if you do something new every day, you mark the day. When your days are all the same, they blur together and you can’t remember what happened five days ago. If you do one new thing, the day becomes memorable. So he asked: “What’s the new thing we’re going to do today?” And then he pointed at those rocks.
The takeaway: this guy does everything at a ten. I was doing those same activities at a seven. He just goes for it. He plays full out. And he told me it started when he worked for Elon — ten years with Elon broke his frame of reference.
Sam: I remember the whole time we were doing whatever that day, he was at a level I’ve never seen sustained for twelve straight hours. And he didn’t check his phone a single time in twelve hours. I asked him about it at the end. He said: “If I’m with you, I’m with you. If I’m working, I’m working.”
Shaan: The money is a footnote. The man is energy rich. That’s the thing. I went out there thinking I was hanging out with someone who was money-rich. I left thinking: energy richness is the thing I want.
Sasha Conn, Buck Mason: 12 Years [00:18:00]
Sam: I hung out with the guy who founded Buck Mason. His name is Sasha Conn. Most people in the startup world haven’t heard of him because he specifically doesn’t want to be famous. He started the company in 2013 selling one thing: the best t-shirt. He bootstrapped from the beginning — he tried to raise money and was lucky he couldn’t because it forced him to build sustainably. I think they do north of $150 million a year now, with 52 stores.
He wants the brand to be the face, not him. Whenever you hear someone say that, it’s like: you’re going to win.
The thing that hit me was the timeline. I sat and thought about everything I’ve started, pivoted on, or abandoned since 2013. This guy started one thing and just kept going.
Shaan: Twelve years compounding.
Sam: And now he describes it like: I have an amazing team, I’m firing on all cylinders, I get to work on the exciting projects, cash flow is not an issue. That reality took twelve years to arrive. Most of those twelve years, he probably would have sold if someone made a decent offer.
The lesson isn’t “you should’ve done what he did.” But there’s a world where any of us, if we’d just been chained to one thing, compounded twelve years of learning and relationships — we’d be five to ten times further ahead than we are by jumping from thing to thing. That hit me pretty hard.
Alex Hormozi: Student of the Game [00:28:00]
Sam: I went to Las Vegas and hung out with Alex Hormozi. He gets underestimated because of how much content he makes, but every time I’m around him I think: this guy is genuinely wise.
Here’s the one thing I took away. He said: “The biggest mistake I see entrepreneurs make is they’re only studying their business. They’re not a student of the game of business.”
He means: when you start a company, you narrow in on your industry, your business model, your competitors. You become an expert on that niche. What you miss is understanding business as a whole — how different models work, which ones are structurally better, when to switch.
His example from his own life: he had gyms. He was getting really good at owning and operating gyms. Then he went to a mastermind where someone told him: you’re a ten-out-of-ten entrepreneur going after a two-out-of-ten opportunity. You’re amazing at getting gyms from zero members to full — why not sell that skill to other gyms?
He went from operating gyms to Gym Launch (licensing), to Acquisition.com (private equity for SaaS companies). Each step moved him into a structurally better business. He could only see each step because he was studying business as a whole, not just his own slice.
Shaan: He also had a business model insight around cost centers. He said: “The old way to build a brand was to spend millions of your own money on advertising. Social media means you get paid to build your brand.”
All the content he makes — he’s not doing it for fun. He’s turning his brand-building activity from a cost into a profit center. Similarly, his seminar and workshop business at Acquisition.com: they were already paying people to diligence deals and meet entrepreneurs. He started charging entrepreneurs to come in and get that same diligence. Turned a cost center into a profit center.
Sam: He also took my feedback extremely well. I told him something fairly blunt about his content that I thought was hurting his brand. He texted me the next morning: “It’s Hormozi, by the way. I’ve been thinking a lot about what we talked about at the end. I’m going to make some content changes. I appreciate you caring enough to say something.”
That openness — at his level of success — is rare.
Wade Foster, Zapier: Anonymous Billionaire [00:40:00]
Sam: Do you know Zapier? Founded in 2011. They’ve raised about $1 million total. They do somewhere around $400-500 million a year in revenue now. Wade Foster, the founder, is about 35 years old.
He lives in Jefferson City, Missouri — the state capital, but a tiny town. Nobody there knows who he is. He told me he doesn’t have a fancy house and nobody in his community uses Zapier.
I’ve known Wade for a while — he showed up to my HustleCon conference at 8am even though he wasn’t speaking until 2pm. He sat with me the entire time just listening to conversations in the green room. He’s that kind of guy.
He came on the pod to talk about AI and he just geeked out. He was in the weeds. He was so passionate. He didn’t have a fancy setup — small home office, nothing fancy.
The big takeaway: he’s the exact opposite of Hayes. Where Hayes is alpha, high energy, let’s manifest, let’s go — Wade is an introverted nerd who just did what he loved and built one of the most successful bootstrapped companies in history. Both work. There’s not one template.
I think when people listen to this podcast, I hope one thing they take away is: there are a million ways to get to where you want to go. And where you want to go can be anywhere.
Eric Glyman, Ramp: Kind and Intense [00:50:00]
Sam: Eric Glyman, founder and CEO of Ramp. They’re about four or five years old, worth roughly $10 billion, doing $800 million in revenue. He’s 35.
The first thing I noticed: he is shockingly kind. When he looked at me during our conversation, I felt like I was the only person in the world. My producer Ari said the same thing from a phone call. He wrote a follow-up email that said “I was truly blessed by our conversation.”
Kindness at that level of intensity was not something I expected. I’m used to intense people being driven and a little transactional. He’s both fully present and fully warm.
Then I asked him something and he said: “Ramp is 253 days old and we’re only just now doing X.” I said: “Wait — you know to the day how old Ramp is?” He said: “Of course. I’m trying to hit this by this date.”
Both things — radical kindness and obsessive precision — in the same person. Those don’t usually come together. He had a four-point analytical rationale for why Ramp could win against Brex (which looked like the runaway leader) — based on regulatory changes, processing time metrics, total addressable accounts. It wasn’t “I had a good idea.” It was: I saw a specific opportunity and mapped a specific path.
You can be an absolute killer and also a very kind, generous person. That combination is rare and worth emulating.
Sanjiev: The Asymmetric Option [01:00:00]
Shaan: Your brother-in-law.
Sam: My brother-in-law Sanjiev. Over about ten years, with no outside investors, he accumulated over a billion dollars of real estate.
The origin story involves a disaster: he took on $15 million in debt to develop 20 commercial locations for a big Jack in the Box franchisee. Three days after close, the franchisee got arrested for tax fraud. My brother-in-law is now sitting on $15 million in debt with 20 properties tied to a guy who’s in jail.
He doesn’t declare bankruptcy. Instead his wife tells him to go to the gym to get out of the funk. He shows up in the middle of the day — he normally works out at midnight. The guy he always sees working out is behind the front desk. Turns out this guy owns the gym and wants to sell it. Sanjiev buys the gym with almost nothing down (pawns his wife’s wedding ring for the initial capital), uses the cash flow to service his debt, and eventually builds 82 gyms across California.
But the real lesson is the real estate play that came later. When he was leasing commercial space for the gyms, he realized he had leverage as a major tenant. So he started adding an option to purchase to every lease. No money, no plans — just a free option to buy at a fixed price within five years.
One day, a buyer approaches him about acquiring a building he has an option on. Assumes Sanjiev owns it. They offer $7 million. Sanjiev has an option to buy it for $4 million. He does a double escrow: agrees to sell for $7 million, simultaneously exercises his $4 million option, keeps $3 million.
That $3 million was the seed of his entire portfolio. He took it and started buying, flipping, compounding — eventually to over a billion dollars of real estate.
Shaan: The principle: find one asymmetric bet where the downside is zero and the upside is real. Then keep playing it. He had ten options that didn’t work out. The one that did got him his start.
What Ties It Together [01:12:00]
Sam: All of these people — they said it in different ways, but there was a theme. High pain tolerance. Not as a brag — a couple of them said it almost as a caveat. “The downside of having high pain tolerance is you’ll keep doing something even when there might be a better path.” But that stick-to-it-ness over years or decades is what allows the compounding to actually happen.
Shaan: And the money is almost never the interesting part. Hayes said it on the boat. Sasha built it quietly for twelve years without caring about being famous. Wade lives in Missouri and nobody knows who he is.
The Nike ad at the US Open captures it well. Scotty Scheffler wins, sets the trophy on the ground, his baby crawls up to play with it. Nike puts out an ad: first slide — photo of him holding his son: “You’ve already won.” Second slide: “But another major doesn’t hurt.”
That’s it. You can have both. You’ve already won. And the game is still fun to play.