Sam and Shaan swap their recent info diet — Scott Galloway’s candid nine-figure personal finance podcast, Warren Buffett’s biography, and David Senra’s Founders pod. They riff on Galloway’s “make money in America, spend it in Europe” philosophy, Buffett’s fat-pitch investing discipline, and the strange story of Buffett’s family life. They also debate investor bias, why people reach for complex solutions over simple ones, the charisma theory of presidential elections, and why neither of them would want to be running a newsletter right now.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host, co-founder The Hustle), Shaan Puri (host, founder Milk Road)
Intro: Text-Based Bangers and Info Diet [00:00:00]
Sam: That’s how we grew, and that’s why I tell people — when I say “blog,” I don’t actually mean blog. I mean create bangers. Text-based bangers, on a consistent basis. Get people to love your free content enough to subscribe. TBB, baby — text-based bangers. That’s been our strategy.
Shaan: All right, we’re live. Can I tell you about a few interesting pieces of content I’ve consumed lately? I want to hear what you’ve consumed too.
Sam: Yeah, let’s do it.
Shaan: The info diet section.
Sam: The info diet section.
Scott Galloway’s Nine-Figure Personal Finance [00:00:30]
Shaan: Let me tell you the first one. I’ve been on a Scott Galloway kick. Scott Galloway has a podcast — I think that’s what he’s most famous for now. He started a few companies. One of them, L2, I think sold for around $200 million — nine figures. He did this podcast called “Scott’s Personal Finance” that I found on YouTube, where he talks about money: how much he has, what he spends it on. He goes, “This is all going to sound douchey, but I’ll tell you.” He’s basically like, I’m worth at least $100 million. He said, “I made it into nine figures recently.” And then he says, “I’m still incredibly anxious about money — it stems from childhood. We were just poor and I’m super anxious about it.”
But then he does something cool. He says two things that are interesting. One: he’s spending between $200,000 and $400,000 a month. And he moved to Europe. The guy asks, “Why would you move to Europe?” He goes, “Well, America’s the best place to make money and Europe’s the best place to spend it.”
Sam: Love that. That’s great.
Shaan: It was awesome. He goes, “Look, what I’ve realized is I’m getting older. I don’t have a lot of time to live — maybe 40 more years or something. I’m going to spend it and enjoy the hell out of it.” He says, “It feels incredibly masculine for me to be able to provide these experiences for my family and I’m doing it.” He says he spends around $100 to $200,000 a month on travel. They fly private. He went to the World Cup — brought another couple and their family just because he wanted to, paid for the whole thing.
He goes through this really detailed thing about spending his money. And another interesting thing he said — I want to ask you about this — is he’s had, I think, three companies, one of which was a very big success that probably made him $50 million. But he said, “I’ve made more money being on the boards of companies and the equity they’ve given me than actually building companies.” What surprised him was that he made more money doing the not-his-main-thing. The ancillary stuff. Has that proven true in your career yet?
Sam: 100%. I wouldn’t say “more” yet, but I’ve definitely seen examples of it. I’ll give you a simple one from my life, and then one from a recent episode.
In my life, I started an e-commerce brand about three years ago. I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve spent on it — it takes a lot to build a real company with real revenues and real profits, and a physical product. Tons of energy. I’ve pulled out zero dollars and zero cents from this business. Now the business makes a lot of money — we’re in the tens of millions in revenue — but it all gets reinvested, and all my time gets invested into it.
One thing that happened along the way: I was always on my phone, and I wanted to be able to check on my store from my phone. The Shopify app doesn’t really make that easy. You can see your revenue but you don’t know how your ads are doing, how your Amazon store is doing, how your Google account is doing, how your Klaviyo emails are working.
So I meet these two guys who are like, “Hey, we made this thing — it’s a mobile way to manage your storefront for any e-com brand. We built it for ourselves.” I use it, I’m like, “Oh, this is great.” I say, “I’d like to invest.” They’re like, “Cool.” I was maybe the first or second investor, very early — like a $5 million valuation or something. Do you remember what you put in?
Shaan: $75,000.
Sam: To a company called Triple Whale. Was that all your own money?
Shaan: No. All my investments have to go through the fund, unless it’s something that wouldn’t be eligible. This would qualify. So it went in from the fund.
So I put this money in and I’m like, “I hope this does well, but I’m not sure. It seems like maybe just an analytics widget. It might not be the biggest thing in the world, but I think it’s useful for me and other store owners will find it useful.” I started telling other owners about it. This company is now worth hundreds of millions of dollars. On a $5 million valuation entry point, we’re up 40x or something — 30, 40, 50x somewhere in that range.
Take $75,000, multiply by 40 — that’s $3 million. Of course it’s the fund, so my carry is 20%, and also it’s not done. This is just a couple years in. If this becomes a $2 billion company, it’s easy to see I will have made more from this than from the store.
And by the way, I invested in six other e-commerce SaaS tools. Sales tax is a pain — I’ll use Numeral for that. Bookkeeping and accounting — I’ll use Final Loop instead of QuickBooks. Postscript for text message marketing. I started investing in whatever I thought was the best tool after doing the research, because I’m not just going to be a user — I’m going to be an investor too.
A lot of these are huge now. I’ve made more money investing in e-commerce SaaS tools than I’ve made from the store itself. The store took all of my time. These others took one hour of back-and-forth emails to do the investment.
That said — had I not done the e-commerce thing, I would have never understood the value of these tools or been able to see them early or been able to say, “Let me in, and I’ll introduce you to a hundred other people with stores.” That network was the key. You made money in this weird, unplanned way — because you were in the game.
Shaan: Same way Galloway made money not from his companies but from being on boards — because his reputation got him there. Way easier, and more money, especially when you count dollars per hour.
I’ll give you another example. We just did a podcast with Samir from Colin and Samir. He talks about how they got their start doing something nobody would look at and say, “This is a good business plan.” They were lacrosse fans — lacrosse players — and they created a lacrosse sports commentary network on YouTube. Niche of a niche of a niche. Pretty early on YouTube, and honestly it didn’t work that well. But it did two things: it taught them about YouTube and making videos, and now their YouTube channel has a million subscribers — it’s a multi-million dollar brand.
But also, when they were following the lacrosse scene, they found this one guy — the best lacrosse player in the country — who wanted to go pro but there’s basically no pro scene. He’d make $35,000 a year. He’s like, “Screw it, I’m going to make my own lacrosse league.” And guess who became the first investor in that league? Samir. He didn’t have a lot of money — let’s say he put in $10,000. But that lacrosse league is now worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
In this weird way, he’ll probably make more from that one investment than from all the YouTube work he was trying to do. But it only would have happened by being in the game and giving himself the opportunity to get lucky.
Sam: I think it’s called “the arena.” It’s being in the arena. Although it’s hard for brown guys like me to say “the arena” without getting caught in that fire.
Shaan: You could say that.
Sam: He’s in the arena. And by the way, that podcast was great.
Warren Buffett: The Biography [00:08:00]
Sam: The second thing I’ve consumed lately: I’ve been reading like crazy. You and Andrew kind of turned me on to it. I hate investing — don’t really love it — but I wanted to learn more. So I read Warren Buffett’s biography. Not The Snowball — that’s too long, like a thousand pages. This one is called The Making of an American Capitalist. Have you ever read anything about Buffett?
Shaan: I read a Buffett book back in the day, like ten years ago, but I don’t really remember it.
Sam: I didn’t know anything about him. But there are a few traits that are crazy. He’s got this aw-shucks demeanor — like, “I’m from the Midwest, what do I know?” — but super charismatic. He could be president.
Shaan: Yeah, well, it’s mostly kind of a performance in a sense. The guy’s a genius — he’s the 1% of the 1% in terms of IQ and horsepower.
Sam: There’s this crazy story where he’s helping to buy ABC — multi-billions of dollars — and he’s sitting at his desk, and they’re like, “All right, let’s work out the deal.” He goes, “Oh, let’s just work it out right now.” They ask about his analysts, where are they? He goes, “I’m the computer. It’s all here.” No calculator, nothing. He says, “If I can’t do the math in my head, I don’t understand this deal and I probably shouldn’t do it.” He just memorizes all the annual reports, all the numbers, and does the math in his head. His IQ is crazy.
The second thing is his discipline. Before he had Berkshire Hathaway, he had a fund — I think it started with like $100,000 — that was growing 30% a year. He did that for like ten years. Then in the ’60s he just shut it down. They’re like, “Why are you shutting this down?” He goes, “I just don’t see any good opportunities right now. So I’m just going to shut this down.” He just stopped investing, had a little mini-retirement. Incredibly disciplined.
And the last thing is his integrity. He’s only sued someone one time — that was when he gave a charity $25,000 and the guy didn’t actually provide the charitable work. That’s it. One lawsuit. There was another time he was being investigated by the Senate, who thought he was insider trading because he’d made a few very smart calls. After investigating him for two or three years, they said, “Hey, do you want to join our committee on fraud? You’re really smart and the most honest guy we’ve met.” And he joined the committee.
Another time: he’s at a country club and he suggests, “Why don’t we let Jewish people in?” The guys are like, “Look, the Jews have their own thing, their own country club — it’s 100% Jewish. Let the Jews go there.” So instead of putting up a fuss, he goes and joins the Jewish country club, and says, “They integrate and let non-Jews in. I think we should do that too.” That’s how he goes about things. Not confrontational, but pretty slick.
And then for the first forty years of his career, he only read annual reports. That’s how he got his information. People ask how he’s so good and he goes, “I just read like five annual reports a day. I don’t even have a computer. I don’t have a terminal. All the information I use, any one of you can go to a library and get that same information.”
Super unique guy. He’s got one downside though. Do you know what it is?
Shaan: He’s like a terrible family man, right?
Sam: Right. He has a very weird family dynamic. So what happened — he got divorced, kind of, but she didn’t officially get divorced. His wife Susie was a hippie, and for some reason he was into that. They were married and he loved her. But one day she goes, “Warren, I just want to go off to San Francisco and do my own thing. But we’re not going to get a divorce.” He’s like, “All right, cool.” Then she says, “Also, I have my friend Astrid — she’s going to come take care of you.”
Shaan: I thought it was her sister.
Sam: Not her sister. Just someone she was friendly with.
Within a week of Astrid taking care of Buffett, they’re lovers. She moves in. But they’re all friends with each other. Susie is like, “Astrid, I think you should redecorate the house — it’s getting a little old.” She gives her tips on taking care of him. When Buffett has to go to big public meetings — meeting with senators, whatever — Susie comes. When he wants to do local stuff that doesn’t require a lot of press, Astrid comes. They take turns. If it’s a really big thing, they’ll both go and team up.
It’s very interesting and very strange. And he’s not a very present father. He’s also super cheap with his kids. There was a time when his daughter was living in a really crappy apartment, she had just had a baby, and one of Buffett’s friends goes to check on her. She can barely see the TV because it’s a small black-and-white set. The friend goes, “Warren, you should buy her a big screen TV — she’s had a baby, she’s sitting in this apartment, just buy her a TV.” He wouldn’t do it. He didn’t want to spoil them. It took convincing, and he still didn’t. Didn’t seem like the best father.
Shaan: I like that — there’s one thing I always remember about Buffett. I have this whole doc I keep called “Buffettisms,” because he has this skill of telling these little parables that are both funny and interesting and make his point for him. He’s got an arsenal of these. I watch a lot of his talks and a lot of their annual shareholder meetings to find these little phrases. He’s so charming, and he does a great job of making his point through stories.
One thing he said once that really stuck with me: “The best rule of this entire game with the stock market is that you don’t have to play.” Most people’s problem is they do too many things. They make too many investments, buy and sell too many things, and feel constantly compelled to have an answer on whether to do X. He says you really just have to sit and wait for the fat pitch. You don’t have to swing.
Sam: That’s where you got your fat-pitch thing.
Shaan: Exactly. There are no called strikes in investing. You can sit there all day and watch pitches go by, just wait for the fat pitch. The problem is people suck at waiting.
That really stood out to me because I’m somebody who historically is very bad at waiting. I’m very impulsive and impatient. That serves you well as an entrepreneur — you take a bunch of action. As an investor, impatience and impulsiveness is a terrible trait. So as I’ve shifted from entrepreneur to investor, I had to ask myself: what do I need to relearn? What do I need to unlearn? What served me as an entrepreneur that’s not going to serve me as an investor? That was one of the key switches I had to make.
Sam: And he stole that from Ted Williams — the famous baseball player, greatest batting average ever. Williams made this chart of the strike zone. He goes, “My batting average if I hit a pitch in this bottom corner is pretty low. Even if it’s a strike, I really shouldn’t swing because my average there is terrible. I’m looking for stuff in the sweet spot — up here I’m over .400.” One of the reasons he had the greatest batting average was he was more disciplined than others about what pitches he’d swing at. He waited for the fat pitch, whereas most batters just hack at everything.
But my issue with Warren’s advice is — all right, what does a good pitch look like? So I ordered this book that’s hard to find. Not a lot of copies were made. I had to find it on Amazon.
Shaan: Oh, it’s hard to find. You had to go to Amazon.com to find it. This little mom-and-pop boutique.
Sam: But they analyze all of his deals and write out what he saw in them. I’m trying to figure out, okay — you’re telling me what a bad one looks like. What does a good one look like? That’s some of the content I’ve been consuming. I’ve been reading a book or two a week.
Shaan: Do you read on Kindle?
Sam: Yeah, that’s all I read. I start on Kindle, and if I like the book I’ll order the hardcover so I have it around the house — to just pick it up whenever. But I start on Kindle.
Shaan: They have that percentage bar at the bottom. I’m like, “I’m going to get through 20% every night.” It’s been awesome. Shout out to Kindle. You gamified your ass.
David Senra and the Founders Podcast [00:18:00]
Shaan: Okay, let me tell you two more interesting things I’ve consumed. I listened to a podcast by David Senra — I don’t know him that well, hung out with him one time. He’s a total nut in the best way. He did an episode called something like “The Greatest Interview I’ve Ever Done.” It was Patrick Collison interviewing him — like, what did you notice having studied all these great men throughout history? What are the common things?
He goes: “The story of the son begins at the end of the story of the father.” Basically, embedded in the story of the son is the story of the father. If the father was great in all these ways, often the son takes a totally different approach. If the father was limiting or hard-assed, the son takes that trauma and uses it in what they do. I thought that was pretty cool.
Second thing he said about reading — he goes, “Do you reread books?” He goes, “Yeah, of course. I love rereading books.” And he said it really well. He goes, “I read books years apart, often. The words are the same but I’ve changed. I’m a different guy than I was when I first read that book. The second time I read it, I’ve had years of life experience. I’ve read a hundred other books. I’ve done all these things. The same words mean something totally different to me now, or I have elevated understanding, or different things stand out.” I thought that was a really great insight on rereading. I’d rather find a great thing and soak in it versus trying to count the number of books I can read in a year.
And then he built his personal story really well. Someone asked, “Why did you start this whole thing — reading all these books, doing this podcast?” He goes, “My childhood was not the best. My parents did their best but they weren’t necessarily great. I’m the only person in my family to ever graduate high school. I wanted to be successful, but everywhere I looked around me, all I saw was the wrong answer — what not to do. I didn’t read as a hobby. I read because I was looking for answers. I wanted to know what to do, because all I saw in my life was what not to do. That’s what led me to reading the biographies of the greatest people.”
He goes, “I’ve spent the last ten years having one-way conversations with the greatest people ever to live on this Earth.” And: “Reading is having a one-way conversation with the greatest people on Earth.” And the podcast — he goes, “I don’t even know why I podcasted. I didn’t even start it. This is just an obsession. I’m studying these people. I needed a way to put my thoughts down. This is an obsession disguised as a podcast.”
Sam: I loved it. “An obsession disguised as a podcast.” He’s very lyrical with it. Very impressive.
I joked with them — I was like, David, I got turned off reading a lot of these books for a while because I would listen on Audible and I had my favorite narrators, and then I’d go, “Oh, I love this guy’s voice — what else did he narrate?” And this guy narrated like a thousand books. I’m like, how is this guy still a narrator? If you read all these business books, wouldn’t you be way more successful?
Shaan: That’s kind of what I’m bringing up here. I love the way he phrases things, it’s really compelling. I actually don’t agree that you’re having one-way conversations with the greatest people on Earth — it’s not like you needed to do all of that to be successful. You should probably also just get out there and do some things. I could argue a bunch of the other sides. But what’s the point? The fact that he believes that is going to lead him to a really great and successful place. I don’t subscribe to all his thoughts, but I’m a fan of his level of intensity and conviction.
In California, I think in the ’90s they banned weightlifting in the prisons because they were like, “We’re building super criminals. These guys are getting yoked, they’re surrounded by other criminals, now they’re bench pressing 500 pounds.” David is like becoming a super criminal a little bit — reading and just cranking away. He’s plotting.
I feel like I could say, “David, you like that book?” He’d be like, “I love this book. What are you, joking me?” And I’m like, “David, in this room right over here, Heidi Klum is standing there naked, surrounded by all the best Michelin-star desserts, all the unreleased Drake albums, the greatest music, the best party — and when you walk in, you become a billionaire.” And I think he wouldn’t have even heard anything. He’d just be turning the page. He’d lick his fingers and look back down. Pure silence.
Sam: And that’s the best compliment and the best insult I can give him at the same time. He really feels like this is the best thing anyone could possibly do. He can’t believe nobody else is doing this. This is the peak of the peak of life experience.
Shaan: Anything else you’ve consumed that you like?
Sam: Not a lot, but — by the way I hope he doesn’t take offense, I’m kind of joking about some of those things. I’m a huge fan of his stuff. He does an amazing job. I appreciate his craft and he’s one of the few pods I listen to regularly. The pod is called Founders, by the way. So give him some love.
Investor Bias and Personality Archetypes [00:25:00]
Shaan: The other interesting experience I had — I’m drawn to people like him. People who are slightly extreme, obsessed, independent-minded. They’re deciding how they want to live life and their rubric of success is different from everyone else’s.
Ben had a meeting with somebody and comes back, calls me — “Dude, I met this guy, he’s great.” He kept saying it two or three times: “Really great guy.” I was like, why is he such a great guy? You were only there for 45 minutes. What do you mean?
I said, “Let me guess. Was he high energy, a nice guy, didn’t intimidate you by being a hard-ass, and did he teach you one or two interesting things during the conversation?”
He goes, “Bingo.”
I know Ben, because that’s your archetype of what you really like. That’s why you really like me — I’m a high-energy guy, I’m a nice guy, and if you talk to me for an hour, you’re going to learn one or two things. That’s why we get along.
So we made a little list: what’s the personality archetype I am irrationally drawn towards? For me, it’s the David Senra types. Slightly extreme, uncomfortable ambition around their thing, independent-minded, obsessed with their craft. I am drawn to that. It’s like a girl who says, “He’s a six, but he’s wearing a leather jacket and it just does something to me.” That’s what I’m drawn to.
On the other side — what can’t I stand? Somebody who’s just dry. No sense of humor. You could be the smartest guy in the world sitting on a gold mine of a business, but if you’re boring, within five minutes I’m like, “This guy sucks. I’m out.”
Sam: Who’s an example of that?
Shaan: I don’t know off the top of my head — famous people, some investors and operators. Like enterprise SaaS people who are like, “Yeah, we just provide solid procurement services to others.” I don’t know. They don’t have a lot of hobbies. “We grow 17% year over year. We just really need to do solid operations.” I immediately feel itchy. I need to get out of this conversation right now. Whenever I read about hedge fund guys, unless they’re kind of like a criminal doing drugs, I’m out. “You’re just trading on Excel all day” — I don’t find that enjoyable to hear about.
But here’s the useful thing: it’s a good exercise to figure out what you’re irrationally drawn toward, so you can apply a discount later when you’re out of the heat. And what do you have an irrational distaste for, where you’re going to underprice or underestimate someone even though you shouldn’t?
People talk about bias from a diversity and inclusion angle. That’s fine, but I’ve never been drawn to spending time on that particular framing. For me, I immediately saw: oh yeah, I could make mistakes being overly generous toward certain personality types. You say three key phrases and I’m all in. And I’m irrationally repelled from things I really shouldn’t be. If I’m investing in you, I don’t need to think you’re cool. I just need to understand what you’re doing and invest in it.
Do you feel like you have the same thing? What are you drawn to?
Sam: I feel like one of yours — I’ll just say it out loud — is you’re drawn to people who are very meticulous and orderly. If somebody’s got a system and they’re a stickler for details, they go up 100 points in your book.
Shaan: That does it for me. Because I envy it — that’s not my natural thing. My wife is like that. I’m drawn to people who are orderly, systematic, disciplined. People who wake up at 5 a.m. every morning. That’s not me. I get a lot of joy being around those people because I’m not like that.
Simple Solutions vs. Magic Pills [00:31:00]
Sam: Can I tell you about a cool thing? I feel like we did a bunch of fluffy stuff today. I got a rant off my chest.
People are drawn to things that are highly tactical, highly specific, and complex — versus things that are simple but a little airy. Let me give you an example.
When I was in LA, we did a bunch of dinners with founders. Everybody in the room had sold their company — successful by traditional measures. The conversation would always gravitate toward two subjects: health and longevity, or life quality and being a happier person. Rich guy problems. Because they’ve already made it, but they feel like, “I’m not as happy as I thought I’d be.” The longevity thing gives them a new carrot to chase. The life quality thing — everybody actually just wants a high quality of life, they just don’t know how to ask the questions around it.
What you’d see: someone would share something simple and useful. “You know, before bed, I don’t really use my phone. I kind of review the day and think about how I did, what I might have done differently.” And I’m like, “I do that too. I have this thing called revision — I just play back the events of my day and go back through them.” The reaction? “Cool.” And that “cool” is like, “Cool, good for you. I ain’t doing that. Don’t tell me to be alone with my thoughts.”
Then somebody else goes, “Yeah, I was in a funk, so I started taking six milligrams of low-dose Naltrexone.” And people are like, “WHAT? What is it called? How do you spell that?” Literally everyone gets their phone out. “How many milligrams? Where do you get it? Can I order it right now before I leave this dinner?”
And I’m like — you’re just going to take this random drug from someone you’ve just met?
Shaan: Or they’d be like, “I hired this functional cognitive coach.” “What’s his name? Does he take more clients? Here’s the money.”
Sam: Bro, have you tried just writing down your thoughts for a second? Nobody wants the simple thing. Nobody wants the obvious thing.
I was like, here’s what I do. When I go into a situation, instead of just reacting — it’s cold out here, I’m uncomfortable, I’m bothered — I just decide before I go in what experience I want to have. I want to have a playful experience, a laughing experience. Then I go in and I look for those moments and create that experience myself. You could just decide what experience you want and then go have it.
And their reaction is, “Is there a pill that does that? Can I get that intravenously? Does it come with needles?”
Shaan: It’s insane.
Sam: Or someone says, “I really want to exercise, so I’m building out this home gym.” And I’m like — do you even take 30 minutes a day? Can you just do push-ups on the floor right now? There’s no gate to pass. You could literally just do ten push-ups right now.
People are not ready for simple action that doesn’t require a magic bullet solution. It annoys the hell out of me.
Shaan: I get why though. When people say “magic pill,” I automatically get interested. Who doesn’t want a shortcut? If I can get to my destination shorter and faster, I’m in.
Sam: These aren’t even shortcuts. The Naltrexone thing — does this work? Did you feel an amazing difference? The person was like, “No, you have to take it for six months first for your body to acclimate.” You’re getting hosed. Maybe it’s useful for some people. But for the eight guys at that dinner who were immediately trying to order it — you don’t need that right now. That is not the correct first step you should be taking.
Shaan: There’s actually good types of procrastination — the forgetful scientist who forgets to shower or puts on the wrong pair of socks. Ah, that’s all right, he’s doing the big things. And then there’s the bad type: making plans that don’t need to be made, buying domain names, going back and color coding things afterwards. In this case, buying pills when 10,000 steps a day would do the trick.
Sam: I was just like, you guys are nuts. But okay, now to satisfy my own point — I like tactics. I like this stuff. But tactics change, strategies don’t.
Presidential Debates and the Charisma Theory [00:39:00]
Shaan: Have you been following the presidential debates? Did you watch the Republican debate?
Sam: I watched the clips. Vivek seems to be the star.
Shaan: How do you even say his name? Some people say “Vivek,” some say—
Sam: You just came up with a third one. It’s V-I-V-E-K, right? “Vivek” is the way to say it.
Shaan: He was like the star of the debate. He’s a debate champion — that’s what this guy was trained to do. But he’s still pulling like 10% or something. I think Donald Trump’s going to win. But I wanted to tell you something I remembered watching that debate.
Sam: You watched it? I love watching debates. I don’t care about politics, but I love watching fights. I love the strategy of it. It’s content creation. I love watching the strategy these guys take. I couldn’t care less about their policies, because they don’t care about their policies as far as I’m concerned. It’s a popularity contest. I want to see who markets themselves better.
Shaan: Here’s something I remembered. Back in the day, I was working at Monkey Inferno and I worked for a guy named Michael Birch. Very interesting guy. He built and sold multiple companies. He sold Bebo famously for $850 million — he and his wife owned almost the whole thing. Huge exit for a husband and wife couple. Before that, he built another social network, sold for a few single-digit millions. Then as soon as the non-compete ended, he created it again — “Now I know what I should have done the first time.” That became the $850 million exit. He also created Birthday Alarm, which had millions of dollars in cash flow every year.
But ever since the big Bebo acquisition, he’d created this idea lab and transitioned to a different phase of life. Like, “What do I care? I’ve already won the money game, in a way.” He wouldn’t say that, but you could tell. He Angels invests, but his heart isn’t really in it.
Is he a billionaire at this point?
Sam: He’s like, “I’m not really a billionaire, but who cares.” He’s at like $800 million, $900 million or something. “I don’t really keep track. Does it really matter?”
Shaan: He did two interesting things. One: he built a private members club in San Francisco. He bought an old candy factory, 60,000 square feet, abandoned — needed tons of seismic retrofitting, nobody wanted to put in the millions it would take. He did it. Built a members club called The Battery — like Soho House for San Francisco.
One time I went there and I saw a booth of three people: a Buddhist monk in orange robes, bald with sandals; a Black guy who looked like a rapper with gold chains and sick shoes; and a blond lady. They were all leaning in, having a conversation. I was like, “This is just the funniest place I’ve ever been.”
Sam: Like the start of a joke.
Shaan: A monk, a rapper, and Cheryl Sandberg walk into a bar. But that’s what it was. I saw Leonardo DiCaprio there, Elon Musk — tons of famous people go there. Anyway.
He always had these random ideas, and once in a while he’d pitch me one. And his idea around the presidential debate was this: he was thinking about it for 2020. He goes, “I think there’s a good chance Trump gets reelected. And if you think about why a lot of people in Silicon Valley don’t fully support that — well, I don’t know if it’s about feeling politically oppressed, or reacting to liberal neocons. I think it might be simpler than that. Donald Trump was just the more charismatic candidate.”
He goes, “If you look throughout history — the last 12 elections, 50 years or so — the more charismatic candidate tends to win. They’re usually tall, not bad-looking, they have the gift of gab. Obama, Reagan, Clinton. Even Bush over Kerry or Gore — Bush was more charismatic. The more charismatic candidate wins.”
Sam: He turned out to be kind of wrong about 2020 — they put forward Joe Biden, one of the least charismatic candidates, and he won almost by default: Trump or not Trump. It was an anomaly. But I think Michael was right in principle. You’re seeing it now with DeSantis — more experience, had the machine behind him, the track record. But he’s just not charismatic. Vivek comes out and he’s a better talker, more energy, better one-liners, willing to take stands. He’s the more charismatic candidate.
Shaan: Michael’s idea was: let’s create a TV show. Just like American Idol or The Apprentice — a show called “The President.” You literally cast people who want to be president but give them an avenue. Right now the candidates all come from the machine — the party pushes their favorites based on controllability, likability, time put in. That doesn’t necessarily put the strongest candidate forward.
So why not take 12 hopefuls, tell their stories, every week go to a new city — maybe a coal mining town in West Virginia — and they have to prepare a speech or talking points for what they’d do to help those people. Then the people vote off the weakest candidate. At the end you’re left with the most charismatic candidate — a challenger to whoever the Democratic party naturally puts up.
His friend Mark Burnett, who created Survivor, could be the producer. He was like, “Even if it doesn’t work, it would be a fun version of trying to bring some influence to politics. If I really want to get involved in politics, the reason I don’t is that it’s very laborious. This would be almost a fun version of it.”
Sam: Did it go anywhere or was he just goofing around?
Shaan: He wrote a memo — a very well-written memo.
Sam: That’s the rich guy version of buying the domain name.
Shaan: He showed it to me. I was like, “Yeah, this is great.” I think he was like, “Okay, if I’m going to do this, it’s going to take real social capital.” And then he kind of was like, “Hmm, maybe not. My life is amazing as is.”
Sam: That’s his version of when the remote is a little too far when you’re laid down and you’re like, “Ah, I’ll just sleep with the TV on.”
Shaan: I love this idea, though. I’m sharing it because more business people should apply their creative and entrepreneurial talents outside of just creating another business. And I think this would genuinely work if somebody created it.
Sam: Here’s my honest take — and this is actually a criticism of this particular point, not of you generally. My issue is: I want my president to know what they’re doing, not just be a good speech-giver.
Shaan: Dude, that’s what we have now. You think Joe Biden knows what he’s doing? The guy is barely alive.
Sam: I’m not saying what we have works. I’m saying my romantic view is that it would be nice if they knew what they were talking about rather than just being good at talking.
Shaan: Your take is: wouldn’t it also be nice if we let the most charismatic person run away with it. But I think you could design the challenges to actually force them to think on the spot and perform — solving real problems, not just responses from handlers with canned talking points. You could put people through a battery of weekly challenges that test the actual attributes a president needs. It’s not just kissing babies and shaking hands. The cynical person would say, well, we should look at their track record in government. But that doesn’t really work. Trump never would have beaten Hillary if that were true — she spent her whole life in politics. On paper, she was far more qualified. But America didn’t get to see that. All they see is what gets put forward: debates and campaigning on TV and social media.
There’s this story about JFK during the Cold War — he goes to meet the Soviet leader, and at the end of the meeting, the leader says, “You know, you really remind me of my son. I guess we could be cool.” I read that and thought — charisma really does matter in diplomacy. Just being likable and going, “Let’s calm down, let’s be friends.”
Sam: Tony Robbins tells a story — and I don’t know if it’s real, full permission to beat me up in the comments — but he goes, “I had a chance to talk to a former president about the Cold War.” Reagan goes to see Gorbachev. The meeting’s not going well. They went in hoping to deescalate, but both sides are getting more dug in, more stubborn. He doesn’t know what to do. Then — he says he hit that point where he got up, stormed out fast toward the door, and right before he got there, he did a little 360 — turned back, big smile on his face, and said, “Let’s start over. I’m Ronald, and I really appreciate these things about you.” Just broke the frame. Used a little playfulness to reduce the tension, and then they had a conversation.
I have no idea if that story is true. Tony Robbins told me this. I believed it in the moment because it’s a great story. Why let the truth get in the way of a good story? It’s a useful technique either way — using a little bit of charisma and playfulness to diffuse a situation, to break through a deadlock, whether in business or in personal life.
Turning Down Presidential Candidates [00:52:00]
Sam: So either Vivek is just not charismatic or I’m an idiot. But let me tell you a quick story. I’ve turned down two presidential candidates — to either come on the pod or speak at my events.
The first one was Andrew Yang. He emailed me, I think in 2015, saying, “Hey, I want to come speak at your event or do an interview — I run this test prep company and now I’m running for president.” I was like, “You’re insane. You’re a nobody who ran a mediocre business and now you’re running for president? I can’t interview you — that hurts my credibility.” Turns out he was a serious candidate — made it top 10.
The second one was Vivek. He DM’d me on Twitter about a year ago: “Would you guys want me to come on the pod?” And I slept on him hard. His Twitter photo was this guy in a suit with a nice smile, kind of nerdy-looking. His bio said pharmaceutical industry. I was like, “This is a crypto guy with abs and a Ferrari. I can’t take this seriously.” I tried to stiff-arm him, make him prove himself. He replied and I ignored him. Turns out a year and a half later, he’s actually a serious candidate. That’s the second presidential candidate I’ve had bad judgment on.
Shaan: For high entertainment: subscribe to Ron DeSantis’s SMS program. If you want to learn about marketing or how the presidential race really works, subscribe to all the candidates’ marketing emails and text messages. Warning — it’s incredibly annoying. If I wanted someone to text me every day, I’d have a girlfriend.
Let me read you the last five texts from DeSantis. Yesterday, 4:21 p.m.: “New shirts, new koozies, new cups, new buttons, new stickers, new hats. If you haven’t seen our storefront, go get the hottest limited edition campaign merch here.”
The day before, 2:08 p.m.: “Friend, it’s Ron DeSantis. I want you to know that as president I will not let the government weaponize federal agencies against Americans who dare to disagree. I’m disgusted by the FBI’s disgraceful act labeling Catholics as extremist. It’s time to fire the FBI director and defend religious liberty for all. Can I have your support?” — link to donation.
7:19 a.m.: “Enough with the talk. Americans need action. That’s what Ron DeSantis is all about. I’m the leader you need. This can’t wait. Rush your support.” — link to donation.
Then a picture of a credit card that says “DeSantis” on it. “Donate $47 or more to join my investor team. If you’re an investor in this campaign, you’ll have everything you need to show it off. Grab your membership card today.”
Sam: It just keeps going.
Shaan: Every single day. “Hey, I’m out here draining the swamp right now.” Just stop. But they’re basically building like a billion-dollar company in 18 months. It’s like a moving company — they don’t care about the service because you’re only going to use it once.
Sam: I hired a service called Muscle Head Movers. All the imagery was these huge buff guys: “We make it easy. We’ll move that couch, we’ll move that fridge — just another day at the gym for us.” Hell yeah. Three tiny Vietnamese guys showed up.
Shaan: The truck said Muscle Head Movers.
Sam: I was like — are you going to address this? They didn’t. I didn’t. Because what am I supposed to say? And they did the job. They used dollies and moved everything. But I signed up for a different experience.
Shaan: Catfished.
Alpha Signal and Scientific Paper Ranking [00:58:00]
Shaan: There’s one cool thing I wanted to tell you about.
Sam: What is it?
Shaan: There’s a guy named Seth Bannon who tweeted this: “Two million scientific papers are published each year. That’s over 5,000 a day. Even if you’re working 10 hours a day with no breaks, you’d have to read one paper every seven seconds just to keep up.” So he built Paper Scraper — something that programmatically reads every paper that comes out. But not every single paper: it prioritizes any paper being shared by top scientists on social media. It makes it easier to keep up with science.
It’s so new it doesn’t even show up on Google yet. He’s like, “We built this for ourselves, but I’ll let people in beta if you fill out this typeform.”
I’d love to see our buddy Leor, who does Alpha Signal. He built an AI newsletter, but with one key difference: instead of telling casual readers what the new ChatGPT feature is, it’s for technical people — researchers, ML engineers, PhD types. A very high value reader.
He built something similar internally. Every paper has a list of scientists involved — there’s a naming convention, just like movie credits. The first names did all the work. The last name is the senior lab director who reviewed it or stamped their seal of approval. So Leor created a PageRank of researchers and scientists. When a paper comes out with one of them as an author, or when those people share a paper on social media, he immediately knows this is probably interesting.
Sam: For anyone who doesn’t know — PageRank is what Google invented. It’s how they know what to show up first. The biggest measurement is how many other reputable websites link back to yours. If the New York Times links to some other website, that tells Google that site might also have high authority. That’s how Google figures out what’s the right webpage to show when you search a question.
Shaan: So Leor did this for scientific papers. He’s like, “Who are the top scientists? What are they sharing? What are they linking to?” You take that interesting paper, feed it through his LLM, and it gets summarized into four bullet points: what was the finding, what was the methodology, who were the scientists, and what are the key takeaways.
Sam: Alpha Signal is only for AI topics, right?
Shaan: Correct. But I’m like, dude — your method to create this newsletter is more interesting to me than the newsletter itself. It’s a generalized product. And Paper Scraper is the same idea from a different angle: of the 5,000 papers published every day, which three should I care about? And of those three, what did they actually say?
He also built something called Spin Out GPT — basically like ChatGPT where you can ask, “Would this work in cell culture or tissue?” and it’ll go look in the paper and answer. It’s like being able to talk to a very smart person who read all the research papers.
Sam: I see where this is going. The Hustle, Milk Road — these were like horse carriages. Random humans trying to keep up with what’s going on. Set up some Google Alerts, check Reddit and Twitter, make a list every day, summarize it as well as you can. The pitch was: “It’s like your smart friend explaining what happened in crypto that day,” or, “It’s like your smart friend explaining what happened in business news.” This is like your genius friend who read every scientific paper ever and you can ask it any question in any variation.
Shaan: That seems pretty powerful.
Why Newsletters Suck Right Now [01:04:00]
Sam: I’m happy we’re not doing a newsletter as our main thing right now. Which is so funny because everybody’s following us into the newsletter business. Now it’s peak hype on newsletters.
And the way people are acquiring users — I just subscribed to Seth Bannon’s Substack, and right after I subscribed it said, “Do you want to subscribe to these 18 other newsletters?” All pre-checked. I almost accidentally clicked yes on all of them. And all these people are like, “Look at my newsletter growth, it’s insane!” You are absolutely full of it. People think they’re filling out a capture form and they’re actually subscribing to 19 newsletters at a time.
Shaan: That’s why I like what Beehiiv did. They have this thing — I think it’s called Sparks or something — where you can pay to acquire newsletter subscribers. You have to manually endorse who you want, and you only pay for a retained reader. Not just someone who clicked and checked a box — someone who’s actually reading from you.
So instead of a vanity metric — “I got more subscribers” — you only pay when you’ve actually acquired an engaged reader. That’s smart. CPA versus CPM. You only pay for it when it works.
Sam: This Seth Bannon thing is awesome. And to reiterate — I’m happy I’m not doing a newsletter as my main thing. It seems really, really hard. At the Hustle we had one daily newsletter. Morning Brew’s strategy was to launch more, but my thing was: if we have more, our main thing is going to suffer. They’re not going to open two or three.
Now people, if the numbers are true, are subscribing to dozens. And I want to know: is the engagement even remotely the same? It seems way harder.
Shaan: It’s a lot like podcasts. How many podcasts do you actually have in a regular rotation at any given time?
Sam: Hard to keep up. With newsletters it’s easier because it only takes three minutes to skim — but it seems really hard to get people’s attention right now.
Shaan: It’s so funny. I got the idea for a newsletter from my friends Neville Medhora and Noah Kagan. They had one foot in the startup world and one foot in internet marketing, and I was like, these internet marketers love email. They use it in sometimes shady ways, but let’s see if we can do it legitimately. People were laughing at it at the time. Now it’s cool. But I am so happy I’m not doing it — it seems way more challenging right now.
Sam: I started it in 2014 but it became what it was on May 19th, 2016. A great day in history.
Shaan: I always remember that because it’s the day before 4/20. Easy to remember.
Sam: I remember that with like 2,000 subscribers to my conference newsletter, I made $50,000 in ticket sales. With 10,000, we did $150,000 in ticket sales. Engagement was quite high. Gary Vaynerchuk told me one time, “My newsletter had a 99% open rate because nobody else was doing newsletters. Yours is only 40% — it’s so much harder.” And I was like, “Oh man, I wish it were easier.” Now I don’t know what those numbers would be, but it would be really hard to make the same money with as few subscribers as before.
Sam as YouTuber: What Could Have Been [01:10:00]
Shaan: The other thing this reminds me of — I wish people could see your early blog posts. We should do a trip down memory lane of some of our projects. Because you are incredibly good at creating content and writing. When I see what you did versus what I see a lot of people doing now, I’m like: there are many rungs on the ladder above where most people are.
I remember your early blog posts just regularly going viral, getting millions of hits, because they were that good. You had the right concept — you were kind of like a YouTuber before YouTube. You really should have been a YouTuber. That would have been your calling.
Sam: We got asked about doing it, we were thinking about it—
Shaan: Sam Parr as a YouTuber, I believe, would have been one of the most successful YouTubers on the platform. “Surviving 30 Days on Soylent Only” — guess what that sounds like? Every Ryan Trahan video. Every MrBeast video. That’s the current meta of YouTube. You were doing this eight years ago. You did “Microdosing LSD.” You did an anonymous entrepreneur who cooked books. You did the thing where you’re like, “Amazon bestsellers are BS — I’m going to prove it by making one for under $1,000.” Guess what? Those are YouTube videos. They would still work, but you have to do them with style, and you actually did them with style.
Your problem was you were locked into the blog world, because those were the people you admired at the time.
Sam: Writing was my thing. I knew how to write. I wasn’t sure I could pull off the visual aesthetic too.
Shaan: You’re good on camera. You lived on a motorcycle or something. You’re doing some crazy stuff. You had the dog, the look, the humor on camera. You liked Jackass. You would have tortured yourself for people’s entertainment. As soon as you got that hit of feedback, you would have gone all the way in.
I still think you should go down that route. I think I can be successful in short form video, but not the way you could have been. Because you’re a lot like Danny Duncan, Ryan Trahan, MrBeast — in the way you are as a character. What you were willing to do. How long you were single and didn’t give a damn. “This firecracker is going to go in my ass — all right, lights, action.”
Sam: I don’t wish I had gone that route, actually. I think I probably could have done it. But I think it’s a hard life. Can you do that at 40? I mean, Danny Duncan — can he do that at 40? It just has to change. It has to evolve.
Shaan: Or like MrBeast — what’s he going to do at 40? He’ll be so wealthy it doesn’t matter.
Sam: But yeah — I prefer writing. I think it’s more fun to be in a quiet zone late at night and just bang it out. It feels more artful. It felt like I was in my zone of genius. Whereas with video, you have to perform. Writing was a different type of performance that I enjoyed more.
Shaan: Surprise surprise, man likes his choices and defends them.
Sam: I was about that YouTube life. I just didn’t have a camera. I was telling Sarah — I’m nervous about moving to the suburbs, like Westport, Connecticut. She goes, “Why?” I was like, “One of my favorite things to do is go to the gas station near my house every day, get a Diet Dr Pepper, and loiter. Dab it up with the clerk, sit and see the regulars. ‘What’s up, Odell, what’s good?’ I just like to do hood rat stuff.”
Connecticut doesn’t have that. Where am I going to watch people buy lottery tickets and scratch offs and smoke? Where am I going to hang out?
Shaan: Think about how many incredible podcasters there are that just don’t podcast — they just chop it up sitting on the steps all day. Can you imagine how good those people would be if we just put a mic in front of them? They’re just the kids who are incredible basketball players somewhere in Africa that we just haven’t found yet.
Sam: I always thought it’d be funny if you walked up and overheard their conversation and they’re like, “Dog, you better diversify your bonds. The Dow’s down.” Having the most academic conversations ever because they read newspapers all day.
Shaan: All right. I think we’ve crossed the threshold. The slab happy face is initiated.
Sam: That’s the pod.