Sam and Shaan pay tribute to Charlie Munger, who died at 99, by unpacking seven of his biggest ideas rather than recycling Wikipedia quotes. Each principle — deserving what you want, avoiding stupidity, inversion, the prescription for misery, and more — is grounded with personal stories from their own business lives. The episode closes with a longevity detour and reflections on Berkshire’s future without Munger.
Speakers: Shaan Puri (co-host), Sam Parr (co-host)
Introduction: Why This Episode Is Different [00:00:00]
Shaan: Today there’s going to be literally a thousand threads that are “Charlie Munger lived till 99, here’s 99 lessons I learned,” and they’re going to regurgitate the stupid quotes on Wikipedia. But this is My First Million — we do things differently around here. We’re not just going to give you the regurgitated quotes. I got to give you that little special je ne sais quoi that you could dip that sandwich in.
All right. Charlie Munger has died at age 99, and all around the world people are remembering Charlie — this guy who was Warren Buffett’s business partner, a billionaire, but so much more than that. He was in the military. He dropped out of school, went to the military, then somehow talked his way into Harvard Law even though he didn’t even have an undergraduate degree. He started a law firm that people don’t even talk about that does hundreds of millions in revenue. He started investing with Warren Buffett and has basically outperformed the stock market over a 50-year period by a huge degree.
Bill Gates called Charlie maybe the broadest thinker he knows. He said Charlie has the best 30-second brain of anybody he’s ever met. And we wanted to dissect that brain — what’s inside it, what made Charlie so prolific, why did Warren Buffett say that Berkshire is shaped in the mold of Charlie Munger and that he is one of the smartest and wisest men he’s ever met.
We pulled out seven of the big ideas. Charlie said a lot of things over the years, but we identified what we think are the seven big bits of wisdom he shared. And what we wanted to do — instead of making a listicle — was take the seven that we thought were really impactful and specifically tell a story of how we learned that lesson in our own business life or in our life.
I told Sam: “Dude, this notes document that we have for this episode is dripping with wisdom.” You’re going to feel it at the end of this podcast — you’re going to need a handkerchief. This episode is about to be dripping with wisdom. I hope you enjoy it. So let’s jump in.
Wisdom #1: Deserve What You Want [00:03:30]
Shaan: What I think would be fun is we just trade our favorites. This guy has hundreds of little Charlie-isms — little quips or quotes about the way the world works, the way minds work, the way the markets work. Let’s just pull out our favorites, trade them back and forth, and talk about them or share a way that we’ve either heard him discuss it or how it’s played a role in our life. You go first.
Sam: Okay. I’ll start with a very easy one. One of his big ideas is: to get what you want, you need to deserve what you want. He says the easiest way to get everything that you want is to deserve it. It’s so simple that it’s almost obnoxiously simple as advice. Whether it’s the partner you want — you should be deserving of that level of partner, make yourself worthy — or same thing with investments. He actually calls out a few things that money can’t buy: trust from other people, success, admiration. Those are things you cannot buy — you can only earn. So if you want somebody’s admiration, deserve it. If you want somebody’s trust, deserve it. If you want success, deserve it.
I’ll share a very simple, practical anecdote about this, because his big ideas are amazing but they just float in the clouds unless you bring them to earth with a real tactical example. When we sold Milk Road, one of the reasons we sold to the guys we did was that I really respected them. It was not the highest offer, but these were the highest-quality people we could sell to. We had a hunch that selling to the highest-quality people would result in the best long-term outcome — even if we lost a dollar today, just being in business with these guys might create three more dollars in the future.
Shaan: And here’s the story that came out of due diligence that was like a nugget of gold. These guys we were selling to had built SEO-based businesses — one had sold his for about 90 to 100 million, the other for over 200 million. I know a lot about marketing and growth, but I know zero about SEO. I’m an absolute beginner. I never touch SEO, I don’t build SEO-based businesses. So one of the ways I priced in the deal was: I’m going to learn SEO from these guys who were masters at it.
So once we got past the negotiating stage, I sat them down and said, “You’re going to teach me about SEO now.” They started to tell me some things, but I was like, “Okay, that’s the general stuff — I’ve heard that before. What’s the real black-belt stuff that I don’t know about that helped one of you become the number-one search result for ‘buy gold online’? That business sold for a few hundred million, bootstrapped, never raised any money. How’d you do it? Was it some hack?”
And he said, “You know, we did all the normal things. I tried some hacker techniques — they didn’t really work.” Then he goes: one day he Googled “how to buy gold online” and they were the fifth result at the time. He goes, “So what I did was — I thought about what Google really wants. Google wants to give you the best search result. If somebody searches for ‘how to buy gold online,’ they want you to get to a page that answers those questions and not have you search again.” So he printed out all five results — them being number five and numbers one through four — and he sat down for an hour and just read them. And he had an honest conversation with himself: “Why would I click on my page? What is objectively better about my page than these other pages?”
And I was like, “Wait — so you didn’t do some black-hat SEO trick?”
He said, “No. We didn’t deserve the click. We weren’t the better page.” So all he did for the next year was, every week, print out all the pages and make his page 10% better. He figured out one way to be objectively better — he could look at it and say, “This is a better page. We deserve to be higher ranked.”
I had literally never heard this. In the moment, honestly, I was kind of disappointed — I came to you for the secret SEO juice, I’m not trying to hear “work hard and actually make a better page.” But it was also refreshing. You go to the masters of SEO and they’re like: yeah, you can do all the tricks, but at the end of the day you have to have the best result. You have to have an honest conversation with yourself: is your page better than these other pages? If you really want to sustainably climb the rankings and be number one — that’s it.
That was such a tangible business example of “to get what you want, you have to deserve what you want.” I’ll never forget it.
Sam: That’s beautiful.
Wisdom #2: I Don’t Know, I’ve Never Tried [00:12:00]
Shaan: I want to bring up one. Whenever I read about these — I call them Freaks, and I mean that in an admirable way — when they’re on the Berkshire Hathaway podium giving their speech, they’re basically set up like a comedian to deliver these beautiful lines. But what I try to find are the weird day-to-day quirks they have, ways they’re acting on a daily basis.
So I’ve got our good friend Jack — when I’m with him he’ll say something like, “Oh, I didn’t name my daughter yet.” I was like, “Why?” He goes, “Well, I need to get to know her first. I’m going to wait to name her — she’s just called Baby for now. Once we get to know her…” And I’m like, that’s so weird. But then you start thinking about it and it’s actually not that weird. It is kind of weird to name a human being before you’ve met her.
And this cool story I found in “The Making of an American Capitalist” — they describe Munger physically: an elf-like face, patchy skin, glasses an inch thick, something of a snob and highly judgmental, but with a deep sense of ethics and smarts matched by Churchillian self-assurance. Once, he was asked if he could play the piano, and Munger replied: “I don’t know. I’ve never tried.”
What a telling line. Most people say, “No, I can’t play the piano.” But this is basically, “I probably could — there’s definitely potential that I will be a great piano player, I just haven’t tried.” When I read that line I thought: this man’s one of a kind.
Sam: I read that line in the research and I didn’t even understand what was remarkable about it. I just moved on. I didn’t notice it until you said it just now.
Shaan: That’s what I mean — when you’re reading about these guys, it’s these little one-off lines. They’ll say “he founded this law firm” and then “next he was bored there” and you move on, but if you stop and look at the law firm, it’s quirky and strange. This “I’ve never tried” line is beautiful — it shows the day-to-day of how you can think differently.
Wisdom #3: I Before E — Learning Big Ideas Plus Exceptions [00:15:00]
Sam: Let me give you number four. My number four Charlie-ism — let me tell you a little story of where I first felt this, then I’ll give you the Charlie-ism.
Rewind the clock fifteen years. I was living in Indonesia — in Jakarta — in a building that had a ping pong table. I didn’t know anybody there, so I used to go down and hang out by the ping pong table hoping to meet people. My brother-in-law and I would go down and play. My brother-in-law is better than me at ping pong. He plays how you’d imagine someone who’s good at ping pong — if he hits a smash, he doesn’t just hit it fast, he jumps even though you don’t need to jump, just to make you feel how hard he smashed it.
I was trying to get better than him, he was trying to get better than me. He was the best guy in the building — until one day this 55, 60-year-old man came down named Poppy.
Shaan: Oh, Poppy.
Sam: We’re like, “Your name is Poppy?” He’s like, “I’m Poppy.” We didn’t know if he was flexing on us or if it was a real name. He takes a paddle out of a case — his own case. We’re like, “Oh, he’s got his own paddle. Oh, this guy means business.” Like the guy who brings his own bowling ball to the bowling alley.
So I play him and Poppy beats me, but he didn’t do anything spectacular. He wasn’t smashing the ball. I thought, “Oh, I was off today.” Then my brother-in-law Aaron plays him — and Aaron has never lost to anybody in this building. Aaron tries to do what he always does: hit brilliant shots, corner of the table, down the line, crosscourt, drop shots. None of it’s working. Poppy is destroying him.
The way Poppy plays: normally when you play ping pong your arm is back, doing a full stroke like a tennis swing. Poppy would just hold the paddle forward — facing you — and move left and right like a wall. Whatever you hit, he’d just hit it back. Poppy was never hitting brilliant shots, but he would also never hit it out and never hit the net. So inevitably, you would keep hitting it back and one of your brilliant shots would go out of bounds — you’d hit it too hard, too soft, you’d hit the net. You would mess up, and he would always score based on your error.
He crushed us that day. He crushed us every day. He would just chuckle and say “good game” and go upstairs. We’d be like, “Damn, Poppy, man.” We never beat him. Not one time that whole summer.
One day he invited us up to his apartment in the building — he lived in the penthouse. Beautiful place. He had a secret poker room. A wall of fancy liquor — like a wine cellar but for spirits. A shower with six showerheads. We were like, “What do you do?” He goes, “I sell soap.” We’re like, “You make soap?” He goes, “No, no, I just import and export.” We’re like, “Is it better soap?” He goes, “No, it’s just soap. It’s good soap — not the best.”
This is how he lives his life, too. No brilliant shots. No unforced errors.
And this is a Charlie Munger-ism: avoiding stupidity is easier than seeking brilliance. He says, “Other people spend their whole life trying to be so smart. All I’m trying to do is not be idiotic. It’s harder than people think, but it’s more important than trying to be brilliant.”
Charlie basically asked: how do I just avoid the great errors? Whether it’s investing or health — how do I avoid the great errors in each area? He wasn’t perfect at it. But what a totally different strategy than anything you’ll usually hear — it’s not about being brilliant or talented. It’s just: avoid stupidity and you’ll outperform everybody.
Shaan: Is there a category in the Oscars for podcasters who can weave a story into Charlie Munger? Because if yes, you might get that nod. That was wonderful. You had me enthralled — I didn’t know where you were going with it.
Sam: You just open your mouth and start talking and see where it goes.
Shaan: You totally won that one. That was beautiful.
Wisdom #4: The Prescription for Misery [00:24:00]
Shaan: I love that one. Let me ask you something. Right now it’s November 29th. Most people are doing their next-year financial planning. For years at The Hustle, I made a very similar mistake that I bet you made — over-optimism. Have you ever hit any of your projections in the first six years of your career?
Sam: Never. I’ve never met a goal I’ve ever set.
Shaan: Dude. If you ask people at The Hustle — one of my big weaknesses is looking at the numbers in the Excel sheet, seeing a seven million there, and thinking, “What if we just deleted that and put a nine? Look how much more profit!” That’s literally what I would do. I would look at the sheets, say, “Yeah, that looks good — but what if you just deleted that number and put it to that number? Look how much better this looks. Let’s just do that.” I’ve made that mistake so many times.
I bought a property a few years back. I thought, “This is only an okay price, but I’m going to take better pictures, do some things when I sell it, and that’s how I’ll make the money.” I had all these projections for increasing revenue, and just like years of failing at projecting — I totally messed it up. So now I try to be way more modest with my financial projections. But I’ve always messed it up.
Munger has a bunch of good quotes about this. He says it’s dangerous to rely too much on models and formulas — the reality is way more complex than that. He says: “We’re very disciplined in our approach and we’re not swayed by flimsy optimism.” And he goes on to say it’s pretty ridiculous that people are biased by both over-skepticism and over-optimism in the business world. His whole philosophy was: buy a good business at a good price and you’re golden. If you ever sell it, or if something crazy improves, that’s icing on the cake.
Whereas what I do — and I bet most people do — is I default to the optimism as if it’s the truth. That’s been one of my biggest mistakes in business. What it does is crush team morale, puts you in a losing state of mind.
What Munger said was: you make a lot of money when you buy a good company at a good price, but you make all of the money by letting it ride for 20 years. The patience is where the big money is. I struggle like crazy to do that.
Sam: Well, there’s the thing you want to hit. Some people say you want to hit 70% of the goals you set — that’s the right balance between ambition and practicality. Zero percent means you’re setting the wrong goals. A hundred percent means you’re playing it too safe. So there’s some number in between — 70, 50, 60, whatever works.
But I think most entrepreneurs and investors are on the side of optimism, because doesn’t it feel better in the moment?
Shaan: Do you want to know something? I’m trying to do no goals. And it’s not working out with any of the partners I’m involved with who are fighting this.
Sam: Yeah, I’ve grown to hate goals, man. But this is like your thing with money — you have a weird relationship with money that you need money therapy for. You probably have a weird relationship with goals too. You know, either crazy goals nobody can hit, or no goals. The answer is probably somewhere in the middle.
The analogy I’d give: let’s say Usain Bolt is in the Olympics in the 100-meter dash. He runs the race. It doesn’t matter what the time was — he won. Tracking the time after the fact, comparing yourself to the number — who cares? So compare yourself to others is the answer instead?
Shaan: Well, we’re talking about Munger and these guys were the analogy kings, so come on.
Sam: Right. I just get fed up with over-tracking and over-planning.
Shaan: Let’s go to one of his other ones that I think is related — one of Munger’s big ideas that I have taken into my life. This is the idea of inversion. He says: invert, always invert. What does this mean? It’s basically a way to think through problems backwards.
If you want to solve something like “how do I be happy in life?” there might be a thousand different answers. But what Munger would do to get to the answer faster is invert. Instead of figuring out how to be happy, figure out what is the surefire path to misery — and avoid that. Bill Gates said Munger goes from A to Z faster than anyone — he has the best 30-second brain — because his default way of problem-solving is to invert.
Wisdom #5: Inversion — and the Prescription for Misery [00:31:00]
Shaan: He actually did a talk where he calls this a “prescription for misery.” What a beautiful phrase. He lays it out:
Number one: ingesting chemicals to alter your mood or perception. If you rely on chemicals to change your mood, eventually this leads to misery — alcoholism, over-stimulation, and so on.
Number two: envy. He has this great quote — “The world is not driven by greed, it’s actually driven by envy.” He goes, “I’m lucky that I’m an old man now and I’ve conquered my envy. I don’t give a damn what anybody else has, I don’t want what anybody else has.” But most people aren’t like that. As soon as somebody else has something, envy kicks in and drives so much of their behavior.
Number three: resentment. If your joy goes down when other people’s joy goes up, that is a surefire way to have a miserable life.
Those first three he stole from somebody else. Then he says, “I’d like to add my four on top of that.”
Number four: be unreliable. “If you are unreliable, you will be distrusted by all those who matter. You might be a mighty fine turtle, but you will be outrun by hordes of mediocre turtles — and even some turtles that are on crutches.” The idea is that availability is the best ability — if you’re unreliable, it cancels out any talent you have.
That one hit home for me, because as you know, I am a bit of an unreliable person and I’ve paid the price for it many, many times.
Sam: Yeah. Hey, by the way, should we bring up that MFM podcast meeting you missed yesterday?
Shaan: Yeah, I was on a different call and forgot about it. These things happen, and it’s a penalty I pay. It is part of my prescription for misery.
Number five: learn only from your own experience. If you decide that first-hand experience is your only way to figure out good versus bad, and you’re not going to learn from other living and dead people, that is a surefire way to misery — because you will learn much slower than someone who learns the other way.
Number six: when hit with adversity, go down and stay down. Don’t bounce back from the inevitable and unavoidable blows of life.
And the last one: don’t be objective. Stay stuck in your ways. Hold on to your initial ideas — your most loved ideas — hold them with a death grip. That is his final prescription for misery: to never change your mind in light of new facts.
Sam: Of those, my biggest weaknesses are envy. This podcast is fun, but sometimes it creates a lot of envy — if we have all these amazing people on, or if it’s just you and me and you do great and I didn’t do as good. And then you start talking to them and you’re like, “Hmm, I’m just as smart as this guy, but this guy…” And you know the trigger: when you ask, “How old are you?” That’s when the feeling hits. Like, can you just do the finishing blow and tell me you’re two years younger than me?
Shaan: Right.
Sam: I read a lot of biographies, and I do something where I write down the years and make notes of interesting things that happened to a person in each year. If it involves a dollar amount, I write it down, convert it to today’s dollars, and write down how old they were. So I’m reverse-engineering different people’s lives. But you know what I’m really doing? Comparing myself.
Shaan: Of course. You’re running that race except you’re not Usain Bolt — you’re Tyson Gay watching Usain Bolt in front of you.
Sam: And I justify it by saying: if I read about someone and I’m better off than they were at my age, I say, “Great, I’m doing better than them and they ended up wonderfully — I’m going to end up wonderfully.” Or if they’re kicking my ass at my age, I just think, “Man, this sucks.”
I’ll give you credit for your honesty and vulnerability here, but I do not advise anyone follow this game plan.
Sam: I’m not saying it’s helpful. I’m just admitting it.
And the last one I sort of struggle with is the bendable one — don’t change your mind, stay stuck in your ways. I try to think of myself as bendable, but I could work on that.
Shaan: I wouldn’t have thought of you as an envious person. That’s a hard one to kick. I don’t think I’m terrible at it, but it’s definitely there. I can’t say “I’ve conquered that mountain.” No, I’m still somewhere on that mountain.
Sam: Hey, do you know what I think it’s the 61st Commandment is? Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife. Right — don’t be jealous. If I said this joke it’s going to get me in trouble with at least five people, so I’m just not going to make it.
Wisdom #6: Inversion in Practice [00:38:30]
Shaan: Let me give you some examples of the inversion principle, because I think it’s one of the most important ones.
When Munger was a military meteorologist in World War II, his job was to keep pilots safe. He thought, “Okay, what’s everything I need to know about pilot safety?” There are seven textbooks on what pilots need to know. But instead he inverted: “What are the most likely causes of crashes?” And he went and studied that — way simpler answer. He figured out that he just needed to be able to predict snow, ice, and fog really well. Those three were the real killers. Get his pilots away from those three and he could ignore everything else.
Let me tell you another example. When I was in college, I got picked for some program called ChinaYOS — supposedly top college startups in the country. Honestly, it was worse than Forbes 30 Under 30 in terms of credibility. But if you signed up and made friends with the right person, they’d take you on an all-expenses-paid trip to China for a week to meet Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba.
So I get picked, I fly to China, I don’t even know what Alibaba is. We go to their headquarters. I’m like, “Holy moly, this is like eBay for China.” And we get a sit-down meeting with the CEO — one of the most powerful people in China. Someone asks the simpleton question: “What’s your advice? What are the keys to success?”
The guy answering — I think his name was David — he says: “I was obsessed with this question. What are the keys to success? I talked to a hundred successful people and got a hundred different blueprints. That didn’t help.” And he goes: “Every success is different — its own little unique snowflake. But every failure is the same.”
His answer was about how to not screw it up once you’re a big company. He said: too much money, too much technology, and too many people. And he tells a story about how they were going to compete with Google and eBay when those companies were coming to China. They needed to invent their version of Google AdWords. Jack Ma said you get 12 to 15 people. He’s like, “Google has 2,000 people working on this.” Jack Ma goes, “Did I stutter? 12 to 15 people. And for office space, you’re going to work out of my old apartment.” The guy goes, “Your old apartment? We need a proper office.” Jack Ma says, “I started Alibaba in that apartment. I think it’ll work.”
On technology — they wanted top servers with redundancy for backup. Jack Ma says, “If I give you redundant servers, you’re going to design a system that goes down. I’m going to give you only the servers you need. In fact, go get used servers — build it so it can run on even crappy hardware.”
He basically David Goggins’d them. And they pulled it off.
Sam: Bezos has a simple inversion too. Someone asked him: “You’re one of the internet CEOs — technology is always changing, what innovations are you most excited for? What’s going to change about Amazon in 10 years?” And he goes: “I don’t think about that. Instead, I think about what’s not going to change.” Customers are always going to want the most selection, the lowest prices, and the fastest delivery. Everything else can change, but those things won’t. So we focus on what’s not going to change because we have to keep beating customer expectations on delivery speed, prices, and selection.
Shaan: And I used this in my own life recently. I’m having a bunch of progress right now with my diet, which is great, because — you know, the scoreboard is 34 years of no progress and then a month of great progress. What changed?
I did a bunch of things, but I also inverted. Instead of trying to figure out the best diet program, the best workout program, exactly how many grams of protein, how much creatine, is it Paleo, keto, or Mediterranean — instead of all that, the inversion was: “What’s a surefire way to be fat?”
And that answer was quite simple. Eat way more calories than I burn. Eat shitty fried and ultra-processed foods. I eat late at night — pretty sure that’s a recipe to get fat. I sit all day instead of walking during meetings — that’ll do it. So I inverted and said: walk more, eat fewer calories than I consume, don’t late-night snack because I always eat crappy food when I do that. Literally all I changed. And boom — results. Instead of downloading 19 hours of Andrew Huberman and trying to follow a complex protocol, it was just a simple inversion.
Sam: That’s great.
Shaan: Let’s do a couple more. Do you have any others you like?
Sam: I have a story he told that I thought was pretty cool. Let’s wrap up with that.
Wisdom #7: Know the Big Ideas — and Their Exceptions [00:45:00]
Shaan: So he’s teaching a class at some college, goes into an economics class, and he has this general idea: you need to learn all the big ideas in a space. He says, “I don’t know anything about psychology, but I figured there are probably 20 big ideas in the world of psychology. I should just read the books and figure out what those 20 big ideas are.” He says: “If I know those 20 big ideas, I’m going to know more than 98% of people who’ve spent their whole life in it — because they’re so lost in the weeds.”
So he goes into this economics class. The big idea that everyone learns is supply and demand: when supply of something goes down, demand goes up. When price goes down, demand goes up. Everybody knows this.
But Charlie has a thing: you learn the big idea, and then — to make it useful — you need to understand the exceptions to those rules. It’s like “i before e, except after c.” You learn the rule, but then you need to know where it breaks.
So he goes into this economics class and says: “Everybody understands that when prices go down, demand goes up. What are the cases where that’s not true? Where the opposite happens?”
Sam: He puts you on the spot like you’re one of the students.
Shaan: Exactly. So hands go up — 50 hands — and they say luxury goods. Any item where price is a signal for quality or status. If a Louis Vuitton bag was $2 tomorrow, demand would briefly go up and then in the long term go down. Everyone gets that one.
Then he says, “What else?” And now you get crickets.
He goes: “Any industry where demand is based on bribing the purchaser.” There are many industries — the defense industry, parts of the medical industry — where companies take profits and shower goods, money, or experiences on buying agents and purchasers. Whether that’s through advertising (spend a ton of money advertising, that’s how I create demand — no advertising budget, no demand), or it’s the military-industrial complex cronyism: “I’ll give you this contract today because in five years you’re going to be on my board and your retirement package will be ten times what you’re making in the government. Because I have so much excess profit I can reward you with big contracts — and actually you want to pay more for these contracts so we’re a really successful company, because it rewards you in the end.”
He goes: “Once you realize that’s an exception to this rule, you will understand how the world actually works. You will understand where the laws of gravity actually break.”
I love that story. It’s interesting as a business nugget, it’s interesting in terms of how capitalism works, but it also shows the way this man thinks — the i-before-e-except-after-C mentality. He goes into any space, speedruns to figure out the 10 to 20 big ideas, and then he looks at the exceptions.
Longevity Detour: What Would Munger Do? [00:48:30]
Shaan: I did this recently. I went to Brian Johnson’s house, and afterward I was like, “All right, should I be one of these tech guys who really cares about longevity? Or am I gonna zag and say longevity is overrated?” I needed to have an opinion. And I thought — what would Munger say?
Hey, Munger lived to be 99 and he didn’t look like a longevity freak. And somebody said this — Varun said it, I think — “Buffett and Munger are in their 90s and they famously eat McDonald’s breakfast every day, eat M&Ms, drink Diet Cokes. They’re not cold plunging every morning or taking metformin.” And he goes, “You know what it goes to show? How important not being stressed is to your health.”
Sam: Yeah. These guys actually were quite low stress in the way they lived their life — spending most of their days reading, playing bridge, talking, thinking. Very few meetings. They didn’t stress out about investments — Buy and Hold, long-term, low churn compared to a lot of successful people.
Shaan: On the longevity thing, I was like: let me go learn the 10 big ideas in the longevity space. Me and Ben carved out two days and just deep-dived. I power-skimmed some books, watched the most popular TED talks from the five biggest thought leaders, looked at what Peter Attia says, what Brian Johnson says. My takeaway — and a big longevity person would argue with me here because I’m doing the short version — is essentially:
Big idea one: everybody’s health declines. We’re probably past the age of “live forever.” If we ever figure out a way to reverse aging or minimize cell damage, it’s not going to be a gradual thing — we used to live till 80, then 90, then 100, eventually 130. It’s going to be a step-function jump. Once we figure out how to stop cell damage, but if you’ve already had too much damage, they won’t be able to get you back to your 20s. You’ll be past the point of return. So there’s going to be an age — a tipping point — where people below it live to like 300, and people above it still live to like 110. A big polarity between those two outcomes.
Sam: That’s interesting.
Shaan: Big idea two, from the Peter Attia school of thought: it’s not live forever, it’s live a longer healthspan. Healthspan versus lifespan. At the end of your life, everybody’s going to have a “marginal decade” — your last 10 years, your health is going to decline dramatically, from being immobile and in pain to not being able to take care of yourself. That’s the bad version of aging.
What Peter Attia and these guys are trying to do is push that decade out. If it was going to happen from 80 to 90, let’s make it 90 to 100. If it was going to be 90 to 100, let’s make it 100 to 110.
But the cost of your today lifestyle in order to affect that final marginal decade — I personally was like, “Not worth it.” I’m going to find the 80/20 of healthy things to do that aren’t so costly or painful or regimented. I’m not going to forget to live today in order to make my 90-to-100 slightly better. So my takeaway: I don’t care about the marginal decade. I’m not going to orient my life around it. There’s an 80/20 of healthier stuff I don’t mind switching to. I’ll do those. And if some wonder drugs come out in the future, hopefully I’m in time for that cutoff.
Sam: Do you think Buffett is going to die next week now that Munger’s gone? Like, is this like an old couple that dies together?
Shaan: That very well might happen. He announced recently that at age 92, he’s finally found his successor. So.
Closing: YouTube Comments and Signing Off [00:51:00]
Sam: All right, well, that’s the pod. Before we go — I want to tell you, Shaan: the people in the YouTube comments have been making fun of us. They’re saying I dress like a serial killer — I don’t entirely know what that means — or that now that I’m a father I’m starting to dress like one, look like an accountant. And they’re making fun of your hair.
Shaan: I looked at that video and I was honestly looking exclusively at my hair. I had a bad hair day. I wake up, roll out of bed, and do this podcast right away — I don’t even look in the mirror. And dude, I’m like the hairiest guy on earth. Like, I’ve got hair on my palms basically — I’m like a gorilla — and somehow I think I’m losing some in the front. Getting a little light up there. And people were like, “Yo, he’s got to start taking…” whatever the drug is called. So to all the commenters: go… do your thing.
Sam: Well, I don’t care what other people think of me — unless it’s related to my looks or my intelligence. So I did go ahead and wet the hair a little bit today and try to spruce it up. It does hurt my feelings sometimes, if I’m being honest. But besides that — you’re going to hear me say “I don’t read the comments, it doesn’t bother me.” But hey.
Shaan: You know what’s working? Shaan P — my little Gary Vee branding pivot — is kind of working in the comments. Every day they’re like, “Shaan P, Shaan P for president.”
Sam: I don’t think anyone said Shaan P for president.
Shaan: There’s a small but loyal army. As they said in Arrested Development: there’s tens of us out there. But from that small base we shall grow. Shaan P. All right, that’s the pod.