Speakers: Sam Parr (host), Shaan Puri (host)
The 5-Year Diary and the Inertia of Change [00:00:00]
Sam Parr: I want to show you something that’s honestly changed my life. Have I showed you this 5-year diary?
Shaan Puri: No.
Sam Parr: Okay, so let me explain how this works. Dude, I’m so jealous that I did not invent this journal. Basically, here’s how my 5-year journal works. On every single page, it says December 1st, and then it has the first year, the second year, the third year, the fourth year, the fifth year.
Shaan Puri: Oh, yes. I’m interested. You took this journaling thing from “Oh, great. The most boring topic ever, journaling,” to “Oh, wait. That’s pretty cool. I want one.”
Sam Parr: I started doing this in November, the week of Thanksgiving, actually. And so, your boy’s getting to last year’s entries.
Shaan Puri: Like a week ago, you mean?
Sam Parr: I started doing it a year ago last week.
Shaan Puri: Oh, last year. Okay.
Sam Parr: I’ve talked about this three times now. This is the third time. This is the first time it’s clicking. But the reason it’s been very special this week is because I’m getting to my previous year’s entries and I purposely did not look ahead to remind myself. Do you want to know something? The biggest takeaway: I don’t change.
Shaan Puri: What do you mean? Your habits, what you’re doing, or how you feel?
Sam Parr: I have complained about the same stuff for 10 or 15 years. I have previous journals where I look back and I’m like, “I’ve complained about the same things.”
Shaan Puri: Give me an example. What do you mean?
Sam Parr: So, is the way that I’m spending time right now even worth it? Is working on this business even worth it? Do I want to go all in on creating content or do I want to go all in on being behind the scenes? Where should I live? Basically, I complain about the same things all the time. Why did I lose my temper today and make myself look stupid? Why didn’t I pause for 10 seconds and reflect before I snapped at my wife or a kid or something?
I think I’ve concluded a few things. One, humans don’t change. Actually, let me rephrase that. I’ve concluded that change is unnatural. Change is not natural. Inertia is natural.
Shaan Puri: Yeah. Right. Inertia is the default.
Sam Parr: And so, you can change. I actually have changed a lot of big things in my life. I was thinking about what causes change. I think a good representation of what causes change in business typically happens at the $10 million mark. The difference between a $10 million and a $100 million a year business oftentimes is systems. I think it typically comes down to hiring great people and creating great systems.
The reason why I love business is because it teaches you a little bit about life. What I’m learning about my own life is that the moments that I’ve changed most is when I’ve had a system. A good system makes things more predictable by taking away how you feel at the moment. The way that you feel in any moment should have nothing to do with the actions that you take to get you to the goals that you’ve set.
For example, the times that I’ve lost the most weight and gotten the most fit is when I had a nutritionist holding me accountable or I had a trainer who I had to see or I was following a plan. The times that I’ve stagnated most in my life is when I’ve not had a plan and I let my feelings on that day dictate what I do during my schedule. When you have a good company, your salespeople have scripts that they follow. They have checklists for follow-ups. They spend the early morning doing outbound. The middle of the morning is doing follow-up emails. It’s a system. I just wanted to talk about whether you have this, and we should talk about some of the systems that we’ve implemented in our lives that have actually made real change. I think the key to living a successful life—not just money, but success defined as getting what you want—is creating a system.
Systems vs. Feelings [00:05:12]
Shaan Puri: You brought up a pretty amazing topic. I think you started with the journal, which is incredible. The year-over-year journal is basically a time machine because you get to see where you were, and it forces perspective which you wouldn’t normally get. The vulnerability of being like, “Dude, I don’t change. I’m the same complaining mother-effer that I’ve been for the last 10 years,” is really funny and honest.
Then you have the systems thing. The best quote on this comes from James Clear, or whoever he got it from in his book Atomic Habits, which is: “We don’t rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our systems.” You see this everywhere. I see it in my business, I see it when I’m coaching basketball, I see it in my fitness life. You don’t become what you want; you don’t become your potential. You become what you regularly do. The old Aristotle quote: “We are what we do repeatedly.”
So what do you do repeatedly? You do what’s on autopilot. You do what’s defaulted. You do what you have on an automated basis and not what’s based on how you’re feeling in the moment, which, if it was a graph, would be up and down, up and down. You’re spot on that this applies inside the company and outside of any of your work stuff. It’s the same thing.
Sam Parr: Let me give you an example. Here’s what I wrote about on January 25th of last year. I said, “I’m one text message away from going Amish. I’m so sick of digital distractions. It’s a drug.” And then I wrote in this other section, “When I hang out with all these successful people, I have to remember my roots. I’m just a punk rock skateboarding redneck from Missouri and I shouldn’t get caught up in this fancy stuff or wanting to achieve all this fancy stuff.” That’s an example. The reason I’m bringing up the digital stuff and being distracted is I wrote about that three weeks ago in the same thing.
Shaan Puri: Right. There’s one thing that goes underneath and comes before the system. You’re saying you need a plan, you need a goal, and then you need a system that’s going to get you to the goal reliably—a system where if you just follow the mechanics, the physics of the system leads you to a certain outcome. That’s very true, but there seem to be a couple of things underneath that. One is the blueprint: figuring out what to want. If you set up your systems toward getting a goal that wasn’t the goal that actually would change the feeling that you want, you’ll be perpetually on the hamster wheel.
This happens a lot in business. We get a promotion and then you immediately are like, “I still feel the same stressed, anxious version of myself. I just need a little more and that’ll be the solution.” Figuring out the right thing to want is key because then you build your systems in that direction. I think that’s a very uncomfortable place to be—figuring out what you actually want in life—because it sounds like it should be so simple.
Sam Parr: That’s the hardest part. You can’t optimize for a goal without a goal, and we spend most of our time worrying about the optimization.
Shaan Puri: Yeah. Or picking a goal that’s actually going to get you the feeling you think the thing is going to get you. You never want the thing; you want the feeling you think the thing is going to get you. You don’t want the fancy watch or the car. You don’t want the promotion. You don’t want the relationship. You want the feeling you think you’ll have if you were in a great relationship. You want the feeling you think you’ll have if your team wins the game. You want the feeling you think you’ll have if you are driving that car instead of this piece of junk.
It’s the feeling that you’re chasing. If you’re not very good at understanding your own feelings and practicing having the feelings that you want, you’re not just going to have them when the thing happens. We adapt too quickly and your base nature, your emotional home, is too strong. When you say, “I’m complaining about the same things,” I would guess that it’s not that you’re literally complaining about the same things. It’s that you’re having the same feelings about some variety of problem—the same genre of problem—but the feeling is almost identical.
Sam Parr: Exactly. And so what should you do about that? I think the way that I’m feeling now—correct me if I’m wrong—do you feel this exact same way or have you had the same issue?
Shaan Puri: I’ve had the same issue. I don’t know what you’re feeling right now, but yeah.
Sam Parr: This idea that I don’t change fast enough or I’m not coaching myself fast enough and I’m not adapting. I think more often than not, the listener and you and me, we don’t need to be taught new stuff. We just need to be reminded of the same thing that we already know. I think that we don’t give enough credit to reminders.
Let me give you an example. I read—or when I don’t have a newborn, I read a book a week probably. I read a lot. I love reading. I get so much joy out of it. Now, there’ve been so many times that I’ve read a book on something like a president, and then you ask me a year later, I really just can’t remember much about that president. I can’t tell you about the thing. I think a lot of times we go too wide and we consume too much stuff versus the same thing over and over and over again to master and be reminded of the same thing.
Another example could be when you’re training an employee on a sales process. I think the majority of the time you have to repeat yourself seven, eight, nine, ten times in a sales meeting. If you have a daily sales standup, you have to have phrases that people can remember constantly because I don’t think they need to be taught what to do. I just think they need to be reminded constantly. So I think reminders are important.
I also think a system of accountability is key. When you hire employees for your business, or at least when I do, I’m like, “I don’t want to do that. I could just do this on my own.” But I’ve noticed that when I hire employees for my company, I then feel like, “Well, now I have to keep feeding this system because now I’m held accountable.” It’s very painful, but I get significantly better results. When I back myself into a corner where I must perform, otherwise I’m going to let others down, that’s when I get the best results.
Shaan’s Side Quest: High School Basketball Coach [00:11:45]
Sam Parr: Have I told you what I’ve been doing lately? I texted you something this morning.
Shaan Puri: It was 12:15, and at 11:55 when I logged in, I got this text from Shaan. It was this really good Instagram reel, but it wasn’t on Instagram. It was Shaan telling the story about how he has quit being a business person and is now fully focused on coaching a basketball team.
Sam Parr: Is that right? So, here’s the story of how I stepped down as CEO in my companies and I’m now an unpaid high school assistant basketball coach. This is a decision I’ve made.
Sam Parr: They were high school kids? These guys look like they had beards.
Shaan Puri: They’re high school kids. I love basketball, as you know. One thing you probably don’t know is that growing up I didn’t watch cartoons. You’ll mention Dolly Parton and I couldn’t tell you who she is, or you’ll be like, “Yeah, you know that Elvis song?” and I’m like, “No, I don’t really know.” Well, that’s also true if you ask me about Sesame Street or Rugrats. As a kid, I never watched cartoons.
Sam Parr: What did you watch? World Series of Poker?
Shaan Puri: I watched two movies on loop: Home Alone, great movie, and I watched Mighty Ducks 2, specifically D2. These things you do as a kid, they sort of imprint on you. In the movie Mighty Ducks, Gordon Bombay is this hotshot lawyer who gets a DUI but gets assigned this community service thing where he ends up coaching this hockey team.
Sam Parr: He pulls up in his limo in New York City or some city and he’s coaching the street kids that somehow also play hockey.
Shaan Puri: Exactly. The business guy who grew up playing hockey but has given it up now has to go back into the world of sport. He ends up being the coach to this shitty, ragtag group of kids, these underdogs, and then they go on a run and make it to the top. He finds his love, his passion, and realizes this fills his cup. I watched that movie a lot of times and I had always said—I don’t know if I’d ever told you this—but I had said a bucket list item, my retirement plan, was to go coach a high school basketball team at least for a year.
I tried convincing my brother-in-law, “Hey, what if we got an AAU team? Could we do that?” I’ve been poking around like, “Is there a way to do this? I think it would be really good for the soul.” The opportunity presented itself about a month ago. I hired a coach—I’m big on coaches—to train me in basketball just as a workout. This guy used to train NBA players before the draft. I worked with him over the summer.
Sam Parr: Did you get better?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, of course you’re better. You practice, you get better. Systems. I showed up two or three times a week. We practiced the same things every time, the fundamentals, and guess what? You get better.
Sam Parr: Was it good exercise or did it hurt you?
Shaan Puri: Oh, dude, it’s great exercise. You’re drenched with sweat, which I would never get in the weight room.
Sam Parr: Same. It’s your full body because you can’t make a move without rotation.
Shaan Puri: And you’re doing lateral movements and stuff, things you wouldn’t do in a stationary machine or barbell. So, he tells me, “Hey, I don’t think I’ll be able to coach you anymore. I got this job. School starts in a week. I’m the head basketball coach at this high school. It’s a small Division 5 high school.” I didn’t know the divisions go to five. D1, D2, D3, all the way to D5.
Sam Parr: So, five is small.
Shaan Puri: Five is very small. And so, I was like, “Okay.” And I said, “So, you need an assistant?” I just said it jokingly. And he’s like, “Yeah, actually, I don’t have any staff. I’m a first-time coach, so I would love an assistant.” I told him, “Dude, I’d love to show up maybe once a week.” I just thought this would be something I would do just the way I do everything: half-ass, baby. I thought that I would make a fun commitment in the moment and then sort of back away over time. Things that I’ve done many times with many cool ideas in my life.
But this year, I’m trying to be a different guy. I said, “I’m going to play the piano.” And guess what? I sit there and I practice scales and I play the piano four times a week and I’m getting good at it. I’m doing the boring things and I’m sticking with it. I’m not giving up. I did the same thing with this. I was like, “I’m going to show up.”
Dude, when I tell you that this is the most fun thing I’ve ever done in my life, I am not lying. This is incredible. Now I’m spending 15 hours a week doing this. I’m basically going to practice four days a week. I commute, which you know me, I would never commute.
Sam Parr: I didn’t even know you had a driver’s license.
Shaan Puri: It’s a 30 to 40-minute drive and I’m basically coaching these kids from the beginning of the season tryouts. We just had our first game last night—our first official game. The video I showed you was our first preseason game. We got smashed by 30, and then four days later we had our first real game and we actually just won. We won by 30 last night and we did a Gatorade dump on the coach because it was his first win.
Here I am, this assistant basketball coach. In The Office, when Dwight’s like, “I’m assistant regional manager,” they’re like, “No, no, you’re assistant to the regional manager.” That’s what I am. I’m assistant to the head coach. And I’m so emotionally invested in the entire process. You would not believe me. I’m so invested in these kids. I’m so invested in getting them better day by day, system by system, habit by habit. I’m breaking down game film of other high school teams that we’re going to play. I’m sending clips. We have a kid who was struggling in school and got kicked off the team, and I’m helping him with his math homework trying to get him back on the team. I am so in, it’s not even funny.
Applying Business Principles to the Court [00:17:55]
Sam Parr: So, are you—I don’t know much about basketball—can you tell a player to make minor changes and it actually impacts the game, or is it just like if you’re 7 feet tall, you’re going to win?
Shaan Puri: Well, this is why I brought this up. You were talking about repetition, reminders, habits, systems. Sports are the great teacher of life. It’s this little petri dish, a simulation of life: you as an individual, you working with a team, you going up against competition, you facing defeat regularly, and you going to practice and then seeing if that translates into the real world.
There have been so many things where we would tell the kids something and then the first scrimmage would happen and we would just get our butt kicked. It’s like, “We told them this. That’s the exact thing we’ve been telling them.” Then we had to take a step back as coaches and realize that the job is to drill this 50 times. We did one of 50 and our perspective was wrong. We thought, “Oh, I’ll tell them once and then they’ll get it and then they’ll just do it live in action when the moment happens.” No, you won’t. You will default. Inertia, baby. You will default to the thing that you already do, the old you.
So now we took this mindset of, “All right, if this matters, there’s only two or three things that matter. You can’t give them 15 things to change at once.” Pick one to three things and then let’s be honest, we’re going to need to say this 50 times with the same level of enthusiasm and we’re not going to get discouraged if it doesn’t happen at number 42 because it takes 50. That’s the mindset as a coach.
It’s the same thing in your own life: you seek progress, not perfection. Reminders matter a hell of a lot more than some new strategy, some new play, some new thing that nobody’s ever done before. You want some new answer because you’re like, “Maybe I was just missing the thing.” Actually, no, it’s because I didn’t internalize the thing, the answer that was already on my plate. Reminders are extremely undervalued to the point where not only are reminders undervalued, they’re discriminated against. Reminders are the minority class of self-help. When you tell somebody something that they already know, what’s their reaction? It’s not, “Oh, that’s helpful.” It’s, “I know that,” right? It’s defensive.
Sam Parr: It’s like, “That clearly can’t be important because I already know it.” And it’s like, “No, no, it’s coming back up again because it’s that important, dude.” This is hilarious. This has happened so many times where you and I come with the same exact thing not even realizing it. If you’re an entrepreneur listening to this, you are going to be nodding your head. How many times have you come up with a brilliant idea and gone to your company in an all-hands and said, “This is what we are doing now and it is new and it is different”? So many times.
Shaan Puri: Yeah.
Sam Parr: I’ve come to the conclusion that a company can basically only do one new project per quarter, but definitely every six months. When I say project, I mean something relatively small. For us, we had never advertised before. Now we’re starting to advertise. Just do Meta. Just do Meta and get really good at that. You think, “Well, we should advertise on Meta, on LinkedIn, we should buy podcast ads, we should do this, we should do that.” No, no, no. Just that one thing and let’s really master it, and it’s going to take six months. It’s funny that you’re hearing that. I don’t know about basketball, but what are you telling them to do? Just that one thing or you said three things? What are those three things?
Shaan Puri: Okay, these are a little bit nerdy basketball things, but here’s one: something called playing off two feet. In normal basketball, when you’re just playing by yourself with no defense, you run in and you jump off one foot to shoot a layup. That’s great when there’s nobody there. When there’s defense, that’s a lot harder to do because not only are there people in the way, but when you jump off one foot, you commit to that path being the only thing you can do.
We have a lot of undersized guys. Our point guard is 5’7”. We don’t have 6’4” athletes that are just going to be dunking and finishing at the rim across the board. I think we have one guy who can dunk. So we had to teach them that there’s this other way of playing. It looks a little less sexy but is really effective: when you get into the paint and you’re amongst the giants and the crowd, you come to what’s called a jump stop. You land on both feet and now you have options. You can pass, you can pivot, you could shoot, you can step through. You’re more under control. It’s almost a slower way to play. It’s not what you do when there’s no defense there. When there’s no defense, you naturally do the other thing. But in the real game, there’s always defense there.
So, we’re going to do things that match our athleticism. This is a habit that you guys don’t have. We’re going to drill this every single day. You’re going to get reps at doing this and you are going to hear us say the same phrase: “Play off two, play off two, play off two.” You’re going to hear that till you hear it in your dreams. That’s one of the core principles. Change requires that level of repetition to do a new behavior.
Sam Parr: You’re going to say it until someone hears it in their dreams. That’s exactly what I mean about reminders. You have to—it’s so funny. Number two is what?
Shaan Puri: And by the way, the actual test is you say it till you hear them saying it to each other. Once they’re saying it to each other, your job as the coach is done. You have successfully incepted the idea into them. This happens also as a CEO. Whether it’s habits in how we do meetings or what matters, you know you’ve done it well when they’re saying it to each other.
I used to do this test with companies if I would invest in them or they were running into trouble. They’d be like, “Yeah, we’re trying to do X.” The little magic trick you can always pull is you take their top five executives or 15 people at their company and you say, “Hey everybody, I would like you to write down the top three priorities of the company. What actually matters right now?”
Then you look at the CEO and you see the CEO start to realize, “Oh shit, we are not on the same page. I have not done a good job.” They don’t even know what we’re supposed to be doing. I have not even successfully communicated the priorities because everybody will basically focus on their little problems in their part of the world or recency—the most recent fire that somebody put on my plate. I kind of forgot about all the other stuff we talked about at that all-hands or that offsite where we made our plans. This is the same thing whether it’s a sports team or a company.
Sam Parr: I heard this story about NASA in the 1960s before we went to the moon. They had this amazing leader and they’re telling the story about how they knew he was amazing. This one reporter sees a janitor mopping the floor at the NASA center and he goes, “Sir, what are you doing here?” and he goes, “I’m helping us get to the moon.” That was the best story ever because they all knew the mission. We all are playing a part in getting us to the moon.
Shaan Puri: Right. By the way, there’s such funny things that happen. One kid came to practice 10 minutes late and we’re like, “Dude, you can’t be late.” And he was like, “Sorry, I was at work.” And then we look at his hands. His hands were covered in grease. He’s a mechanic, I guess. Our point guard is a mechanic. And then he comes to practice.
Sam Parr: Wait, in high school he has jobs?
Shaan Puri: Yeah.
Sam Parr: Is his name Vinnie? Does he look like a man?
Shaan Puri: Vinnie’s amazing. Yeah. So, anyways, there’s all these little things where you’re like, “Oh, you forgot what it’s like to be a teenager, but secondly, you forgot how much of the basic habits have to be installed in somebody that will serve them not just here, but also whatever they do.” Most of our guys are not going to be in the NBA. None of them. So, how do I teach you something that’s useful today for you on this team so we win and have fun, but that’s a master skill that’s going to serve you in the future? I’m not doing my Gordon Bombay if I don’t actually do both for them.
Sam Parr: How much percentage of a difference will—let’s just say your team is a five out of 10, just average. Good coaching, what do you think that would change?
Shaan Puri: I think good coaching can take a five out of 10 team to an eight.
Sam Parr: Which is great.
Shaan Puri: Which is dramatic. Yeah.
Sam Parr: In my leadership position in my career, I think I’ve only been average and I’ve seen great. I particularly love reading military books about Navy SEALs and stuff like that. I think I get good examples of what a good leader looks like. I think the difference with all else being equal—I’ve read Jocko’s book, I forget what it’s called, something about leadership—he talks about the story during BUD/S where they have six different groups of eight guys carrying the rafts on their back and they have to race. They assign leaders and all they do is they change the leaders after each race. What they notice is that the leader determines whether the boat wins or not, not the other seven guys lifting the boat.
When I heard that example, I was like, “I’m not that leader at this moment and I have to become one because I think the difference is more than from a five to an eight. I think it’s potentially almost a 10.” Leadership is so important and it’s just so challenging because if you’re like you and I, you think, “Oh, I’m charismatic. I’m probably already good. I don’t need to learn. I can convince people to do stuff or I’m an idea guy, my ideas are good.” That’s just not the case. Just like basketball, it’s a skill. Learning how to get teams to operate effectively is a skill and I’m learning all of this in real time. It’s been very challenging.
The Power of Memorable Values and Chiasmus [00:27:45]
Shaan Puri: I’ll give you an example that I took from the pod. You were on here talking about company values. You’re like, “At Hampton, we’re trying to come up with our values.” You were saying, “Here’s what I think they’re going to be,” and I was pushing back. Right after I got off the pod, I grab my whistle and my clipboard and I drive over to basketball practice.
When I get there, I was like, “Hey, it’s the start of our season.” I’m telling Danny, our coach, “I think we should install the two or three things that we hang our hat on. What are we all about?” In sport, they call this your team’s identity. There were all these famous teams that had a real identity, like the Bad Boy Pistons. It was in the name. You already knew they were tough, they were mean, they had a nasty streak, and you could not push them around. They would push you around.
In the modern day, there’s Heat Culture. The Miami Heat are known to be this team where they hold a standard almost like the military. For example, they’re the only NBA team that does this where you get tested on weight and body fat every single week and you’re either fined or you don’t get to play if you are not keeping your standard. Doesn’t matter who you are. If you’re the star player, you can’t just coast by on your talent. They demand it from day one. By the time you show up to training camp, you need to already be in shape. You don’t come to training camp to get in shape. That’s just a known thing. You got to buy in or you’re going to be out.
So we go there and our first day, we do it all wrong. We’re like, “Okay, it’s all about playing hard. Effort. Effort is going to be one of our things.” We tell them three values. Effort’s the first one. You get to the end of practice. Coach had to leave, so he’s like, “Coach Shaan will finish up the practice.” I’m like, “Me? That’s me? Wait, I’m coach. I don’t know what to do here.”
As we’re finishing up, I just huddle them up and I’m like, “All right, how did we do today on those?” We started the practice saying, “This is our team identity, these three words.” I was like, “Who can give them to me?” They couldn’t even remember. They got one of the three. They got effort as the only one they remembered. They wanted to remember; they just couldn’t. This is to your point about repetition and reminders.
So then I was like, “How’d we do on effort?” Some guy was like a nod with a shrug, “Pretty good.” Another guy just shook his head no with no explanation. Another guy was like, “Yeah, it was good effort.” And then I remembered what I was telling Sam: Facebook’s value was “Move fast and break things.” It wasn’t just “speed,” which everybody could say, “Yeah, we’re moving fast.” It’s, “No, no, no. Are you moving so fast you’re breaking things? Because if you’re not, then you’re not even playing at our speed.”
Sam Parr: So what’s yours?
Shaan Puri: I realized if we just said the word is “effort,” then some effort’s fine, I guess. “Pretty good effort” is fine. But there’s one kid on the team who always beats everybody in the sprints. He’s not the most talented kid, but he plays the hardest and whenever we make them run, he always finishes first. His name’s Max. And I was like, “Oh, perfect.” I go, “All right, we have a new standard. It’s called Max Effort.”
If you’re not playing as hard as Max, it’s not effort. That’s not what we do. We play with Max Effort. That’s the only one of the three that stuck because it was like a campaign slogan. It is actually a bar you could pass or fail, whereas most of the other values were like, “Yeah, we want to be really competitive.” There’s no pass/fail; you can’t test it. Everybody knows: “Did I actually go at Max Effort today or not?” It’s a very simple pass/fail. Taking these things from business and trying to apply it here has been very interesting.
Sam Parr: I think that we too often think about marketing to customers when we should be marketing to ourselves and our teams and our families. This sounds eye-rolly, but my wife and I are like, “Should we have values for our family?” We’re at the age now where our children are just now old enough where we’re able to form traditions and we’re like, “What traditions should we have? What do we want to teach them?”
I joke with my daughter where we do daily affirmations. I say, “Repeat after me: I’m bold, I’m tough, and I won’t conform to anyone.” That’s her daily affirmations because clearly I care about that type of stuff. But we had to sit down and we’re like, “All right, what collectively should we care about so we can teach our kids? And also, what traditions can we have?” I have these things I call my four Fs: family, fitness, finance, fun. That’s the categories that I value or I weigh myself on. I need to have that for my family and I need to have that for other parts of myself.
If I’m being a weak leader, I need to come up with a cool phrase that I can remind myself of in times when I want to revert back to the old me in order to create change. This whole episode is about change. These cute phrases—I just dismissed them by calling them cute phrases, trying to make myself feel better—but they work. They work so much. At Hampton, we have this thing called the three Cs: commitment, candor, and confidentiality. We have to repeat it roughly six times to our customers for them to understand and remember the three Cs. It all has to be in a memorable format.
Shaan Puri: I was studying this last night. How do you actually do it? You said they need to be memorable. All right, Sam, tell me how you make them memorable. There’s a couple of frameworks, but I’m not an expert on that. We actually care about this and we should be good at this. We’re actually pretty good at writing and pretty good at talking. It’s what we do for a living. Even we aren’t that far ahead. So, who is great at this? What group of people is amazing at this?
Sam Parr: I don’t know. Marketers.
Shaan Puri: Marketers. People who come up with specifically slogans.
Sam Parr: Yeah.
Shaan Puri: Another one: where is it life or death? Where do you have to be great?
Sam Parr: The military or police.
Shaan Puri: Military and politics. You got to get elected. “Make America Great Again.” That’s a thing that he repeated a thousand times, but it was enough to stick. It was polarizing, it was interesting, it was repeatable, it was something you could get behind.
I was studying this last night and there’s this phrase called a chiasmus. Sam, if I said the following phrase: “Ask not what your country can do for you,” what would you say next?
Sam Parr: “Ask what you could do for your country.”
Shaan Puri: Exactly. And that’s a chiasmus. It’s basically a sentence structure that is an earworm. When was that phrase said? It was said 50 years ago or something like that.
Sam Parr: JFK said it in 1961, I think.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, exactly. This is more than 50 years ago. And yet, off the tip of our tongue, you and I can say this phrase that was said 20 years before we were alive. That’s how powerful that phrase is. What is that structure? It’s basically an ABBA structure. The first part is about asking: “Ask not what your,” and then it’s “country can do for you.” That’s the B. Then you switch the order and basically “ask what you can do for your country.” You switch the sentence structure.
There are these two overall structures: ABBA and ABAB. What you start to do is you find two phrases that individually are valid. I don’t know if you’ve seen that podcast clip that goes viral where people are like, “Oh my god, I hate podcasts,” where there’s that girl trying to be motivational and she says, “Don’t love your job. Job your love.”
Sam Parr: Oh, yeah. The blonde-haired lady.
Shaan Puri: Yeah. And everyone’s just like, “Ah,” it’s the ultimate groan. The reason why that chiasmus doesn’t work is because “job your love” doesn’t make any sense. You have to find two individual statements that make sense, like “asking what your country can do for you” and “what you could do for your country.” Both are individually valid. Then you structure it this way and it becomes incredibly memorable. If you go look at that JFK speech, there’s like three of them that he does with that same structure in that one speech.
Sam Parr: Yeah. Here’s another one: “Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.”
Shaan Puri: Exactly. Chiasmus. These sound beautiful. They’re very satisfying to the mind. When you understand how the mind works, you see that the mind loves order. It loves structure. Why is a face a beautiful face? Symmetry. The more perfect the symmetry of the face, the more beautiful the face to people.
Another example of this: the game Tetris. Why is the game Tetris so addictive? Why are games like Candy Crush and Tetris so addictive? Because they tap into this part of your brain that’s almost a cleaning instinct. There’s a mess and then you put one block in the right place and it evaporates the mess. It creates order out of disorder. The brain loves that. It just wants to do it again and again. This is the basis of the game design of Candy Crush and Tetris. The brain likes what it likes. Deciding to change your brain, which is multi-thousand years of evolution, is very hard. But just changing the structure of how you speak so that you tap into what the brain likes and give it what it wants so that it does become memorable and sticky is obviously the much better way to go.
Radical Generosity and the “Greedy Voice” [00:37:15]
Sam Parr: This is pretty profound. This is very fascinating. What did you read to learn this? You said last night you were curious about this.
Shaan Puri: Well, I started asking different questions. I think I even said it earlier: whose life depends on this? Anytime I want to get good at something, I try to figure out who this is a “must-have” for. If you want to lose weight, you go look at the bodybuilders training for a competition. If you want to know the logical extremes of how you get the maximum muscle and the lowest body fat, go watch what they do.
Sam Parr: Yeah. Whose next meal is dependent on getting this right?
Shaan Puri: Exactly. For example, right now I’m writing a book. I told Diego yesterday, who’s helping me, “We’re doing this process where I write in the morning and then I do a bit of a show-and-tell with them and I show them what I’m doing and then I get feedback. But the problem with our feedback is I want you to like it. I want to show it to you, but I also want your honest feedback because I want to make this better. You’re trying to be polite and not hurt my feelings because you see that I tried very hard this morning, but you’re also trying to help me make it better. Those two things are at odds with each other.”
I was like, “We don’t even know how to give feedback in this way that’s like, ‘Look, I need to be able to share so that I can get this better, but I don’t need my emotions to swing based on yay, they liked it, I did a good job, or oh, they didn’t like it, I did a bad job.’ That’s so lame and a waste of energy.” On your end, I don’t need you having one part of your head saying, “How do I say this the right way because I want to be nice and supportive?” versus “How can I tell you what I’m feeling?”
So I was like, “This art of giving feedback on art, on something that’s subjective—I don’t know how to do this and you don’t know how to do this. Who definitely has already solved this problem because it’s a must-have for them?” I was like, “Oh, let’s text a couple of people who are comedians.” Comedians have to figure out if this is funny or not. Once I’ve written the joke and looked at it 20 times, it’s not funny to me anymore. I can’t even tell. I’m too lost in the sauce. How do they do it? How do musicians do this? How do they play a song and know if it’s a good song? I can’t tell anymore if this is any good. How do they get feedback? So now we’re going to go find the people to learn from for whom this is a must-have.
Sam Parr: That’s actually—first of all, there’s two or three takeaways. The question of “whose life depends on this” is a great question. I’m very curious actually. I want to know the answer because I create a little bit for a living. I want to know how you know if something’s hitting. If I had a guess for a comedian, they would probably just say, “I perform it in small audiences and I suffer the pain of bombing.” That might be it for them. “Oh, cool. So, what’s my version of an open mic with 20 people and testing if it bombs? Can I do that in my world? Is there a way I could set that up?”
Pixar, I think, wrote this book, Creativity, Inc., which is very good. They talk about the brain trust that they have, how they show raw, not even the movie but a single scene, and how they created a dynamic of trust. There’s actually a great story of when Disney bought Pixar. Pixar had been making hit after hit and Disney animation had been just bombing for years. So they put the Pixar guys in charge and they were like, “Great, we’ll merge these two companies and then we’ll just start making hits like Pixar.” Didn’t they just want to fire all the Disney people, though?
Shaan Puri: No, no, no. I think what the main guy, Ed Catmull, did was he realized, “Oh, what a perfect AB test. What a perfect randomized control test here.” They didn’t blend the teams together. They didn’t move them together. They kept the teams separate. Then what he did was he basically took the Pixar method and he went and he taught it to the Disney folks. He’s basically like, “If we just took our process but not our people, could we make those same people who have been failing succeed?”
To your question earlier of how big of a lever leadership and coaching is—can it take a five and turn it into a 10? They actually started creating hits once he taught them the process. For them, I think trust was the underlying thing. If you don’t have trust, you’re not going to share your work at the right times. You’re not going to give real candid feedback. You’re not going to receive candid feedback in the right way because you distrust what’s going on. You think your project’s going to get killed if it’s bad or you think this guy’s going to come steal your thunder if you let him collaborate on it. You have all these fears that are basically a lack of trust. Once they installed their trust process, Disney animation started making hits too.
Sam Parr: I think one of the other points from that book was he was like, “We have hitmakers. We got these two or three people who are just typically more right more often than other people. We listen to them.” He did a pretty funny thing about that.
We should—okay, so for MFM we’ve done a handful of challenges like the MFM fitness thing. We should do a give-back thing. Tell me about—I haven’t really given my time to others, which I don’t know if you consider coaching. Is it like you rescued a dog, but you say the dog rescued you? Is it that type of thing?
Shaan Puri: To be perfectly clear, my choice was selfish. I wanted to do it. I thought it would be fun and it is very fun and I do want to do it. So it’s not like this burden I’m carrying. At the same time, I had recently, in the last two years, given some money to charity and felt nothing. Maybe I did some good in the world. It’s hard to know. You give the money and it just goes in a black box mostly and then, hopefully, someone’s life got changed from that in some positive direction. But I don’t know and I didn’t feel anything. So, I didn’t want to triple down on that.
My trainer has this great thing he says. He always talks about “our economy.” I was like, “Why do you talk so much about the economy? Like Jim Cramer. What are you talking about interest rates and the economy?” And he’s like, “No, us. Me and you and my other clients.” Because he trains my mom and then my mom referred another person. He’s like, “It’s all like a web.” He was like, “I’m just talking about our local economy. I want that local economy to thrive. I don’t care what’s going on in the macro; I want the local to thrive. That’s what I can affect. If that’s thriving, that actually improves the lives of these people that I can see, feel, touch. If everybody was just doing that in their local little bubble, then the big picture would take care of itself.”
I was like, “Okay, fair enough.” And he even went further with this sort of cute thing. I was like, “So if the normal economy measures GDP, Gross Domestic Product, how do you know if your economy is doing well?” He’s like, “Baby, smiles per hour. I just want everybody to be smiling. If I made you laugh and then you carried that vibe into the house with your wife and with your kids and then they carried that into school, that’s how it works. If you’re making people smile by whether it’s your mood, it’s doing something for them, it’s thinking of them, it’s having an experience together, that has this carry-on effect. They take that smile into the next interaction. That’s how it spreads.”
So I started actually buying into this. It is about your local economy. It is about smiles per hour. So I was like, “What do I do that is a kind of give-back but not the way I did it last year where I put money in some black box into some multinational nonprofit and then it just disappeared and I don’t know what happened?” I didn’t feel anything. The idea of going to a local high school, taking an unpaid job and just going and contributing my time, my talent, my effort, and affecting a group of 12 guys—that sounds small, but it feels very big. Solving world hunger sounded very big but felt very small. There’s no feeling. So I don’t know if this is the right direction or wrong, but that’s the one I’ve gone.
Sam Parr: I’m not charitable. I want to be, but I don’t know how to be. I don’t want to just write a check to someone and not feel anything. I want to be selfish. I want to get value out of this, just like a feeling. I talked to Mike Beckham—he started Simple Modern.
Shaan Puri: Yeah. The hugely successful water bottle company.
Sam Parr: He told me all the numbers and he told me I could share it. He’s worth $200 million because the company does something like $200 million a year in revenue and does $50 million a year in profit. His net worth, because he owns half of it and then with the multiple, he goes, “I’m probably worth $200 million.” He said, “I have about three or four million to my name, but I pull $5 million out of the business every year and I take $1 million of it and I give away four.”
If you guys Google Mike Beckham and Sam Parr, you’ll see a post I wrote about it. I think there’s a chance I got the numbers slightly wrong, but basically he said, “I take something like $5 million and I give the rest away. My family spends $25,000 a month, so we take enough for us to spend minus taxes and I give $4 million or four and a half million dollars away.” I was like, “That’s insane, man. Why do you do that?” He’s like, “Well, it’s not generous to do this when I die because that’s not hard for me. It should be some type of challenge. This should feel like I should feel a little bit of pain.”
But then he said something really great. He said, “The more that I give, the less loud the greedy voice in my head becomes.” He’s like, “I feel this greediness, this voice in my head that says make more money, buy more stuff, do this, but the more that I give, that becomes a whisper because I feel what it’s like to give away this money and it feels significantly better than acquiring a bigger home or another car.” He was like, “I drive a $30,000 CRV because I know that if I bought a $90,000 car, that’s $60,000 less that I can give to people and it makes me feel good to do that.”
His whole point of telling me this was he wanted to get me to give now versus when you’re old or dead. I thought that was very inspirational. It wasn’t that inspirational because I haven’t done it yet, but more admirable.
Shaan Puri: Yeah.
Sam Parr: It inspired me like a Rocky movie—you know, “I should get into boxing one day.” But I did think it was really awesome.
Food Noise, Money Noise, and the Evolution of Work [00:47:10]
Shaan Puri: You know, I’ve read this a few times on Twitter where somebody will say, “Oh, I started either microdosing or I started taking Ozempic or whatever.”
Sam Parr: I’ve done all those things. You can just ask me.
Shaan Puri: Okay. So, maybe you had this too, but they talk about “food noise,” which was not a phrase I’d ever heard before. They basically said the biggest change is not the weight loss; it’s that I don’t have food noise—this chatter in my brain about the next meal or about wanting this.
Sam Parr: Let me give you an example. I have an addictive personality and I had addiction stuff before. Tell me if you’ve ever experienced this: you get a piece of dessert, like a cake. You eat half of it, you put the rest in the refrigerator, you go lay in bed. You lay in bed and you’re like, “But it’s still there. And it’s uneaten. I think the fork that I used might still be in the sink. I could probably just use that maybe. Well, I’ll just go up and get a little bit of a bite.”
I will do this seven times until it’s gone. And then I say to myself, “Shit, well, I already did this. I might as well eat this entire sleeve of Oreo cookies.” Before you notice, you’ve done 1,000 or 1,500 calories of binge eating, but it’s all based on one urge. That is the food voice. When you take GLP-1s, not only does that voice get dimmed, other addictions get dimmed. I noticed I bit my nails less. I noticed I wasn’t craving—it used to be where I would smell beer if I walked by a brewery and I’d be like, “Let’s go see what’s up.” Not anymore.
Shaan Puri: What is up? When you go see what’s up in that situation?
Sam Parr: The secret is you should not go see what’s up, but you smell the hops and you’re like, “Ooh, that’s nice.” But yeah, it definitely turns it down.
Shaan Puri: So I wanted to ask you about this on the money—the loudness of the money voice, of the “more” voice in your head. A few podcasts ago, we did an episode where we talked about what’s hard for us in life, what’s some of the wisdom that helps, and just trying to figure stuff out out loud in front of a bunch of strangers, which is a little bit uncomfortable.
In that, I mentioned this thing that had come up. I had a lot of friends who basically have all this success and then they go start another company and it’s like then they stress out, lose some hair, gain some weight, and try to build another company. You said the best phrase ever, too: “You’ve already earned the last dollar you will ever spend. So why are you trading good hours for bad dollars now?”
That’s something that I had thought of for myself and when I saw others, but I’m not immune to it either. I think I have it to a lesser degree in the same way that food chatter you were talking about—that guy’s got a megaphone in my head, whereas I think for other people it’s a little bit more like a whisper.
I want to ask you: you are also in that boat where I believe you have earned the last dollar you’ll ever spend. You’re a pretty frugal guy in general; you’re not Mike Tyson buying tigers. You had a great exit with The Hustle, and you have earned the last dollar you’ll ever spend, but here you are starting more companies, making investments, and every day you wake up and you take your life energy and you go to an office with other people. You could always talk about how you like working and the mission. I’m not saying it’s bad. I guess what I mean is: how do you think about money and wanting more? Are you honest with yourself that you do want more? And then how do you square that circle of “but I don’t actually need more because I have already earned the last dollar I’ll ever spend”? What’s that chatter in your head? How loud is it and what does it say?
Sam Parr: I think nothing is all or nothing; there’s a priority list. The number one priority for me is I just don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to spend time, and when I spend time sitting around, I feel like I’m missing out or I feel like I’m not contributing and that feels bad. Yet when I spend all the time working, some days I have bad days and I’m like, “What am I doing? I should be doing this other thing.”
That exists, but then the one right below that is: I’m not good enough and my self-worth is directly correlated to the success of the thing that I’m working on.
Shaan Puri: My self-worth is my net worth, basically.
Sam Parr: Right. Yeah. You could say that. And so that’s probably through years of trauma and believing something, but it’s hard to break. And then the last thing is: more money does feel good. Yeah, it definitely feels good. What I have to do—I do math all the time where I’m like, “I don’t need more. Everything that I want, I have.” But I can’t break that. I guess if you wanted to be a therapist or a psychologist, you would say the reason you don’t change is because you don’t want to. You like how it feels.
Shaan Puri: Do you like how it feels?
Sam Parr: I love when things go well at my company; I do feel on top of the world. The problem with building companies is you typically only feel like that 10% of the time. Things are bad most of the time.
Shaan Puri: It’s not the most effective way to get that feeling.
Sam Parr: Yeah. So I say I don’t gamble, I don’t do drugs and alcohol, and instead, this is a dopamine slot machine.
Shaan Puri: Yeah.
Sam Parr: Okay. So, it’s like: do you like being addicted to gambling? You say no, but when you win it’s so amazing that it makes you keep going.
Shaan Puri: But at least it’s not heroin is what you kind of just said.
Sam Parr: Yeah. And then I also justify it by saying—and this is a bad justification—I’ll go ahead and do the work for you. You say to yourself, “Well, I don’t want my kids to just see me sitting around. I want them to see me working really hard and I want to set a good example.” But then, they probably would rather be with you.
Shaan Puri: Yeah. They want to see me.
Sam Parr: Yeah. And I say I’m doing this for them. And it’s like, what is this? What is this for them? How does that make sense? They don’t need anything physical. What do they need that I can’t give them already?
Shaan Puri: Right. Is 50-hour weeks the most effective way to just give them the general principle that you should work hard at things? That might not be the most efficient route to that answer.
Okay. So, I wrote down three things. I wrote down “imagination,” which I think is the first one you said, which is “I don’t know what else to do. I want to do something and I don’t want to do nothing, therefore I do this thing.” I think about that a lot. Suli Ali came on the podcast a while back and he said something.
Sam Parr: Suli being your good buddy who is presumably worth hundreds of millions of dollars and is one of the more successful entrepreneurs we know.
Shaan Puri: Correct. He’s my great friend, but he’s also the guy who I respect and trust the most when it comes to entrepreneurship and business strategy. I’ve met a lot of people wealthier than him, but he consistently is the highest signal, best judgment person. He’s just such a winner.
He came on the pod and he goes, “I used to think I was limited by some lack of resource. Maybe I didn’t have a skill I needed. I needed to learn how to code. Maybe I didn’t have enough money. Maybe I didn’t have enough time. I just assumed I lacked some resource.” And he goes, “Now I realize that all I ever lacked was basically imagination.” He’s like, “The thing I lacked the most was even figuring out what to want, what the possibilities were of what I could do, and how I might be able to go do those things.”
That sounds kind of hand-wavy, but the more smart people I meet, it’s almost like the bigger that side of your brain gets where it’s like, “I am analytical. I am good at making plans and then executing them and operating.” The better you are at that, the less—I’ve noticed they’re disproportionately bad at imagination. For example, “I kind of don’t know what else to do with my hands.” That’s kind of what you said. There’s a lot of things. There’s actually a ton of things.
The stupid example I gave earlier—and this wouldn’t be the right thing for you, but it was the right thing for me—which is: well, what if instead of going and chasing down the next investment or starting another company, what if you took four months, one season, and you just coached a high school basketball team? That was actually the right answer for me, which is totally out of left field. Doesn’t even make sense. It wouldn’t be the right answer for other people, but it’s the thing that totally fills my cup in a way that another business that was successful would never do.
Sam Parr: But I think that imagination game is quite challenging. For example, if you said you have a billion dollars today, what do you want to do? I’m like, “I don’t have an answer.” We might get flamed through the comments here. All we’re talking about is second-mountain problems.
I was thinking about why I want all these employees. We’re moving to a new office down the street and we just signed this lease. It’s a million-dollar lease over three years. We’re building out this office. It’s a lot of money. I’ve never done this before. And I was like, “Why am I doing this?” I think maybe I’m lying to myself again. I was like, “I care about capabilities.” What I hate is that you have an idea—how often do you have an idea for a small project and you’re like, “Uh, now I got to go get the people and then I got to train the people and I don’t think they’re going to be any good”? All the time.
I was listening to Ari Emanuel talk and he was like, “We have this thing and this thing and this thing.” I was like, “How cool is it that your company and you have all these capabilities? You have an idea. Wouldn’t it be cool if this existed in the world?” And it’s not just a business idea for him. I think he cares about the show. It’s like, “Wouldn’t it feel awesome if at the UFC we did blank, or we bought all these tennis tournaments and we offered food at a discount?” I love the idea of having lots and lots of capabilities and I think that’s why business building is fun.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, I have that right now actually. I forgot to say this, but one of the things I’ve been talking about for a while on here but have not executed—the walk hasn’t matched the talk—is I had this realization that video is the language of the internet. If the internet was a country, it would be the most important country in the world. It’d be more powerful of a country than America. It’s a place where you live and you spend time.
Then you say, “All right, well, do you speak the native tongue?” Because if you don’t—if you come to America but you don’t speak English—you’re putting yourself at a pretty massive disadvantage. I believe that video is the language of the internet. It’s how people communicate online, whether it’s long-form like this on YouTube or it’s short-form, which is growing more and more popular across YouTube Shorts, Reels, TikToks, etc. It is the way people communicate information. If you don’t have the capability to communicate and tell your story or connect with others that way, you’re just not speaking the important language of the important country.
In fact, it doesn’t really matter where you were born or what you were doing or how hard you worked. Pretty much if you were born anywhere in the world, the best decision you could make for your life quality and upward mobility was to move to America and learn English. Even if that meant starting at the bottom, even if that meant being uncomfortable. In the long term, that was the best thing you could do. There was no amount of hard work you could do in Somalia that was going to make up for that one decision.
Sam Parr: Dude, is this the most charismatic and epic way just to say you’re going to start posting on Instagram?
Shaan Puri: Yeah. I’m going to start posting on Instagram.
Sam Parr: Can I not just sell your ass on the fact that I’m posting on Instagram? Dude, imagine your wife at the dinner table telling this story: “Listen, years ago our grandparents lived in India. The best thing they could have done is learn English. Now here we are today, the year 2025. Shaan, are you going to start posting on Instagram?”
Shaan Puri: Yeah, exactly. In fact, I’m going to start specifically posting a story series about the coaching thing I’m doing. Basically, every week I’m just going to post a thing like the one I sent you.
Sam Parr: Dude, that was a good video. Do you get inspired by Marshall?
Shaan Puri: No, not Marshall. There’s actually these young guys who are doing this. There’s this format where—the Airbnb guy and the bar guy. His name I think is Rajan. They’re building a luxury Airbnb in Virginia. There’s a guy who’s bought an old bowling alley and he’s rehabbing it. It’s basically like, “Yo, I’m doing a project for shits and giggles and I want to make it happen and I’m kind of new to this. I don’t have it all figured out, but I’m going to share as I go.” I just like the format and I think it’s fun and I want to do it specifically on something that’s not business.
It’s very hard for me to get motivated to be like, “And now I’m going to give you business guru content.” Even if I like business, it’s just very hard for me to sit in front of the camera and do talking-head content about business or about myself or about some new SaaS company. But I was like, “This one I would want to follow.” So I’m going to make this content. I’m going to make a coach account. It’s going to be like Coach Shaan or Coach P or something. I’ll put the link in the Instagram or in the comments of this. I want people to follow it because I’m going to post videos on here and I think they’ll be great.
Sam Parr: That’s so funny. I’ve been doing the Instagram thing. It’s pretty fun because you start trying to—it’s basically because we’re the old guys now. It’s sort of like when people wanted to start newsletters and it was like, “Dude, you’re writing way too tight. You got to be a little loosey-goosey.” I’ve done the same thing on Instagram where I start talking to the camera and I get official. You’re going to have fun. It’s very intimidating.
Shaan Puri: Pop those two buttons down.
Sam Parr: Dude, it’s so intimidating. If you go to my thing, I do all of our videos now where I’m holding a spatula as a microphone because we had to have fun.
Shaan Puri: Million-dollar Manhattan office. “Hey fellow kids.”
Sam Parr: Yeah, exactly. It’s so funny that you say that. Your content is pretty good, though. The problem with all social media, like being like, “I’m going to try to post good short-form content,” is it’s basically saying, “I’m going to go to the bar and not get drunk,” because it’s so easy for your mind to get wrapped up in the vortex of, “How many likes did that get? How many views did that get? Is that good? Is that bad?” I don’t even know physically if even knowing that, it’s physically possible to go in and not want that. I could easily see myself aborting that process six months from now. Even though in this case it’s like I’m doing it for just this basketball season, which is just three months and it’s only content about this random side quest that I’m on. It’s not like, “Here’s my personal IG. I’m going to create short-form content every day.”
Sam Parr: But let me tell you something I’ve been telling myself and it’s been helping so much. One, the algorithm is so good right now on Meta that the right people see the right stuff. I’m pretty sure that the camera knows what I’m wearing and what my background looks like, what I look like. I posted a skateboarding video. It knows that I’m doing a skateboarding thing. It shows it to the right people somehow.
The second thing is that I have noticed—I’ve only been doing this for a handful of weeks now and I’m going to be doing a lot more—but people text me when something hits. That is so much more cool than the number of likes or the comments on the thing. Just those texts. And the cool thing is once you have a business—which in this case, you’re actually probably not going to be doing it for a business—you don’t need that many people to watch it. I’m seeing it’s changing our—we’re getting customers. I’ve made a lot of money off of it already in a very short amount of time with very few views. I think my most popular thing is getting 70,000 or 80,000 views. It’s not a lot for Instagram, but the right people are shown the right stuff and you don’t need that much to make it cool. There is something weird about Instagram right now and I know that any 21-year-old listening to this is like, “Yeah, duh.” But if you are above 30 and you grew up with this stuff—I’ve never posted on Instagram up until recently. The algorithm is way different than what I used to think it was.
Shaan Puri: That’s cool. Makes a ton of sense. I think you’re doing a good job. I think the spatula trick is a good trick. I like that. Everybody’s got to have a shtick. That’s yours. You’re the spatula guy.
Sam Parr: Great. That’s where we thought we’d land in life.
Shaan Puri: I mean, write that in my diary. Have you ever had the thought: what did your grandfather do? Dude, when I think about my grandfather, I think if I was him right now, I’d have 18 confirmed kills under my belt in World War II in an ammunition factory in India.
Sam Parr: Yeah.
Shaan Puri: Okay. So, that was my grandfather. His idea of what work is. And you’re talking to a microphone with a sheep on it that says, “Sorry I’m late.”
Sam Parr: Yeah. My shirt literally says, “Sorry, I’m late. I was dillydallying.” That’s what I wore to work today.
Shaan Puri: Dude, your grandpa had lost three fingers before the age of 28.
Sam Parr: I was like, “Sara, is this shirt too wrinkly right before the butt?” And she’s like, “I think it fits what it says.” It’s like, “Oh yeah, that’s true.” Just a mind-bending thing, right?
Shaan Puri: My grandpa was a sheriff, he was a cop. A job that you can buy an action figure for. Right? Like soldiers, policemen, the factory worker, construction—doing a real thing that the world critically needs that’s hard and completely unglamorous. And then I think about his son, my dad. And it’s like he sat in a cubicle, in an office. Not a factory. It’s like, “Well, what does he do?” It’s like, “Well, he types on this computer mostly and he wears a suit for some reason and he will sometimes fly on an airplane to go meet with somebody, shake their hand, talk to them for a while, come back home.” So he does these business meetings.
That’s what I grew up with. To my grandfather, what my dad did kind of looked and seemed like a little bit of a joke. And now my dad looks at me and he’s like, “You’re wearing a shirt with a sheep on it. It says ‘dillydallying.’ You’re talking to your friend on this tiny screen. You’re podcasting to who? What? What is a podcast? Do you make money?” I’ll still go to family gatherings and they’ll be like, “So, how do you earn money, though?” I’m like, “Uh, I don’t know. How do I explain this? Ads?” And they’re like, “But where and how?” I’m like, “Have I told you about HubSpot?” And so, my uncle has a CRM. I don’t know why.
But to them, what we do—which is like, “Yeah, you’re talking with a spatula to a cell phone to strangers so that .1% of them will go spend 10 grand joining your membership community”—it’s like, “What is this?” And then you think about what your kids are going to do. It’s going to be completely unrecognizable. Work is going to be unrecognizable from one generation to the next. And I feel like such a wuss doing it.
Sam Parr: Our kids are just going to be live streamers, right? Like that girl who was like, as comments were coming in, she’d be like, “Woohoo, cowboy!” every time somebody got one of those gifts. That’s what our kids are going to do. Something that seems even worse. Or it’s going to be like, “Yeah, I’m an AI therapist.” It’s like, “What do you mean?” It’s like, “Well, I talk to AIs to make them feel better.” It’s like, “What is that? Is that a job?”
I think about your mom all the time.
Shaan Puri: Well, inappropriate.
Sam Parr: Well, it could go either way. I think about your mom coming to America all the time because the way you told the story was really good. I saw myself in her situation of not having a lot, being on a plane for the first time, coming to America where we didn’t speak anything. You just dropped off in Berkeley, I think it was. And you’re like, “What do I do?” I felt a little—not even close, but sort of like that when I moved to San Francisco, but on a much smaller scale. I think about her all the time and I think about immigrants who come here with nothing and I’m complaining about this. I’m complaining that my apartment that’s already huge isn’t big enough and I want more and I’m sad about it and I’m going to pay a therapist money where they could hear me complain about this. The idea of a therapist is someone you pay money to complain to. It’s so funny. I just think about that. I’m like, “How ridiculous is this?”
Shaan Puri: Yeah.
Sam Parr: Sacagawea carried her three-month-old kid across America for two years. For two years, she carried that kid in a piece of leather.
Shaan Puri: Yeah. But the car at the place only had forward-facing car seats.
Sam Parr: And I need four strollers. She carried him in a leather sack without diapers. I think about that all the time. I think about this stuff on a regular basis. How soft are we?
Shaan Puri: It’s so funny because you know that famous Ernest Shackleton—the journey will be hard, people will die—that job posting. What’s that famous thing?
Sam Parr: Ernest Shackleton, honestly the greatest book I’ve ever read.
Shaan Puri: I think I said his first name like he’s Ernie from Sesame Street and then I called him Shackleford. What’s his name?
Sam Parr: Shackleton is his name. He’s just the hardest dude of all time. The book Endurance probably might be in the top three books I’ve read of all time. The story is basically in the early 1900s when he was in a ship without power, sails around to the bottom of Antarctica. The ship gets so deep into the cold that the water, the ocean, freezes around it and he walks for three months to get to the tip of Brazil. No one died.
Shaan Puri: So here’s the job ad: “Men wanted for hazardous journey, small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful, honor and recognition in event of success. Ernest Shackleton, 4 Burlington Street.” That’s the job posting, dude.
Sam Parr: Such a good book.
Shaan Puri: Our job: “Wanted: cardboard box cutter. Lots of Amazon packages. It’s getting a little bit unwieldy in the laundry room. Take off your shoes when you enter. Please bring own box cutter. Don’t have tools.”
Sam Parr: Softer than cream cheese, man. I’m so soft. I pride myself in trying to be hard and there is no pride there. Why do I smell like chives? Oh, softer than cream cheese. Maybe that’s why this is ridiculous.
Shaan Puri: All right, so we started off talking about “Dear Diary.”
Sam Parr: The softest entrance, softest exit you’ll find in podcasting history.
Shaan Puri: That’s the episode. That’s the pod.