the 6 traits of people who can’t stop making money

Take our founder personality quiz: https://clickhubspot.com/dclt Episode 872: Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) and Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) talk about the different types of founders. — Show Notes: (0:00) Natural Money-Makers (1:52) Attributes of Natural Money-Makers (3:10) The Story of Nick Kokonas (8:12) The Story of Jay Gould (10:00) Can It Be Learned? (13:04) The Story of Syed Balkhi (17:58) Only Spend the Second Derivative (22:27) Trading Valuable Hours for Useless Dollars (26:50) Other Play Styles That Win — Links: • Syed Balkhi episode - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzHdrQ5pDFo — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton (joinhampton.com): My community for founders. Average member does $25m/year. Many of the guests are members. Get after it...apply: http://joinhampton.com/mfm — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Shaan's weekly email - https://www.shaanpuri.com • Visit https://www.somewhere.com/mfm to hire worldwide talent like Shaan and get $500 off for being an MFM listener. Hire developers, assistants, marketing pros, sales teams and more for 80% less than US equivalents. • Mercury - Shaan uses Mercury across all of his companies. you can too: http://mercury.com/ Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column, N. A., Members FDIC • I run all my newsletters on Beehiiv and you should too + we're giving away $10k to our favorite newsletter, check it out: beehiiv.com/mfm-challenge My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by HubSpot Media // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano /

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

• 0:00Sam Parr?

  Can I tell you about something I've been noodling on? This idea of a natural moneymaker.

• 0:04Shaan Puri?

  I was gonna ask you about this.

• 0:14Shaan Puri?

  Explain, you made up this term, like, what is a natural moneymaker?

• 0:18Sam Parr?

  A natural moneymaker is a person who tends to be involved in deal making, brokering, and inserting themselves into situations. They tend to not build publicly, and they've built multiple businesses ranging from a hundred million to many billions in multiple different fields. And there's a distinct difference between a natural moneymaker and a great founder, or a great CEO, or a great entrepreneur. I consider myself to be a decent entrepreneur. I'm not a natural moneymaker. Ted Turner, one of my heroes, he started CNN. He was not a natural moneymaker. He had vision, he knew how to recruit people. He had a good sense of the market and what products to make.

• 0:59Sam Parr?

  But a natural moneymaker does all those things, plus they're way colder about money. And they're way more logical, and they're way more rational.

• 1:08Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I just think of my buddy Suli. I feel like Suli is a natural moneymaker.

• 1:12Sam Parr?

  A natural moneymaker.

• 1:13Shaan Puri?

  High hit rate, whereas it seems like most people fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, finally succeed. It's like this person kind of like succeeds, succeed, fail, succeeds, succeeds, succeed, right? It's like mostly success, which defies the batting averages that you're supposed to have as a business person or entrepreneur. Secondly, if you ask him to explain it, it's not like a lot of words. It's a lot of instinct. So naturally, instinctively figures out where money's gonna be made and where money's gonna be lost. So I call this having a great nose. They just sort of sniff out bullshit where bullshit is. They sniff out opportunity where opportunity is. And they win across multiple categories, even though they might not be the best manager or the best designer or the best at anything.

• 1:57Shaan Puri?

  You can't say like, well, it's because they have that one super skill. The skill is being a natural moneymaker.

• 2:03Sam Parr?

  And I listed out some of the attributes that I've noticed they have that are a bit different from an entrepreneur or a great CEO or a great founder. The first one is that they're unemotional about business. I said, natural moneymakers have anxiety like everyone else, but they use their emotions to make money. Being emotional and passionate is actually how a lot of founders typically succeed. It's how they recruit people. But natural moneymakers are far more cold about money, far more logical. And there's a story about Carl Icahn. Carl Icahn was like a tycoon, hedge fund, PE guy of the 1980s. And there's this famous story where he buys, I believe, a shipping company. And within two weeks of going to the office every single day, he was like, there's 12 floors of people here. I don't know what they do. I'm firing all of them today. We're just gonna get rid of all of them today.

• 2:48Sam Parr?

  And like four months or five months later, he talks to his team. He's like, so those 12 floors of people, are you noticing that like they actually were doing something? It's not hurting us that they're gone? And he's like, no, didn't even notice that they were gone. And a natural moneymaker is very good at seeing nonsense and just cutting the fat and being totally unemotional and very rational about it. A lot of emotional people, I would say, I'm in that category, would say, but these people have jobs. You know, we can't do this. A natural moneymaker is far more rational. And he's like, well, the numbers show this, therefore we do that.

• 3:20Shaan Puri?

  So the guy I just did a podcast with, it's not out yet, Nick Kokonas. I feel like he's kind of like this. Do you know his story?

• 3:28Sam Parr?

  No.

• 3:29Shaan Puri?

  It's unbelievable story. So this guy starts as a, he like studies philosophy in college, but he likes math. And he decides I want to be a trader, like, you know, like a stock trader. So he gets offers from like, you know, JP Morgan and whoever, bankers like that, like a good salary, good job, but not a trader. Trader basically like runs their own book of business. You need to be a natural moneymaker if you're gonna do that, because you're basically high speed making decisions all day. And at the end of the day, he told me, he's like, you would, you would basically walk away and you either won or lost a house. He's like, I'd make like, I'd win or lose like 300 grand in a day. And the emotions of that, imagine like, you know, you go to work and you made 250,000

• 4:11Shaan Puri?

  or you lost 250,000, you only got like 600,000 or a million bucks. Like, you don't have that much to even work with. You're taking these huge swings every day. Why do I call him a natural moneymaker? Because he made, you know, tens of millions of dollars as a trader. His best year, his company made 100 million in profit off of one arbitrage that he found. And he basically figured out that like, you know, ETFs were getting popular. And what's the ETF? It's basically you go buy, let's say, the SP500 ETF. Well, it's basically like owning all 500 stocks in some proportion, and you go buy it. So what he realized was, as ETFs were getting popular at early days, the cost of the ETF, like, let's say, the 100 stocks that you were trying to buy,

• 4:56Shaan Puri?

  was not the same as if you actually go and find each of the 100 stocks of their current price in real time. There was a little spread, a little slippage. And so what did he do? He's like, oh, I can basically buy, like, I can use options to buy like a future contract on those same stocks, and I can with no risk make money every single time somebody buys this. But in order to do that, he had to like figure out how to run like cable fiber from the New York Exchange to the Chicago Exchange, so that he could get the price quotes in real time, whereas everybody else was like calling. And they would like call a guy, tell him, hey, I want to buy this. Then he would write it down on a slip of paper. The guy with the slip of paper would run it over to the traders. Be like, hey, I got a piece of paper for you. Then he would take the paper, yell it out, and then the trade would get made. And that like 30 seconds, he realized was an opportunity.

• 5:41Shaan Puri?

  So he sniffed it, he sniffed that one out. Okay, what happens after that? He leaves, he goes into a completely different space. He creates the best restaurant in America. The number one restaurant in America was called Alenia. It was the first Michelin star restaurant outside of New York. At the time, he said that the Michelin guide was not even coming to America anymore to check out restaurants. And he goes on a forum and just declares, we're gonna create the greatest restaurant in America. So that's our mission. We're gonna create the best restaurant in America, and we're gonna make it so that it looks bad on the Michelin guide if they're not giving us three stars. Like, the fact that we're not three stars will be a reflection on them and not on us. And so just takes this audacious approach, pulls it off.

• 6:24Shaan Puri?

  He finds this amazing chef, Grant, partners with him, creates the greatest restaurant, Alenia. And in an industry that famously sucks as a business, like if you say like, what are some of the worst businesses you could start? A restaurant would be up there. And yet, as a natural moneymaker, he goes and creates this thing that at its peak, Alenia was doing, you know, 26 million a year in revenue with almost 20% profit. Even during COVID, when every restaurant shut down, they pivoted and figured it out and made money during COVID by doing like, instead of high-end stuff, they were doing like $35 takeaway dinners for people, whatever, figured it out. And then goes on and does other things. And while I'm talking, as soon as we get off air, he's telling me about this like

• 7:06Shaan Puri?

  current arbitrage he's found with wine collections. And he's like, dude, I just bought this million dollar wine collection for 150,000. And I'm, I figured, you know, I was like, how did you even in your spare time find this?

• 7:18Sam Parr?

  Dude, they find deals.

• 7:20Shaan Puri?

  They just find deals. And he's just always finding deals.

• 7:23Sam Parr?

  There is no off button. These natural moneymakers, I have, we have a friend who I was with one time. He's both of our buddies, and he was on his phone when we were out. And I was like, what are you doing? He was like, well, I just found out that you could buy defaulted or soon to be defaulted credit cards, meaning you could buy the debt. And I could just hire this firm to go and collect the money, and I could make like a 14% return or something like that. It was like pretty not meaningful, and our friend is very wealthy. And I'm like, are you insane? And what that describes, and what you described with your buddy, is that natural moneymakers are maximizers. Diminishing returns are still returns. They don't say that enough is enough.

• 8:04Sam Parr?

  And so what I've noticed with these people is like with your story, with your buddy, I buy index funds. You can do this new thing called direct indexing, which is not the same thing as what you're describing, but same sentiment, where you're like, you get a small like spread, a tiny one. And people like me, I'm like, ah, that's good enough, there's too much trouble. Natural moneymakers do not say it's too much trouble. They do not say diminishing returns, they say diminishing returns are still returns. It doesn't matter. And there's this famous story about Jay Gould. So Jay Gould was in the 1800s. John Rockefeller said he was the greatest business mind of all time. And there's a story where his wife had just died. She had died two years ago. He was the patriarch of this like, like, he had like three daughters,

• 8:47Sam Parr?

  and then he had like two or three nieces who he looked after. And he had tuberculosis, which was a death sentence. He was about to die. He had like a year left. And when he was out to eat with his family, someone came and whispered in his ear, and they're like, hey, this one railroad is like going out of business. I think you can get it. And his nieces and daughters were like, hey, please don't do this. Like, our family is good. And he goes, I'll think about it. And then the next week, he's with his family again, and he gets another call, and he puts the phone down, and he goes, hey, family, I've thought about it. I need to do this. I have to return to my first love, which is making money. And he did the deal, and he dies like six months later. And that's like an extreme example, but these natural moneymakers are extreme maximizers.

• 9:30Sam Parr?

  It never turns off, and the perfect number is more.

• 9:35Shaan Puri?

  So I think Charlie Munger is kind of like this, right? Like he, I think famously, like, you know, a couple of weeks before he died, he was still doing, doing deals, he's still doing investments. He, he made money, obviously with Warren Buffett and Berkshire through, you know, the buying, buying of businesses and stocks, but also was an incredibly successful real estate investor. I think also owned a very successful law practice before that.

• 9:59Sam Parr?

  On the newspaper?

• 10:00Shaan Puri?

  I think Munger made, yeah, newspapers. I think Munger made money a bunch of different ways and had a very high hit rate, had an incredible nose for bullshit and an incredible nose for opportunity, had incredible judgment. But can I ask you a question? So because the term is natural moneymaker, are you basically saying this is nature, not nurture? Meaning you either have it or you don't?

• 10:21Sam Parr?

  I think that you, I think it tends to be people who are brought up in families where they talked about this stuff at a very young age. And I would argue it tends to be instilled or tends to be they're, they're born with. And because the last attribute for my natural moneymakers is that they're very comfortable with complexity. The average entrepreneur, let alone the average Joe, we, we like simple. We say, how many times do you use that phrase in your business? Let's keep it simple. You know, let's just like, let's just like do this, this, like, let's just keep it simple. I have noticed that natural moneymakers have very, very, very high IQs and they can grasp very complex topics. Our friend Suli, when he does a variety of deals, I, I don't know him that well,

• 11:04Sam Parr?

  but I've heard him talk about stuff and they, not always, but sometimes the deals tend to have all these contingencies. If this happens, then this, and then if this happens, then this. And they can kind of cut through that and they could see where and how value is locked. And they can very quickly in their head, compare that to the alternatives. And the natural moneymaker tends to be really good with very complicated things. And the average Joe is not. A very complicated thing, well, it's kind of, it is simple to, to explain, but it's very complicated to grasp is like this idea of compounding. That's what I've noticed amongst the, the people I know, who I describe as natural moneymakers. Okay, breaking news, right when we got done recording this podcast, producer Ari actually

• 11:48Sam Parr?

  went and made a fun quiz with all of these archetypes that Sean and I are talking about on this podcast, the sniffer, the natural moneymaker, and like six other ones. And so there's a link in the YouTube description, or if you're listening on Spotify, in Spotify, there's a link here. And it goes to this really funny quiz, based off of everything that you're hearing us say now, which archetype are you? Which will ultimately help you pick a game that you can win, that you will have a better life and enjoy it. And so I think this stuff is really interesting and I think you might like it too. So click the link and fill out the quiz now.

• 12:19Shaan Puri?

  But what about the people who are smart, good at math, high IQ, but are not natural moneymakers? What is it that they lack or what is different about them, do you think, than the people who are also smart, high IQ, good at math, but are natural moneymakers? What do you think that, what's the gap, once you have that requirement, let's say?

• 12:36Sam Parr?

  I think that there's this slight gene of like wanting to conquer. You know, Napoleon, Napoleon had this great quote where his peers were like, oh, I'm Irish, I'm Italian. And he goes like, oh, I'm descendants of conquerors. Like, he's like, I just have it in me. And I, I've noticed that these people, they just tend to have a competitive streak where they want to be the best at a very young age when it comes to making money. I don't know why that happens, but I believe it's probably because of IQ and like this, like wanting to win. Another friend of ours, Syed Balkhi, I believe he is kind of the best example of someone we've had on my first million, who's a natural moneymaker.

• 13:16Sam Parr?

  So if you guys haven't listened to that podcast, Syed basically started a WordPress blog, which is not sexy, that made some amount of profit. And using that profit and influence, he started buying WordPress plugins. And then he has since bought tons of real estate. He's a fairly prolific stock investor. He buys a lot of privately held companies as well. And I would say that he's made a lot of money in a variety of ways. And when I have heard him explain why he buys all these gas stations, and I'm like, these gas stations are beneath you, right? You're buying like a $200,000 gas station, you're worth hundreds of millions of dollars. I don't get it. And he was like, he has this sentiment of like, but I can get good returns from this and I can just do this, this, this, and this, and this. And I'm like, that sounds really complicated and a lot of work, but they don't have that

• 14:00Sam Parr?

  same like nervousness about that.

• 14:03Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's hard to say, because when I think of the people that, this is maybe the, the one point you said so far, that I'm like, I'm not sure that lines up with my, my, my experience, which is all the people you just mentioned that I know, Syed, Suli, whoever, they really pride themselves on simplicity and they, they, they really respect simplicity. But you're right that they are willing to chew through what seems to me like complexity, but to them, they see it as simple. Like, I think if you ask them, they'd be like, there's nothing complicated about this. You know, it's, this was the simple way. And to me, I think it's complicated, you know, like for, for example, one of them, they were selling a product, like a D to C brand or D to C product, which many people do that, e-commerce.

• 14:45Shaan Puri?

  It's hard to make money in e-commerce by default, sort of like restaurants in that way, where you can get revenues, but the profit margin is pretty slim. You might be like a 10%, 6%, but 14% EBITDA margins. Then you pay taxes on that, you know, as you take it out, but you're always buying inventory and you're always kind of living on a knife's edge with the Facebook ad platform and tariffs and other things. So, you know, your life can change at the drop of a hat. So one of those guys, they had one of these and they ran it ultra profitably at scale. And one of the things that they did along the way was they just, you know, I was like, oh, so like, what'd you do then? He's like, well, you know, the cogs kept going up, so then we built our own manufacturing plant. I was like, what?

• 15:29Shaan Puri?

  And he's like, yeah, like I found these guys who do it in Europe and I called them and I said, yeah, but again, he said, made it sound simple, but I'm like, you stood up your own manufacturing at scale while you were like in the middle of the whole thing? And you've never done anything like that? You, I've never seen you in the outdoors, you know, like, so you're, you have a factory now? And he's like, yeah, like I found these guys in Europe doing it and I called them and I said, hey, can I come see it? They said, yes. And I was like, how does, how much does this machine cost? And he's like, cost this much? He's like, cool. So how long does it take to pay back? They're like, oh, it pays back in like, you know, two months or something like that. He's like, oh, okay, good, check. All I needed to know. And he's like, what scale, what scale do you need to pay that back? And they're like, this scale? He's like, got it. So that's a check.

• 16:13Shaan Puri?

  Then he's like, can I buy this machine? Can I buy yours? Can you buy, who'd you buy it from? And they're like, we buy it from these guys. He's like, awesome. Can I pay you to come stand it up in wherever I'm at in the US? And they're like, I mean, we don't really do that. He's like, but how about if I just like really made it worth your while to come stand it up? And they're like, yes. So he's like, great, done, factory. You know, like, and the factory was like up and running a year later with that process. And their cogs dropped in half and like, you know, the, you know, the business just got even more lucrative, something that I would have shied away from because it's complex. But in his mind, I don't think he saw it as complex. I think he saw it as simple. And so I think they, they, they view it as simple, whereas I think others shy away from the complexity. And I think the truth is somewhere in between, meaning they're willing to do hard things

• 16:58Shaan Puri?

  that they're not familiar with. But the reason to do it is very simple. Like they don't need to write a six-page memo to convince themselves. The logic fits on a fortune cookie. And I think that's the, like, where simplicity plays in. Like, the reason to do it is very simple. Doing it is actually quite, quite difficult, maybe complex, but they'll find the simple version of it. Meaning they'll find the guys who've already done it, they'll find out how much the machine costs, they'll ask the guys to set it up, they'll, you know, they'll do things like that along the way that, that make it a lot simpler. Like I asked Syed about the gas station, like dude, I don't know anything about gas stations. And he's like, you just need to have a hard corner in a good area. So here's the track record of the thing. And I was like, yeah, but I don't want to manage it. And if you figure out, he's like, it's a triple net lease, there's nothing to manage. All right. So he immediately is like, it's simple.

• 17:42Shaan Puri?

  What are you, what are you talking about? This whole thing is simple. I'm like, maybe it is simpler than I think on the outside, having never done it, because I'm confusing uncertainty with risk. I'm confusing unfamiliarity with complexity. Hey, let's take a quick break. You know that feeling when strategy is done, the brief is written, everyone's aligned, and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create all the content? That someone is usually you and it's due tomorrow. Well, the Breeze Assistant from HubSpot can help. It works right inside HubSpot. You can draft a campaign copy, blog posts, emails, all in your brand voice, all using your actual customer data. So you don't create just content, you create content that converts. Check out hubspot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses.

• 18:22Shaan Puri?

  By the way, little finance nerd thing that I still remember from that episode. Do you remember his advice on like kids and spending?

• 18:29Sam Parr?

  No, what did he say?

• 18:31Shaan Puri?

  So, well, the funny thing was, he was like, every time I'm gonna have, every time my wife gets pregnant, I buy a gas station and the gas station will pay for the kid. And we're like, what? But he's like, the best advice I ever got from my mentor when I was very young, like when I didn't have enough money to go buy a gas station. But the core idea is the same, which is you only spend the second derivative. And I was like, dude, I don't remember what a derivative is. Like, I don't remember calculus. Can you just explain that? He goes, let's say you make, whatever, you make a hundred grand. If you make a hundred grand, that's not the pool you can spend from. You now invest the hundred grand and whatever the hundred grand is making you, that's what you get to spend as like on, on whatever you want at that point. So that that's your, you'll never go broke strategy.

• 19:14Shaan Puri?

  Cause you are only spending not your income, but the investment returns off your income. And at the beginning, that sounds small, cause on a hundred grand, your income might only be 10 grand. Or, well, that's what you get for discretionary, do whatever the hell you want beyond your lifestyle. Like you don't get to upgrade your lifestyle beyond that amount. But as that compounds, you can, you know, in the next year, you put another hundred grand. And now you've got 200 grand coming in and now you're making 24 grand off that. And as that compounds, basically after five, seven years, you could now live life off of only the interest, of only the gains of your investment income and not the core, you know, income you have from spending. I don't think most people would ever, ever really do that or think about that rule. Do you do that? You're, you're pretty like conscious and conservative about money.

• 19:58Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but the way that I do it seems far more simple where it's like, I wanna, my annual budget is less than 3% of my liquid net worth. And I do that because I can go to bed at night knowing that it won't ever run out. But I think that that is child's play compared to what you're describing.

• 20:16Shaan Puri?

  No, no, it's the same thing. You're, when you're saying liquid net worth, I'm assuming you have that liquid net worth invested in things. And you're saying, I'm only gonna spend 3%. So you're spending less than what he's saying, but you're still in budget, right? You're saying the same idea, which was, I guess the idea is more like this. When you made, as you started to make more money, did you upgrade your lifestyle? Or did you invest the money and then only upgrade your lifestyle with the gains of the investment?

• 20:42Sam Parr?

  Yes, you, you, you make it so you can, um, you, I, I just call it principle. Don't touch the principle, only live off of the interest. It's not really interest, but that's the phrase.

• 20:51Shaan Puri?

  Right. It's the principle, principle.

• 20:54Sam Parr?

  And, but, and, and the last thing is that I have noticed, and correct me if, if, if this is not true in your experience, is when people hear this or when they see me write about this topic, they think of like a miser, like someone who's like kind of unhappy and like their life is like strictly business. And these people's lives, it might be strictly business, but I have not noticed a correlation between the people who are like this and people who are happy. Because you'd wanna dismiss these people as like, oh, well, they're just like, um, all they care about is money. And, um, and I'm like,

• 21:28Shaan Puri?

  Dude, live a little.

• 21:29Sam Parr?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm like, I don't think that's true. And I can give you a good example. We had Brian Johnson on the podcast and we said the exact same thing that everyone said to him. We're like, don't you wanna cut loose? Don't you wanna like eat birthday cake? He's like, no, I'm happy doing this. I'm happy. And like my friend Val is a natural moneymaker. He's very happy. He's very good to his family. He's a very generous guy. And then I could name other natural moneymakers who are pains in the asses. They're miserable and they are misers. And I think that there's probably a similar spread of like unhappy and happy people and jackasses and not jackasses who fall in this category as any other type of entrepreneur.

• 22:06Shaan Puri?

  I, I agree with what you're saying, which is there's a bitter reaction that can happen when you hear about people either being very like planned and regimented about their money. And you feel a little bit guilty for not being, and then as a defensive posture, you say, oh dude, you know, that's no fun, right? You quickly write it off as a defensive mechanism for yourself. Yeah, you dismiss it versus just leaning and getting curious and being like, oh, like, why do you do that? How does that work? Either A, it's cool, that works for you. It's not what does, it's not what would work for me. Or hmm, maybe I could steal a little bit of that or a lot of that. And that would be improvement, right? Like that's a better reaction. So I do think people have that reaction and that reaction's a little silly. At the same time, I don't wanna make it sound like, if I think about the natural moneymakers that I've met,

• 22:51Shaan Puri?

  it's not like they're all well-rounded and happy people, you know, maybe, but also absolutely maybe not. Right? Like this is, it's completely almost divorced from the natural moneymaker side. The one thing I will say is I do notice that people who love the sport of business and are really good at it and get a high from it and have built their identity on it and have status from it. It is so hard, they are trade, they, they continue to make a trade that over time, to me, makes less and less sense. Meaning you're trading valuable hours for useless dollars, right? They, they basically are trading their time and their energy for money they will never need, never spend, never use. Money's a tool to improve the quality of your life.

• 23:34Shaan Puri?

  And they've passed that point where money's able to improve the quality of their life anymore. And then they'll justify it all kinds of, oh, it's for my kids. Oh, it's cause I want my kids to see me working hard. It's like, no, your kids just wanna see you. And they're just not seeing you a lot, you know? So yeah, I don't think you want your kids to see you just sipping a Mai Tai all the time. But like, you're not home a lot and they probably want you home more than they wanna see you working hard. As a good example. And so I, I think people make up all kinds of screwed up stories. And, um, I think, I think a lot of people will,

• 24:09Shaan Puri?

  they will enjoy the rewards that they've built up of the feedback loop of being good at something. And they will avoid areas of their life they're kinda bad at. Cause God, it sucks to do, to go spend time on stuff you're bad at. I could speak from my own experience, there's all kinds of things like this in my life. You know, fitness was one where it was like, it's always easier for me to read that next article or make that next slide deck than it is to get my ass up and go run. But like, what, what is, what will actually move the needle in the quality of my life? Getting my ass up and going to run, not reading that next article or writing that next email. It's not doing anything for me. But there's other areas of life too, like in my marriage, like, okay, how do I, how do I be a better husband? How do I actually show up differently?

• 24:52Shaan Puri?

  How do I, what if I improve, what if I made my marriage have 20% more fun, more spark, more chemistry? I don't really know exactly how to do that, but I do know I'd get more gains from that than adding another, you know, uh, X dollars to the portfolio. That's just a number on a chart that I'm not using anymore, you know, that it doesn't do anything for me day to day. So, you know, you, it's, it's really hard to make these trades where to say no to something you're good at and you know how to do, and you have an amazing feedback loop on and you're respected for, to go into these areas you kinda suck at and you don't know anything about. And like, you know, for me, like I went and became a beginner piano player last year. It's like, I'm gonna carve out time for something that I'm bad at, that I've never done, that most people my age don't start at.

• 25:36Shaan Puri?

  And I'm gonna suck at for the next three months as I just get my bearings. And it's gonna cost me money and it's gonna make me no, no money. And I'm not gonna become famous for it. And nobody's gonna like what I do, cause I'll still suck at it after a year. But I'm gonna go do it anyways, because actually playing music is really fun. And actually learning a new skill is really fun. And it added this other joy to my life in a totally different way. But I had to like steer away from the familiar to go do that. I think that's the part I would say I noticed that people struggle with.

• 26:02Sam Parr?

  That's great. That was a really good bit. And I would finish with saying, the cool thing about my first million is that I hope that we have shown that there's an infinite ways to win the game and all of them have cool attributes. Jesse Itzler is someone you and I both really admire. I don't categorize him as a natural moneymaker. He's very wealthy. He's really nice. He's really kind. He's got a great family. We can find people who we also would describe as that, who would fall in this category. This is just one category of people that I have observed. And I'm not envious of many of their lives, but I am envious of many of the attributes that they show that are weaknesses that I have.

• 26:45Sam Parr?

  And so it's fun to like, ask myself like, what does Suli do? What does, like, how would, what would they do in this situation? I may not take that route, but I would like to know how they would handle it. Because maybe that tool will be useful for me in, in, in any given particular like situation.

• 27:02Shaan Puri?

  It's also interesting, what are the other categories? So natural, let's say natural moneymaker, I love your, I love your phrase there. I think that's a dope one. But it's not, you know, when I hear it and I hear it as the only option, I have a different reaction where I'm like, Ooh, I want to be that. That sounds kind of awesome. I want to be a rainmaker like that. And then also, I feel a little bit bad because I'm like, I don't think I am that. So I guess I just suck then? And no, no, there's actually like these different options. And so there's an interesting question of like, what are some of the other options? What are some of the other play styles we've seen that you might fall into as a mold?

• 27:34Sam Parr?

  I want to write about more of them. I think that another one is like someone who's truly a missionary. Where they, like I would say Brian Chesky is this, where he has dedicated his life to this mission, a mission that maybe someone else would dismiss as silly or whatever. But he's totally dedicated to A, making Airbnb a great company and B, making travel good. I truly believe that's what he's about. Then you have guys like Jesse or Richard Branson. I actually don't know Richard Branson enough to categorize him, but I know Jesse enough to know that he is someone who is very extreme with his balance. I would call them extreme balancers, like these people, like Jesse's a very extreme guy. He comes off nice and he is nice, but like he has all these like regimented, like I must take it.

• 28:16Sam Parr?

  I want to take a vacation here. I'm going to do this adventure here because that's fun for me. I know exactly what I'm about and I'm going to go 100 to the max on this adventure. I love that. That's an awesome one. So there's like a missionary. There's like an extreme balancer. I don't know what else there would be.

• 28:30Shaan Puri?

  So there's like, I've seen one that's kind of like, in any video game, you always have this one character. So it's like, you'll have the tank, which is like your brute force relentless forward energy. This is like the Frank Slutman's of the world.

• 28:43Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 28:43Shaan Puri?

  Right? These are the operator.

• 28:45Sam Parr?

  They're militant.

• 28:46Shaan Puri?

  They're militant. They have a large span of control where they can lead an army forward. And just get behind me and I can take so much damage, like a tank in a video game. I don't know if you've ever played like, one of these, like Overwatch or something like that, but like they're Reinhardt. And so you, they're just standing there. They're just marching forward, taking bullets. And they could do that for a long time. They have a high level of determination, extremely high pain tolerance. They're extremely operational. They're tactical. They have a large span of control and they can be a good sort of leader. Today's podcast is brought to you by my friends at Mercury. They make the world's best banking product. I think you know this already. I use Mercury for all of my businesses. I think I have like maybe seven or eight businesses. We use Mercury as our business banking across all of them. And now they actually just launched a personal banking account. So I have my personal account there.

• 29:31Shaan Puri?

  I moved off of Wells Fargo and Chase. I'm just all in on Mercury. Why? I like products that are easy to use. I like products that get me and the problems that I have. So like very easy to make a joint account with my wife, very easy to spin up virtual cards. Uh, one click and I get savings yield. It just has all the stuff that I need in one place. So if you're looking for the best banking product on the market, it's definitely Mercury. I will fist fight anybody who disagrees with me on that. Go to mercury.com slash personal and learn more. Mercury is a fintech, not an FDIC insured bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group and Callum N A, members FDIC.

• 30:06Shaan Puri?

  Another play style you'll often find in these games is the trickster. And the trickster is, is the one who does the exact opposite. They have no pain tolerance. If you hit them, they're pretty much wiped out. But you get, it's very hard to hit these people and they find these cracks. They find arbitrages. They come up with a pet rock and they'll make a million dollars selling the pet rock. Right? Alex too, is a trickster. He did the million dollar homepage and then he did Calm, calm.com. And the first product for Calm was an app that you opened up and it just said, do nothing for two minutes. And it got popular and he's on the late night show and people, they create these like almost viral sensations. John Fio is like this. They create these, these little products that are almost like, wait, it's a, it's a weighted blanket. And like, they'll figure out that like, they'll figure out a way to sell these almost like novelty,

• 30:50Shaan Puri?

  unique items that are completely divorced from utility. A lot of people who create products that are like, I remember I met this guy who built the product that was naming stars.

• 31:00Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 31:00Shaan Puri?

  He's like, I created a registry where you can name a star and it's officially named in my registry. That's it. And people were paying 30 bucks to name someone, name a star after someone for their birthday. And this guy was making millions of dollars doing that. And that's the, the sort of this trickster archetype where you're extremely creative lateral thinker.

• 31:18Sam Parr?

  Eric Ryan is in there. So if you guys are curious about this psycho demographic, look up Eric Ryan on MFM. He started Method Soap, Ollie Vitamins, Wellie Band-Aids and Trickster. And some of the ways that you've described it, sound negative or sound insulting, that's not at all what you mean, but it's like.

• 31:37Shaan Puri?

  They have magic.

• 31:38Sam Parr?

  Yeah, that's far better.

• 31:39Shaan Puri?

  They can, they can take inanimate objects and like sort of bring them to life in a way. And they, they find these opportunities where everybody else ignores them. I would say you have the kind of like visionary missionary type that you, that you mentioned. I think there's probably also, you know, Paul Graham wrote this blog post, fierce nerd. I think there's something to the extremely high IQ, extremely high competitive drive, probably like socially strange person. And this is like the like Zuckerberg dynamic, you know, Zuckerberg archetype where you think because they're nerdy, they're weak. But no, they're actually incredibly fierce. You just have to play them on their battlefield. And it's like, if you ever go to a Magic at the Gathering, uh, you know, tournament or a chess tournament,

• 32:20Shaan Puri?

  and you, you think this is like, it's going to be like quiet, meek, like, you know, uh, sort of sterile. And it's like, no, there's, there's like a fury in each of these people.

• 32:29Sam Parr?

  I would say Travis Kalanick is in that category where it's all just a game and he likes playing games with aggression.

• 32:37Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. I think you have the sort of, um, the deep students. So I think, you know, there, there's some people who are like, um, you know, like in Game of Thrones, the guy who's like in the, he's like just copying, writing things down on scrolls, like the historians. And so you find people like the, uh, what is it? Dan Carlin of Hardcore History or David Senra. There's people who, they have an incredible like long distance running style of mentality around, uh, like the incredible endurance for history, for study and fascination with, you know, the inanimate dead, right? Like the people who aren't even around anymore. They don't go play the game themselves, but they'll study everybody who plays the game

• 33:17Shaan Puri?

  to a depth that is, you know, unbelievable. And they become experts in that way. And so I think there's people who do that in every industry, actually. Uh, you'll, you'll find people who are, who are like that.

• 33:28Sam Parr?

  You know, we've done almost 1,000 podcasts of which some percentage were interviews and it's fun. I've found myself like categorizing people. It sounds like you have as well. And that's like interesting. And I think the, the, the reaction to this needs to be not that stupid or, uh, whatever, like negative story that you tell yourself, but like, where do I find myself drifting towards? How do they act and what attributes can I steal or mimic from all the others that will make me fulfilled and happy?

• 33:59Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Ray Dalio said it well. He, when he was, we were like, dude, you really, really believe in personality tests. Like to a, a degree that I don't find most kind of like incredibly intelligent billionaire types to be really into this. And his very simple point was, do you think you'll have more success fighting your nature or working with your nature? Like we all have some natural wiring of how we are, your nature. Obviously working, you know, working on things or in a style that suits you is going to be better and less friction than try to do some other style that doesn't suit you at all. And when he said it like that, I was like, oh yeah, that makes complete sense. I have never actually thought about these different play styles. We're doing this off the cuff.

• 34:41Shaan Puri?

  I'd be interested, it'd be interesting to actually sit down and try to do this, but I would be down to do this as like a little project. There's one more I thought of just now, which is the sniffer. And the sniffer is a little bit like the natural moneymaker, but they just sniff out deals. They sniff out opportunity. Um, and they're less hands on. It's really as an investor. So, um, I've actually talked about this with, uh, Austin Reef. So Austin Reef from Morning Brew, I think he's a good operator, but I don't think he's the best. I think he's one of the best sniffers. This guy has told me about like seven things early that were non-obvious that I kind of dismissed that turned out to be so on point.

• 35:20Shaan Puri?

  And he really is very good at finding almost these off-market, off the beaten path trends, or sometimes just a singular person where he's like, that person's got it, or this idea is going to work, or this category is, is going to work. And he is so spot on, um, which is weird because I don't think that's what he, I don't think that's what he thinks about himself, but it is so obvious to me that that is what he is absolutely world-class. And I've had a couple of friends that are like this. A friend Vishal who was like this, who put me on to things very early on. My first Bitcoin purchases back in like 2014 were because he immediately was like, yeah, this is huge. And oh, by the way, you know, the second thing he said was huge. He was like, you know, was going to be, um,

• 36:03Shaan Puri?

  uh, like stable coins and privacy coins and prediction markets. And this is back when like the stable coin projects were all terrible. And he's like, yeah, I don't know which one it's going to be, but I know that one of these is going to be very massive. And it turned out that that was correct. This was like before the terms were even really like mainstream.

• 36:22Sam Parr?

  Well, because those people tend to be, they differ from the moneymakers a little bit because they tend to be more enthusiastic.

• 36:28Shaan Puri?

  Their conviction gets really high.

• 36:30Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And they're, they're, they're enthusiasts and business people. So Austin's one of my best friends. He lives on the street from me. He does this all the time where he'll like say something and he gets a little lit up, where he'll like talk about it and he wants to share it. A lot of my friends who are like these natural moneymakers, they shut up. They don't want people to know.

• 36:48Shaan Puri?

  John Parker is like this.

• 36:49Sam Parr?

  Like, yeah, I agree.

• 36:50Shaan Puri?

  He's an enthusiast, but he's got an amazing nose. You know, he, uh, obviously, you know, sniffed out the kind of Napster opportunity. But then after that, you know, the guy made more money off Facebook than anybody, you know, almost as much as Zuckerberg. And he didn't, he didn't even create the thing. He just saw it early on for what it was and realized what it was before anybody else. And then if you read this memo he wrote, this email he wrote to the founders of Spotify, he spotted Spotify before anybody else also.

• 37:18Sam Parr?

  Before they, before they.

• 37:19Shaan Puri?

  He was like, look.

• 37:20Sam Parr?

  He believed it before they did.

• 37:21Shaan Puri?

  You guys, well, I mean, I don't know if they, they're working on.

• 37:24Sam Parr?

  I guess what I mean is these people, they tend to think, I don't think you get it. This is going to be so much bigger.

• 37:28Shaan Puri?

  Exactly, exactly. And, um, so you've seen, I've seen a couple of these people that are just amazing at sniffing out the, the, the winner, the opportunity, and it's so obvious to them and it's not obvious to others. And then the world catches up. And those people make for incredible investors, obviously. You know, it's a conviction arbitrage. You, you, you believe before everybody else believes. You see it before everybody else sees it for, to be true. And when you do that, you can make a lot of money.

• 37:55Sam Parr?

  Sniffer, trickster, magician.

• 37:59Shaan Puri?

  Natural moneymaker.

• 38:00Sam Parr?

  Yeah, natural moneymaker.

• 38:01Shaan Puri?

  Tank.

• 38:02Sam Parr?

  Missionary. Uh, I, we maybe should work on our names a little bit, but, uh, yeah, there's something.

• 38:08Shaan Puri?

  Does half sound like sexual positions?

• 38:10Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 38:12Shaan Puri?

  Half sound like slurs?

• 38:14Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Um, all right. That's it. That's the pod.

• 38:28Shaan Puri?

  All right. Let's take a quick break. I want to tell you about marketing school. It is a podcast that is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network and it is run by Neil Patel and Eric Su. And these guys are both marketers who are running businesses. And so if you want real world tactics from practitioners who are actually out there in the field doing it, this is the podcast for you. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts.