Best of This Week: March 11th

Some of the best moments from this week of My First Million. ----- * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. * Want more insights like MFM? Check out Shaan's newsletter. ----- Show Notes: (01:40) - The ABZ framework and getting started (04:30) - Very long distance girlfriend (12:15) - Guerilla recruiting tactics ----- Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. ----- Additional episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:13Ben?

  Hello and welcome to another episode of My First Million Best of the Week Edition. This is Ben Wilson. Best of the Week brings you some of the best moments from this week's past episodes. No new content, just revisiting the hits. This week, we've got some great ones for you. First off, we've got Steph Smith joining Sam and Sean to discuss something that Sean calls the ABZ framework and why you should just get started on whatever project you want to work on instead of overanalyzing. Give it a listen.

• 0:39Steph Smith?

  Sam, I think you do this really well when people like I've seen people come to you and they're like, "Sam, I'm thinking of like, starting this business and like, I want to cover this topic and I want to blog and all this stuff." And you're like, "All right, like, what's your first step?" Or like, you'll be like, "Just write," or something like that, which just like, simplifies to the like, idiot Jedi, like, just do the thing, not like, overanalyzing the like, 50 startup articles this person has written online.

• 1:04Shaan Puri?

  Dog. He just needed it. He goes Randy Jackson on him.

• 1:09Sam Parr?

  Well, I get, I just get frustrated. I think, because I think that like, I think that it's good. So if like, building a business is step zero to 10 and 10 is like, you're this billionaire, or like, your vision has been achieved, you know, you, you, you own all this property, whatever that is. It's good to have number 10. And then, a lot of people are like, "All right, that's step number 10." And then like, steps 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, I gotta figure those out. In my mind, I'm like, "No, well, the only thing that's important is 10 and 1." And one, after you get done with 1, you'll figure out number 2. Just, but until you get to number 2, don't even think about worrying about number 3. It's not important.

• 1:42Shaan Puri?

  Dude, I have, I have the same exact thing. I call it ABZ. Literally like, word for word, your thing. And I went on Jack's, to Jack's community, he asked me to give a talk, and to his like, Visualized Value community. And I, this was the one thing I told him. I go, You you have you're at A. That's where you are. Z is the vision. It's the dream. It's good to have that. It's good to know what that is, right? That's like the North Star and like without that, you know, you don't really have the motivation. I don't really understand like what the hell you're trying to do. But wherever it gets paralyzed is they think they need to know step B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J. And it's like, and then they get paralyzed or they start thinking about step D when they haven't even done, you know, A to B yet. And so I go A, B, Z. It's all you ever need. It's like where you are, you got to know that accurately. The next thing you need to do, you need to know that. And then you need to know the end vision.

• 2:28Shaan Puri?

  And everything else is irrelevant. Like, just do that. And so you just literally said the same thing with your own, like with numbers, basically, instead. That's awesome.

• 2:36Sam Parr?

  Great minds think alike. I mean, that's exactly how I feel because every time I've ever had any bit of success, or even when I've like done something and it didn't work out, I just think that like if you just start and you're going to see so many things that you didn't even expect or realize were an opportunity and or that weren't an opportunity. You're like, oh, I thought this. It's actually way different. But that's cool or that's not cool. We got to quit. Uh, you know what I mean? And uh, you just, that's why you just have to do something. I get really frustrated with inaction.

• 3:05Ben?

  All right. Next up, we've got a segment from our drunk ideas episode. On this one, Sean is talking about an idea that he calls the very long distance girlfriend.

• 3:14Shaan Puri?

  All right. First idea is called very long distance girlfriend. Okay. So I had this idea because I realized like I'm sitting there and me and my wife, we like to watch all these dating shows, right? So we watch Love is Blind. We watch The Bachelor. And you watch these shows and it's sort of like, it's like the honeymoon period. And I like, I would say most people's homes are like ours. It's like, the scene is this, on screen, you see like two usually beautiful people living some kind of fairy tale date. Um, and then like one person's kind of like, you know, there's some drama. One person's being dramatic or one person's unsure and the other person's really good or whatever. And then you, and then if you, if you zoomed out off the TV, you'd see a couch with usually a couple

• 3:57Shaan Puri?

  sitting like six feet apart from each other because they're so sick of each other. Uh, you know, just like, you know, in their sweats, not dressed up with their, you know, double chin, eating their popcorn and Cheetos and be like pointing at the screen and be like, ah, she's not even that hot. Or like, you know, oh, he's, you know, he's such a jerk. And it's like judging these relationships, right? But like, there's something to this of why we like it, right? We like seeing these other relationships, but I also think.

• 4:21Sam Parr?

  It's like when we do that, we do that with UFC. It's like, oh, he shouldn't have tapped out.

• 4:26Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, dude, he's such a pussy.

• 4:28Sam Parr?

  So weak. He looks scared.

• 4:30Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, dude, he's so scared. That's why I don't like him because he's scared. It's like,

• 4:34Sam Parr?

  Yeah, he's not confident.

• 4:36Shaan Puri?

  Oh, my God, there's a spider in my room. So, so, yeah, there's definitely like a judgy. There's a fun in judging it, but I would also say there's a fun in the sort of fairy tale. Like, I think everybody, when you're watching these shows, you sort of put yourself in the shoes of either the person pursuing or the person being pursued. You know, you're the, you're the damsel or you're the prince, whatever it is. So the idea behind very long distance girlfriend is as follows. It's a service or app. I think it's just a service. I think it's just a text message. This is a phone number you put in your address book. And we give you the perfect boyfriend or girlfriend. You're never going to meet with this person. It's not even the intention. It's just somebody who's going to treat you perfectly because they're paid to do it. And so, so it's like prostitution.

• 5:20Shaan Puri?

  It's like, what's a prostitute? A prostitute is somebody who's paid to love, to love you, right? To make love to you. But that's a lot. I don't want to cross that line. That's a lot of work. So this is like, you know how Tinder made dating easier because you don't have to like, go date everybody. You just sort of swipe left and right easily on your phone. It kind of gave you this like flirting hit, but you didn't have to go out, put in a lot of effort. So here's what you would get if you, if you sign up for very long, very long distance girlfriend. There's, there's going to be a person that pretends to be your girlfriend. They're going to text you. They're going to ask how you're doing. They're going to be emotionally there for you. They're going to text you maybe photos of themselves. They're going to say that they want you. You're going to be like, oh, my God, I'm, I'm, this person wants me. They're never going to nag you. They're never going to get mad at you.

• 6:03Shaan Puri?

  They're never going to get jealous. They're never going to do any of the things that real human beings do when that are the downsides of relationships. Only the upside, none of the downside. So for girls, you're going to get Prince Charming on the other side. He's going to be complimentary. He's going to be thoughtful. He's going to be there for you. Uh, and for, for guys, you're going to get sort of what you want as the perfect girlfriend. And we're just going to hire call centers of, of just dudes. And they're going to behave as your very long distance boyfriend or girlfriend. All right. Give me your, give me your ratings. I'm going to start with Sam.

• 6:32Sam Parr?

  I give that a 10. I think that, uh, I think that's great, to be honest. I think that surely that like, if we went to adultfriendfinder.com or something like that, is that what they do? What is adult friend finder? What is that like, like webcam or?

• 6:45Shaan Puri?

  You're asking the wrong guy. I don't fall for these trick questions. I have no idea.

• 6:50Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I mean, this is brilliant. How many friends do you have who you've only met via texting and you've like, I've, I've got like a bunch of friends who have only ever texted.

• 6:59Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. I have now most of my life is people I only text with. Maybe I knew them before. There's a bunch of people that like, I don't know, just through Twitter or through, you know, the podcast or through friends of friends. We get in a group chat together. I know their personality. They're cool. Like that's my actual friend, even though I never met them. So why not?

• 7:16Sam Parr?

  Even heard their voice or talked to them like through voice.

• 7:19Shaan Puri?

  And in fact, I have no desire to really meet them. Like I don't want to go out of my way to go like, you know, hang out with them. I'm getting all the benefits that I want out of just the texts.

• 7:28Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So anyway, I have a lot of friends like that and I consider them to be really close friends. I, I, I can't tell you how tall they are or what their voice sounds like, but I love them. And so because of that, I'm in. What do you think, Ben?

• 7:40Ben?

  I give it a one. It sounds diabolical. It sounds evil.

• 7:43Sam Parr?

  A one zero or?

• 7:45Ben?

  Oh, just a one.

• 7:46Shaan Puri?

  A one zero? It sounds big. A big slow roll for a 10?

• 7:51Ben?

  There's this genre of idea of Sean business idea that essentially is I went and watched an episode of Black Mirror and said, actually, that's a good idea.

• 8:01Sam Parr?

  And this is one of those.

• 8:02Ben?

  All, all Black Mirror ideas are good ideas. Yeah, that's actually, where do you think they're getting their ideas?

• 8:08Shaan Puri?

  They go to the great idea pile and then they take a great idea and they say, okay, let's put this to its logical extreme where it actually turns bad.

• 8:15Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Like have you, remember that, remember that TV show in Disney called Smart Home where, uh, the, the, the, it's like a smart home. It's like Alexa before Alexa.

• 8:24Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 8:24Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So great idea. And the smart home ended up being the mom and the wife. So it kind of is like what we're describing now. So I think that like.

• 8:33Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. I haven't watched her. I think her is something like this. It's like a voice assistant that he kind of falls in love with. I haven't seen that. But again, it's not even a fall in love. It's just, dude, it's fun to get certain types of text messages, right? It's fun to get a funny text from a friend. It's fun to get something interesting texted to you. That's kind of what the hustle does. The hustle just sends me some interesting stuff every morning. The Milk Road tries to do that. Here's some interesting crypto stuff, right? Where you're a friend, but I'm not really your friend. I'm just sending you some cool stuff. You like getting that message. But that's for the work part of our life. What about the personal side? Ben, are you telling me you would? I mean, I know what you're gonna say. You're gonna say no, but let me just put it out there anyways. You're telling me you would not want to be getting texts from a woman who's so into you, and it's not cheating. You're never gonna do anything.

• 9:18Shaan Puri?

  It's not even a real person. You're never gonna see him. Nothing like that, especially if you're single, right? Like, I'm not talking about, like, we're all, I think we're all married men, right? So, so it's not for us. This is for 25-year-old me, not 30, I don't know how old I am, 34-year-old me.

• 9:32Ben?

  Yeah, I, obviously, we're not the target demographic, all of us, because we're all married. Yeah. But having said that, like, even if it was just like, as a, as a friend type of thing, I like, I already have actual friends that I don't text back. The last thing I need is another thing that's literally just a person to not text back. I don't need another one of those in my life, but...

• 9:55Shaan Puri?

  Okay, fair enough, fair enough. Maybe it's a bad idea.

• 9:56Ben?

  But, no, no, no, as a, as a business idea, of course, it's a good idea. Of course, it's like, this has money-making potential. As a thing that is good for humans, you know, that's, that's why I gave it a one.

• 10:07Shaan Puri?

  Oh, I'm not, I'm not in the...

• 10:09Ben?

  I know, I know, I know. I just felt like I had to be the conscience here. I had, one person had to be like, Sean, you know, this is, okay, okay.

• 10:15Shaan Puri?

  It's good, you know, I'm the, I'm the devil, you're the angel on the shoulders. We have to be there, yin and yang. That's how it works. That's good. Uh, yeah, you know, if you want good things, you should, uh, you know, go eat your vegetables, work out, you know, wake up and pray, do all the things, right? Like, that's cool.

• 10:31Ben?

  Don't invest in Russian companies.

• 10:33Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, don't invest in Russian companies. Don't have the very long-distance girlfriend service for $19.99 a month. Don't, um, you know, don't use TikTok. Don't do any of the things that you do, probably.

• 10:45Ben?

  All right, and last up, we're throwing it back over to Steph Smith, who talks about using secret puzzles to recruit top talent, from the CIA to the NSA to Google and other top tech companies. It's an interesting strategy and one that Sean actually has some experience with. Give it a listen.

• 11:01Steph Smith?

  I guess related to companies hiring. So you guys know mischief, right? It's this like company that does these crazy stunts. They're on, I think stunt number 70 and I their latest stunt, I thought was really interesting and relates to this idea of just like creative hiring. So if you scroll down.

• 11:20Sam Parr?

  Tell me about what mischief is. I don't entirely get it because they raised funding, but when you explain what they are, I'm like, who, what grown adult would trust this child with money?

• 11:28Shaan Puri?

  It's like South Park or Saturday Night Live. It's a weekly show. It's like a weekly sketch. But it's just done through code. They make a website instead of like a video making a joke. They make a website that's a joke.

• 11:40Steph Smith?

  Yeah.

• 11:41Sam Parr?

  But is it?

• 11:41Steph Smith?

  Exactly.

• 11:42Sam Parr?

  Does it make money?

• 11:43Steph Smith?

  I think it does. I don't know how much they've made. They've raised three and a half million dollars. So I don't know, like you're saying, I don't know who those investors are, what they're looking from mischief, but just to give like two examples. So one of them recently was, I think it's like called Tuntin'. I don't know why it's called that, but basically it's called the game of death online, which you sign up, you get an account and you pay $10 to join the game. And all you have to do is log in daily to stay alive and the last person who stays alive gets all the money. So it's just kind of like these silly quirky games, but the last one they did was, they also do like commentary through their game.

• 12:22Steph Smith?

  So it was a commentary on, in this case, the MSAT. So they got people to pay $50 to take the MSAT. And the highest score won, it's basically like a, a their version of the SATs. And the person who got the highest score won the entire pot. So they didn't actually have that many people did it. They had 500 people who did it. But it reminded me of something you guys talk about on the pod or have talked about on the pod, which is, you know, the power of like crowdsourcing things like SpaceX. If they want to develop some new technology, they put out some competition. And that tends to attract more interesting people than, you know, if they hire a bunch of recruiters to go, you know, find the people in theory they're looking for.

• 13:04Sam Parr?

  The example, the example I think you're thinking about is they were trying to figure out some like, were they trying to like decode some protein or something that helped with this AIDS? Medication and they like turned it into a video game and they'd spent 10 years trying to solve it. And then like a bunch of video gamers got it done in like three weeks.

• 13:23Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 13:24Steph Smith?

  Well, there's the SpaceX. What's the SpaceX challenge? The one that everyone knows.

• 13:29Shaan Puri?

  Which is about X Prize?

• 13:30Steph Smith?

  It's just like they're.

• 13:31Shaan Puri?

  That's not from SpaceX.

• 13:32Steph Smith?

  Yeah, but there's also.

• 13:33Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's like a version of that where they basically just put out the bounty and then let people, let anybody sort of enter to try to win.

• 13:41Steph Smith?

  Okay, there's a, I feel like there's another one that SpaceX does, but in any case, like, what I'm getting at is all, I mean, we work for HubSpot. There's all these companies that are trying to attract like quote unquote, top talent. And they're doing it in a way that in most cases, like true top talent, like, are you going to want to be like DM'd on LinkedIn and go through like a traditional interview process? Like, in most cases, no. And so my question is, why isn't there like a really like mischief style recruiting agency? That puts out these challenges that the smartest people on the internet are like stoked to solve? Just out of like sheer pride that they then can funnel potentially into these companies.

• 14:24Steph Smith?

  Maybe it's the case that these people just like would never want to work for these larger companies. But I just wonder why there isn't a more creative route.

• 14:30Sam Parr?

  I have something.

• 14:31Steph Smith?

  Recruiting.

• 14:32Sam Parr?

  I have something for you. So this is one of the very first articles the Hustle ever wrote. I don't even know if you can Google it anymore. It was literally like, we wrote it like two weeks after starting. And it was about my friend named Max. And if you Google, Ben, the Hustle Google interview, or the Hustle secret Google interview. So my friend Max was teaching himself some, I gotta remember all the details. This was like six years ago. He was learning some type of coding, some type of language. It was, and it was like a rare language. And he was typing in all these things on Google, like what does blank mean? How do you do blank? And after a while, his Chrome browser like went, like looked like the matrix. And it said, you look like you might belong to one of us.

• 15:15Sam Parr?

  And it says, we've noticed that you've been Googling a lot about this type of language, and we are hiring for that. Would you be interested in applying here?

• 15:23Shaan Puri?

  That's amazing.

• 15:24Sam Parr?

  And very few people ever saw this, but we wrote an article about this. This article got seen by millions of people. What's it say, Ben? What was the language? Google has a secret interview process and it landed me a job. That's the headline. And, and he ended up working there and it worked. It worked. And it was wild.

• 15:41Shaan Puri?

  That's dope. And you know, only Google could do that because they own the browser and the search engine, but, uh, but what if you were just like, what, what if there was just like an app that just sat on your computer that basically just tracked everything you did? I know. Sounds great, but like gave you job opportunities based on what you do on your computer, right? Like if it knows that Steph is in all these different like subreddits and it's like, and she's like looking at Google trends and all this stuff. That's like a signal for what type of person you are, right? Like it's actually like a much higher quality signal in theory than any job interview you could do where you're just trying to like present yourself as a certain way versus like what you actually do on the internet, right? Like, oh, you spend a lot of time in Excel or what you, what you actually do on your computer. It's like, you spend a lot of time in Excel, you know? So, uh,

• 16:25Shaan Puri?

  we've seen, we've seen what your capabilities are. Okay. If you're doing macros in Excel, you could probably qualify for certain types of jobs. And so I wonder if there's like a thing you could do like for college students. It's like, hey, put this on your computer. And like, do you want your first job out of college? Like, we'll, we'll help figure out what that job should be. We'll help get you like a job opportunity, uh, just by putting this like tracker on your computer. Sounds very not evil.

• 16:48Steph Smith?

  Yeah. I mean, the, yeah, I mean, I know. It's always like a, oh, tracking everything on your computer thing. But the reason I thought of this is because I watched the QAnon documentary and in it they have, have you guys heard of like Cicada 3301?

• 17:02Shaan Puri?

  No.

• 17:02Sam Parr?

  No.

• 17:03Steph Smith?

  No. It's, they covered it in the documentary, but basically it was like the epitome of these like crazy online puzzles. I think there's been three of them. The first two were solved. The third one still has not been solved. And they are like, you know, there's, there's like a picture online and there's like a message and encrypted in that message. There's a bunch of numbers and then you have to know to like go to another website and put it in. The point is, a lot of people thought that this was actually a recruitment tool for like either the NSA or the CIA. And so I was like, man, there should be something, maybe not that crazy, but something like that online for companies.

• 17:36Shaan Puri?

  Did you guys ever do one of those? I did this in college. We found this website.

• 17:41Shaan Puri?

  And it was like, you know, it said some like vague thing. It was like, the game has only begun. But have you realized that it's begun yet? And it's like, you have to like right click, view source and in the source code, there's a URL. You go to that URL. And then it downloads an audio file. You listen to the audio file. It sounds like nothing. You listen to it backwards. All of a sudden it gives you coordinates. You go to those coordinates on a map. The map and it was like a 50 part game, like mystery game. And me and all my friends got totally obsessed with this. We spent like hours and hours and hours for weeks. I don't remember what the name, this is back in college. This is like 15 years ago, but like the, uh, I remember at the end, the, the last puzzle. We could never solve. And I think the guy just made an unsolvable puzzle. Like I just think there was no solution.

• 18:26Shaan Puri?

  Uh, and his name was Mr. Wiggles or Mr. Squiggles or some shit like that. And he, um, he had this puzzle that was like the unsolvable thing at the end. But it was so much fun. And actually, now that I think about it, that is actually a great like filter and barometer for who might be good at certain times of, types of work, like the type of person that would do that for fun and solve that problem. I would love to hire that person, right? Because I know what that took.

• 18:50Sam Parr?

  Could you? Could you be like, uh, there's this, like, if you're that game maker, Mr. Wiggles or whatever, like, could you like, do that as a service for a variety of companies? Uh, and like make these games like, hey, we're gonna try and find you. But I bet it's like, hey, I bet we're gonna do this thing, this and this thing. And I bet you we're gonna get you 20 new applicants every month. To these silly games, but they're gonna be high, high quality applicants.

• 19:14Shaan Puri?

  Totally.

• 19:16Steph Smith?

  I also think there's an element where like, as I said, as if you're top talent, you're getting a DM from someone on LinkedIn, you're like, I'm just gonna ignore this. But if you played a game and at the end of that game, it's like you are part of the like point oh oh one percent that solved this game. Like, I feel like that would be so much more compelling. And maybe they still are like, no, I'm never gonna work for an enterprise.

• 19:36Ben?

  Okay, that's it for this week. Thanks so much for listening. We'll see you all next week. Bye.