Cold Open: Egon Durban Intro [00:00:00]
Shaan: Egon is great. He has a very aggressive bedside manner. And “aggressive bedside manner” is like the nicest possible way of calling the guy a dick. This guy’s definitely an asshole, and they’re like, “Oh, you know, he’s just very direct. He’s very honest. He’s a straight shooter.” Those are all just ways of saying this guy will trample you.
Opening Banter: High-Intensity Mode [00:00:20]
Shaan: What’s up, Sam? I don’t know if you’re ready, but I’m going to ratchet up the intensity a little bit here. I’m going to start high-intensity on the podcast. I’m going to talk about some high-intensity individuals. Would you like to hear about some high-intensity individuals?
Sam: I wore my high school letterman jacket — if you haven’t noticed, I’m shocked you haven’t made fun of me. So I’m ready for high intensity. I look like the big man on campus.
Shaan: You look like Al Bundy right now. Like just dreaming about the good old days.
Sam: I wish I could have took State. That’s the vibe I’m in. I’m ready for some intense stuff.
Shaan: I’m going to tell you about some people that I think you know of — a couple of them I think you know a lot about. But they’re all tied together, and they are all what I will call all-in individuals. They’re all insane — and insane in the same way — which is that they are all the way in on what they’re doing. I was reading their stories and I was kind of inspired. They’re all very different stories, but then I realized: no, it’s actually the same story. It’s about being all in.
Egon Durban: Silver Lake’s Managing Director [00:01:30]
Shaan: Okay, so who are these people? First I want to start with a guy named Egon Durban. Do you know who Egon Durban is? Do you know his full story?
Sam: I don’t know his full story. He kind of is shrouded in mystery a little bit. I know that he’s been on top of the game since he was probably 30 or 35, and he kind of controls — it seems like — almost LA a little bit.
Shaan: Yeah, a little bit. So he is the managing director of Silver Lake, which is a giant private equity investor that invests in technology. They have $72 billion in assets under management, which — I’m pretty sure that’s bigger than every venture fund combined.
Sam: Did you say $72 billion?
Shaan: Yeah, $72 billion. So if you take out the Vision Fund, I’m pretty sure this is bigger than almost all VCs combined.
Okay, so who is this guy? He’s got a crazy track record. But first I want to give you a few quotes about these all-in individuals, because even though I don’t do anything like this guy — I’m not a fund manager, I’m not a managing director of a private equity fund, I have no desire to be — I do see some of these descriptions of him and I’m like, it’d be nice to be called that. It’d be nice to have that be a true thing somebody could say about me. Sometimes you just got to hear that level 12 exists for you to even unlock that part of your brain.
So let me tell you some things. He goes to Georgetown, then he goes to Morgan Stanley. He’s known immediately in the banking world. They interviewed some people and they go, “He came in as an entry-level junior guy, early 20s, and Egon was immediately comfortable at the grown-ups table.” He just carried himself very differently. It’s not that he had the experience, it’s not even that he was smarter than anybody — but he carried himself like, “I belong in this conversation and I’m going to show up that way.” He never had the “I’m just here to learn, I’m just happy to be here” energy.
The next thing I heard: “Egon is great. He has a very aggressive bedside manner.” And “aggressive bedside manner” is the nicest way possible of calling the guy a dick. This guy will trample you.
Sam: Aggressive bedside manner — I love that.
Egon’s Career Move: Build the European Business [00:04:30]
Shaan: So in 1999 he leaves his banking job to join Silver Lake. It’s the dot-com boom. He’s like, “I think technology and the internet — this is the next big thing.” And he does a very smart career move. If you see this career move, you know this person’s a winner: they join a thing that’s working, but instead of staying at the mothership, they find the next frontier.
He’s like, “Hey, do you have plans or a person in charge of expanding to Europe?” They’re like, “Not yet, we want to do that next year. We’re going to do a search.” He’s like, “Cool. I’ll move there now and I’ll do it.”
So he moves to Europe and builds out the whole European business investing in European tech companies. One of the big ones is Skype. Skype was a European company that had already had its run-up, then faltered, and was riddled with lawsuits. He partners with a16z, buys Skype out for $1.9 billion. People were like, “This is messy. It’s on the decline. It’s hard to turn a technology company around.”
He goes in and basically says: we’re going to do two things. We’re going to hire a great CEO, we’re going to settle all these lawsuits, and we’re going to invest in making the product better — because the product’s just been atrophying. He immediately settles the lawsuits, hires a great CEO, starts investing in the product. In 18 months he sells it for $8.5 billion. So $1.9 billion to $8.5 billion — he basically triples their money on a billion-dollar principal base. Immediately makes a name for himself.
Sam: And he’s only like 35 at this point.
Shaan: Yeah, probably early 30s, my guess.
The Power Struggle at Silver Lake [00:07:00]
Shaan: So 2008, financial crisis. The founder of Silver Lake, Glenn Hutchins — this crazy guy, if you go watch interviews of him, he’s got a mustache, comes into the office barefoot, never wears shoes, kind of like one of those “one with nature” founder types but he’s in private equity, which is usually suits and cutthroat guys.
The financial crisis hits, Glenn’s getting real stressed out. He’s like, “I just need to take a step back.” Egon Durban’s like, “I’m here, I’ve been here, I’m ready for this.” He’d just done the big Skype deal, so he’s riding that wave. There’s a fund to raise and he’s like, “I’ll help you raise it, you can use my track record and my name, but I need a seat at the top.”
So there’s a bit of a power struggle. The other founders don’t really want to step back. There’s sort of a coup — Egon and four new guys basically become the new managing directors and the founders all end up stepping back. In a PE firm, as you rise you get an equity stake and it becomes a partnership. As they raise fund after fund, the guys who were the main principals of the first fund might now have a smaller stake, because the new people doing all the work are going to have the big stake in the new fund. That’s kind of what happened.
Anyways, he gets it. And then he starts doing just crazy aggressive stuff.
Egon’s Investment Philosophy: One or Two Bets Per Year [00:09:00]
Shaan: Here’s his strategy. In the 16 years since all that happened, they’ve grown the thing like crazy — added something like $25–30 billion in assets under management. And he says: “My goal is to be the best risk-adjusted tech investor in the world. What I’m trying to do is find one or two bets per year — all-in bets, opportunities that I can’t say no to. One or two bets per year. That’s it. I spend my whole year just trying to find one deal worth doing.” And then when he finds it, he pushes all the chips in.
He did this with Alibaba — put in a whole bunch of money at $35 billion market cap, then 6X’d their money. Alibaba became a multi-hundred-billion-dollar company. And at the time he was like, “We see this as a Google-sized opportunity — this is the Google of China, we need to be in this.” Other people thought $35 billion was already overvalued.
Another example: he went to some conference, spoke on stage, gets off backstage, bumps into Michael Dell — first time he meets the guy. About a year later, he does the biggest tech buyout deal ever, which was taking Dell private. A multi-billion dollar buyout. The biggest deal at the time.
Sam: Some of the crazy things this guy has done —
Shaan: So he sucked at golf but he wanted to be good. Golf is the business sport, right? So do you know what he did?
Sam: No.
Shaan: The employees had a gym. He just locks the gym. He shuts it down over a weekend, converts it into his own private golf practice facility. And the analysts are like, “Hey, what happened to our gym?” He’s like, “I don’t know, go across the street to BlackRock and ask if you can use theirs.”
Sam: Kind of an asshole move. What did his employees think?
Shaan: He’s now an eight handicap golfer with memberships at clubs around the world. That’s the ending of that story.
Sam: Ha.
Shaan: He also got criticized for wanting power in the Hollywood world. He became the biggest backer of WME. The joke was he’s buying things just to get access to the Oscars — just an absolute savage individual.
Another thing he said — I love the way he phrased this: “We get paid to hit singles and doubles, then we steal third, and we come home on a passed ball.” It’s just a different mindset than “I’m trying to hit home runs.” He’s like, no, we hit singles and doubles, then through good operations we steal third, and then we get home on a passed ball — the market continues to grow and we benefit from it.
Back in 2021 he said, “I think everything in tech is overvalued. Every private tech company combined is $350 billion. If I could buy that whole asset class I would — I’m pretty sure it’ll two or 3X. But picking any individual company is really hard. Companies valued at a billion dollars might not just go down 30% on a correction — they’ll go to zero. There will be no bid for these companies.” Which is pretty much exactly what played out that following year.
And then April 2020 — two months into the pandemic — he invested a billion dollars into Airbnb. At the time everyone thought Airbnb was going out of business.
Sam: My wife worked there at the time. We were at home thinking, “That whole company is dead.”
Shaan: And he invested at something like an $18 billion valuation. He’d never even met Brian Chesky. He made the investment sort of unseen, injected a bunch of capital when the business needed it. People were like, “Is that a rash move?” But Airbnb has done fantastic since then.
He also said: “I love Ari Emanuel. I talk to him every single day.” And people were like, “Every day? About what?” He said, “Ari averages a 90-second phone call. We’re texting and calling every day. It’s usually 90 seconds. Sometimes it’s a specific ask — hey, we need this introduction, we need this analysis. But I don’t like formal board meetings every quarter. Too slow. I like the pace that Ari moves.”
Ari Emanuel: Hollywood’s All-In Agent [00:16:00]
Shaan: So that takes me to the next all-in individual: Ari Emanuel. You know Ari Emanuel, and a lot of people know him because the Ari Gold character in Entourage is based on him. But there were some things about him I didn’t fully know.
Did you know he’s one of three brothers and all three brothers do really interesting stuff?
Sam: Tell me.
Shaan: There’s a book I read years ago — I believe it’s called “The Brothers Emanuel: A Memoir of an American Family.” So Ari Emanuel is probably a billionaire and one of the shot callers in LA. His brother is Rahm Emanuel, who was the mayor of Chicago and on Obama’s cabinet. And the third brother — Zeke, Ezekiel — they go, “A lot of people know us, but they don’t know that our third brother is the smartest and the most successful.” Ezekiel was the head of health policy under Obama, basically the architect of the Affordable Care Act. And I think he helped pioneer advances in heart transplants. So the two brothers are like, “Zeke’s the smart one. We’re just more stubborn and bullheaded.”
Sam: That’s hilarious.
Shaan: They asked Ari about Entourage — “Is that you? Is Ari Gold you?” And he’s like, “Well, they got some things right. I am very aggressive. I didn’t go into an office with a paintball gun and shoot everybody, so I didn’t do that, but they got a lot of things right, unfortunately.”
Then they asked, “How have you changed over the years? Are you still as aggressive?” He goes, “Here’s what I have to say: you need to know when you’re on the field. When you’re on the field, you’re there to compete, you’re there to win, you’re there to kill. But I’ve learned that I’m not always on the field. Sometimes I’m off the field and I need to behave a little bit differently. That’s the only change that’s happened to me in 30 years.”
Sam: We know somebody who worked with him. They told some pretty hilarious stories.
Shaan: So growing up he was dyslexic — he had to go to a reading teacher for like three hours a day. He said, “I hated it. I used to cry all the time. I used to feel so embarrassed.” Then he just realized: this is my superpower. I’m going to win a different way. “I can’t read these contracts, so I’m going to surround myself with people who can do those things for me, and I’m going to do other things that only I can do.”
So his day is: he’s on a treadmill with an earpiece in, and his assistant is just loading calls — getting people on the phone that he wants to talk to for 30 to 90 seconds at a time. He immediately hits someone, makes the point, hangs up. Next call is ready in his ear. Starts at 6:00 a.m. Something like 200 calls a day.
Sam: Somebody told me he was in his office and whenever he wanted his assistant’s attention, he’d throw almonds at her. Just hit her in the head with an almond, she’d turn around, he’d go, “Next call. I need the next call.”
Shaan: What a douche.
Sam: Exactly — all these guys, all of them, they all have the same trait.
The Hollywood Mailroom: How All Three Started [00:20:30]
Shaan: So there’s also the classic mailroom story. David Geffen, Barry Diller, Ari Emanuel — all have the same story: they started in the Hollywood mailroom and used that as their feeding ground. I was thinking about what it is about the mailroom.
The mailroom is basically the job nobody else wants to do. So it’s already a filter — it’s going to filter out anybody who doesn’t really want it, because it’s so unglamorous. Interesting thing number one.
Interesting thing number two: the way it works, you’re making copies of scripts and driving them around town, delivering to clients, fetching lunches. If you do well, you become an assistant, then you can become an agent. But you learn the whole town while working seven days a week. The guys who made it used that as their opportunity to build an incredible network. The job is essentially networking, and they used every rep of that — instead of mentally checking out — to actually build their power network.
Sam: Can I tell you the last one now?
Shaan: Yeah, yeah, for sure. I’m into this.
Dana White: From Bellhop to UFC President [00:22:00]
Shaan: Okay, so you know this person well but I don’t know if you know the full story. Dana White. Tell me what you know.
Sam: All right. So Dana White — I think he was a boxing instructor, but not coaching real boxers, like a jazzercise class in Boston. He moves into this bad neighborhood, and Whitey Bulger — who’s a big gangster at the time — comes to Dana’s gym and goes, “Hey man, you’re in my hood, you owe me a thousand a month.” Dana White doesn’t pay him, because he thinks he’s a tough guy. Eventually he realizes Whitey’s the real deal and he owes him $10 or $20 grand. Dana’s like, “Dude, I have nothing.” So he moves to Vegas to flee.
He went to high school with these two rich brothers — the Fertitta brothers. The Fertitta family owned penny casinos, low-class slot places. Eventually they owned bigger casinos, I think Station Casinos or the Golden Nugget. The two sons, Lorenzo and Frank, start making deals in Vegas.
Dana comes to them and goes, “Hey, there’s this thing called the UFC. I went to one of these events and it’s amazing. The guy’s selling the brand for $2 million — we’re really just getting a crappy little octagon and the name. Let’s buy it.” They do it. Dana gets 4% equity, the brothers get the rest.
They fail for four or five years, they’re in the hole about $35 million. They come up with this brilliant idea to do a TV show called The Ultimate Fighter to promote the events. They convince Spike TV to air it. They’re running out of money, about to shut it down — then Forest Griffin and Stephan Bonner have their famous fight. At the time it was a huge deal. I was a kid, I remember watching it. The fight is so good that even though one guy won, they give both of them six-figure contracts. From there, the UFC took off.
They eventually sell for $4 billion to Ari Emanuel’s company. That’s the story.
Shaan: Very good, off the cuff. I want to fill in a couple of details.
You’re right that Dana grows up in Boston, but he goes to college twice and drops out twice in the first semester. He ends up as a bellhop, a bouncer, laying asphalt. He wants to be a boxer, but he sees a guy he looked up to come in totally punch-drunk, and goes, “Oh, I can’t do this.” So he’s like, “Maybe I should teach boxing classes — Boxercise — instead of trying to be a boxer.”
He’s doing all that, working as a bellhop, and describes the day he quit: “I was just sitting there and I realized every day I do this is another day I’m not doing the thing I want.” He goes, “Because before I used to feel like I could always someday do something. And then I realized: what do I have to lose? I can always come back and be a bellhop — this is the bottom. But I will never get back this window of time in my 20s where I can take a shot at something.”
So he quits, starts doing the boxing thing, tries to become a promoter. Then the mob thing happens. He said: “These guys show up and in the movies it’s cool when you see mobsters, but if it’s real life and they want their money, it’s super scary.” They wanted $2,500. He’s like, “I have nothing.” They call him a couple weeks later: “You owe this money by tomorrow 1 p.m., or else.” And he was like, “Oh, I’ve got to get out of here.” He went home that night, went to delta.com, bought a one-way ticket to Vegas, and left all his stuff — his TV, his dresser. Just ran away.
Sam: This was Whitey Bulger behind it?
Shaan: Yeah, like the character from Black Mass, behind The Departed.
Sam: And he just left everything.
Shaan: He just left everything. Then a couple other things: he and the Fertittas weren’t actually close friends in high school. They just knew of each other. Dana was the kid who would go to the restroom and kick the door really hard during class, making a huge sound. The uptight teacher would go irate trying to find the culprit. Dana would run away, and half the class period would be gone with no teacher. One day he did it and his shoe flew off and the teacher found it — Dana got in trouble. But the Fertittas logged that in their minds: “He took a bullet for us.”
Years later at a wedding they reconnect. Lorenzo is like, “I want to train jiu-jitsu.” Dana’s heard that a million times, nobody shows up. Lorenzo shows up the next morning ready to train. That’s how they actually got to know each other and fell in love with MMA.
Buying the UFC: The $2 Million Bet [00:29:00]
Shaan: So while he’s doing that, Dana becomes an agent, starts representing Tito Ortiz and Chuck Liddell. The UFC is so small back then, but he’s negotiating with the owner of the UFC — “You got to pay Tito more, look at how much money this guy’s bringing in.” Finally the owner goes, “Look, Dana, there’s no money. This whole thing’s going to fall over. You’re not wrong but I have nothing to give.”
And in that moment — which should have been a disadvantage — he turns it into an advantage. That’s when he approaches the Fertittas: “Hey, let’s buy this thing.” And one funny thing is the owner had mismanaged the business so badly he didn’t even own ufc.com — he’d sold it to “UserFriendly Computers” for a little bit of cash. And Dana had to go buy it back.
Sam: What did he get when they bought it for $2 million?
Shaan: He said, “Well, we had this octagon — basically just a cage and some mats, which isn’t very expensive. But I loved the name UFC so much we had to have it.”
Then they put in $40 million more. He felt so bad bleeding his friends’ money. Lorenzo calls him: “Dude, I can’t keep doing this. Can you try to sell it?” Dana calls everybody. Calls Lorenzo back the next day: “There’s not a lot of appetite. Best we could do is maybe $6–7 million.” Lorenzo says, “Okay, let me call you tomorrow.” Next day: “You know what, screw it. Let’s keep going. Let’s put in another $10 million — one last chance.” That last $10 million is what they used to create The Ultimate Fighter.
They were $50 million in. And when it sold for $4 billion, the brothers each owned about 40% of the business. Dana made $360 million on the sale with a 10% kicker.
Dana’s Personality: Blackjack Bans and Childhood [00:33:00]
Shaan: Some other things about Dana. He’s a banned blackjack player at multiple casinos. His strategy: bet $75,000 to $100,000 per hand, and if he wins the first two hands he walks away. That infuriates the casinos because they need the law of large numbers to catch up and he’s just taking $200K and bouncing. But when he starts getting in the hole, that’s when they get him. Kind of an impulsive individual.
He talked about his dad being an alcoholic: “My dad was never around, and if he was around you didn’t want him to be. He was not a good guy. But I wouldn’t change anything. The toughness that built in me — I wouldn’t have that if I’d had a nice, safe upbringing.”
He also talked about riding his bike everywhere in Boston. He bought a Walkman and would listen to Tony Robbins — Awaken the Giant Within — every day, just riding around working himself into a frenzy. He said, “Then I started buying those tapes for people as gifts because it was so impactful to me.”
Sam: Isn’t that funny? Dana White is a tough guy — like you don’t want to mess with this guy physically or in business. And even he listens to self-help stuff. I used to be ashamed of listening to Tony Robbins and then you realize even the badasses consume a lot of this stuff to get pumped.
Shaan: The people who have improved themselves seem to have done something to improve themselves. It’s insane.
Dana’s Mailroom Equivalent: Three-Year Apprenticeship [00:35:30]
Shaan: One more thing about Dana that I didn’t know. He did his own version of the mailroom. For three years before anyone really knew him, he worked under a guy. He said, “I told myself I’m going to spend three years with this guy, because if I do that I will know everything there is to know about the fight business. Today I’m not the guy who can go be the next Don King. I know that’s where I want to go but I gotta learn, I gotta earn my stripes.”
So he spent three years doing every job in the business — he was a cutman, a cornerman, a referee, managed talent, read all the contracts even though nobody asked him to. He said the hourly wage, given the number of hours he put in, must have been ridiculously low. But he knew that’s what he needed.
The Common Thread: All-In, Connected, Loyal [00:37:00]
Sam: You haven’t actually explained how they’re all the same.
Shaan: They’re all maniacs — all-in individuals. People who are all the way in. Ari is a good example. He’d already made it. WME was one of the top two agencies in Hollywood. He’d already made it. And then to buy the UFC, he raised every dollar he could, but he basically had to leverage and mortgage WME. So he put everything he’d worked for at risk to buy a very high-risk asset at a very high price.
Silver Lake sees what Ari’s doing and they’re like: if Ari Emanuel is going all in on something, he will not lose. He will not let this fail. So Silver Lake became one of the bigger funders.
And Dana had options to sell the business — actually had an option to sell for almost a billion dollars more. He turned it down because he wanted to work with Ari. He knew Ari was the guy who’s all-in, and the future upside with Ari would be bigger, even if today’s payout was a billion dollars less.
So they all shared that trait. That’s why they all wanted to be in business with each other. And the Fertitta brothers — same reason they wanted to back Dana. They’re wired the same way.
And if you watch a big UFC fight, you’ll see Ari Emanuel, his girlfriend to his left, Egon to his right, and then a few seats down is Dana. They always sit in the exact same spots for all the big fights. I remember seeing Egon there and thinking, “Who’s that guy who’s always there?” That’s how I learned about him.
Sam: Dana said when he sold the UFC it kind of messed with his head. He spent two days in his hotel room just like — “I have $300 million in my bank account, my best friends who have been doing this with me are gone, and I’m used to being the guy who is fighting to make it. What happens when you make it?” He was like, “It really screwed my head for two days.” Then he was like, “All right, I’ll just go back to doing exactly what I know how to do.”
The Fertitta Brothers and Cousin Tillman [00:40:30]
Shaan: What do you know about the Fertittas?
Sam: I didn’t look up their history too much, but a couple of bullet points: they work out every single day together at 7:00 a.m. I like that as a brotherly thing to do. They attend all meetings together — not divide and conquer, both brothers sit there together, drink a Diet Dr Pepper, and go to almost every meeting together.
Their cousin Tillman Fertitta — do you know who he is?
Shaan: Yes, Tillman.
Sam: Tillman bought into Landry’s, which is a steakhouse in Texas. From there he bought many other things: Bubba Gump Shrimp, a ton of those not-fast-casual-but-not-really-nice restaurant chains. Then he bought out the whole company after taking it public, and now it’s one of the most profitable privately held companies — he owns 100% of it. I think it does something like $3 billion a year in EBITDA. He also bought the Houston Rockets.
He’s known as being a real asshole, though. The other Fertitta guys — in all the interviews I’ve seen with them, they seem shockingly well-mannered and calm. They’re still sharks, but they seem like really easygoing guys, if that word can be used for these types of sharks.
Shaan: They are incredibly respected. I’ll leave you one last quote from Dana — about risk-taking. He goes: “You can always go back to your job. But here’s what you can’t do: you can’t go back and get this opportunity again. You can’t rewind time, you can’t get back your youth to take risks. I realized I didn’t want to be on my deathbed with a bunch of I-should-haves.”
He goes, “Not everything I’ve done has worked. And what I’ve learned is that even if it turns out like shit, it’s not just that you learn how to win — sometimes the most important learning is, ‘I thought I wanted to do this, but it turns out that’s not what I want to do.’”
Sam: What’s he referring to?
Shaan: Could have been anything — when he thought he wanted to be a boxer, goes in, realizes that’s not the thing. I thought that was good because everybody talks about, “Oh, it’s okay if you fail, you’ll still learn.” But rarely do they explain this: one of the most important things in life is just figuring out what it is you actually want to be doing. Most people go their whole life never finding that, and then they’re in their 30s or 40s or 50s and they feel like it’s too late to try something new. They’re so far down one path they don’t want to go back to the bottom of the mountain.
So it’s so important to know: early on, when you’re not that far up the mountain, use that to your advantage. Because you can go back to the beginning and choose a new path. And sometimes going down that path isn’t just about becoming a better hiker — it’s about learning this isn’t a path I like. And the only way you could have known that was by trying.
Sam’s Takeaway: Loyalty [00:44:30]
Sam: My biggest takeaway from these stories is loyalty. I’ve heard Dana and the Fertitta brothers talk about their little trio, their three-person team — they’re crazy loyal to one another. I was always envious that I didn’t have a brother around my age who I wanted to partner with. I read about the Fertitta brothers a lot and I’m envious of that relationship. They seem like they’ve had a healthy relationship with their parents, who were business people, and when they brought in Dana they were all crazy loyal to one another. They never disrespect one another publicly.
And even Dana — I don’t like many of the things he’s done, and I’m not a Trump supporter — but he said, “Trump was nice to me in 2008 when nobody else would help us. Trump helped us. I remember that. Therefore I’m going to repay him now.” I don’t think Dana is a straight-up guy all the time, but his value of loyalty — I respect that, at least when it comes to those two brothers.
Shaan: You’re kind of like that too. Loyalty is a deeply rooted value for you. If someone’s loyal or disloyal to you even in a small way, that goes really deep, right?
Sam: I don’t forget. Someone will do something — you remember that story about how I asked a reporter if she wanted to freelance for The Hustle and she said “that’s cute”? I’ve always held a grudge and wanted to destroy her. I went and reread the email the other day when I was talking to Sarah and she didn’t say “that’s cute” — she said “that’s so sweet, I appreciate you so much, but I’m not interested.” But for some reason at the time I read it as a dismissal and for the last 10 years I’ve been waiting for this woman to make a mistake so I could pounce.
The point being: if someone’s disloyal to me, I want to destroy them. And the people who are loyal to me, I go all in on them. When I moved to San Francisco not knowing anyone, the way you get ahead is you have to have a group of people who you do everything for and expect them to do everything in return. Once you find that group, it helps you so much — not just in business but for everything.
We have a friend who is so incredibly loyal it’s almost annoying. Best gifts. But it’s not about the gifts — it’s that I know if I was in trouble this guy would drop everything. More than my dad would drop everything. He’d say, “Send location. I’m there.” Why do I feel that way? I have no idea. But he’s shown it in a bunch of small ways. And man, it’s paid off wonderfully for him. He was successful on his own, but his loyalty has definitely gotten him ahead.
I was with him one time and he wanted to ride a skateboard. I said, “Ron, don’t ride the skateboard. You’re 40 years old, you’re about to hit your head.” He does it anyway. Gets a concussion. We have to take him to the hospital and take care of his kid for two or three days. So he’s been repaid a little bit in his loyalty, but it’s paid off. I feel like I owe him so much I’d do anything in return.
”Fu Loyalty” and Other Versions of Fu Money [00:49:00]
Shaan: I was thinking about this: you know the phrase “fu money” — like, “Oh, he’s got fu money.” A lot of people aspire to have that. But an interesting question is: what are the other versions of fu?
Like, maybe you could have fu health. If you’re in absolute pristine health, you’re extremely fit, mobile — you have fu health. What else could you have?
I think Ramon has fu loyalty. He is fully abundant in the loyalty that he has for others, and that others will have for him. Because me, you, and I’m sure everyone he’s friends with — we would all go to bat for him completely. As a thought experiment: what are the other versions of fu that actually might be more valuable than fu money?
Sam: My personal trainer has fu happiness. The guy is happy no matter what is going on. He’ll do whatever because he just doesn’t care. There’s traffic — “Oh, I’m having a party in my car.” This person cut him off — whatever. He just makes his own version of reality and he’s always in a good mood, completely unconditional. He’s completely invincible in that way.
Shaan: I think you have that.
Sam: I aspire to have that.
Shaan: From my perspective, you have that. I was thinking the other day — does Sam ever get rattled? I’ve been with you when you’ve lost a bunch, I’ve seen you make a bunch, but I’ve seen you lose in a variety of bets. You don’t get rattled.
Sam: I tweeted something the other day — everybody’s got a “butt clench number.” It’s an amount of money where it makes your butthole pucker up a little bit, and it’s good to know where your pucker number is. Because I had just wired a bunch of money and it wasn’t even that I was worried I’d lose it — I was just like, “Let me double-check the routing number.” Palms a little sweaty. You know that animation when you’re going to send an email to your whole list — the monkey’s finger about to push the button, sweating and trembling? That’s the pucker number for some people.
Shaan: Your number was high. Mine is like a thousand. When I think about why I get stressed about certain things, I think — who was it, JFK had a photo of Abe Lincoln on his desk and he’d ask, “What would Abe do?” When I get stressed I think, “What would Neville Medhora do? How would Shaan Puri handle this?”
Neville is another person who has no stress. One time he was thinking about buying his first house — he’d never thought about finances, he’d been making a great living for years and never thought about money. He could buy whatever he wants. He was thinking about what house he wanted, going to pay cash, big investment. He was talking to me and Sarah and he goes, “I couldn’t go to bed last night. I was thinking about buying this house and I can’t get exactly everything I want and I actually have to second-guess some things.”
We didn’t say a word. He looked at Sarah and goes, “Is that stress?” We were like, “Yeah, dude — that’s stress. You finally experienced it at age 38.”
Shaan: And you and Neville have that same thing — a very high tolerance for stress. It’s crazy to watch. People take pride in saying, “I don’t tolerate no disrespect.” But what are you really saying? You can’t disrespect me — if you say something rude, that says something about you, not me. You can’t bother me.
Tony Robbins said it well: “How cheap is your happiness?” If all it takes is somebody doing something really little to take your happiness away, your happiness is cheap. You’ve got the TJ Maxx of happiness. Your mood is at the dollar store — anybody can pick it up for so little. Someone takes the grocery cart you wanted and now you’re pissed. Don’t be cheap with your happiness. Be expensive. Be luxury.
Hard Truths: The Book Developer and the Tax Guy [00:56:00]
Sam: I heard a funny story about you. I was with Ben last night at Ramon’s birthday and he told me this story about how you were thinking about writing a book, you meet with this amazing author, and the guy in the middle of the meeting goes, “Stop the conversation, I’m out of here, this is not a good fit.” And instead of being insulted, your takeaway was, “I really respect that about you.”
Shaan: That’s not exactly what happened. Let me tell you the actual story.
He’s a book development guy — the guy in between an editor, a publisher, and a writer. I’m like, “Who’s the best in the world at this? I want to talk to them.” So I meet this guy. He asks me, “What do you want to write about?” I go, “I think I could write about anything. I could write about storytelling, I could write about marketing — that’s actually maybe the problem, I might write multiple books. I have so many ideas and I want you to help me think through which of those ideas is the right one.”
He goes, “That’s a nightmare.” He goes, “That’s probably the worst answer you could give to somebody like me. I want someone who has spent 10 to 20 years of their life only thinking about one thing, and that thing is what they need to pour into a book. The guy who can write about anything and everything? That’s going to be miserable for me.”
He didn’t end the meeting but he was just being brutally honest. And I go, “All you did was make me want you more.” Because the speech I’d given about what I could write about — it was an A+ speech. And whenever somebody can say the truth in the face of my persuasion, I have an extreme amount of respect for them. It’s not about generic pushback. It’s about truth.
The guy said the true thing, which was: that’s not what you want when you’re writing a book. What you want is “My whole life has been building up to this one book and I can’t wait to pour it out because I’ve refined it in my head for 10 years.” And I was like, “That’s actually right. And I want to work with you even more now.”
Sam: The same thing happened the other day on a tax call. I’d been looking for a new tax person. I created this whole tax data room, sent it to a few people, did three calls.
First guy: “Hey, took a look at everything, looks really good, I have two suggestions for saving some money.” Okay, thank you.
Second guy: “This looks great. Congratulations on your success. We can handle this for you, we have similar clients.” Okay, fine.
Third guy gets on the call and goes, “All right. I’ll be honest with you — you have way too much complexity for how much money you make.”
Part of me heard that as: you’re too poor for me. My ego wanted to push back. But then more than that — I let myself have the feeling for 15 seconds. Ego deflated like a balloon pricked by a pin. Then I asked myself: what do I actually want? And I hired the third guy. I totally agreed.
As we were talking he goes, “Actually, now that you’ve told me more, a lot of this does make sense given the trajectory. But I still think you really have to ask yourself: do I want to optimize for taxes, or would I rather just spend my time making more money?” I was like, “Sir, you are exactly what I’ve been looking for.”
Even though that first punch hit me right in the gut and I wanted to get defensive — I’ve learned that getting defensive gets me absolutely nowhere.
Shaan: Everybody has the same feelings. It’s just that some people hold the feeling for 10 years, some people stay mad for three days, and the goal is: can you just have the feeling for 30 seconds and move on?
Sam: I don’t know about that. Rage is an amazing motivator. I have achieved a whole lot remembering being dumped by a high school girlfriend.
Shaan: You’ve had great accomplishments, but you probably want to remember that you want those accomplishments because you think they’re going to make you feel better. Using rage to get there is not the way.
Sam: ABS aren’t built in the kitchen. They’re built by an eighth-grade girlfriend telling you you’re not good enough.
Shaan: Just remember: ABS are built by a crumpled-up Valentine’s card.
Sam: Can I tell you a funny story? I was in sixth or seventh grade and I really liked this girl Rachel. I wrote this like poem-Valentine thing, folded it up, cut it out. I’m standing there — she opens it up and reads it. She goes, “Oh my God, Shaan, this is so sweet. This is amazing. Who’s this for?”
Shaan: Oh no.
Sam: And in my head I was like, I could just be courageous and say, “This is for you. I love you.” Instead I was like, “It’s for Chelsea.” I just made up a name. She goes, “Who’s Chelsea?” I go, “She doesn’t go here.” And then for three months I kept up this entire charade that there’s some girl I met that I like and that note I showed you was for her.
Shaan: That’s where you were.
Sam: I don’t know how I don’t have abs from that. That was pretty devastating.
Shaan: See, you have to use that rage to get those abs.
Sam: Although apparently it didn’t even work.
Shaan: Rachel, if you’re listening to this — there was no Chelsea. You were Chelsea.
Sam: There was no Chelsea.
Shaan: Now she knows.
Sam: That’s awesome. That’s it. That’s the episode. That’s the pod.