Shaan returns after two weeks off for the birth of his baby and Sam after his grandfather’s funeral. The episode becomes a wide-ranging conversation about paternity leave, Aristotle’s idea of flourishing, the underrated power of engineered rest and think time, and Shaan’s announcement of his 1-hour book series on creativity. Sam shares the Paul Graham procrastination framework and a eulogy story about his grandfather’s gift to his father: the brainwashed belief that he was special.
Speakers: Shaan Puri (host), Sam Parr (host)
Back From Time Off [00:00:00]
Shaan: You know, I have a soft spot in my heart for immigrants.
Sam: You do love immigrants, dude. Like Korean store owner energy.
Shaan: It’s almost racist how much you love immigrants.
Sam: Dude, what’s going on? I haven’t seen you in about two weeks. I had a baby and took about two weeks off. You were doing some family stuff. What’s going on?
Shaan: Let’s talk about your baby first — it’s much happier. I went to my grandpa’s funeral. Let’s not start with the saddest news. Tell me about the baby.
Sam: So we were due on the 20th. On the 13th or 12th, my wife was like, “I don’t want to freak you out” — it’s 10 p.m. — “My water just broke.”
Shaan: What an unbelievable sentence. She didn’t want to freak you out. That’s the most Sarah thing I’ve ever heard.
Sam: So we went to the hospital. She gave birth. She had to get a C-section, so I didn’t do anything.
Shaan: You’re out of the room.
Sam: I eventually came in and she was shaking from the medication, so I was basically just rubbing her face and calming her down. My wife is very stoic, so I’ve been lucky. It was great for me. No big deal. I mean, I was exhausted and complained about it for a week, but I took two weeks off, and it got me thinking.
Shaan: Wait — before we get there — what was your role? Handholder? Coach? Off to the side? Cameraman?
Sam: Honestly, sometimes I’m put in a situation where I’m supposed to be comforting and I realize I’ve never once done that before. Like when you swing a tennis racket and you don’t know how much force to apply — that’s me trying to comfort someone.
Shaan: When I got engaged I started to put my knee down and then I was like… a pat on the back will do.
Honest Takes on Paternity Leave [00:05:00]
Sam: I took two weeks off and was chomping at the bit to get back after honestly four days.
Shaan: Here’s the zone of truth on paternity leave. There seem to be two groups of people. Some people hold their baby for the first time and their life is changed — this inner spiritual awakening. Didn’t happen for me. It doesn’t happen for a lot of people. For me it takes about 15 months to actually love a baby. I care for the baby, I want no harm done to the baby, but do I crave holding and touching and the smell?
Sam: Can I save you? “You love your baby, but you may not be in love with them.”
Shaan: That might be a little generous.
After 15 months, though — it’s incredible. All in. But as a newborn? The baby is just not that interesting.
What I think actually works: take the week off before birth, be a calming presence, take load off your partner. Then clear the calendar the first few days after birth because you never know. After that, spread the time out — maybe two weeks at month three or four when you get sleep regressions. That intermittent approach is more useful than just sitting there for two weeks while an inanimate object naps.
Sam: It made me realize that taking time off and just sitting at home and walking around your town is special. It honestly felt like a mini retirement. Puttering around in the morning without rushing.
Aristotle and Flourishing [00:12:00]
Sam: Stoicism gets a lot of credit right now. Very hot. But Aristotle is one of the people who influenced those guys. I’ve been obsessed with this idea of his: flourishing. The Greek word is eudaimonia.
He has around 14 virtues. Each one has extremes on either side where the virtue becomes a vice. Courage — on one side is recklessness, on the other is cowardice. The middle is courageous. Charity — on one side is ostentatious giving that actually enables people, on the other is stinginess. You want to be in the middle.
According to Aristotle, to live a harmonious flourishing life, you need those 14 virtues. And he talks about leisure time — not as a way to recoup from work, but as an end in itself. The reflection is the goal. A perfect, flourishing life needs dedicated time to think.
Recently I experienced work where I was so happy to go home to see my family, so happy to get up and work out, and I was like: I am flourishing. Stress didn’t equal pain. Stress equaled growth.
Shaan: That tracks. I do have leisure time — piano, tennis, basketball, kids. But what I don’t do is spend dedicated time in silence thinking. In the past decade, it was basically zero. I’d think accidentally in the shower, but never consciously scheduled think time.
Engineering Breakthroughs [00:18:00]
Sam: I think you can engineer breakthroughs. For me it’s slow mornings — 30 minutes to poke around before the day starts. Working out. Journaling. Reading. And unscheduled time with interesting people, no agenda. You had a breakthrough that led to Milk Road after going to a conference on a topic completely unrelated to your interests. That’s why conferences work.
Shaan: I’ve been writing a book and along the way got really into how the great creatives actually work. One of the things that surprised me was how much engineered rest matters.
Aaron Sorkin, when writing a script, takes eight showers a day. He says his best thoughts come in the shower. There’s science behind it — warm water, relaxed environment, no distractions. Every time he gets stuck, he showers and pushes through the plateau.
Einstein was a prolific boater. In the middle of the day he’d get on a little no-motor boat and float out to sea for hours. The Coast Guard worried about him. He’d say the further the better — that’s where he did his best thinking.
Darwin went for walks whenever noodling on a problem. He’d walk laps and kick a stone off at the starting point with each lap. He’d talk about “four-stone problems” or “five-stone problems” — measuring the difficulty of a problem by how many laps it took to make headway.
This all looks incredibly unproductive. Taking a nap, going for a walk, floating in a boat — you look like a lazy bastard. But if you look at how the great ones work, this is part of their routine.
Sam: I remember meeting Tim Ferriss. I asked him what his daily routine looked like and he said people expect something awesome. But it would be incredibly boring. “I wake up, stretch, drink some tea, putter around for a while, and have long periods of inaction where I’m just trying to think about what I really want to do.”
The 1-Hour Book Series [00:28:00]
Shaan: The premise of what I’m working on: I’ve created a series called 1-Hour Books.
One of my biggest pet peeves is that books are long not because the ideas require it, but because of the publishing industry. Publishers want a certain physical weight. If you go to a publisher with a thin book they say, “It won’t sell as well.” People need to feel they got value by holding something heavy.
How many books could have been blog posts? There are a lot of books that are a couple of great ideas and then 200 pages of fluff.
So I decided: can I create books that are life-changing but readable in one hour, in a single sitting? 10,000 hours of my research for one hour of your time — that’s an incredible trade.
The first book is on creativity. Seinfeld, Disney, Rick Rubin, Pixar — I went and studied how all these great creative people actually work, and started working completely differently myself.
Shondra Rhimes described her creative morning like this: “Imagine a door five miles away. Those five miles are lined with cupcakes and episodes of Game of Thrones and Idris Elba wants to talk to you and there are really great books you could read. Every time I sit down to write, I mentally have to run those five miles past all that stuff to get to the door. Sometimes I’m almost dead by the time I get there. But behind the door is where all the good stuff is. That’s where the great ideas live.”
Every day I wake up and spend two hours on what I call “eating crap for breakfast.” You’re going to make something that probably sucks today — but you’re going to sit down and do your five-mile run and do the deep work. What ends up happening is you push past where an amateur will give up.
The amateur sits down, it kind of sucks, and they seek a reason to stop. The pro sits down, it kind of sucks, and they keep going. The difference isn’t talent. The difference is the pro can tolerate their own mediocrity longer.
Sam: I think Tim Ferriss said he wouldn’t wish writing a book on his worst enemy.
Shaan: You don’t do this if you’re looking for something quick or high-probability of success. Books take one to two years, sometimes five. George R.R. Martin has been trying to write one for 13 years. Even when they succeed, it’s nothing compared to building a company or doing a podcast.
You don’t write a book for other people. You write it for yourself. A hundred people come to me and say, “I want to write a book.” Really they want to have written a book. That’s the first question: do you want to write a book, or do you want to have written one?
I chose a subject I’m currently fascinated by and where I’m the lab rat — I get to actually use the principles. It’s the book I need right now. That’s the only way to do it.
Sam: If I had to bet, this will be the most successful thing you’ve ever done.
Paul Graham’s Three Types of Procrastination [00:42:00]
Sam: Paul Graham wrote this article on procrastination that kind of changed my life. He says there are three types.
Type one: you just don’t do the thing you’re supposed to do. Most common type.
Type two: you do things with professional-sounding words — researching, making to-do lists — but in reality it’s procrastination. Completely worthless.
Type three: this is the good kind. You’ve seen the archetype of the forgetful scientist — mismatched socks, hasn’t showered, kind of dirty. That’s actually the best type of procrastination.
If you’re doing your life’s work, it means you have to ignore other things. Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg wearing hoodies and pajamas all the time — people made fun of them for not wearing suits. But they were actually doing type three procrastination. They were focused on their life’s work and ignoring everything else. It’s going to annoy people and piss people off, but that’s how you do great work.
Shaan: I love that. That fires me up.
Shaan’s Grandfather and the Gift of Belief [00:50:00]
Shaan: I want to share something I didn’t plan to share. As my grandfather died at 98, I flew to DC for the funeral. And my dad gave a eulogy.
My dad’s family grew up dirt poor in the middle of nowhere in India. You have to zoom in three times on Google Maps to even see the town. And somehow my dad went from there to a mansion in San Francisco with an iPhone in his pocket.
He was telling the story of the best thing his dad ever did as a father. My grandfather worked at something like a government weapons factory. He would take my dad there and the boss would be like, “Hey, little one — someday you could run this place.” And my grandfather would say to his boss, right in front of my dad: “No way. This boy is special. You don’t know. This boy’s going to be in America doing incredible things. He’s not going to work in a factory.”
He never explained why he believed it. There was no evidence. My dad hadn’t done anything special. But my grandfather just kept saying it, in public, over and over. And eventually my dad became sure too. He started to believe it about himself.
My dad said: that was the one gift my father gave me. Not money, not a fancy school, not toys. He gave me this brainwashed belief that I was special. And from that, everything else followed.
Sam: That’s the best thing I’ve heard in a long time.
Shaan: You just had a kid. I think about that a lot — what’s the one gift I can give? That story stuck with me as a parent.