‘Think and Grow Rich’ Is a Lie. (But The Advice Still Works)

Get Sam's top 7 books for entrepreneurs (+ his reading strategy): https://clickhubspot.com/wkf Episode 800: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talk about the backstory of Think and Grow Rich, lessons from prolific indie hackers, plus Sam’s new career to becoming a dating expert. — Show Notes: (0:00) Think and Grow Rich (12:57) The fraud of Jay Shetty (15:29) What makes a guru legit? (22:38) Peter Steinberger (25:24) Pieter Levels (34:34) Christina Cacioppo (40:21) Sam, a dating expert (43:40) 5-second rule (45:01) Shaan the matchmaker — 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 - Need a bank for your company? Go check out Mercury (mercury.com). Shaan uses it for all of his companies! Mercury is a financial technology company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column, N. A., and Evolve Bank & Trust, 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 — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com • Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth • Sam’s List - http://samslist.co/ 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?

  Fake and Grow Rich, amazing book. One of the best selling books of all time, but the whole backstory completely fake and he's a total con man.

• 0:08Shaan Puri?

  What? What do you mean? None of it's true?

• 0:20Sam Parr?

  I have to tell you this story. So I'm rereading a bunch of old books because I like rereading old books. And I started reading Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People. Have you read that one?

• 0:31Shaan Puri?

  I love that book, Sam. Rule number one.

• 0:34Sam Parr?

  Rule number one, the person's name is the, is the most beautiful. The golden rule.

• 0:41Sam Parr?

  I love that book. I just, I, the reason I like these old books is because some of them, the, the, the rules have stood the test of time and the writing is always like, all their writing, for some reason, it's like cute. There's something about.

• 0:50Shaan Puri?

  I'll tell you something stupid I did. I took the book and you know how people wear like, you're a denim guy, you know this, distressed jeans?

• 0:57Sam Parr?

  Oh, yeah.

• 0:57Shaan Puri?

  I distressed the book. I roughed it up a little bit. I made it look like this is an heirloom that's been passed down from Napoleon himself.

• 1:03Sam Parr?

  Did you like dog ear certain pages even though you didn't even read the thing?

• 1:07Shaan Puri?

  Tattered, tattered and folded.

• 1:08Sam Parr?

  Folded it like a baseball hat.

• 1:09Shaan Puri?

  First 30 pages, but like, I made this book look like it has already won friends and influenced people.

• 1:16Sam Parr?

  You just put it in the back of your pocket and just walk around with it?

• 1:19Shaan Puri?

  For people who don't know, or people have heard of the book, but if you, if it's been one of those things like, you know, like The Wire, it's like, I heard it's a great show, but it's kind of old now and I just, I guess I'm out on that. Like if you know of the book, but you haven't actually cracked into it, could tell the quick story of it?

• 1:33Sam Parr?

  Dale Carnegie, he originally was a public speaker and he taught public speaking classes. Then he created a book called How to Win Friends and Influence People. And I think it's like 15 or 20 rules on how to basically make friends and make people like you. So it could be saying their name. It could be asking them questions. So they do most of the talking. It's never arguing with someone. Cause no one wins an argument when you guys fight. And there's like, how many 15 or 20 rules? And it's just like an old timer book. It was released in the 1930s. So it's almost a hundred years old and it's probably has sold 50 to 100 million copies. And to this day, there's the Dale Carnegie Institute, which is a public speaking classes and a lot of amazing people, including Warren Buffett, have said that, uh, that book influenced them and helped them. And in fact, Warren Buffett, he was an instructor at the Dale Carnegie Institute, I believe.

• 2:18Shaan Puri?

  Love it. Okay, great. And you were gonna say, so you've been rereading this book?

• 2:21Sam Parr?

  Rereading that one. I'm reading, I just got the Power of Positive Thinking. That's another one from the 1930s. I just love these old books. And like I told you, I'm in the motivational phase of my life right now. I'm back at it. I just want to be influenced, to be, you know, motivated and happy and all that stuff. It's a girl dad thing. You know what I'm saying? Like, once, once you have a girl, you know, you're just emotional. And so I'm into this stuff. But there's one book that I started reading last night, and I was curious about it. The author. Because it just got me interested. But it's called Thinking Grow Rich. Have you read Thinking Grow Rich?

• 2:57Shaan Puri?

  A classic. I've, again, read the first 30 pages. Loved it.

• 3:00Sam Parr?

  So you've read 30 pages. You get it. So let me tell you the story about Thinking Grow Rich. Thinking Grow Rich, one of the earliest self-help books. I think it predates How to Win Friends and Influence People. It sold around 100 million copies, making it one of the best-selling nonfiction books of all time. And to this day, it still regularly lands on the New York Times Bestsellers list. I mean, it's a huge thing. And, and so basically, the story is that there's this guy named Napoleon Hill.

• 3:26Shaan Puri?

  Can I say it wrong? And you correct me? Isn't it something like, he got commissioned by Carnegie?

• 3:32Sam Parr?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 3:33Shaan Puri?

  And he went and interviewed all these people, or he hung out with, what was it? What is the story? So?

• 3:37Sam Parr?

  It's even more epic than that. So basically, Napoleon Hill is this guy from Appalachia, came from nothing. He's this really poor kid. And makes his way to New York City, and he's writing an article for a magazine, and he meets Andrew Carnegie, who at the time, this is like Elon Musk. He's the best of the best. Andrew Carnegie runs Carnegie Steel. This is Tesla. This is the biggest company in the world by far. And he's talking to Andrew Carnegie, and Napoleon was like, look, I'm just trying to figure out what makes people successful. And Andrew Carnegie goes, look, son, you seem promising. I want to tell you to do something, but can you promise me you'll actually do it? Because I have a feeling you're not going to follow through. But if you do follow through on me, I think you're going to be really successful.

• 4:17Sam Parr?

  And Napoleon goes, look, I'm desperate for success. I'll do anything you say. And Andrew imagined Elon Musk saying, Sean? I need you to go out and talk to 500 people, the most successful people on earth. And I need you to tell me what made them successful, because I want the world to know about this gospel. They have to know what makes people successful. And I need you to study them for the next 20 years. And I will help fund it. I will help make this a reality. Will you do that? And Napoleon goes, hell, yeah, brother. I am in. This sounds like the world's greatest mission. Let's do it. And so Andrew Carnegie introduces them to Henry Ford. They introduce them to John Rockefeller, also one of the richest men in the world, and even introduce them to Woodrow Wilson. And then FDR, the president of the United States. And Napoleon Hill spends a decade or two writing this book. And it becomes They Can Grow Rich.

• 5:02Sam Parr?

  And it basically distills down all of the amazing stuff that makes someone successful. And it goes even further. After this book, because Napoleon Hill got to meet all these presidents, he basically was there when Woodrow Wilson negotiated the end of World War I. And he helped give Woodrow Wilson the speech that he needed to convince Germany to back down. And then it goes even further. Do you remember the famous line from FDR? He says, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." You remember that line? Napoleon Hill, baby. He wrote that for him.

• 5:33Shaan Puri?

  Wow.

• 5:34Sam Parr?

  Yeah, pretty amazing, right?

• 5:35Shaan Puri?

  Fingerprints are all over this country.

• 5:37Sam Parr?

  All over this country. He shaped America. Well, none of it's true.

• 5:46Shaan Puri?

  What? What do you mean, none of it's true?

• 5:49Sam Parr?

  Everything I just told you is a lie. Except for They Can Grow Rich. Amazing book. One of the bestselling books of all time. Everything else, totally false. All right, I read a ton. I would say almost a book a week. And the reason I read so much is because my philosophy towards reading is I want to see what worked for the winners that I love and what strategies they use. And then I want to see what mistakes did they all make? What were the common flaws that they all had? And I just want to avoid that. And so HubSpot asked me to put together a list of the books that have changed my life, and I did that. So I listed out seven books that made a meaningful difference in my life, and I explained what the differences that they had on me, or what actions I took because

• 6:34Sam Parr?

  of the book. And then also, I listed out my very particular ways of reading, because I'm pretty strategic about how I read, and how I read so much, and how I remember what I read, and things like that. And so I put this together in a very simple guide. It's seven books that had a huge impact on my life. And you can scan the QR code below if you want to read it, or there's a link. You guys know what to do. There's a link in the description. Just go ahead and click it, and you'll see the guide that I made. So it's the seven books that had a massive change in my life, and then also, how I'm able to read so much. So check it out below.

• 7:07Shaan Puri?

  So what do you mean? Where did this come from?

• 7:09Sam Parr?

  Listen to this. So Napoleon Hill, originally was called Oliver Napoleon Hill, that was his name, married someone at the age of-

• 7:17Shaan Puri?

  Already, minus five?

• 7:18Sam Parr?

  Yes. Married someone at the age of 16 or 17, eventually gets divorced because he goes broke and spends all of his money on prostitutes. Starts a lumber company, and he gets arrested for fraud, gets arrested again for stealing a bunch of cars. And if you go to the MBD master document, I actually list his rap sheet. So he got in trouble in 1908 for lumber fraud. In 1908, again, he gets arrested for cashing fake checks. In 1909, he creates this thing called the Automobile College, which teaches kids how to work on cars. Turns out, he actually kind of teaches them how to go and sell the course. So it's a multi-level marketing scheme, and he gets run out of town because he runs off with a

• 7:59Sam Parr?

  lot of money, gets arrested again in 1910 for car theft. And just like, a history of just, like, literally been in jail, we're talking like 15 or 20 times. And he comes out with this, I mean, he just tries business after business after business. He literally tries like 15 businesses. They all fail. He marries a woman, he convinces the woman's parents to loan him money for this, like, farm or something he wants to start. That goes bankrupt, bankrupt, and he divorces the woman. I mean-

• 8:28Shaan Puri?

  Lion girl broke?

• 8:30Sam Parr?

  Yeah, like, really bad.

• 8:33Sam Parr?

  And so in the 1930s-

• 8:35Shaan Puri?

  So did the Carnegie part happen at all? Did he even interview any of these people?

• 8:38Sam Parr?

  So Carnegie died in 1919. And in the 1930s, he comes out with this book. He had written a bunch of books already that none of them were hits. This particular one was a hit. And he tells the story of meeting Andrew Carnegie and how Andrew Carnegie asked him to do this. There's zero proof that he met Andrew Carnegie. And Andrew Carnegie, I've read actually three biographies on him. I got married at Carnegie Hall because I loved him so much. The book comes out, I think in 1929. Carnegie has been dead for 10 years. And David Nassau, who wrote the best biography on Carnegie, they're like, dude, Carnegie documented everything. There's no proof that he met-

• 9:12Shaan Puri?

  Carnegie said no. Or Carnegie didn't say anything about this. What about the people, Wilson and FDR and-

• 9:18Sam Parr?

  None of it happened. He'd never met any of these guys.

• 9:20Shaan Puri?

  And nobody debunked it?

• 9:22Sam Parr?

  Well, so here's the thing. People did debunk it later on, but it's sort of like R. Kelly and his music. You could separate the art from the artist. Do you know what I mean? Like, I could still, I could still listen to the music and acknowledge that it's good music. But a lot of his, the book was so good, and I could talk about some of the stuff in the book. It was so good that it's known that he was a fraudster. And that all of this story, it's completely fake. But the book is actually so good that he, he didn't get a pass, but people acknowledge the book's great. And also, he's full of shit. So in the book, there's actually a bunch of amazing stuff. For example, have you heard of the term mastermind? He created that. So he came up with this idea-

• 10:01Shaan Puri?

  Probably not. Probably lies, probably all lies. So you think I believe that?

• 10:04Sam Parr?

  I think he was-

• 10:05Shaan Puri?

  Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, don't fool me again.

• 10:08Sam Parr?

  That's a Andrew, a Napoleon Hill term. So he created this idea of, I mean-

• 10:13Shaan Puri?

  He popularized it at least.

• 10:14Sam Parr?

  Popularized it, but it's, I think it's the first time that someone has ever said the word mastermind, or at least published. He did a bunch of amazing stuff. So in the book, he says that you need to be, you need to have a specific goal. You need to write it down and you need to repeat it to yourself every single day, twice a day. That's been proven to be true. Like, there's a lot of research that shows like if you write down goals, you repeat it to yourself, you are something like two times more likely to achieve your goal. Another thing that he said was like this idea of persistence and grit. And he like goes through tons and tons of chapters of like the importance of persistence and grit. Angela Duckworth, I think we talked about it, has this book called Grit, and it's also been proven that grit is more likely to make you succeed than IQ. And then there's other parts where he talks about like daily affirmations. And like, this is all woo-woo stuff, but this is like proven to be true, that if you like affirm that you're going

• 10:59Sam Parr?

  to be successful and all these things, you are actually more likely to be successful. And so he actually does have a lot of amazing stuff. There's some other weird stuff. He talks about how like sexual energy is the most powerful energy on earth and you need to harness it. There's a bunch of weird stuff in there, but there's a lot of really amazing stuff. And so, but when I read about his background, I just thought it was like one of the craziest things that I've ever read about because it's so in-depth about how he just lied about the entire backstory. His whole life, basically, is a lie. Oh, and by the way, I have to add, if you've read the book, have you noticed how he mentions the secret? Uh, I don't remember that, but yeah, okay. Okay, so in the book, he talks about there's the secret to success. There is in fact a secret. Andrew Carnegie, the most successful man on earth, he conveniently dropped the

• 11:43Sam Parr?

  secret into my pocket. And that's what I'm going to talk about. Well, in the book, Think and Grow Rich, he never actually outlines the secret, or sorry, he never like explicitly says what it is. But what he does say is he goes, I've written another book about this, the secret, and I've outlined it, like perfectly, I made it incredibly clear. Now, the thing is, is like, I'm not even going to tell you the name of the book. It's going to come to you when you need it. And it was called, this book was called The Law of Success. And it was a 14-volume course that you had to buy. It was very expensive. And so, the book, Think and Grow Rich, it's just the front door offer. It's like the cheap version. So

• 12:23Sam Parr?

  like the $10 book that upsells you on the $2,000 course. And so, this is like one of the early versions of like an unclosed loop, like an open loop, to like get people to go and buy stuff. And then you could go and buy his seminars. And so, his marketing prowess was like pretty amazing. And it's totally worked. Napoleon Hill became like a seminar company, and it actually was somewhat successful before he stole a bunch of money and it got in trouble for fraud. But his marketing was amazing. And the book actually has a lot of amazing stuff. But the whole backstory, completely fake. And he's a total con man.

• 12:58Shaan Puri?

  That's pretty wild. Similar to like what's going on with the Jay Shetty thing, right? Have you seen this?

• 13:04Sam Parr?

  No.

• 13:05Shaan Puri?

  You know Jay Shetty? He's like me with green eyes.

• 13:08Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so he I he's a very attractive guy.

• 13:11Shaan Puri?

  Very popular. His backstory is.

• 13:14Sam Parr?

  That he's a monk?

• 13:16Shaan Puri?

  I was a monk, you know, I was I was in trouble, I blah, blah, blah, and I went and I became a monk in India or Nepal or something. And then one day, and this is where I knew the story was bullshit immediately. One day, guess what happened? A monk at the monastery comes to him and says, "You're not meant to be here. You're meant to do more, like to do bigger things in this world. You're meant to go back to America and start a podcast." Essentially, it's what he told, you know, "You're meant to go popularize this monk wisdom." Which, I mean, come on, do we really think that a monk broke his silence and just randomly went up to him and was like, "No, no, no, you are supposed to go do this other thing." Like, how convenient?

• 14:00Sam Parr?

  We need you to start a seminar company, Jay.

• 14:04Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's bullshit. So basically, I like, it's questionable, I think, even if he was a monk, if he ever did like a stint as a monk. Like, being a monk, I think, is also like a kind of quite a long-term commitment versus like, I did a seven-day retreat at a thing or whatever. So I think that part's questionable. Definitely the part about the monk telling him like, "Your your purpose in life is to go do this other thing. That's bullshit."

• 14:23Sam Parr?

  Dude, he's only 38 years old, and he's been famous for like 10 years.

• 14:27Shaan Puri?

  So I'm just waiting for it to be revealed he wears colored contacts. That's gonna be the final straw for me.

• 14:33Shaan Puri?

  But basically, you know, then they're like, "Oh, he has this degree." And it's like, "Oh, wait, he didn't actually have that college degree." In fact, he has his own school that gives their own certificates for 10 grand. And that's where he got his certification from. It's like, the whole thing, you know, starts to fall over. But you know what, like? The things he says, right? He took old ideas, he repopularized them in his book. You know, his podcast, he gets people to open up and he's a good podcaster, you know, so it's hard, right? And art from the artist, as you said. And so I think it's very, very similar.

• 15:04Sam Parr?

  He was the officiant of J. Lo and Ben Affleck's wedding.

• 15:08Shaan Puri?

  You are meant to officiate celebrity weddings. I met a guy who was like his like brand coach, like early on. And I was like, I was like, tell me, is this really? He was like, I have, he said, I have no idea. And I knew better than to ask. I was like, okay, sounds good.

• 15:28Sam Parr?

  Dude, that's crazy.

• 15:29Shaan Puri?

  I can't tell if the self-help industry is, actually has a higher percentage of this sort of like

• 15:38Sam Parr?

  Yes.

• 15:38Shaan Puri?

  fraud and fakery. And there's something about the nature of wanting to be a guru that is attractive. It's kind of like politics, right? The people who seek power tend to be people who are flawed in certain ways. The people who deserve power don't seek it. And so I wonder if it's the same thing with like the kind of self-help guru space? Or if it's a, if it's a bias where you just really remember the cases where they are, they turn out to be frauds? Because it's so, so damning, right? Given that, given the front that they, that they present. And so maybe it's just that it actually like strikes a bigger chord? Or is it actually more frequent? I don't know.

• 16:15Sam Parr?

  I know a bunch of self-help people and I know that the majority of them.

• 16:21Shaan Puri?

  What does that mean? Who do you know? What are you talking about? How many self-help people even are there?

• 16:26Sam Parr?

  I mean, first of all, are, some people look to us as self-help people, to be honest. So like, we run in circles with people that like at least have a book that are in the self-help category, right? Like, uh, so like, and I know that like, when I see them, I'm like, you son of a bitch, you built this into existence and, and you're, I don't, I don't know anyone who I would say they're fraudulent. But it just like, you're just painting the best picture of the reality, um, which I don't think is necessarily wrong. But who do you know, if anyone that's in the self-help industry that you think is totally legitimate?

• 17:01Shaan Puri?

  Well, let me give you, give you, give you the nuance here. What does legit mean? So what I don't mean by legit is you live a perfect life because no one does. So that's not, that's not the criteria. If that's the criteria, then nobody should ever, there is no such thing as, as this. The second is that, well, you had these problems and that's why you're, you know, you had these problems. Look at your broken past. So it's like your, your present doesn't need to be perfect. Neither does your past because of course, the people who get really into self-help are the people who needed it, right? They're the people who, if they had the pain, they had the wound and therefore they went and studied, therefore when they overcame, they're, you know, they have the deepest mastery and understanding of it because they actually like self-actualized, self-did it. So I don't hold it against anybody also if they had, you know, sort of a broken past.

• 17:46Shaan Puri?

  The only thing I think is bogus is if A, the things you preach don't actually help people or they're like a lower form of, of success or you're sort of helping, this is sort of like the Andrew Tate problem, right? Like he might, or even to an extent, you know, there's people who are like fitness people who it's all about the grind and suffering. Or there's business success people who again, it's all about the grind and suffering. And, and so you're, you're actually giving people a, a dirty form of fuel, right? You're giving them a, you're popularizing a path that is not actually the best method, right? It's like giving medicine that's, you know, not as effective as the leading

• 18:30Shaan Puri?

  medicine when the leading medicine exists. Like as a doctor, you really shouldn't be prescribing like medicines that are not as effective. You should be prescribing whatever the most effective thing is in the market. So that's, that's the first knock I have. And the second is you, you're actually lying about your past or you're lying about, you know, your, your present. Like the lying, I think is obviously a deal breaker. It's obviously a trust buster. So yeah, you know, that, that's kind of what I think. You said, who do I think is legit? Okay. My honest opinion that I'm afraid to say, because I think it'll be immediately get attacked, but Tony Robbins, I think is legit in, in the two definitions I just gave. One, I think his advice is extremely helpful and I think it is sort of the best

• 19:11Shaan Puri?

  medicine for, for, you know, a broad scale of people. So I think what he preaches is actually extremely helpful and I don't think he's lying.

• 19:22Shaan Puri?

  I've never seen

• 19:22Sam Parr?

  What is there to lie about? What claims has he made?

• 19:24Shaan Puri?

  I've never seen evidence that he lies about like his past or whatever. Um, you know, does he embellish or exaggerate or, you know, like, you know, like make this conveniently trim the timelines for the story? Maybe I have no idea. I don't, I don't go audit that. You know, I think the criticism of him is twofold. One is like, did he get me tooed? And like, is, did he do that stuff? I don't know what, what that situation is. And the second is, is it a cult? Like, is he almost so effective that it becomes like a cult? Like he's sort of an abuse of power of people are falling so far into his rabbit hole that like, somehow that's a negative thing. Um, I personally got a lot of value from it. So like, I guess that's my bias on this.

• 20:03Sam Parr?

  I've read his books. I like him. I don't know anything about his personal life though. Um, I know a person who I could say is totally legitimate and misses base off of me hanging out with him for collectively eight hours. So not that much time, but also talking to dozens of his employees. Gary Vaynerchuk, uh, Gary Vaynerchuk.

• 20:20Shaan Puri?

  Interesting.

• 20:20Sam Parr?

  Uh, I have nothing but positive things to say about Gary Vaynerchuk. And he's one of these guys who, um, gets criticized for hustle culture. I think he works actually that hard, which you could argue is not good, but everything that he, I've seen him say online. I have heard his employees who have worked with them for years back it up and say it was totally legitimate. And he's a wonderful man.

• 20:42Shaan Puri?

  I have another one. Jesse Itzler. I've now spent a lot of time with Jesse Itzler and, uh, you know, if you think about, uh, when you meet people, there's sort of, uh, think of it like in math terms, there's like the Y intercept, which is where the points, the line starts. It's like, how high up does it start? That's usually your expectations or their reputation. Um, you know, people, you know, we met like Ty Lopez and we met the guy from Fire Festival, right? So they're low on the Y intercept. They, you come in with a extremely negative perception. Uh, and there's other people who you come in with extremely positive perception of, of like, are they really as good as it is? And then there's the slope of the line from there. Does it doubt? Does this slope downward? Does it slope upward? Jesse's one of the few people that was, I came in with a high expectation and then he's the only ever beat it. Like, and I've said, I've been

• 21:26Shaan Puri?

  to his house, I've met his family, his kids. I've done multiple like kind of events where he came and he hung out. We've done podcasts together. Like, I'm not his best friend. I'm not with him all the time, but I've, every time I'm around this guy, I'm like, wow, he's the real deal Holyfield. This, this is really like, he lives what he preaches and, um, he's just a genuinely good dude, like genuinely there for you and, um, I just haven't been able to detect the normal flaws that come with this sort of stuff, whether it's narcissism, or it's an extreme self-interest and they're money motivated underneath the hood, or they're fame motivated, or they're really protective of their image, or they kind of have this like weird tendency to like brag, or dominate the room,

• 22:07Shaan Puri?

  or you know, things like that. He's got none of that shit. And I've literally asked him, I'm like, how did you slay the money monster? You don't seem, you're the only guy in this room that's not just still chasing more, more, more, more, more success. Or how did you, you know, they were talking about this and you actually have done more than all of them in the room, but you didn't say anything. He's like, well, I didn't feel a need to, like, well, what do I do? I don't need to prove some, I didn't need, why did I, why would I have needed to do that? I was there to learn. I wanted to learn. I wanted to hear. And I was like, wow, this guy's just showing up in a great way. Today's episode is brought to you by HubSpot. Did you know that most businesses only use 20% of their data? That's like reading a book, but then tearing out four fifths of the pages. Point is, you miss a lot. And unless you're using HubSpot, the customer

• 22:51Shaan Puri?

  platform that gives you access to the data you need to grow your business, the insights that are trapped in emails, call logs, transcripts, all that unstructured data makes all the difference. Because when you know more, you grow more. And so if you want to read the whole book, instead of just reading part of it, visit hubspot.com.

• 23:07Sam Parr?

  Can I talk to you about one more thing? Check this out.

• 23:10Shaan Puri?

  All right. Sam puts this photo here of this extremely jacked man, who's clearly a bodybuilder, clearly some sort of athlete, clearly that's his profession.

• 23:20Sam Parr?

  Do you know who that guy is?

• 23:22Shaan Puri?

  This is the Open Claw guy, right?

• 23:23Sam Parr?

  Is that incredible? Okay. So could you tell the backstory of Open Claw? Because it's a pretty amazing thing. And I think you actually know a lot more about it than I do.

• 23:31Shaan Puri?

  So this guy named Pete. So he's an Austrian dude. He learns to code. He builds like a PDF side project of sorts called PSPDF Kit. And it actually becomes like the gold standard for like a PDF library for developers. It's used by like Apple and Box and DocuSign. And he basically bootstraps the thing. He ends up selling a majority stake. I think he sold it for a lot of money, like maybe north of a hundred million dollars. Tries to retire early. He's like, golf sucks. Uh, has an existential life crisis. Like, what do I want to do? Decides, alright, I'm gonna keep building. That's what I enjoy doing. So he starts building open source projects. He launches like, you know, 40, 50 different open source, small little tools or projects before this. And then he decides to create like Jarvis from the movies.

• 24:16Shaan Puri?

  He's like, why don't I just have an AI assistant that lives on my computer, like on my desk? And I just tell it to do things and it could just do it. And the problem with most AI tools before this was that they, you know, you could talk to, you could go to that AI app, you could talk to it, it could tell you things, but it couldn't do a whole lot, right? Because it didn't have access to your different apps and your accounts. And it couldn't message somebody, couldn't send money, it couldn't control this, it couldn't control that. And he was like, forget it, I'm gonna give it God mode. I'm gonna give it access to this stuff. And the reason why I could do that is I'll put it on my own little computer here instead of in the cloud. And it will run as an open source project locally on my computer. So he releases this thing initially called Claude Bot. And then the anthropic who makes Claude was like, hey,

• 25:01Shaan Puri?

  we kindly suggest you change your name if you wanna ever see your mother again or something, you know? So he gets forced to change, he changes it once, twice, and it ends up becoming Open Claw. So it becomes one of the fastest growing GitHub projects ever. Twitter goes nuts over this thing, it starts a revolution. People are buying Mac Minis, the price of Mac Minis is going through the roof. And then recently, he gets acquired, acquihired by OpenAI for an undisclosed sum of money that people speculate could be a very large sum of money.

• 25:32Shaan Puri?

  Is this a one-person billion-dollar acquihire? We don't know, we don't know what this is. Uh, and now he's part of OpenAI. So that's the story.

• 25:38Sam Parr?

  That's what people online were saying. They said it was a billion dollars, but I have no idea if that's true.

• 25:41Shaan Puri?

  Nobody knows.

• 25:42Sam Parr?

  What's crazy is you talked to, I think last year you said the word of 2025 is generative. So Ari, do me a favor, share your screen again and click his GitHub link. Look at how many projects this guy has put out, with the last one being Open Claw. But is that amazing, how many projects or little products that this guy tried to make before he got to the huge win?

• 26:06Shaan Puri?

  It's not shocking, let me put it that way. I think it's awesome, but it's not shocking because this is a pattern you'll see over and over and over again, which is that The people who are the best, they make the best quality stuff, tend to also make the highest quantity of stuff. They just take a lot of shots on gold. They're prolific, they're generative. Often it's because they start earlier, but even if it's not that they start earlier, they just attempt more than you. And that's a good example. In fact, Levels had this great tweet about his hit rate.

• 26:38Sam Parr?

  Levels being Peter Levels, who we've had on the pod, and he's kind of helped invent this word of indie hacker. He probably makes-

• 26:46Shaan Puri?

  I would say he's the most famous indie hacker.

• 26:48Sam Parr?

  And he does something like $2 million a year with just him making a lot of these projects, and he's pretty amazing.

• 26:55Shaan Puri?

  All right, so check this out. Same tweet, same idea from Levels. So he says, "Four out of the 70-plus projects I did ever made money and grew. 95% of everything I did failed. My hit rate is only 5%, so ship more." And then he had basically a list, it's like all projects, and then he has projects that made good money and grew. Nomad List, Remote Talk, Rebase, and YouTube Network for Electronic Music. Those are the four out of 70 that he did to try to make this successful. I've joked before, he's like the Jordan logo for indie hackers, which is his, like, sitting on a couch, shirt off in his boxers, just typing on a laptop, sitting in Bali or whatever. And he basically showed that he has a 90-something percent failure rate, that it took him, whatever, 50-plus projects before he had a hit, and,

• 27:40Shaan Puri?

  you know, all the revenue, all the success comes from like, you know, three or four projects that he did out of such a long list.

• 27:48Sam Parr?

  Incredible. I'm not, I don't view myself as a prolific person.

• 27:52Shaan Puri?

  I think you're blind to it, dude. You did, here's projects I know that you've done, just projects, right? Sam's attempt to make a thing and be successful. Okay, hot dog stand, next one, moonshine company, selling moonshine stuff online, right? The book club that you did in San Francisco, events business, newsletter business, blogging business. Paid subscription business, Airbnb rental business, Airbnb community, mastermind community. I'm on 10 and it's been 10 seconds, right?

• 28:25Sam Parr?

  I guess that is...

• 28:26Shaan Puri?

  I don't even know half the shit that you've done.

• 28:27Sam Parr?

  What's funny is...

• 28:28Shaan Puri?

  Keep going. What else is there? Keep going.

• 28:29Sam Parr?

  Well, conferences, meetups. I did a lot of meetups and conferences. I created a copywriting thing called copythat.com.

• 28:36Shaan Puri?

  Copywriting workshop. You hosted it at my office one weekend. I remember that.

• 28:39Sam Parr?

  Content school.

• 28:40Shaan Puri?

  Sam's List. You heard of Sam's List?

• 28:42Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 28:43Shaan Puri?

  Your list of accountants. Okay, what else?

• 28:44Sam Parr?

  Yes. I made $3,000 from a website that taught you how to get a roommate in San Francisco.

• 28:49Shaan Puri?

  Roommate matching, roommate finder, roommate infographics.

• 28:53Sam Parr?

  I made a thing called MyRenter, which was a universal rental application.

• 28:58Shaan Puri?

  This podcast, Money Wise Podcast, your Instagram influencer content attempt. What else?

• 29:06Sam Parr?

  I don't view those as attempts. I guess that's kind of the point, which is...

• 29:10Shaan Puri?

  That's the point.

• 29:11Sam Parr?

  When you're just like doing things in your free time that seem like hobbies.

• 29:17Shaan Puri?

  And I don't know your family well, so you could decline to answer this, but you have siblings. In the same amount of time, let's say that was like a 15-year period, and we named at least 17 things just now, maybe there's probably 20, 25 things total if we really thought about all the things, right? How many do you think the average person, or even a sibling in your own home who grew up in the same environment as you, would have attempted? Is it one-to-one ratio? Is it half as much? Is it a quarter as much? Is it a tenth as much? What is it?

• 29:45Sam Parr?

  It's less than a tenth.

• 29:47Shaan Puri?

  Less than a tenth. I have a sister, same thing. And there's no knock on them. They're great people. They're wired differently. They want to do different things in life. They have different goals, maybe. But just to kind of just, again, drive this point home, which is that like, quantity is the path to quality, right? And that you have to be prolific. You have to be generative in the amount of things that you're trying. And you almost always, when you think you have a quality problem, you have a quantity problem underneath the hood. And it's quantity of iterations, right? You don't need to do 10 things at once. That's not what I'm saying. But you need to commit to doing a lot of things. And the beauty of it is just, it's like dating or anything else in life. You only need one to work, right? You only need one and your whole life changes.

• 30:27Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I always make a joke. I was like, you know, dating like business, you only need to be right once. You could, it only has to, has to work out one time and it's worth it.

• 30:36Shaan Puri?

  By the way, here's a blog post from him called Finding My Spark Again. And he basically shows his GitHub commits for the year after he sold his business. So he sold his business and he tried to do other things and he just felt empty afterwards. And he just got back into making stuff, just committing code, writing code, building tools, building products. And he basically was like, the spark returned because building was always the thing that gave me joy. And it just clicked. I had an idea. I started hacking. I realized my spark is back. And like to find meaning, it wasn't therapy. It wasn't ayahuasca. It wasn't going to another country. I had enough of my own bullshit and I realized that you don't find happiness by moving countries. You don't find purpose, you create it. So you don't find purpose, you create it. I think is like a pretty like powerful statement.

• 31:18Sam Parr?

  How cool is that, that he was blogging? That blog post was from June of 25. So does that mean that OpenClaw was six months old?

• 31:26Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, OpenClaw is like brand new, dude. It's like.

• 31:28Sam Parr?

  Well, sorry, I know it's brand new, but like he'd only been working on it for six months.

• 31:32Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's crazy, right?

• 31:34Sam Parr?

  Incredible. That's incredible. I don't know enough about technical stuff. Is he considered a great developer?

• 31:40Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, no, I think, I don't know if this is true. This is now like, I'm just going off of random tweets I've seen. But I think the story is that he vibe coded OpenClaw and he didn't even read the code afterwards, which is why there's like a lot of like security concerns and like potential vulnerabilities. And he's even said like, why did he join OpenAI? He's like, when I had this thing take off, dude, I mean, imagine the DMs. It's like the most popular AI project in the world. AI is the most popular industry in the world. And so, you know, his DMs are flooded with acquisition offers, job offers, investment offers. Like turn this into a company. You could be the next ChatGPT, et cetera. And he basically was like, I don't want to build a huge company. That's not what makes me happy. I want to build an AI agent that actually does the thing that I'm trying to build here.

• 32:23Shaan Puri?

  Like that's my, my best shot of doing that is joining OpenAI. And so he went there and he's like, yeah, I agree. There's a lot of problems with OpenClaw. He's like, I'll leave it open source. You know, there's, there's issues. It's hard to set up. There's security vulnerabilities. Yes, agreed. And what? I'm going to go here and try to make a better version of that that will be without those problems.

• 32:42Sam Parr?

  My co-founder installed it and he was like testing it out. I haven't installed it because I'm nervous. And he, um, we just got this, he installed it just in our work Slack. And he made like a marketing bot that would update, uh, the whole company on like, um, you know, how many people signed up the day before or whatever. And this morning, uh, and he called it, uh, Stanley or something like that, like Stanley, the marketing bot. And Stanley would give updates. It would be like, hey, I'm Stanley. I'm the marketing bot. I want to let you know that these many people signed up to Hampton, yada, yada, yada. Today, we get all we at our company, we all got a message that said, hey, I'm Jerry. I fired Stanley because he made a bunch of mistakes. And I want to let you know that the previous error was X, Y, and Z. The truth is this, and today, this is how many people signed up. And we were like,

• 33:24Shaan Puri?

  Wait, did that by itself?

• 33:26Sam Parr?

  By itself. I get a notification. It said, I fired.

• 33:30Shaan Puri?

  He didn't give it feedback. It just decided I need to go.

• 33:34Sam Parr?

  I got a notification in our team channel and it said, I had to fire this person and it changed its name.

• 33:40Shaan Puri?

  Okay. No, that's great. But did Joe say to the thing, you're making mistakes, make a better version of yourself? Did he tell it that or it just did it?

• 33:47Sam Parr?

  He did not. He said that he did not tell it to do that.

• 33:50Shaan Puri?

  All right. That's scary. That's funny and it's very scary. That's crazy.

• 33:54Sam Parr?

  So we had to uninstall it. We, uh, like, he, he uninstalled it because we were like, this is just getting to be too much. This is weird. But it basically, yeah, it alerted us.

• 34:05Shaan Puri?

  Poor decisions lately. Sam is now tied up in an undisclosed location. I'll be making decisions from here on out.

• 34:10Sam Parr?

  It's pretty incredible, isn't it? I was using, um, Claude Cowork yesterday where I was saying, analyze the, the Slack conversations between my partner, Joe and I. And tell us what we can do to have like, to be the best leader or like analyze to, to make us like have the best relationship possible. It was amazing.

• 34:28Shaan Puri?

  That's hilarious. By the way, uh, he said a great thing. So people took his like project list. And they started tweeting like, look at this. He failed 40, he did 40 or 50 different projects. It didn't work before finding OpenClaw. And then he like, what are you guys talking about? He's like, all those things were basically like mini tools that OpenClaw used. Like that wasn't random. Like, great. It makes for a good story, but that's not true. Here's the truth. And it's like, if you weren't jacked, handsome and rich already, now you're honest too? God damn it. You know, like this guy, this guy seems great.

• 35:04Shaan Puri?

  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. 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. 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.

• 35:49Shaan Puri?

  Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group and Column NA. Members FDIC.

• 35:54Shaan Puri?

  There was another example of this like many projects thing, quantity thing that was on the pod that it was a while back. Christina from Vanta came on the podcast. The episode is popular, but I feel like this one, there's really one takeaway from this, this episode. She told me the, the story about the pottery experiments. Kind of a semi famous example, if you read a bunch of books, but most people don't read books. The story is there's a professor in a college in Florida. And the actual story is I think it was about photography, but they kind of changed it to be about pottery for some reason. So he gives the, he has a class and he wants to prove a point, which is that to be a great creative, again, it's about this commitment. And so he says, half the class, he tells, you will be judged at the end of the semester on quality. I want you to make the best thing you can make.

• 36:38Shaan Puri?

  So all year, you don't have to do anything, but turn in your best pot at the end of the semester and I will grade you only on the best pot you make. Okay, great. That's first half of the class. Second half of the class, he says, I will grade you only on the quantity of the number of pots you make. They could be bad, they could be good, don't care. As many as you turn in, your grade will be a function of quantity. All right. The two groups go on. So at the end of the semester, what happens? Obviously the quantity group made way more pots as you would expect. The surprise, the spoiler, obviously, is that they also made the better pot. So like the higher quality pots also came from the quantity group, who was not focused on quality at all. They're only focused on quantity.

• 37:18Sam Parr?

  And they found out that the quantity group had a higher measured satisfaction rating.

• 37:26Shaan Puri?

  Correct. So win across the board. You made more stuff, you had more fun doing it, and you made the better stuff. Okay, so you sort of swept. Now, why is that? Obviously, if you do things a lot, you get a lot of shots on goal, a lot of more attempts to make something great. If you do things a lot, your skill level goes up. So your ability to make something great goes up. And the last thing is you remove your filter. When you just try to do things that are, you try to make a lot of things, you don't self-inhibit. So you don't count yourself out, which you don't, you're not afraid to create, which usually pushes you towards doing safe projects. With this, they were willing to experiment more widely. And because they were able to go wide, they did things that were more original and novel. Okay? So that's the kind of the story from that. So she was saying, like, that changed my life.

• 38:08Shaan Puri?

  So today Christina is the CEO of this, I don't know, $5 billion tech company, close to $10 billion maybe at some point, called Vanta. And so I asked her about her process getting there. And her story was like, she was like an associate VC or something at Union Square Ventures, had never learned to code in her life, and decided to teach herself to code. She like would dress up like she's going to work, go to a coworking space, sit at the same desk every day, like treated it like a job. And was like, I'm gonna make shit. I'm gonna make a lot of shit. And so she shared this list of projects on her website. So these are like, you know, roughly, she goes roughly in chronological order, most of these things never saw the daylight, which is probably for the best. And it's like, I don't know, 25 different little mini projects that she built during this time.

• 38:53Shaan Puri?

  And so she was making a lot of pots. And then she, so she tells a story about the pottery experiment, how this had this, it changed her thinking, how she built all these different projects. And of course, the last one, which really didn't even use code. It was just a spreadsheet in Excel, which was, let me help, let me see if I can make a useful spreadsheet in Excel for any company that wants to get their SOC 2, you know, security certificate. And so she... And she just did it in Excel, did it manually and started helping companies manually. And eventually turned that into software and that eventually became Vanta, which now does hundreds of millions in annual revenue, which is like this pretty crazy success story. And she had this quote on the top of her website, of her personal site that just, it was from the book Art and Fear. And the quote was this, it says,

• 39:36Shaan Puri?

  "The function of the overwhelming majority of work is simply to teach you how to make the small fraction of your art that soars." And like, and I think if you take that mentality, you will have a very different result. Then if you take the mentality of, I need to make something great. And you try to make one thing and then you're sort of disappointed in your results. And you sort of get to see, you go down a discouragement loop.

• 39:56Sam Parr?

  Wow. And so this lady, I listened to that. I didn't realize how impressive she, she might, is she a billionaire now? She might be one of the youngest self-made women billionaires.

• 40:07Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think I started the podcast with like, in the Forbes ranked her like, you know, over Katy Perry and under Oprah or something.

• 40:17Shaan Puri?

  Of like most successful, richest women in the country.

• 40:21Sam Parr?

  I didn't know too much about her. That's pretty cool. I didn't know what Vanta did also. I guess, and frankly, I still don't entirely understand it because I don't know what SOC 2 entirely means. I guess it means compliance for software.

• 40:32Shaan Puri?

  It's one of those subjects that's best stepped around.

• 40:35Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's like a word that you read about all the time in a book, but you never want to say it out loud.

• 40:39Shaan Puri?

  I've read Harry Potter 30 times and when I watched the movie, I was like, Hermione?

• 40:47Shaan Puri?

  What the hell?

• 40:50Shaan Puri?

  It's been 10 years of Hermione.

• 40:54Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. She's impressive. When you meet her, you're like, okay, I get it. You know, sort of has that. What is, what's that word you say? Oh, the oven burns hotter?

• 41:03Sam Parr?

  The oven burns hotter.

• 41:04Shaan Puri?

  Okay, got it. Like you're just wired a little bit better than us in the brain. It's all good. She also was the first investor in Replit early on, which I think if I look at now this like projects thing, she says, "Interactive REPL to teach Python" was one of her projects, which might've been the reason that she invested in Replit first. And I don't know, I'm just guessing there that maybe it had something to do with it. And you know, Replit's now like a, I don't know. What is it? Three, four, or five billion dollar company?

• 41:35Sam Parr?

  Damn dude, Christina's awesome. We should do a follow-up because that was like two years old, I think, that podcast.

• 41:40Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that'd be fun.

• 41:41Sam Parr?

  All right, Sean, I have an announcement. I've been thinking a lot about this and I'm finally ready to announce it. I am resigning from business and I'm starting a new career. And I need Ari to play a clip in order to give some context. News, I just got called out on the Mel Robbins podcast. I'm officially a dating expert. Check it out.

• 41:58Speaker 02

  But one of my favorite people who I really admire is my friend Sarah's husband, Sam Parr. Whenever I talk to Sam about dating, he talks about what he did to make himself a more desirable partner. And he really had a strategy for it. So for example, he said, I think it's really attractive when people have passions. So I'm going to work on developing a hobby that will be interesting to talk about. And he got really into denim. And when he was meeting up with girls, he would say, I'm going to this denim swap this weekend. Let me tell you about Japanese denim. And they That's kind of cool. Yeah, they would find it interesting. He really stood out. He was memorable.

• 42:32Sam Parr?

  World renowned pickup artist.

• 42:36Sam Parr?

  Denim worked, it worked.

• 42:39Shaan Puri?

  I just endorsed you on LinkedIn for this.

• 42:41Sam Parr?

  Oh my gosh, I'm going to be hosting dating seminars over the next couple of months. And if you guys want to sign up, please let me know. I just have to warn you, Sean, I know you're married. Do not walk up to a bunch of women and tell them that you're into denim. Otherwise, you're just going to be booked full with dates.

• 42:56Shaan Puri?

  Right. Yeah.

• 43:00Shaan Puri?

  You seem visibly excited. This is the most excited I've seen you in like six months.

• 43:04Sam Parr?

  It's just so funny. I saw that and I was like, there's no way, like, they're only telling the story because it worked. But if I told you that I walked up to a girl and asked her if she wanted to go to a denim swap meet, like, like, hey princess, want to come see my bug collection?

• 43:23Shaan Puri?

  I like how you doubled down and you're wearing denim today, too. Fast follow.

• 43:27Sam Parr?

  I am what I am. And

• 43:31Shaan Puri?

  You've had fitness influencer, business influencer, now dating influencer. Did I miss one?

• 43:37Sam Parr?

  Professional skateboarder.

• 43:39Shaan Puri?

  Professional casual skateboarder.

• 43:41Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 43:43Shaan Puri?

  White man who can jump.

• 43:46Sam Parr?

  How funny is that? That was that made my day. I've just been walking around my office, asking if anyone needs a mentor for dating.

• 43:54Shaan Puri?

  What's the story with Mel Robbins, by the way? Do you know who? Do you know her backstory?

• 43:59Sam Parr?

  I actually don't have any idea who she is, but she has a ton of followers. What is it?

• 44:02Shaan Puri?

  She used to work for James Courier at their startup. She was like a marketer and then became like this life coach extraordinaire type person. And I think, I mean, I don't know what bridged that transition. Obviously lots of hard work and useful things for people. But I feel like she's a self-made woman. I feel like she decided like, I now shall do self-help. And then she like intentionally went into it and did it. You know what I mean? Like made a pivot into that career.

• 44:33Sam Parr?

  Well, I remember that Rick Marini came on the podcast and who was James's partner. And he said, um, you know, I was just like, my wife was listening to a podcast and I was like, that voice sounds familiar. And he was like, wait, I used to have a intern or a marketing manager named Mel. Is that? Oh, my God, that's the lady who worked for me, Mel Robbins. And he had no idea that she was into this stuff. And so I guess she kind of manifested it. She's a manifest cowboy.

• 45:00Shaan Puri?

  She's got her, the five second rule. You know the Mel Robbins five second rule?

• 45:04Sam Parr?

  Like where you could eat stuff off the floor?

• 45:05Shaan Puri?

  You would think, right? It's world famous. Turns out this is the alternate. So her five second rule, this is her book, um, which is basically if you are procrastinating or you have self doubt. So let's just take an example. You're a guy, you see a cute girl at the cafe. There's that moment where you have to decide, am I going to approach her and say something to her or not? And her rule is basically you count backwards, five, four, three, two, one. And then you just physically move towards doing it before your brain can stop you. So you sort of, the body overrides the brain. You don't let yourself be an over thinker. That one principle is like her most famous principle or most useful thing that has spread, the idea that has spread the furthest.

• 45:47Sam Parr?

  That's been great. I mean, that's a weird coincidence because since I've been a pick-up artist expert for the last 24 hours, I've been teaching this idea of the three-second rule, which is if as long as you see, whenever you see a girl who's cute, you have to go up and talk to her within three seconds. So, great minds take a light there. You have to run.

• 46:03Shaan Puri?

  Doesn't matter the distance. You have three seconds.

• 46:07Sam Parr?

  And the first slide is, I was staring at you and I just wanted to let you know, and then you just say the first thing that comes to your mind.

• 46:12Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 46:14Sam Parr?

  This is, by the way, this is a perfect coincidence that you're talking about manifesting into a self-help guru, because I have a crazy story to tell you.

• 46:21Shaan Puri?

  Wait, before you go there, can I tell you one more five-second rule story? This is just useful to the, you know, if there happens to be a young, single man that listens to this podcast, I know, absurd, but if there was, such a guy, this might be useful. My trainer is telling me this story. So, my trainer is one of the best humans I know. He's also super funny, always in a good mood, gets along with everybody, super fit. He's like incredible. He's a catch. And he's almost-

• 46:46Sam Parr?

  Is he single?

• 46:47Shaan Puri?

  He's single right now, and the crazy thing is, he's so, it's almost like, you know, when people like, I'm gonna work on myself for a little bit, and they like, like Mel Robbins was saying that you did, right? You made yourself a more desirable partner. He just kept doing that, kept investing in himself, made himself the most desirable partner, right? Like, such a great guy. So, I told him, I said, this year, I was like, I got this inkling, I'm gonna introduce you to somebody this year. I have this gut instinct that I'm gonna find the right person for you. I don't know why. Somehow dots are gonna connect. And he's like, I'm here for it. And he goes, I have the crazy story. I was at the gym, like, a year ago, and I saw this girl, and there was this five-second rule moment where like, she made eye contact, I made eye contact, but we were kind of far away. She was in the middle of the set, I was in the middle of the set.

• 47:30Shaan Puri?

  Didn't walk over to her, and I kind of overthought it for a second. And she's like, dude, I'd never do that. But he's like, she was just, she just seemed great. So, he's like, I just, I missed it. He's like, but I told myself, if I ever see that girl again, I'm going up to her. He goes, so yesterday, I'm across the street and I see that same girl at this bus stop. And he's like, I ran across the street, so I run over to her. He's like, I just told her, he goes, he goes, hey, hey, he goes, I gotta tell you this crazy story. I saw you at the gym like a year ago, and at the time, I was too nervous to come up and talk to you. I thought you were really cute, but I just, I fumbled the ball, and I told myself, I said, if I ever see that girl again- I'm definitely gonna come up and talk to her and I just had to come up and say hi.

• 48:13Shaan Puri?

  And she, she loved it and then they went, they went on this date and they went great. And I was like, this is, that is a great story. Cause I feel like every guy kind of has been in that position of the first part of the story. And you can turn the L into a big W by using it, actually. Not like just being ashamed of it or sort of kicking yourself about it, but actually use it as the line. When you go up to the girl, cause you know, it's very flattering.

• 48:34Sam Parr?

  So date one happened?

• 48:36Shaan Puri?

  So date one happened, went well, and yeah, we'll see what happens. But if there are any women out there that we're looking for, the happiest man I know, the guy who's got the best mindset, who is just an absolute joy to be around, hit me up. You'd slide into my DMs. If you're, let's say you're a good wholesome person who likes to have fun, good sense of humor. You're looking to have a family and you just haven't found the right guy yet. Maybe he's the guy for you. Slide into my DMs. I believe I'm connecting the dots this year. It's happening.

• 49:04Sam Parr?

  That's pretty interesting that you're, now you're going from a business person, you're writing a book on creativity.

• 49:09Shaan Puri?

  Mashmaker?

• 49:10Sam Parr?

  To pimp?

• 49:12Shaan Puri?

  Pimp, yeah.

• 49:13Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 49:18Sam Parr?

  That's awesome. Um, all right. How do you feel?

• 49:21Shaan Puri?

  I feel great.

• 49:22Sam Parr?

  I didn't comment on this, but wearing the Ralph Lauren bear sweater, I own a few of them. I've never worn them because I thought you were gonna mock me. And frankly, I think it's great. I think a grown man should wear a teddy bear on their chest once in a while. I'll wear mine next time.

• 49:37Shaan Puri?

  All right. Well, I think on that point, that's it.

• 49:40Sam Parr?

  That's the pod.

• 49:50Sam Parr?

  All right, my friends, I have a new podcast for you guys to check out. It's called Content is Profit and it's hosted by Luis and Fonzie Camayo. After years of building content teams and frameworks for companies like Red Bull and Orange Theory Fitness, Luis and Fonzie are on a mission to bridge the gap between content and revenue. And each episode, you're gonna hear from top entrepreneurs and creators, and you're gonna hear them share their secrets and strategies to turn their content into profit. So you can check out Content is Profit wherever you get your podcasts.