Episode of My First Million with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri.
Transcript
Note: This transcript was auto-generated from YouTube captions. It may contain errors and lacks speaker identification. A full Gemini audio transcript will replace this.
Kind: captions Language: en do you regret buying your home yes Sam what’s up what’s going on let me pull up some of our documents I’m in Austin still and what’s what’s what’s a with the world like in Austin right now crazy everything’s crazy I don’t think it’s as bad as San Francisco but the world is crazy I I decided to we got a new office down here and so I’ve rented a house to see everyone and it’s cool Austin’s a great city what do you thinks gonna happen to San Francisco do you think it’s gonna like is this gonna be the end of San Francisco being like the place I think so yeah I think so for a couple reasons you know right now I’m selling my house yeah so say you’re your house looks different you’re decorating it to sell aren’t you yeah I am trying to sell my house right now so it’s about to go up for sale and I’m trying to move to the suburbs of the Bay Area but and so right now because I’m doing that I’m in the middle of the market and listening to people I’m securing you know what are they what’s like a mic is the market hot to sell am I gonna get a good price when I try to go look for something else is there a lot of stuff available or is it a bidding war and you know just like you would expect there’s sort of a you know a flight to the flight to space right now and not like the space expand I’m talking about like physical house space people in the urbanisation yeah do religious people are leaving cities the leaving San Francisco for sure so a lot of people were in San Francisco were here because of the career opportunities and now that the tech companies are saying you know either we are already remote or we’re going remote or way more remote friendly and your work from home for the server foreseeable future here there’s basically no the premium the extreme premium I mean like one bedroom for four grand a month two bedrooms six grand a month you know type of rents to be in the city and so like you know when a when a studio condo is a million dollars in the city you know if you don’t have to pay that you’re not going to and so people want space people want more affordability and people want to be away from like a whole bunch of other people from this virus and so that is driving a lot of people out of the cities now some people say oh that’s just temporary personally I don’t think so I don’t think you can put the genie back in the bottle once the companies start letting you be removed and it doesn’t matter where you’re physically located why would you live in a more expensive area only if that lifestyle really appeals to you which it will for like twenty something year olds right to be in cities but right now you get the twenty something year olds and the 30 something year olds because the 30 something year olds are there for their career and that’s gonna go away I feel like I’ve been in Austin for a week now I’m gonna stay for another week maybe I’ll stay one more week down here it is definitely happier like the way of life like it for me and for many others I understand why you’d happier here like dude my new house I got I got a pool I’m like a swimming pool like what is this this is amazing that makes me happy just looking at the swimming pool I like it too my thing though is I miss San Francisco I want to come back I do miss a little bit of a struggle I also miss the people I hate the people and a dangerous San Francisco has like actual you know real problems with crime and homelessness and stuff like that I don’t think anybody wants that and where they’re living it I think you know there’s part of it that’s the energy of the city I love being New York I love being at emphasis come around all these energizing interesting ambitious people a bunch of single people but then there’s just like crime and homelessness and like extreme expenses that put a burden on you and I think that’s nobody likes that I almost feel like not a real way but just because I can’t think of a better word a little homeless where I’m like well where the [ ] is my place now like where’s my like you know yeah you and I we’re not quite similar you’ve done it more than I have but me too and a lesser extent I’ve lived in many different cities and I finally felt like I had a home in San Francisco and now I’m like [ ] like it’s wait it’s like damn it’s way different and so I’m I’m pretty sad about it to be honest like I’ve been like depressed over it I’m also sad obviously about all the other shit’s going on is it are you seeing unrest and protesting and looting where you live I’m seeing it because I’m just glued to Twitter and me too you know I’m just scrolling and I can’t believe my eyes and it is it so sad there’s so many different things going on at the same time and then the the shitty part about that to me is that everybody pulls a different meaning away from it so like if you’re biased going in is you know did you know if you’re a racist in one way you’re going to look at this and say oh man they’re rooting and they’re looting and rioting and this is awful what are those small business owners do why are they why are they getting the store smashed and then if you’re somebody else and you’re looking at this you’re like dude people are sick of it they’ve hit their breaking point because it’s been going on for so long this police brutality and I totally understand what’s going on and then other people are looking at it and they’re sort of like hey what’s like why are these other malicious groups kind of hijacking the movement and just inciting violence and you know antifa or some people believe you know Russia China whoever it is who’s dropping these pallets of bricks off trying to bait people into violence and you know some people just rying to make the world burn and so there’s all these things mixed together and I think whoever you are you’re gonna select the evidence that supports your feeling and you’re just gonna get stronger you’re just gonna see more evidence towards your view and it’s gonna make people more divided my friend shared something and it was like four circles and it was like I’m pissed off about the racism in our countries and black lives matter black lives matters has a point I’m pissed off that businesses are getting ruined this is not the right way to do it I’m pissed off as the police because I think most of them are good but a few bad cops ruined [ ] for everyone and then I forget the fourth one and then it was like at the center all the circles had a little bit of everything and like you can be here I was like that’s how I feel I’m angry at it’s sad circle I don’t know what the fourth one was let’s see it was really great though did usually happy to see this girl I don’t see that but no that explains like exactly how I feel you know and how many people feel and you know I think it’s really great you know there’s a whole bunch of things that that you hear you learn from these experiences where you’re like oh you know that is a sort of a nugget of wisdom or and a bit of empathy that I didn’t have before and so you know when you see people that are you know one great quote I saw was when you have a thousand good cops and ten bad cops but the good cops don’t police the bad cops thousands and ten bad cops and you know I believe that and then that sort of applies to my life too like in what anytime I sort of stand by and do nothing well injustice is happening that makes me sort of complicit in my own way right and you know I think about little minor examples of that in my own life and then it was George Floyd’s George George Floyd’s death was murder and the police should be held responsible I think most cops are good but police departments are corrupt and there are some bad cops looting businesses and destroying properties in morale it hurts the cause I empathize and I agree with black five matter protester and believe in then the right to be heard and then right in the middle was like I am here and this is sad right yeah it’s really crazy and I know people don’t listen Spock has to hear like you know talks about socio-economic issues and racism and whatnot but you know this I think affects everybody is very different than anything that’s happened in my lifetime where you have riots breaking out across the nation all simultaneously and things really do feel like they’ve hit a breaking point for many reasons I think also the fact that people were picked up at home for the last three months I don’t think that helps necessarily because that’s a sort of a bunch of a bunch of you know just water boiling over you know at a certain point as well I agree I saw I agree I don’t even love discussing this stuff as I think about it a lot and I also tend to like they talk about the positive but let me bring something up that I don’t think I have bring up brought up and I want to hear your opinion so I don’t this doesn’t matter and it doesn’t change I don’t think it should like validate or just not about validate anything I say so like my wife’s black my family’s black I’ll have black children and this was the first time or half partially black children this was the first time that I was at my house with Sarah my wife and like she broke down she was like I don’t I don’t know how she’s like I don’t know where I fit in on this because she’s like a successful black woman she’s a guy haven’t had a lot of racist stuff happened to me or if any like I yeah and it was and she’s like but I yeah it was it was it was just a total mind [ ] because I’m like [ ] what am I supposed to how am I supposed to I don’t I don’t know what to feel I didn’t I was like I don’t I don’t know what to do and it was incredibly exhausting do you you you’re Indian do you consider yourself white or not white what definitely considered was of white and nor does anyone who sees me thinks I’m white but well I don’t know like how but I get what you mean in the sense of like in some ways like do you feel that you’re privileged or prejudiced against I think that’s a different way of looking at it and like you know my sister so we I was born in Tulsa Oklahoma which is like you know not the most open-minded and racially friendly place and so my sister when she was in kindergarten you know students would would draw a picture of a pig and then write her name on it and cover the body and brown mud and then they would give it to the teacher and the teacher laughs my sister who always remembers this like she was I don’t know six years old and she vividly remembers the teacher sort of looking at this and laughing and saying no no no put it away but like being you know involved in it and I never I don’t understand that what’s the pig have to do is that because just like a brown brown dirty in the mud you know that sort of thing and and you know I remember you know when she went to my mom it was like why can’t be we’d be white aside to thing where’s like you know asking questions as a kid just trying to understand why am i different what does that mean why do other people think were worse than them that sort of thing I personally never experienced that cuz I had luckily moved out of Oklahoma when I was really young and went to different places where it was it was less so or just got lucky and sort of my experiences around who I was around but I guess I would say like you know when 9/11 happened you know they’re not fun to be a brown guy in are you are you any religion a Muslim no under and they just but I wouldn’t even do yeah would be Hindu but you know just that’s typically what most any people are but yeah you know I’m not religious but you know I do grow a beard pretty quick and so like yeah you know like when you go to the airport I don’t think you think about how do I look today whereas I think about that so I’m like look I’m not trying to get hassled for no reason here’s let me shave before I get on this flight or like you know I had friends who like are Muslim who had like key their house keys take it away from them in TSA because it was like this is you know potentially a dangerous thing and then like this is my apartment how does that make you feel so the fact that you have to shave are you angry or you wait where do you what’s that make you feel like I’m not angry about it you know I I sort of have this opinion that my Bible my personal philosophy if you were going to boil it down to any one thing is the only thing you have control over is your attitude towards the present moment and so so that’s empowering and disempowering right so it’s disempowering because it’s like [ ] I can’t control anything that’s going on I can’t control how other people feel how they’re gonna act I can’t control the results I’m gonna get in my life but it’s empowering it’s like the one thing I control is my attitude towards the moment so that sort of is a superpower because then no matter what the situation is no matter what the moment is I can decide what my attitude about it is gonna be so for example when something shitty happens to me someone says something shitty or you know I you know get that extra I sort of hate coming to this room while I go through TSA clearance you know the meaning I put on that is of my choosing and if I put the meaning of it that you know I’m less than I’m being wronged that doesn’t help me it makes me feel like [ ] and so I just decide not to feel that way but I know that like on the grand scheme of things I get off pretty light it’s very different than never feeling safe you know going for a jog in your neighborhood or something like that I think you know there’s levels to it and I haven’t experienced those levels where it would be very very challenging to put a positive meaning on what’s going on yeah it’s a it’s just a confusing time because you feel so many different emotions and some of them are opposite and I had to like talk to the whole company today which were small let’s say 20 or 30 people and I was like I don’t know what to say other than a few guys like ever feel out of place somewhere like our company we’re gonna we’re gonna make you feel safe like we’ll hire all types of people we like I wasn’t sure if that felt like weak or like like oh like like a barely anything I was like I don’t know what I was like I don’t know how to [ ] handle this other than you’re safe here but yeah you know I think that’s the right approach because it’s not about having the answer or the wisdom or the most heartfelt thing and the best speech but like I think it is important if you’re the leader to show up as a decent human being in that moment just say look I understand I’m also feeling this crazy mix of emotions I just want to do my best with this anything you know we’re gonna we’re gonna try to do our best at this I think it goes a long way to just be a decent person and try to be present and visible there versus kind of shying away from it which is what a lot of people do yeah it’s crazy and I have a feeling once I have children my opinions gonna change a lot like or not my opinion but my I think I’ll learn a lot yeah like having black kids or part black kids I think well I’ll maybe I’ll see something that I didn’t previously see and one more thing which you know we can cut all this out if people tell us later hey you shouldn’t talked about this on the pot but did you watch The Trevor Noah thing that’s posted on YouTube or whatever I did not I’m typically not a fan of his I think that a lot of times he says is the wrong take so I I tend to avoid him but I would watch it if you suggest it avoid him cuz he I don’t think he’s that funny but I did watch this thing and you know he brings up like what’s going on he’s like yeah a lot of people are looking at what’s going on and saying well this isn’t right either right of course police should not murder citizens that’s wrong but also rioting and looting and destroying things is also not right and what his point was which I think made me better understand what was going on his point was like you got to think about this what is society you know a society is essentially a contract it is an agreement amongst a group of people up here’s what’s right and wrong of how we’re gonna act here’s the behaviors that are tolerated here’s the babes that are not tolerate he goes so what you’re saying is that one side of a contract you know if we’re if we go into a contract together and you’re just breaching your side of the contract regularly and without recourse and I just see wow this guy just keeps breaching his side of the contract then I also have no no desire or incentive to uphold my side of the contract he goes you’ll see somebody that’s homeless and you know they don’t go and just murder necessarily because because they’re in a bad position they say look these are the rules of the game I’m losing in the current game or have not been able to sort of get to an advantage position in this game but like I still respect that we’re in a game together and there are rules of this game he goes what you’re seeing now is that a group of people you know black people in America feel like the contract has just been breached over and over and over again where they’re you know unnecessary and unjust violence against us and so now we’re gonna breach the contract too and we’re gonna sort of make it very known what it feels like when the contract is being breached for apparently no reason and it doesn’t seem like a positive thing and so that made me look at you know when somebody is either protesting whether it’s peacefully or not peacefully when somebody’s rioting and they’re creating a sort of unsafe environment for all it’s sort of I don’t know sort of explained to me why somebody would behave that way it’s because if you feel like the other party is just turned breached the contract and then there’s no recourse then it’s like I’m gonna terminally breach the contract and and we’ll see we’ll see how it feels and now both sides feel what it’s like when the societal contract gets totally breached I definitely feel the tension I feel it I feel it definitely feels like like almost like the end of the world a little bit it’s like there’s it’s like a small it’s like in the same way having a new puppy is just like a small taste of having a baby it’s like that’s how I feel right now like I’m like it’s like the world if like everything that I believed in is gonna come to an end it’s gonna take a little a little like this right you know it’s there every sad story there’s also an inspiring story where people are you know waking up the next day and going and cleaning up the city and people standing together and you know I think there’s a lot of really positive things going on too and I think that’s the you know that’s the silver lining or that’s the other side of the coin here where is progress being made and there’s this guy there’s this guy he’s a listener I actually forget his name I think his name is Zach I told you about him he’s from Utah he called me the other he calls me like every week like hey you gonna come to Utah now you’re gonna come to you did he call you y’all talking about he calls me every week and he called me like a Sunday ago when there’s all this Corona thing was go like it was like bad Corona and I just got some bad news and he called me I was like quick [ ] call me or like I like I lost my temper with them so first of all if you’re listening guy forget your name but my apologies you just caught me at a bad time he’s [ ] calling me and I was so angry about the world and so anyway he was calling me about coming to Utah I’m like maybe I need to get out to Utah right now so a guy like I feel like I’m afraid to be around the world at the moment so maybe I’ll go out there let me ask you a question real quick and I mean we don’t have to owe you you bought your house so your house is in a you could say where you live if you want but we’ll say it’s a nice neighborhood that still has some issues in San Francisco it’s like I would say one of the less nice neighborhoods I’m just going over all but it’s still desirable because it’s like in the hipster area do you regret buying your home yes do you as your what you can want to say what your rights is is that your new house or not yeah sure so the new house front is seven grand a monk and was that less than your mortgage yeah it’s less overall because with the house you have you know property tax you have your mortgage and then you have like you know sort of the house maintenance issues that come up over time that you know we’re just miscellaneous things do you think you’ll make it a bit money a little bit less but similar you think you’re gonna make any money off of this deal not really and that’s good you know because selling house has a lot of fees so like you know when you buy a house if you want to sell it the next day you basically need to sell it for 5% more just with the broker fees and then there’s like the transfer tax and then there’s you know all the staging costs you know it’s gonna cost us 15 grand to stage the place and fix up the paint and the you know little scuffs and scratches that we’ve had along the way and then our you know we didn’t take care of a long as good as we should have so we gotta get a landscaper so there’s all these costs of selling so it’s gonna come out that you broke even any wood for free or as they come out that you just lived for a crate or whatever the yeah I lived for I lived it basically about what I could have lived renting it or maybe a little bit ahead we’ll see how it Nets out like it’s unknown right like with the cove it and stuff like we don’t even know you know for somebody to come do an open house tourists like a lot of friction now it’s like wear your mask signed this waiver blah blah blah so I don’t know where it’s gonna sell for but the reason I regret it is not because of any of that you know right before I bought the house like I had been house hunting and like a week before I was hanging out with soui Antilles you know one times wealthier than I am and I asked him I said do you own your place and I was hanging out at his house he says no don’t you own like you know just the most baller house here because you could and he was like oh yeah no I like the you know I like to flex a bit of renting blah blah and I was like mmm seems like he just kind of didn’t give me the full answer there so I asked him it again at the very end of walk even want to make you feel bad yeah talking about uber and I was like so if you were me would you buy he goes no I hope wait why and he goes he goes really simple he’s like I just think I can get a better cap rate and better return on my money essentially doing other things than buying a home so like you know you put your down payment down 20% your home in our case 25% and that money sits in your home and it’s appreciating at the rate of your home appreciation which is like you know varies resonated well I think yeah historically across all homes I think it’s 3% yeah exactly the San Francisco did a lot better during a certain era where was like 10-15 percent a year but his point was basically like yeah like I know that my if I take all my options for how to deploy a dollar you know stock market I can expect about a 7% return and you know I can do private you know startup investing I can do private equity I can put my money with hedge fund I could do multi find real estate there’s like all these things I can do putting it into a down payment of a house is not the best way and on top of that it doesn’t spit off any cash flow so like if I do if I just buy a home and I rent it out to someone I get the appreciation of a home plus I get the cash flow every month we’re trying to say this to everyone and they hate hearing it and I understand why they hate hearing it but I think buying how in our in our in Austin all of our staff buys homes and I’m like look don’t tell me you’re buying this house because it’s a good investment tell me you’re buying this house because you want to like when I bought my stake last night I didn’t think that this 30.00 is a good investment I did it because I thought why it's not a financial investment but a good investment like it made me happy I wanted it I work hard so I can have things I want so if you're so like if you buy your house don't tell me you're doing it because it's you're just throwing away money on rent right tell me you're doing it because it's gonna make you happy or because you want to because that is a good reason but to say that it's an investment that's [ __ ] you could say that it's a great way to preserve wealth but it absolutely in most cases is not a great way to make them well right yeah exactly yeah and I don't blame anybody who thinks that I thought that five seven years ago I would have also said it isn't renting like flushing money down the toilet and if you buy your home you have equity blah blah blah and I learned pretty quickly first person I talked to that were like no that's not exactly how it works so yeah if you haven't gone down that rabbit hole go down the RAM hole because they sort of American dream of like own your own home with your you know your white picket fence in your backyard that is pretty silly and yeah it also made a lot more sense with the ratio of income to housing prices was closer than it is now now it's significantly different out of that and you face like you know risk right like when I'm in my home and now boom remote work is on the rise being in a city is not not the thing anymore it's like oh [ __ ] you know people take it for granted that these things just sort of go up and you know you're one shift away you know as soon as Elon Musk can make the Hyperloop work where I can commute long distances in like 20 minutes or less then people are gonna want to go live further away have way more you know space resources whatnot and not want to be impacted you know like I started eating into a city a lot of people will choose that and so you're one technological shift or one policy shift or in this case one policy plus biological you know terror away from not wanting people not wanting to be in a certain type of real estate class like the way a family in real estate is now struggling because of because of what's going on you get a whole lot of unemployment and now people can't pay the rent and you know every month rents are dropping it was like 99% of people pay their rent last month on the multifamily stuff that I read ninety percent of people are paying their rent and if that dips below you know a certain number maybe it's 82 percent or whatever it is now all sudden you're underwater in a multi-family real estate the way that I like to live because so I've been an entrepreneur since I was 16 making money on my own not necessarily all the time a lot of a lot of money but like having to like go out and hunt and kill each week and I like am allergic to like really big purchases and I'm allergic to getting locked into stuff and I actually think that that me being allergic to that has actually hurt me I think that had I increased my overhead on some things my overheads really cheap I had I increased my overhead I actually would have worked harder to like have to like fulfill that overhead but now I mean if I don't work for many for very long I don't even know how long maybe forever I'm fine and I just prefer to be on that defense cockroaches and putting you know in San Francisco you got to put them three or four hundred thousand dollars on home I'm like a [ __ ] I don't wanna that's scary I don't want to do that you know what I mean yeah and so I've never had the courage to do it okay um a couple things I thought were interesting [Music] one you usually posted something about this thing called mode points what is that me yeah did you post something about mow point no what is no points it's just I thought it's your friend who was doing it it's basically like oh my friend yet no yes he just launched it yeah Moe my friend Moe okay so what it is is yeah I was like what the heck I didn't even remember the name my friend Moe helps people with points that's funny I love that we're talking about so Moe points so Moe it's my friend Moe him and Ramone grew up together in most from Afghanistan by way of where's Ramon from Netherlands and then moved here and they used to have a business it's shut down now so I could talk about it where they would buy and sell airline points and he became an expert on how to maximize points and so I'm getting into this now and so for example if there's all these ways that you can like inter spending money on advertising on this and that you can maximize your points and fly for free forever for years and so he would teach me how to do it myself and I was like whoa turn this into a course and so that's what it is let's let's pick them out though is it moe points comm moe points calm yeah I checked it out because I was pretty interested in this like in the same way that you want like a tax guy to help you save money on the back end you know whenever you do likes pretty significant credit card spending and a lot of times if you own your own business you can rack up a lot of spending on cards I hate going and figuring this stuff out I just feel like it's a waste of my brain and it's a waste of my time to go or like optimize my spending and buy points so I can travel free and look all this stuff but I think no it's valuable and I was hoping to get like what's the shortcut what's the like you know either you do it for me or like what's the 80/20 give me the few things I can do that will give me the highest return on my time and effort because I know I'm sort of wasting this opportunity and I don't want to go become an expert in the stuff but if you're an expert fantastic so I signed up for it oh great I make sure he knows so you know points are interesting I just got into him recently so I earn maybe 300,000 to 400,000 points a month and that translates to 1% of that in cash value so if I spent a million dollars a year on through my credit card which sounds like a lot if you're just an individual and that is a lot if you're an individual but your business that's nothing I get 100,000 cash back now here’s the cool things that cash fact in most cases is tax-free so in if you live in San Francisco that’s the equivalent of getting a salary of 180 grand or yeah and so it’s great and so I’ve actually met some entrepreneurs who I think you can get up to three hundred sixty thousand dollars some of the Countians gonna like tweet at me and say I got it wrong but I’m almost positive and it’s controversial I’m almost up to 350 thousand dollars in cash back and so I know this one lady who’s got this flour company and she gets three hundred fifty thousand dollars in cash back income a year yeah that’s great I have a friend who he he basically negotiate with his investors he’s like I’d like to pay the AWS bill from a company on my personal credit card and so he earned like whatever Amex double black platinum gold whatever it is like the highest tier for life because they were spending like you know three million a month on AWS but they crazy and so like he’s like oh if I ever want to fly I fly first-class now I get like three eccrine odds I get freed this I get three that because that’s the person like the highest tier of Amex and he’s like yeah I got lifetime because during my company I just asked can I just put this on this card and keep that you know tied to my name and and so and so that’s what Moe’s trying to do now it’s just like a course and hand hand-to-hand combat like consultation we try to help people but that is kind of interesting too like logged into a portal and like technology and it does it for you that is pretty amazing and and your transaction fee is either upfront fee or you take you skim a little that is incredibly interesting I like it okay so have another random idea I want to talk about so I have a friend shout-out to my friend Mike who he went to Duke where I went to school he was Duke best football player at the time like he was like I think he led the nation in tackles or something like that she’s an amazing linebacker was football player goes he’s a little undersized but he gets drafted or he gets a tryout with it with a couple teams and he ended up getting cut after a year I think from the Indianapolis Colts and that sort of like the end of his football career but he built a ton of connections and still has connections with athletes in the NBA and NFL so I was talking to him about it I was like you know what problems these guys have what stuff are they trying to do because these are often a class of people who have a lot of money I have specific problems to like people with money fame and specific lifestyle what are some ideas that you know problems that they had that I’ve just never seen but I could solve because I understand them and so one of the things he had mentioned not even has a problem but I was like asking how they did it was every athlete or I should say every many athletes start their own foundation or charity you’ve probably seen this like you know oh you know random wide-receiver it’s not just like the top of the top it’s like random I just yeah I have a foundation back in my CD it’s for kids for you blah blah blah kids and books it’s for Justin poor yet for year one of my favorite fighters has one and so I was wondering was it hey why do they do this and then be like how do they do this like could you build a business around this and so on the y-you know there’s some interesting things and again the accountants are gonna be sort of out in full force correcting me on this but it seems like basically the you know there’s some tax advantages to a foundation in addition to like obviously wanting to give back as often an athlete’s come from pretty rough you know backgrounds and so they do feel this pull okay I’ve made it I won the lottery how do I get back so there’s the there’s the emotional pole to give back and create a foundation and then there’s the financial pull as well which is there are some tax advantages to doing the to doing it this way where you basically are you’re able to give and you’re able to give today and reduce your taxable income and that money goes to the foundation which can then over time spend that money long after your career is over even so you can separate the the time of giving and then the time of spending you can separate the tax event from the giving yeah that’s got the name of it but you and I have a friend who had a large exit and what he did was he put away a significant amount of money I think a very significant amount of money at least five it could be as high as ten he put it into this charitable account and over the next I’m gonna butcher this I think over the next five years he has to spend that on what’s it called what’s a nonprofit called a 403 C five oh yeah he’s got a he’s got a he’s got to get rid of it so whenever I see like a missing charity I’m like hey guy cool and there’s other things like a DAF which is a donor advised fund which is what Jack Dorsey said I’m gonna give a billion dollars away and he did it via a DAF so this other ways but I guess but my idea was cool so there’s reasons a Athletes one foundations they’re clearly doing this but I know athletes athletes are not excited to go figure out the paperwork to start a foundation to make sure they’re reporting on time all that stuff so I was wondering is there a stripe atlas for foundations is there a push a button get your app you get your foundation spun up without having to get on the phone without having to print out a piece of paper and go mail it some but somewhere because I think you could build a pretty nice but you know potentially pretty lucrative subscription business where you know these foundations there’s a spin up fee and then there’s an annual maintenance basically to keep your foundation in good standing I think there’s a business there so let’s talk about Atlas for a second so Atlas is a thing with stripe and it’s a click of a button set up in a I’ll see I think or do other stuff seek or pins out speak or Borella why how does that make money well it makes money so it’s strategic for striped because if you’re doing that you’re probably gonna stay in the stripe ecosystem so they’re like cool how do we get more customers let’s get new businesses to get created and then bill your strengths so it’s kind of like when Facebook gives away Internet to people who don’t have the internet it’s like cool we’ll give you the Internet and guess what you’re gonna do the internet use Facebook so stripes doing the same thing it’s like how do increase the rate of new startups because in start-up stir who use a stripe and then if they grow they grow with us and fantastic we got them all their young type of thing so then how would this make money then what charity they do charge a fee so like when I did it I used ripe Atlas to spin on my company and I think what it is a couple hundred bucks but it’s great it’s like I don’t want to talk to a lawyer I trust that this will this will get set up properly if they do all the filing and documentation they’re just email me hey here’s your tax ID here’s your entity here’s the Articles of formation etc and so stripe Atlas was great took me three weeks and I don’t know two hundred dollars or something like that and I got my company set up why did she do a sequel I did an LLC for me oh but if I wanted to do a sequel but like if I was gonna do a startup that was gonna erase money I would do a c-corp and and I would have used it for that let’s talk about the same amount Monday yeah have you read this post no but it’s the same woman something I I have something good that can piggyback off of it okay you want to start with that you want me to kind of know and I want you to start is the Sam Altman who’s the guy who runs white Y Combinator or just run it anymore actually but he was the president of my Combinator and kind of one of the you know more well-known guys soca valley he put up this blog post called idea generation and he said you know one of the most common questions I get is how do you get ideas for our new startups a lot of it we want to do startups but they don’t quite know the idea or they don’t have a lot of conviction in it and he says something it really goes why see once tried an experiment to fund people who we thought would be good founders but with no ideas you guys and I think every company and this no idea track failed and it turns out that founders have a lot of ideas about everything but like great founders actually have a lot of ideas and if you want to founder if you have a founder who can’t think of an idea they probably shouldn’t be a founder it’s kind of distant but then he’s just explained art so how do you get ideas for startups so he says think number one you want to be in the right environment so you want to be around the right kind of people so he said who are the right kind of people he goes you want to be around people who can have a good feel for the future they will entertain improbable plans they’re optimistic and they’re smart in a creative way and he says they have high idea flux which is you know pretty good for our podcast like I consider both of us idea machines and that’s what he says we calls idea flux so the rate of ideas coming in other body these sorts of people tend to think without the constraints that most people have they don’t have a lot of filters and they don’t care too much what other people think he says this is important because the best ideas are pretty fragile most people don’t even want to start talking about them because they sound kind of silly up front and like take the hustle for example we want to be this big bad media company we’re gonna do an email newsletter and an email newsletter actually sounded quite silly to people who were traditionally in media this was you know back if you rewind several years so you want to be around people who won’t make you feel stupid for mentioning a bad idea and they certainly don’t feel stupid when they mentioned that ideas and he basically says stay away from people who are like the world has beaten them down or they’re the type that belittle your ambitions and unfortunately this in most of the world they hold on to the past and and if you want to live in the future you don’t want to be around these people and then he says okay so here’s the sort of next thing that would help you get good idea so first let’s be around those types of people the second is identify a tectonic shift that’s happening right now how is the world changing in some fundamental way can you identify the leading edge of that change and the opportunity that unlocks it for example mobile phone comes out 2007 2008 and then you get all these companies like snapchat uber Airbnb etc that were launched in that time on top of that like core fundamental shift these up when a big shift happens the big companies usually get beat by fast moving and focused startups so you want to ask yourself a question like what’s something that’s possible this year that wasn’t possible last year and pay attention anytime something like that comes up there’s probably a lot of good ideas in that space the last thing is if you ever feel like something is like if you can say the statement I’m sure this is gonna happen I don’t know if we’ll be the ones to do it that’s a good sign he’s like uber was like this for me the first time I used it it was clear I wasn’t gonna be hailing a cab any longer or calling the dispatcher but I wasn’t it wasn’t clear to me that uber was necessarily gonna win the space I mean the last thing he says is it’s important sorry it’s kind of long it’s important to think about what you are well-suited for so like if you do some introspection or you ask your mentor to figure out what you’re good at he goes I believe that founder company fit is as good as product market fit and he goes lastly you could just a good idea if you can articulate why most people think of it think it’s a bad idea but what you understand about it that makes it a good idea so that’s a final test all right so I thought there’s a pretty interesting post yeah I think it’s crazy interesting and I didn’t break this up because I don’t even care about promoting this but so Goggin biani reached out to me about three months ago and for trends we did this thing where he like just give a talk and people signed up and it was neat and he was like hey I’m thinking about maybe I want to launch like a school or something can I like partner with you guys and you promote this course I want to do and I was like yeah that sounds interesting and so me and him just start riffing more and more and I really got fascinated with this idea ideas like why is it Shawn that you are good at finding ideas and I was like I don’t know why but I wonder if I could like give frameworks behind it and so he’s kind of leading the way and I’m just kind of tagging along a little bit and so we were hosting this thing it’s mostly him posting with a little bit of me and it’s called the ideation bootcamp and I put together what I thought was all these frames works on coming up with ideas and a few of them that I have coincidentally I’ve never read the same up an article until you just told me are similar and so a few of them are like I like to do reverse engineering and so what I look at is I can go to like a website and see like how they do it because to me if I can see how someone does it it helps me realize what’s possible another one is unbundling so I like to look at like really big things like eBay or Craigslist or Reddit and being like okay if usually if something’s huge it becomes a victim of its own success and they can’t move fast enough to adapt from an early like interesting change and so we talk about like I just made up ways to figure that out and then I see is there anything else that’s interesting that is related to that because I didn’t realize it that he kind of actually discussed that um oh and then another thing that I like to do and coincidentally the things that I’m talking about is like he’s talking about we just go in like tactically it’s like how do you look at like he talked about something that’s growing quickly but and you like hop in on it and that’s actually quite hard and tell me what what I’m missing here the things that I really love to do is I like to look at forums and comments and article comments and user reviews for apps on iTunes sakir like what what about parking this [ ] that’s like makes them love something or makes them hate something and that’s what I used to come up with ideas so what Sam often said was it’s something that’s growing quickly early on that like you think is gonna be the future well how else do discover those so so there’s two way so what is your do you discover a platform that’s growing really pop really fast and you go on top of it I’ll give you a perfect example of this zoom is growing like [ ] crazy right now I think I went from like 10 million users to over like 250 million users during just a kovat crisis you know my mom and my auntie use zoom now because that’s how we celebrate birthdays during cocoa and they you know soom used to be this enterprise thing so zooms growing like crazy I had this friend Victor I don’t remember if I’ve mentioned this on the podcast but he created this thing called zoom URL basically zem URL comm and it’s basically Eventbrite for zoom so you noticed the problem of like hey cool everyone using zoom to meet up but zooms like kind of invite and like you know the sort of like splash that page doesn’t exist so there’s not a cool way to like make an invite for a zoom event you just send this ugly link and you say join this zoom that’s where we’re gonna do this conference or this birthday or this whatever and so he just made a really pretty auto generator you put in your zoom link and then you can upload a photo you can put the details all over and you make this little landing page for your event and he’s growing like crazy because he’s just throwing he’s piggybacking on top of zoom very opportunistically on the platform and he’s doing something that you know zoom probably isn’t gonna get around to doing for a little while so he’s got this opportunity to grow solving a new problem and so the other way which I said this is I think where I see you do this less is about technology shifts and I think this is where gentleman is actually talking about more which is you know when you go in the back of an existing product a platform kind of sucks cuz you end up with this platform dependency and then they can often kill you or clone you or you just get stuck on that platform you never get off whereas technology shifts like oh [ ] we couldn’t do this before but now machine learning is good enough that this is now possible or for example my friend told me about these little NFC stickers you know what that is near-field communication so basically I bought these on Amazon they’re like these tiny little stickers that cost like you know 10 cents each or something like that and if you get these in bulk they’re very very cheap and you just program them so that like if somebody just moves their phone into this thing it touches taps this thing it’s like Apple pay it will fire something open on their phone you can open up a website it can open up whatever and I’m like dude this is great for marketing like I should just put these on products or you know this could be in my shoes it could just say is this a real Jordan or is this a fake these little things can be embedded everywhere because the cost has come down and the reliability has come up and the core platforms like I found an Android now you know by default will react to these and I’ve seen things just like they do QR codes so there’s a so technology ships is I think the one that most people don’t understand cuz they don’t have Technic like technical literacy so they don’t know what’s going on and they don’t know when something before that was impossible is now possible because it was like actually there’s just a subtle shift over time or the cost of this chip has dropped and now it’s really economical to do something that before that would have been ridiculous or now that you have a small that needs to be so so how do you identify this so for example I I have a meeting every week with my former CTO for my startup cuz he lives in that like bleeding edge of technology and I have an hour a week that it’s called the cool [ ] hour it’s on our calendar and he just shows me cool [ ] and I just told him look when we’re usually in meetings I talk 90% the time you talk 10% cuz I’m the kind of talker or sales guy but in this meeting you’re gonna talk 90 I’m gonna talk 10 and the cool [ ] hours just you demoing to me cool [ ] that I don’t know about because I don’t understand cryptocurrency the way you do I don’t understand VRA or the way you do I don’t know about these other ladies are the technological shifts that are going on so we’ve been doing this for a month now and it’s [ ] awesome I basically got a front row seat of this and all I had to do was just ask a smart guy who is in that world but the more generic way of doing that is just to hang out with those guys so again it’s sort of like what this post was if I was like who do you hang out with ends up being what’s in your what’s in front of your eyes and so we hang out with a bunch of business people that figure out different ways to make money so for us how do you make money is there some question of which way do you want to make money I know 100 paths and I have a five examples of each of those hundred paths I have 500 different examples of how to make money I just got to choose one that fits me whereas people who are in the world of technology they don’t really know exactly how to make money but they can tell you 100 interesting things with technology and so sometimes you got to hang out with them and eat lunch with him you know three times a week so that you’re hearing those things put yourself in that position yeah it’s like you just gotta hang out like in the fringes and I think that like a great places great places to hang out the fridges are ready reddit hacker news just like the way that it and I guess you’ve just gonna you’re helping me finalize my one slide show I have to do which is you have to look at user behavior and you have to find this fringe behavior that’s growing quickly right you know a couple podcast ago I went off on this random tangent about defy decentralized fun you know finance yeah it was just like you know I’m speaking gibberish I don’t even know what the [ ] I’m talking about but it’s because I discovered this fringe right so all this activity happening I was like global whoa I don’t even understand this but I know enough to know that this is unusual and this is a phenomenon and I need to know more and so like boom save that tap in that tab open in my brain and I’m gonna come back to this you got to know more about this this is unusual this is new it’s interesting well I think that’s what you have to do when you have ideas which is you have to actually steal from a lot of different places so you like take like [ ] I don’t know like wow at a restaurant I could order like I only have to pay for what I order or something or I don’t [ ] know like our giving example maneuver like I don’t actually have to like have I don’t have to own the cabs you know what I mean I’ll give you an example so two ideas if you if you do a little idea sex with them so cloud kitchens we’ve talked about that in the podcast before so creating a virtual restaurant selling on top of post made to coober et cetera and then in the world of e-commerce I was thinking about upsells upsells is you know obviously critical to e-commerce it’s like you’re buying one thing it’s like hey do you want fries with that right hey do you want this extra thing and it increases the order value by 20% 30% 40% whatever it is upsells are critical in e-commerce in the world of delivered food delivery they basically don’t exist so I was thinking like how many times were if we were ordering you know Chinese food or Mexican food or whatever through some restaurant why doesn’t a breeds just do a you know sort of have a cloud dessert company that’s always just like do you want to add some ice cream on top of that or hey we just made brownies whatever and like I bet they can increase the cart size and it shouldn’t be another restaurant it should be a upsell across all orders of all restaurants that day then so like I don’t know you can sort of mismatch ideas if you see something that’s interesting or critical in one area in another area they don’t do it that’s usually you know makes for an interesting [ ] thought experiment i i completely agree with this i when i’m wondering is do you can you teach people this or either got it or you don’t know for short teach people this yeah i would love to say here either got it or you don’t that would make it mean that make me feel awesome because like i got it and other people do but the reality is i didn’t have it and now I do and I know exactly what I did to get there I hung out with people who have a bunch of interesting ideas and I got thirsty for that so I started hanging out with them either in person or my Twitter feed is just full of those people like I don’t have you know I don’t put sports into my Twitter feed as much like I surround my feed with that so that even when I’m just browsing that’s what I get the second thing is like start to come up with these frameworks so for example one framework I have you should steal for your thing it’s like you if you imagine this 2x2 grid on the left side you have what type of problem is this this is a new problem or an old problem right old problem people trying to meet their mates they want to date somebody that’s an old problem new problem hey I’m trying to throw a zoom event and I don’t have a good way to share that right that wasn’t a problem that existed five years ago but it exists now and so new brought an old problem and then you have new solution old solution so it’s like cool old solutions to things can be applied to new problems so that’s what the zoom URL thing is he’s taking an old solution like Eventbrite or splash that or like these proven methods he’s just saying cool I can specialize and tailor that to this new problem which is zoom events rather than in-person events and then you take new solutions which are things like oh wow so crypto lets you have trust or like a digital contract so I don’t need an escrow person so maybe you know I can take an old problem like you know escrow and a home and a home sale but an inert solution notarizing yeah notaries okay cool yeah exactly so a new solution push a button somebody has GPS on their phone and they come to you and they solve your problem for you they either pick you up to take you somewhere or whatever cool maybe I can apply that to this old problem notary and so you just take that 2x2 grid and you say cool what are all the new solutions that are interesting to me and the other one is what are all the new problems that are interesting to me you just keep jotting those down anytime you you know whatever that is and so that’s a framework you can use to understand ideas and figure out is this idea actually something novel or not well it’s novel whenever you cross old problem and new solution or old solution and new problem those are the two boxes that the new ideas coming if it’s an old problem old solution there’s nothing new there don’t do it you’re blowing my mind I’m listening no I don’t understand how you come up with these likes like you think you think and like you know how people used to say Obama talks and like quotes like he always like he just has these one-liners that are like really great you talk and frameworks yeah I don’t know why but I think it’s because I like frameworks so I’m studying them and then I just naturally start thinking that way another another way to practice this if you want to become an idea person is like James altra shared this but he was like every day I write down ten ideas it doesn’t have to be good bad it’s just a daily practice of idea generation because if you think about it like oh man I wish I was better ideas cool do you do that do you practice coming up with new ideas every day oh you don’t okay you know I also wish I was fit but if I don’t go exercise that what what do I expect is gonna happen well that’s gonna magically get fit it’s the same thing here I have to that idea I don’t do the James altra one but the two I do one is this podcast twice a week I get up in front of them you know a lot of people and I try to come up with new ideas that’s a practice how do I prepare for that I have these documents on my phone and my laptop once called the biggest idea in my head and I have every month and I just write down it this month what is the biggest idea in my head and I just put it there and so like I’ll go to my doctor right now I’ll read you one of mine biggest idea man Sean everyone has asked that you share this [ ] and you never have yeah you know these are I I don’t know if I want to share these things today somewhat something I want to share somewhere they don’t want sure so like in April I refinance my home and the biggest idea in my head was like holy [ ] that was so much work and such and so painful biggest idea in my head is turning refinancing into a five minute online process I don’t know how but if there was a new solution that’s an old problem that I would want solved when we were doing the weight loss challenge the biggest idea in my head was holy [ ] everybody needs a little monitor in their body that tells them how their body is reacting to the food they eat if we want to change people’s diets and not have half the country be obese we need to have real-time feedback loops so that when you put that you know piece of chocolate in your mouth you pay a price immediately and not like five years down the road and so the biggest idea in my head was how do we make these glucose monitors so cheap and readily available that everybody gets feedback for everything that it’ll help the country eat better about the world world’s eat better that’s the biggest idea in my head for one month and so I just write these ideas down and then you know I basically have a place to put them I I’m I’m just I’m like being a listener right now I am thinking about this I don’t know I don’t have anything to add I feel like I’m a student at the moment it’s listening to this but that’s great what you guys are doing if you guys are gonna release these courses or classes I don’t know I don’t know I like really the truth is is that we don’t have hustle con revenue in June and he had done all the work and I was like yeah okay well well I’ll work with you had to do it and I don’t know I personally as a business like our business like we have an ambitious goal to build a really large company I think horses will not be part of that you there right I think that it was simply like a thing to like well let’s just try it and it actually covered our also found revenue so or profits so but we I will not do this I will not do it ever I hate the course business I think it is it is not fun but I it for a solopreneur yeah for a company no I think it’s [ ] I think that if you’re reforged which is a $5,000 thing for companies that is interesting but I still think it sucks to host like I don’t I don’t think it’s like it maybe it make some profit I don’t know if it does but it definitely does but I personally don’t like it I don’t think most people even finish this [ ] yeah most people don’t I think that like Duggan who created he created what you to me right yeah you know me he I think he everyone who came out and said less than 5% of people finish you know at one point I’m MOOCs massively open online courses were all the rage everybody said MOOCs are gonna revolutionize education it’s gonna just shitty system and then they came out and they were like look we made a Harvard education free and open to anyone all you had to do is click a button and enroll and then you should got to show up and take it you could have a Harvard education for free online from the comfort of your own home and less than 5% of people I think finish the course and I think that tells you a lot about like why people do a thing you know people don’t go to university to learn that’s the sad truth people go to university to get credentialed so that they can get a high paying job so if you want to compete within the university you should actually create a credential that gets you a high paying job that would gives people confidence if I get this credential I would get that’s I think this is what you needed this is what you your next thing will have to be this is the area I’m most interested in and if I could just figure out an angle I’ll do it because there’s this other great talk that came from the YC mafia it’s by this guy Richard Hamming and it’s called you and your research she’d go read it’s a speech he gives and I didn’t know who this guy was apparently he’s like a kind of technologist from back in the day he talks about his time at Xerox PARC in Xerox PARC was responsible for life let’s call Richard Richard what I think is Richard Hamming his name I’m pretty sure is Hamming I don’t know if this person is Richard maybe I just inserted generic white name but the Xerox PARC is where like you know the visual graphic user interface like Steve Jobs went to Xerox PARC and was like Oh mouse point set idle on screen that’s how computer should work and he like stole the innovations basically from there because they were just doing Rd and he was like trying to print [ ] to the world anyways he talked about Xerox PARC and used to he said he tells the stories like I was that lunch one day and I asked my co-workers these brilliant people you know all the brain in the world is stuffed into these guys skulls and he’s like I asked him what is the most important what is the biggest idea in your head what is the most important problem in your space in your industry what is the most important problem and then they would say a thing music and what are you researching and they would say a different thing he’s like why aren’t you working on the most important the most burning question in your space the most interesting thing in your field why are you that working on and he discovered like you know so his his message is basically ask yourself that question what does the most the biggest thing in my space what is the biggest challenge or opportunity in my industry why am I not working on it and then she could work on it he says the filter is you have to ask yourself do I have a novel angle and how I’m gonna attack that problem because if I just go but if I like the big problems are kind of known but you need a new attack vector of how you can solve that problem if you don’t have a new attack vector you’re just gonna waste your time and energy you’re gonna get the same result as everybody else but if you have a new attack vector then it is your responsibility as a smart and talented person to go to it so that’s how I think about this University thing and for a long time I already knew the last project I do I’m gonna do that’s [ ] dude that’s [ ] that is only one way to do it because if you think about it like a lot of great restaurants aren’t particularly really novel in the solution well I mean they’re like novel and branding or they’re novel in that sean is making it do you know what I mean so I think that is a little [ ] I know restaurants are [ ] right like no they’re not you’re wrong the restaurants are having businesses no you’re wrong one of the large tool min 42 owns what’s he owned forty demos but he also owns some restaurants yes you know some chains it’s mostly he owns the Golden Nugget me owns a whole bunch of other stuff too yeah and like some steak houses is like Bubba Gump shrimp just like fast casual stuff that regular people go to and it’s like so fun into the most profitable privately owned companies America the best restaurant chains all had a new attack vectors right McDonald’s realized the new attack vector and they productionize fast food and they had a real estate model the franchise model to back it up Chipotle now and they did the same thing but they had they realized over the fast-casual model which was different but there are many hey there are many cases where the the amount of success they had it’s not into proportion to the amount of mmm the their new novelty is not a proportion with the amount of success that they have yes so okay here’s what I think if you’re talking restaurants the analogy there is like I’m gonna create an online course - right that’s me opening up my restaurant just like everybody else has a restaurant but my restaurants run by me I think I’m a good cook I think some people will like my will like my my restaurant what I’m try to do is sort of change like change the restaurant industry right so like when I talk about education it’s not like I’m just trying to create a course I’m trying to make it so that I guess that here’s the analogy I don’t want to build a car I want to build a road so roads basically are new platforms that anybody can create a car on and you can get a lot more data - no I understand roads versus if you’re just trying to build a car if you’re just trying to be a car driving on the existing road system you know I mean I get it that’s a fair point no it’s asked is a car it’s us getting on here and entertaining people we’re gonna reach a certain set of people given a certain amount of effort making go they can scale pretty big because we’re using the Internet and it’s awesome and it’s free that’s that’s good it’s better than the cars of old where we would just go to a event and we would host a meet-up in 40 people would show up and we would talk that’s the old way this is much better right so much better car but it’s still not a road a road is podcasting if you create something like podcasting boom you’ve changed yeah you’ve really changed the world and that’s that’s more exciting to me I get it I we’re in the same page there on that one I think we had an interesting podcast I’ll be interesting to interested to see if people like it or not I think we turned I think we covered a lot and actually turned I was expecting this week’s [ __ ] those in a horrible mood I think we turn it into something good cool yeah this was fun I think we should switch the order around I think you should put the maybe the political stuff at the back I don’t know we’ll see well we listened to the reviews we listened to the tweets so let us know what you think cool all right let’s get outta here