Speakers: Sam Parr (host), Shaan Puri (host)
The Content Diet and Presidential Assassinations [00:00:00]
Shaan Puri: Most people live their life like this. They build a well and they start to pump water. And at the end of their lives, after a lifetime of pumping, they see they are still thirsty. They spent their whole life pumping rather than drinking, which was the reason they started pumping in the first place.
What up, Sam? I wanted to do something a little different today. End of the year, I was doing a little Slack cleanout and I was looking at this one channel for the best stuff I read this week. I call it my content diet channel. It’s basically what were the vegetables, what were my whole foods that I consumed because I consume a lot of junk, but this stuff was actually good. I was just browsing through what really stood out or resonated with me and I have a couple. I wanted to know yours because you read a lot more than me and I think we read totally different things. I’m curious if anything comes to mind for you on that topic.
Sam Parr: For me, it’s a lot of books. For example, the topic that I got obsessed with this year was presidential assassinations. I went deep on the four different presidents who were assassinated and that interested me. I’m a huge history fan and I could talk to you all about history. I can say some of the most amazing stuff that I learned.
Shaan Puri: I feel like we did a whole bit when the Trump assassination thing happened on presidential assassinations. There’s some crazy stories, right? There’s the guy who had his speech in his pocket that blunted the blow and he got shot and he survived.
Sam Parr: Roosevelt. He gets shot by his car on his way to his speech and doesn’t die because the speech is so thick in his pocket. He gives the speech while bleeding. There’s only been four presidents that have been successfully assassinated and three of them happened between 1865 and 1905.
Pretty much up until Andrew Garfield was assassinated, which I think was around 1904, any American could just go to the White House and schedule an appointment with the president. The idea here was that they were supposed to be a man of the people. I think that’s ridiculous. The Secret Service, even up till 1963 or 1965 when JFK was shot, was only about 300 people. It was basically non-existent. I’m obsessed with that—about how something became an institution even after four deaths happened.
Leadership and the Power of Oratory [00:03:15]
Sam Parr: I’ve also been obsessed with leadership and the idea of speeches. Have you ever studied any of the great speeches of American or world history?
Shaan Puri: Not in particular. What you got?
Sam Parr: In particular, Winston Churchill. Have you ever seen the movie Dunkirk?
Shaan Puri: No, I haven’t.
Sam Parr: The idea is early in the war of England, this was when Nazi Germany had just invaded France and it was clear that Nazi Germany was officially bad. Before it was like, “Yeah, they’re horrible, but they’re going to stay themselves.” They start invading other countries and people start freaking out. They go through France and everyone’s like, “Oh my god, imagine today. Imagine France getting taken over.”
England, which is nearby, was like, “Oh my gosh, now they are coming to us.” They start officially getting into a war and have a skirmish in Dunkirk where the Nazis surround a part of England and they surround 50,000 or even 100,000 soldiers. Basically, if those people died, the war would have been over. It was a magical moment where hundreds of ships that were just fishermen, but also the British Navy, raced over and they grabbed these guys off this island and they saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
But that’s not the important part of my story. Up until that point, England was fearful. They were imagining all the worst things that were going to happen. Winston Churchill, who was in power, was a very fearful person and he was very nervous. But then he goes, “Screw it. We’re not going to take this. We’re going to get after it.”
He gave this speech in the House of Parliament where everyone’s watching him and he was like, “We’re going to fight in the beaches. We’re going to fight in the trenches. We’re going to fight in the land, and we will never ever give up.” He gave this amazing speech that basically changed the entire morale of the country. We were talking about tens of millions of people.
I’ve always been very fascinated when there’s one person who can exert a relatively small amount of energy and get everyone else to change their energy. If you’ve ever been to a concert—I used to love watching these Oasis concerts. They were famous for helping create this idea of a mega concert. They would have 250,000 people in the audience and they’re a relatively high-energy band, but it’s just one or two guys singing into a microphone and they get 250,000 people to light up and push that energy back to them. I’m obsessed with what is that one thing that person has and how do they leverage that amount of energy to impact potentially hundreds of thousands or, in the case of Winston Churchill, tens of millions of people. I try to figure out what words someone has to use. If you think about Winston Churchill, do you know what he looks like?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, I’ve seen photos of him.
Sam Parr: He’s a short, fat drunkard. He’s not a good-looking guy. He doesn’t have the traditional movie star good looks. What I’ve been trying to study is how people do that.
Shaan Puri: Because you want to deliver this at work or what’s the connect the dots for me?
Sam Parr: Yeah, because I do want to become a better leader. Once your company gets to a certain size—my company is only at 25 or 30 people—but I’m getting to the point now where I’m not doing a lot of the work. I am having to not motivate people, because a good employee is already motivated, but in order to make a good employee a great employee, you do need to inspire them. I’ve just been trying to figure out how to become a better leader.
The Resistance Against Digital Loneliness [00:07:30]
Shaan Puri: We’re going to advertise in the banner ads, we’re going to advertise in the podcast, we’re going to advertise everywhere. What is the rally cry that you’re trying to get to? What would be an example? Have you tried it yet?
Sam Parr: Right now AI is everywhere and it’s making me sick that I am having to talk to AI all the time and I’m not having a lot of relationships in real life. I’m not having what you call these belly-to-belly conversations. What I’ve noticed with Hampton is once we got people in the room in the same room once a month to have their conversations for the core meeting, it literally will change their lives. Not because we’re particularly special, but just being in a physical setting with people who have been vetted and you know that you have like-minded interests.
We are indoctrinating them into having what we call the three C’s: confidentiality, candor, and commitment. That will change someone’s life. These are entrepreneurs. Eventually, we want to figure out how can we do this with everyone else. But just this idea that the world is going one way, yet everyone is so incredibly lonely and sad. What can we do that solves that, even if it’s for a small group of people like entrepreneurs?
Shaan Puri: Did you see churn go to zero when you went from digital to in-person?
Sam Parr: It’s crazy. On a bad month, it would be 60% annual retention. Now it’s 80% and 90%.
Shaan Puri: Wait, 60% means 40% churn?
Sam Parr: 60% retention.
Shaan Puri: So 40% would churn every year before?
Sam Parr: Annual, yeah.
Shaan Puri: Okay. And then now it’s jumped up significantly just by making that work.
Sam Parr: 85% to 90%. But there’s all this other work of being crazy about the vetting process. I don’t think people realize that thousands of people apply and we let in 4% or 5% per month. We do a lot of work, but in real life does most of the work. The problem is it’s a pain in the ass. It’s really hard to do. We have to find these moderators in all these cities and train them. It’s really, really hard. But it’s not even close. It’s night and day.
Shaan Puri: It sounds like one of the things you’re doing is you’re tying it to a bigger movement, which is what I think the great leaders do. You’re not saying, “Hey, we are trying to win. We’re trying to grow revenue.” People only get so excited by the financial success or metric success of your specific company. But when you say, “Look, the world is going this way, but we have to fight. I don’t want to live in that world. I think that world is messed up—the world where we just get lonelier and sadder, only talking to AI, not seeing other people, just living digitally.”
This digital overload is going one way. We’re part of the resistance. That “we’re part of the resistance” is generally one thing that most leaders do. You could play in a high school football game, but you’ll feel like you’re going to war and you’re fighting for your brothers and they took something from you and your family. You can make it so important when actually it’s a division 3A high school football regular season game that you’ll never remember four weeks from now. But the leader can elevate the importance and what this means because the meaning is what you say it means. What you tell yourself it means is what you’ll actually feel about it.
Sam Parr: When you studied social studies classes in fifth and sixth grade, they used to talk about these Roman emperors. They would often refer to them as orators.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, orators.
Sam Parr: Which is kind of interesting.
Shaan Puri: Content creators without the internet. If I had an orator at Rome, it was someone who stands on a rock and says, “Hey everyone, here’s what we have to do.” Should we rebrand from podcaster to orator?
Sam Parr: It’s an interesting thing.
Shaan Puri: Technically that is what we do.
Sam Parr: And you ask yourself why on earth would an orator—someone who could just speak well—why would they control the entire world? I started thinking about that obsessively and I’m like, okay, well what do the leaders have in common? Most of the time it is great speeches and great speaking. I underestimated that for a long time. So I’ve been trying to figure that out.
Shaan Puri: That’s been a rabbit hole you’ve been obsessed with.
Sam Parr: I’m shocked that you’re not going down that track either. I think you have that. I think you study it as well. I don’t think you get credit enough for studying that, but I’m shocked that doesn’t fascinate you.
Shaan Puri: It does. It’s just what season are you in? Which rabbit hole do you happen to be in right now? That’s a good one. I’ve got it earmarked. That’s of great interest to me, but right now I’m interested in a couple other areas.
Die with Zero and Life Energy [00:11:45]
Shaan Puri: I want to give you one. There’s a book that I think a lot of people have heard about, probably even read. I read it, but I had forgotten about this part of it: Die with Zero. Die with Zero is really just YOLO rebranded. What is it about? I emailed her this passage from the book. It says death wakes people up and the closer it gets the more awake we become because when the end is near, that’s when we suddenly start thinking, “What the hell am I doing? Why did I wait this long?”
You can’t live every day like it’s your last; if so, you wouldn’t bother studying or visiting the dentist or doing anything that has delayed gratification. But if you delay gratification for too long or indefinitely, it’s just too late. You also can’t live life as if it’s infinite. So we all face the question: what’s the best way to allocate our life energy before we die?
Principle one: timing matters. Some experiences can only be enjoyed at certain times. You can’t water ski when you’re 90. In the book, he tells this great story about how his buddy, when he was an investment banker, said, “Let’s go backpacking through Europe.” He’s like, “I’m down.” His buddy says, “Awesome. It’s going to be a six-week trip.” He’s like, “Six weeks? How are we going to get six weeks off?” He’s like, “Well, we’ll ask, but they probably will say no. We’ll probably have to quit.”
He looked at his friend like he was being so reckless. “Wow, you’re just quitting your job to go backpacking through Europe. What a reckless thing to do. What an irresponsible thing to do. I will do the responsible thing and stay in the job.” He talks about when his friend came back and he immediately sees the glow. He sees how he’s talking about his time abroad. He’s like, “Oh, I made a mistake.” What he thought was responsible was actually irresponsible because he threw away this time in his 20s where timing matters. There’s only one time to go backpacking through Europe and sleep in hostels.
Bill Perkins, the author, finally gets his promotion when he’s 32 and he takes enough time off to do that trip. He’s like, “Guess what? It’s not as fun to go bumming around in hostels when you’re 32 or 33 years old.” That was a game to be played when I was 20 to 25 and I missed the window.
Timing matters. That’s the first thing. Second thing: what to worry about. We can always make more money in the future, but we cannot go back and recapture time. So it makes no sense to let life opportunities pass us for the fear of squandering money. Squandering our lives should be of much greater worry.
Last one: money is life energy. Think of money as the concept of life energy. You trade some life energy working to get some amount of money, maybe $10 an hour. Then, when you want to buy a shirt for $30, you don’t think about $30. You say, “Hell no, you want me to go work for three hours for this shirt?” Similarly, a higher salary doesn’t mean more income on an hourly basis. If I’m making 200K a year but only working 20 hours, that’s better than making 300K working 40 hours. It’s like eating a cookie. One cookie is one hour on a treadmill. Is that cookie really worth it? Imagine if your credit card started at 100 years old and every time you buy something, it now goes to 99 years and six months. It’s like, “Oh, that was six months. I just paid for that.”
Sam Parr: If when you checked out it was like, “Based on your salary, that was four and a half days of work. Would you like to work 108 hours right now?” You’d be like, “Never mind, just keep the blender, dude. I don’t want it. I’m not interested in this.”
Shaan Puri: I thought there was a lot of good stuff in this book. I actually didn’t really read the full book because it’s kind of like a “book should be a blog” type of deal, but the core concepts in the first 50 to 75 pages were really, really good. The last one—this is one for you—is that the vast majority of financial fears are completely irrational. There are real financial fears, they do exist, and then there are irrational or illogical financial fears, like rich people who still worry about money even though the math clearly shows they’re fine and will always be fine. I think this is also true for a lot of people.
Sam Parr: I hate that advice though because it’s like telling a young guy who’s struggling to date someone, “Just be yourself.” It’s like, well, myself sucks. Can you instead teach me how to be a better self? Telling someone not to worry is like telling an alcoholic, “Just try harder.”
Shaan Puri: So what is the solution?
Sam Parr: I don’t know, years of therapy. I’m not sure exactly, but I haven’t found it. No, I have found it. It’s just get richer.
Shaan Puri: No, I don’t think you found it.
Sam Parr: I don’t know. I think you have to hit a point—I have hit a point where I’m like, okay, there’s enough for this current lifestyle. That’s for sure.
Shaan Puri: The final visual he has is that most people live their life like this: they build a well and they start to pump water. As the well fills, they use a cup to scoop out a small amount of water. They take a sip and go right back to pumping higher and higher. At the end of their lives, after a lifetime of pumping, they see they are still thirsty. They spent their whole life pumping rather than drinking, which was the reason they started pumping in the first place.
When I see these things, a lot of times the takeaway that people have is that I shouldn’t work or I shouldn’t do something. I think that’s not the takeaway that he implies, but that’s the takeaway that a lot of people have. I think that is such a bad idea to not work. I do think that there is something magical about 30 to 50 hours a week. There is something magical where you have to have a thing that you’re contributing to with others for a shared mission. When I see this, I don’t want young people to think, “I should get rich and not work.” I think that’s not the goal. You should have a mission in life that aligns with yourself, but you have to contribute to society. Otherwise, you’re just going to feel empty.
The Jar Analogy: Sand, Rocks, and Big Rocks [00:17:15]
Shaan Puri: The idea here isn’t work or don’t work, or don’t care about money or care about money. Those are false choices. It’s really the idea that the way most people live their life—and I’m speaking to the type of person who’s going to listen to this podcast. You’re probably an overachiever type, probably a little type A, pretty hungry for success. You might be slightly impatient. These are common disorders of the MFM listener group. I know this because I am one.
The trick is for most of us, we basically work, work, work and then we try to fill in some life around the gaps. The idea of what he says and what I picked up from Jesse Itzler is: look, you have to decide what you want to do in life. Schedule that. Don’t worry, the work is always there. The work will fill in all the cracks around those things. But if you just wait until you have large gaps of free time or it’s the right time to go do that thing you always wanted to do, work is like a liquid or a gas. It just expands to fill the container you give it. You have to be really conscious of how you let that fill the container.
The analogy I use with Jesse is you have a jar. Imagine for your year the jar is empty right now, but you have sand, small rocks, and big rocks. The sand is going to be all your day-to-day life routines. It’s going to be your errands, your Zoom calls, your meetings. That’s the sand. It’s stuff that you have to do. You have to do a lot of it, but you’re not going to look back a year from now and remember any of those. Your Zoom calls don’t go in your lifelong memories or your photo albums.
Then you have the small rocks which are little initiatives, little efforts. And then you have the big rocks, the things that really matter to you. Taking that family trip or going and visiting your parents even though you don’t have to and maybe you don’t have time to do it, but they’re getting older and you want to go visit them. Or it’s learning that new skill or launching that project. Those are your big rocks.
If you put the sand in the jar first and then you say, “Great, now I’m going to fit the big rocks in,” they don’t go in at all. But if you put the big rocks in and you say, “I’m doing these. These have this much space. They’re in here,” and then you fill as much sand as you can, it turns out you can fit all the things into the container if you do it in the right order. The sand will fill in all the cracks and crevices. But the big rocks don’t work that way. You just have to make sure you figure out what are my big rocks, what do I actually really care about, and then how do I put them in the jar first? Not do them first, but even just schedule them first so that my life doesn’t just become a jar full of sand.
Sam Parr: That’s the same analogy that the book Traction uses to teach you how to use their EOS system. They use the exact same analogy on why you should set goals and work hard.
Shaan Puri: Because somebody did this to us in high school or something. It’s like a magic trick. “Oh, try to fit all these in.” If you do it in one order, it looks like it’s physically impossible. You put it in the other order, it all fits in and you’re like, “Oh, I didn’t need a bigger jar. I just needed to put things in the right order.”
Howard Marks and the Judgment of Selling [00:20:45]
Sam Parr: What else did you read this year that you liked?
Shaan Puri: There’s this Howard Marks blog post that I mentioned called “Selling Out.” Have you read this blog post?
Sam Parr: That’s a new one. Was that one of his more recent ones?
Shaan Puri: It was in January of 2022. It’s a conversation with his son Andrew. Howard Marks, who came on the pod, was awesome. His son Andrew is also a great investor. They were talking and basically the basic idea in investing is buy low, sell high. But when do you actually sell on the high? Do you sell when it goes up a little bit, when it goes up a little more? Do you wait? Do you hold it forever?
He’s talking to his son about it. He’s like, “Hey, you have this position. Do you think you should sell?” His son is like, “No.” He’s like, “Well, is there any price that you would sell? Certainly there’s got to be some price.” His son’s like, “Yeah.” They have this back and forth, almost like a Socratic dialogue. He basically says the premise of the blog post is that there’s only two reasons people sell: because things are up or because things are down.
That sounds a little silly, but let me explain. You could sell because it’s up, as in you’re taking profits. You’re afraid that the gains will go away and so you want to do that. But it certainly doesn’t make sense to just sell just because it’s up. That would be like you owned Amazon back in 1999 and it’s $5 a share and it goes to $9 and you sell. Obviously that wouldn’t have been a good decision. Simply saying sell when it’s up doesn’t make any sense because how far up?
Selling when it’s down is usually an emotional reaction to things. Panic, fear, disappointment leads people to sell. The whole market gets pessimistic and so you do too. So clearly just selling because it’s down isn’t a good idea. So then when do you sell? Basically, he talks about the concept of opportunity cost. All investing is about relative selection.
The first part of the logic is you initially invest in something because you have some thesis. Over time you’ll either feel more validated about that thesis or less. More information will come out. Does the reason you bought this thing feel more true today or less true today than it did at the time? Maybe you believe that this would be the best thing ever. Then they release the product and it’s not so great. Now your confidence level should go down when that happens. Is the primary principle behind why you invested getting more true or less true?
Sam Parr: Wait, was he saying that is the right way or wrong way? That your opinion should change?
Shaan Puri: No, they should change. As new information comes out, you update your thinking and you say, “Well, if the reason I bought the investment is no longer true, then I need to either have had a new reason to invest or I should not be invested in the thing.”
Sam Parr: Versus just sticking with it because of cognitive bias or sunk cost fallacy.
Shaan Puri: Trying to convince yourself that despite all this evidence, I still believe the facts are wrong and putting blinders on to reality. The second part of it is it’s all about relative selections and opportunity costs. If you were not invested in this, you would be invested in something else. Do you have more conviction and better prospects investing in something else than you do in this?
He’s talking about with his son Andrew, who says, “Well, that’s true, but it depends on your goals. Right now, trimming or selling would mean selling something that I have immense comfort in based on my bottoms-up assessment of it and moving into something I feel less good about and know less well. To me, I would rather own a smaller number of things which I feel strongly about because I will only have a few good insights over my lifetime. So I have to maximize the value that I have from those.”
This has tended to be true across most people who are active investors—that you only have a few good ideas. Whether this is angel investors where the vast majority of their portfolio comes from two or three bets that they made out of potentially hundreds, or it’s George Soros saying the most important thing in investing is position size because you’re going to be wrong a bunch. I think his hit rate was estimated to be about 30% correct. So 70% wrong. He’s like, “So the key is that the 30% correct, I need to be correct in a big enough way where it’s going to make outsized returns and when I’m wrong, I need to be wrong in smaller ways.” Position sizing—the game is all about sizing. I don’t care if you’re right if it’s too small.
Stanley Druckenmiller, who’s now this legendary investor, says that’s the number one thing he learned from Soros. He came in with a great idea and he expected Soros to say it’s too risky. And he’s like, “Well, if you’re so confident, we should be betting 10 times the size. Either you’re wrong about your thesis or you’re wrong about your size. You can’t be right about both right now because your size is too small on what you’re saying you believe in.”
Sam Parr: The reason I love talking to people like Howard Marks—and I would love to have any of these investors on—is not because I particularly care about investing. I find it mildly interesting, but it’s fine. I care more about what they can teach me about how to live a better life. Because when I hear you talking about truthing this with investing, I’m like, “Oh, I made that mistake with this relationship. Therefore, my thinking is flawed.” Did you have any takeaways on how this could apply to life other than just through investing money?
Shaan Puri: No, I was thinking about it more from a money point of view to be honest. But his solution isn’t like he gives you some formula at the end. He says the bottom line is we should base our investments based on our own estimates of the asset’s potential. That’s the reason you invest, not because it’s up or down. We should not sell just because the position has risen. There could be a reason to limit the size or how concentrated you want to be, but there’s no scientific way to calculate what that limit should be. It’s a personal choice.
In the end, it comes down like everything else in investing entirely to judgment. It was less about how do I apply this philosophy to everything and more like, damn, judgment is the ultimate lever. Just like you’re saying with relationships—who you pick to marry, where you choose to live, what you choose to invest in, where you go with your career—these are all judgment calls that we put very little thought into. Most people are pretty thoughtless about a lot of those decisions or we put very little effort into becoming better at judgment. If I asked you today, how do you become better at judgment? And how much time did you spend this year working on that muscle?
Sam Parr: None. It’s none consciously.
Shaan Puri: Consciously, we’re spending no time on probably the most important muscle to our long-term happiness because your decisions become your destiny. So how do you make better decisions?
The Decision Register Framework [00:27:45]
Sam Parr: Do you study that?
Shaan Puri: I do a couple of things. I don’t know if I study it, but I told you this before: I write down all my decisions. I have this thing called the decision register. It’s a table and I write down two things. When I’m making a decision, I write down what it is and why I’m making it and my confidence level in the decision. And then I go back and I assess the decision register.
Two things come out. First, I see was I right or wrong in that. And then the other thing was what were important decisions that I didn’t even realize were important at the time. Like going on a whim to that conference that felt like a small decision at the time, but actually this amazing relationship came out of it and that led to this huge outcome for me. That’s a good way to be retroactive.
Sam Parr: Explain to me how you said you write down what it is. Part of solving the problem is defining the problem. I buy into that, but how can I use your framework for making a better decision in the future versus just looking back and trying to adjust?
Shaan Puri: I call it the decision survey. Here are the actual questions I have in a Google Doc. First, what is the decision? Write it in the length of a tweet. Actually write it down. Then two, check in on your feelings. What am I feeling right now while I’m making this decision? Is it extreme fear, some fear, neutral, some greed, extreme greed? What is my emotional state when I’m making this decision? I know if I’m on either end of the spectrum, on the far end of the greed spectrum or in the fear spectrum, I shouldn’t be making the decision.
Sam Parr: It’s like going to the grocery store hungry.
Shaan Puri: Exactly. Then I write this: what is the one decisive reason to do this? Blended reasons are bad reasons. I learned this from Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn guy. I think he learned it from Peter Thiel, which is if you want to go do something, you don’t say, “Well, it’ll be good because…” He gives the example of, “Should I go speak at this conference?” He’s like, “Well, it’ll be good because I’ve never visited Canada before and I might meet some cool people there and it might be a good reason to work on my public speaking skills and it’ll be a good chance to spend time with this person.”
Basically, that’s what bad decisions sound like. You can just blur out the words. If you hear that tone, you’re about to make a bad decision.
Sam Parr: But you’re saying bad decision meaning a bad outcome or you’re deciding on the wrong thing? Does bad decision mean I’m saying no when I should say yes, or does bad decision mean I shouldn’t even—
Shaan Puri: Poor judgment process. A poor use of the skill of judgment. A better way to make decisions is the input. The outcome might work out. It’s like in poker sometimes you play deuce-seven offsuit. It’s a bad decision. You shouldn’t have made the bet, but you got lucky. Two sevens came out and you hit trips. Okay, cool. You don’t want to let that fool you into thinking, “Well, I should always play deuce-seven. It’s my lucky hand.” That’s what really bad players would do.
In the same way, there are people who will fold pocket kings because they got beat once. Well, no, you should always just put your money in with good odds and then let things play out based on the probability and over time it’ll work in your favor. You can’t do what’s called resulting, where you judge every decision only on the result. You have to be able to judge the decision based on the input, not the output, which is easier in poker because the odds are known than it is in life because the odds are unknown. But you have to do your best to do it either way.
I try to write the one decisive reason. If I’m going to go give that talk, it’s literally because I want to go spend time with this person and they live in Canada and that’s why I’ll go give that talk. If that one reason is not enough to do it, then there’s really no reason to do it. You should have one reason that’s strong enough to do the thing and everything else is bonus, but you can’t count it.
What I do is I make my strongest reason for and my strongest reason against and then they joust. I write the single reason I would do it and a single reason I wouldn’t do it. I look at those and say, “Who would win this? If that’s an arm wrestling match, who wins? Which one is stronger?”
Sam Parr: But what attributes does each of those arguments have?
Shaan Puri: For example, it could be, “I want to be around my family” versus “This one thing could change—I could make a lot of money because it’s a new customer.” First, it’s got to be honest. That’s the first thing because I think we’re not honest sometimes about why we’re doing certain things. I think it’s got to be concise. It can’t be a spaghetti reason because your brain can’t even understand it.
Then the last is you have to tie it to the value. Right now, is your top value making more money, getting in great shape, or is it spending time with your loved ones? They’re all good things, but do you have one that’s valued more? Secondly, do you have good substitutes? Okay, I could do this to spend that time with this person, but couldn’t I just go hang out with them when they’re back? Couldn’t I just call them once a week? Is there not a valid substitute that doesn’t have the same cost? If there is a valid substitute, you do it.
Secondly, I write down what are the secondary benefits? And then I ask again, if I took all the secondary benefits away, would I still make the decision? These are all related to “don’t do blended reasons” because that’s the number one thing that we try to do, especially smart people because we love making lists.
Sam Parr: A lot of times what people do is they do pros and cons and they go, “Well, the cons list is way longer, therefore that’s right.”
Shaan Puri: Exactly right. Or they just don’t even make a decision. They write a big pros and cons list and just paralyze themselves. “I don’t know. It’s too complicated.” That’s why you don’t want to do that.
What triggered the decision? What made me want to do this? Which is usually a sneaky way of figuring out the fear and greed thing. It’s like, “Oh, because my buddy did this and he got this great thing and now I want to.” It’s FOMO or something like that. Seven is: what alternatives did I consider? Which is usually just a test of did you consider any alternatives or are you just trying to do the first thing that you thought of? That’s a sign of shallow thinking which results in bad decisions.
Eight is: is it a reversible decision? If it’s a reversible decision, good. I don’t need to worry about it as much. If it’s irreversible, I should think about it a lot. What’s the upside if I’m right? What’s the downside if I’m wrong? What follow-up is important to make sure this one decision would be a higher chance of being a success? You could almost make a bad decision a good decision if you do it with enough intensity, if you follow up and follow through and do secondary actions. When and how will I know if this is a success? And then lastly, what do I think is going to happen? Just write down a quick prediction of the future.
Sam Parr: Did you create this?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, it’s pretty good.
Sam Parr: Thank you. It’s a lot of effort.
Shaan Puri: I’ll tell you, I do this probably one-third of the time I should. The average person does it 0% of the time. The reason why is because it’s like going to church or something. “Oh man, I have to go do this thing. I know it’s the right thing to do. I know I should do this. I know it’s good for me, but it takes a little bit of effort and it’s going to require me to be critical of my own thoughts.” It’s so much easier to just not check in on those things.
Cognitive Biases and Reading Philosophy [00:34:45]
Sam Parr: There’s this quadrant—four squares—and it’s high urgency versus low urgency and then highly important and not important. You want to allocate a certain amount of time to things that are not urgent and are very important. But that bucket tends to get no love. Typically it’s unimportant and urgent and important and urgent. Because of that, you don’t invest enough time that actually builds the foundation to a lot of things in the future.
What’s really fascinating is that we’re discussing how do you get good at making decisions, which is one of the top 10 things on earth you could ever potentially learn. Yet I have never actually thought about that. I’ve tried to read Charlie Munger, who is famous for being an interesting thinker. When he died recently, they wrote an article about him and he had these funny quotes where he was like, “It was really hard in life because I just knew I was so much better than everyone else. Even though I talked a lot, I wanted to talk so much more to show how much better I was than everyone else.” He’s this really cocky guy, but his thinking is very good. I have tried to read Poor Charlie’s Almanack five different times and I just find it incredibly boring. I think you find it boring, too.
Shaan Puri: Yeah. I’m like, I should love this on paper. Everything about this, I should love it. And then you read it and it’s like I’m reading about Charlie’s grandkid. Do I care about this? No. It’s just a little slow. I’m like a kid. I need some zingers every few minutes.
Sam Parr: It’s very textbook.
Shaan Puri: He has this speech which he and a lot of other people really love about cognitive biases. What are the top reasons for human misjudgment? It’s about this exact topic and I’ve listened to that. It’s good. But I find it pretty hard to memorize 23 cognitive biases and carry them around in my head all the time and identify them when they’re happening and then find some root cause.
I find a much easier thing is this Socratic method of: well, what are you doing? I’m doing this. What makes you think that that’s a good idea? Do this. How will you know if this worked? That Socratic method to me is just a much clearer indicator of when I know what I’m doing and it’s a good decision or I’m making a bad decision. It helps me avoid things in the moment.
The other thing is just time. Don’t try to make a decision in the same time you’re gathering information. Sleep on it or let three days go by as a cool-down period if you can. It’s the same thing with any impulse control; if you just add a time delay, you can avoid a lot of mistakes.
Sam Parr: When I was younger, in my early 20s and late teens, I used to do book reports on all the books that I read. I still occasionally do it, but before it was like, I’m going to read this one book this quarter, and I’m going to read the bibliography and all the cited sources, and I’m going to master this, and then I’m going to write a book report on it.
One quarter it was The 48 Laws of Power because I was like, well, if you learn about power, then I could see when people are trying to manipulate me and if I want to get powerful, hopefully I can memorize it. But there’s 48 of them. How on earth am I supposed to memorize all of them? For the longest time, if you Googled 48 Laws of Power summary, I had this Google Doc that I wrote and I summarized all 48 laws and I shared the document with people.
When you share on Google Doc, you sometimes put “share with link.” You forget that that’s searchable on Google. For the longest time—I think it was three years—my Google Doc was number one. Every time I logged in, there would be hundreds of people on this document. It was so funny that it became number one. Then I made it so people could comment. People started commenting on it and they would add interesting takeaways. It was a crowdsourced thing. It was actually really cool.
But I was obsessed with how do I memorize this stuff? Now that you’re talking about this Charlie Munger thing, I’ve tried to read this tons of times. Right now I’m telling myself and everyone else listening that this is important, but I have not done it. I need to do this. This is actually so fascinating. A really interesting thing is I asked myself: do I wish I would have done this three years ago? Yes. I should probably do it immediately then because I will be less regretful if I do it in the future.
Shaan Puri: Naval had this thing about reading that changed the way I think about reading. I used to approach it similar to you, which is I’m reading to get information. I’m reading to learn something. I was like, this book contains stuff and the goal is to get the stuff from the book to be stuff in my head. That was hard. Sometimes I’d be like, “Ah, this stuff isn’t that great,” or “Oh my god, how am I going to memorize all this? How am I going to remember any of this? Do I remember the stuff I read recently? No, I don’t. Does this even work?”
Naval put it differently. He goes, “When you read, it’s like rubbing two sticks together. All you’re trying to do is create a little bonfire in your brain.” He’s like, “You’re looking to spark a thought, an idea. So you read not to get all the stuff from the book to be all the stuff in your head. You’re reading to just catalyze some spark, some thought, some realization, some thought process, some new idea in your mind.”
If you look at books as creating that spark in your mind, you look at them very differently. You don’t even need to read the whole book and you don’t feel any guilt towards that. You don’t need to remember things from the book. The book just needs to be a consistent tool to get you to think more interestingly and think more deeply in the moment itself. If you just do that habitually, you’ll just consistently be a good thinker. Once I started doing that or once I went into reading with that mindset, I enjoyed it a lot more because there was way less pressure. There was way less obligation. I didn’t feel obligated to finish. I didn’t feel obligated to remember. All I felt obligated to do was ask: what thoughts does this spark in my head? When I started paying attention to that, it changed how I read.
Fiction, Jack Carr, and Akon’s Ringtones [00:41:30]
Sam Parr: Did you read anything else that you liked this year?
Shaan Puri: I read a lot of stuff. Fiction—there’s this book called The Will of the Many. Highly recommend if you like stuff that’s in the kind of Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, fantasy, sci-fi genre. It’s not sci-fi, it’s more fantasy, but it’s basically this book that mirrors the Roman political structure. There’s a hierarchy. The Will of the Many was a good book and it’s a series. The second book just came out, Strength of the Few. I just crushed that one. I’m into this series right now. For me, one of the great joys of life is getting into one of these fictional series, but they’re pretty hard to find. They’re pretty hard to get into because it’s a lot of world-building. When you do, it’s really, really rich.
Jack Carr this year—you know Jack?
Sam Parr: He does mystery novels or what does he do? Is it like war, like Tom Clancy?
Shaan Puri: Yeah. It’s called The Terminal List. We actually had him on My First Million. The James Reece series, which starts with The Terminal List, which is a bestseller.
Sam Parr: Dude, it’s crazy. We had him on the pod. I didn’t want you to come because I wanted to nerd out with him and I was embarrassed as to how much I love this book. It’s one of these things where you read one of these books and you fall in love with these fake things and you don’t want to tell anyone else.
Shaan Puri: Fake things?
Sam Parr: Like have you ever read a book and you’re sad it’s over? You have to remind yourself that this person isn’t real. There’s been times I’ve read a fiction book and I’m Googling—I need to see did other people ever draw this character or did an actor ever play them so I can get to know them further. That’s how it was with this guy and Jack Carr.
Shaan Puri: Which books did you read?
Sam Parr: Like seven of them. He’s got six or seven of them. I’ve read almost all of them. He’s one of the more prolific guys. I don’t know how he writes so much.
Shaan Puri: He came on the podcast. Is there one thing you remember from what he said or did he say anything really insightful?
Sam Parr: Listen to this. He was a Navy SEAL where he was bad. He was a bad-to-the-bone dude and he basically started writing these books, which was funny because writing is not a very typical masculine thing—writing fiction, writing stories. But this guy is a masculine dude.
Shaan Puri: He writes like his grip on the pen is—
Sam Parr: Yeah, and when he’s thinking, he’s picking his teeth with a big knife. But he’s a pretty hardcore dude and yet when he talked to us, he was very soft. He was the politest guy. He was so kind. The book series is basically a Navy SEAL who was wronged and he goes to the end of the world in order to right the wrong. It just so happens that he gets into different adventures seven different times, seven different books. Sort of like James Bond—how on earth is one guy constantly saving the world? But it was crazy how soft this guy was. Yet at the same time, he has definitely killed a lot of people before and he was this pretty hardcore dude, but he was so gentle and I found it really—is that a weird thing to take away?
Shaan Puri: It’s a thing you do a lot, which is we have someone on and you’re almost like a feeler rather than a listener. You’re more into their vibe and their persona.
Sam Parr: Always. It’s always the first thing.
Shaan Puri: Which is cool. It’s different than the way I operate, but I find that often when I ask you about somebody, it’s always the way they were, not what they said, which is cool. I think actually that is what we pick up from people—the unspoken—but you are particularly in tune with that.
Sam Parr: I felt that way with John Morgan where I don’t even remember half the stuff that he said, but he had this cowboy vibe that I was into. I am all vibes. That’s an interesting observation. I do that all the time where I don’t even remember what he and I talked about. I can’t remember anything. But then you will do these things constantly where you recall these stories and they’re very minute. I’ve been with you and I’ve heard you retell the story and you’ll be like, “And he set this thing down and he looked at us and he said this thing,” and I’m like, “He did? I don’t even remember that.” How do you remember that? I don’t think of those details. Or we’ve been with—you’ve told stories of Furcon and you’ll retell a story with a detail that I had no idea about, but I just remember him as a really nice guy.
Shaan Puri: It’s interesting also to figure out what do you want to observe. I wonder how intentional you could be about that. Can I change my little metal detector here?
Sam Parr: Could I actually improve it? Could I be more intentional about what it is? Or is it just innate? It’s very hard to change. I’m curious about that.
Shaan Puri: It’s sort of like people who say they’re bad at names. I’m like, “No, you’re not. You just don’t care.” Someone said that to me. I was like, “I’m bad at names.” And they’re like, “No, you just don’t care.” And that bothered me. So I was like, “Okay, I care.” Whenever I meet someone—if someone recognizes me on the street—I’ll say, “What’s up, man? What’s your name?” Kevin. “Okay, Kevin, where are you from?” Kevin, you’re from Idaho. “Okay, Kevin from Idaho. Man, it was so good to meet you. Thanks, Kevin.” You repeat it a bunch of times and then you associate it with where he’s from. I will always remember someone’s name all because someone made me feel bad. I think I should change to how do I remember certain details. The way that you have to remember those details that you’re referring to is you have to remember the story. It all has to be the story.
Eric Jorgensson and Akon’s Ringtones [00:47:15]
Shaan Puri: Eric Jorgensson is another thing I read this year. Eric Jorgensson runs Scribe and he wrote the Navalmanac. He wrote a book that compiled all of Naval’s wisdom. Dude, I think he sold a million copies of that.
Sam Parr: Is that true?
Shaan Puri: I think he sold a lot more than that. More than 1 million copies.
Sam Parr: How many books have sold more than 1 million?
Shaan Puri: He’s made a lot of money off that book. And it’s great because the genre of that book is an “in his own words” biography type of book. He doesn’t write it himself. He compiles what Naval said without adding any of his own commentary. Naval has this philosophy of you open-source your material. You let other people fork it, remix it, and let your ideas spread. What more do you want than your ideas to spread?
Sam Parr: This is a win-win for everyone.
Shaan Puri: Yeah. So he’s doing one on Elon right now. He sent me an advanced copy of his Elon book. I was excited and I cracked it open. One thing that I like right away—smart by Eric—is he puts something that you don’t already know about Elon at the front just to signal to you there’s going to be stuff in here that you don’t already know, assuming you’re an Elon fanboy or in the tech bubble already. If he was like, “Yeah, Elon likes to think from first principles,” I’d be like, “I know, I’ve read all this before.”
But he talked about Elon talking about memory. He’s like, “Yeah, when I was a kid, I learned how to do these memory palaces.” He’s like, “You can remember pretty much anything if you learn that memory is a skill and there’s a way to do it.”
Sam Parr: Is that like walking through a house?
Shaan Puri: Yeah. You create a physical 3D structure in your mind and then you link the thing to a room or a location, a visual object, and then you create a little bit of a story of walking through from one to the next. The people who could memorize all the cards—they’re like, “The king is a real king and the number seven is a house. There’s a king in a house. He meets a queen, so he has a wife.”
Sam Parr: On Seven’s Lane. And on Seven’s Lane, his wife the queen, she loved diamonds and so she—yeah. And you do that and that’s how you build this thing.
Shaan Puri: So it’s Elon talking about memory palaces and I was like, this is great. I’m happy to get an unlimited buffet of new Elon anecdotes and nuggets because how rare is that? So I thought that was pretty cool. In general, his book is really good. It’s going to be good.
Sam Parr: I can’t believe he has sold that many copies of that book. That is absolutely insane.
Shaan Puri: One of the topics I was going to do today is a “work smarter not harder” topic. Eric is an example of this. How do you write a best-selling book that sells millions of copies? Well, what if I told you it’s none of your ideas and none of your words? Would that interest you? It’s a way smarter way to write a bestseller.
There’s this incredible interview that came out—a clip that came out. Did you hear it? It’s Akon talking about his music.
Sam Parr: No. What’d he say?
Shaan Puri: Akon the rapper was on a podcast and he told the story. They’re like, “Dude, so you had a crazy career.” They were talking about his Guinness Book of World Records that he owns for ringtones. He tells the story: “Yeah, man. I was recording music and at the time the way we sold music was you would sell your single on iTunes and it’d be $1.99 for your 4-minute song.”
He’s like, “But then I walked around and I saw everybody had a phone and they all had a ringtone. They had a song as their thing. So I asked them, ‘Hey, do you get to pick what that is?’ They’re like, ‘Yeah.’ He goes, ‘How much did that cost? Is it free?’ And they go, ‘No, you pay for it. $4.99.’” He goes, “$4.99? A 4-minute song is $1.99. A 10-second ringtone is $4.99.”
He goes, “And even better, I call my lawyer. I say, ‘Hey, check my contract with the record label. What’s the cut on ringtones?’” His lawyer calls him back and says, “Hey, there’s nothing about ringtones in here. There’s nothing about digital anything and there’s nothing for ringtones.” He goes, “Say less.”
He hangs up the phone and he goes, “I started making music songs that were meant to be ringtones. Every song I did, I would focus on how is this a ringtone?” And so “Mr. Lonely” became the number one ringtone in the world. He wrote that song to be a ringtone. He’s like, “I would write the song with a ringtone in mind. I would record it with a ringtone in mind. I would chop it up and make it really easy for these songs to be ringtones.”
He broke the Guinness Book of World Records. He sold 11 million ringtones. $4.99? That’s $55 million of gross sales on ringtones. He’s like, “I became the ringtone king.” And then he’s like, “Then the next time they tried to redo my contract, they tried to slip in ‘and ringtone sales.’” He’s like, “Let’s take that out right there. Nope. That’s not going in the contract. We’re going to have to renegotiate a separate deal on that.” I just thought it was brilliant. The Akon ringtone—work smarter, not harder. How do you sell a 10-second song for two times the price of a four-minute song?
Sam Parr: I remember being 14 and hearing girls that had that on there. I’m going to put that on as my ringtone now.
Shaan Puri: I don’t think you do ringtones. Does that still work?
Sam Parr: Yeah. Because I had—
Shaan Puri: Nobody has a ringtone now.
Sam Parr: No, I did. If you called me, it was a remixed version of the Nokia one and it actually had beats. It started off like a normal one and then it came back. Can you just bring ringtones back? I feel like if I was the music industry, the number one thing I would try to do is bring ringtones back.
Analog Toys and Poppi Soda [00:52:30]
Sam Parr: Let me tell you what I’m bringing back in my house. I bought a DVD player because I don’t let my kids watch TV, but I’m letting them sometimes on Saturday when I’m overwhelmed—if it’s just me watching two kids—I need something, but I don’t want to turn YouTube on because I don’t like the ads and stuff. I’ve got a DVD player and we go to a thrift store down the street from my house and there’s DVDs. It’s incredibly fun to put the DVD in there.
There’s this new toy—have you seen this toy called—it’s the little red thing that plays music.
Shaan Puri: Yeah. What’s that called? It starts with a Y. They kill it.
Sam Parr: It’s called Tonies.
Shaan Puri: What is it? There’s two of them. There’s one that starts with a Y as well.
Sam Parr: It’s called Tonies—the box—and you put a character on top and then it just starts to play songs. But actually you buy it and then it doesn’t connect to your Wi-Fi because you don’t have a 2G connection. You only have 5G. That’s my story about the Tonies.
Shaan Puri: It doesn’t connect?
Sam Parr: Doesn’t connect. You have to have 2G. You have to have less G’s. I have too many G’s. I don’t even have 5G; I’ve got one above that, I think. But it’s an incredible toy. I’m playing with this and so we’re actually on the hunt for a boombox. I want to buy a boombox where you just put the CD in and a cassette tape and click play. It’s so fun. We’ve had so much fun in my house doing some of this stuff.
Shaan Puri: Tonies—these guys crush, by the way. They do hundreds of millions. Tonies—let’s see, is this the right thing? Yeah, 510 million euros last 12 months. 510 million euros on this kid’s boombox. Isn’t that insane?
Sam Parr: Tonies. The other one is Yoto. That’s the one I got. Have you seen Yoto?
Shaan Puri: No.
Sam Parr: It’s the same thing. I don’t know how they’re different, but I just remember one time I typed in Yoto and it said like Yoto versus Tonies.
Shaan Puri: 127 million in revenue. Are you joking me? What’s going on?
Sam Parr: Crazy, right? It’s an incredible toy.
Shaan Puri: This is ridiculous. This makes me mad.
Sam Parr: Why? It’s pretty brilliant.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, that’s what makes me mad—that the brilliance was not mine.
Sam Parr: Dude, I followed this guy on Instagram now who started Poppi. I don’t know how he came on my feed, but I saw him and I thought it was me. He looks just like me, but he’s better looking. Have you seen what he looks like?
Shaan Puri: I thought it was me. Hold on. Poppi the drink?
Sam Parr: Yeah, Poppi founder. The man. It’s a husband and wife. Look him up.
Shaan Puri: Let’s see. So you thought this was you?
Sam Parr: Trust me. Go to his Instagram right now. I’m telling you. Look at the videos. I was like, “Am I really a billionaire CPG guy or what?” I said, “Want to do a video together? We look alike.” And he said, “Could be funny. Let’s do it.”
Shaan Puri: He’s got a podcast. Better podcasting, probably.
Sam Parr: I don’t know if he has a podcast, but he just does Instagram stuff.
Shaan Puri: Dude, are you mad? This guy’s just taking everything you work for. There can only be one.
Sam Parr: I was shocked at just—do you know that Poppi sold for like two or three billion dollars? And it started out as a probiotic soda. That sounds like the worst idea ever.
Shaan Puri: He lives in Austin. Oh my god, this guy is you.
Sam Parr: Yeah, if he wants to trade spots, we could talk. He just crushed it on that. It’s the ultimate hack when you start a company with your wife and it works and you both get all of the equity.
Shaan Puri: Is that it? Is that the pod?
Sam Parr: All right, that’s it. That’s the pod.