Best of This Week: Feb 14th

Some of the best moments from this week of My First Million. ----- * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. * Want more insights like MFM? Check out Shaan's newsletter. ----- Show Notes: (01:05) - The BTC thieves and Sam's interaction with them (10:30) - Paper cut companies (18:30) - Max Lytvyn on how he knew Grammarly could be a big opportunity (23:25) - How to avoid accidentally over-indexing ----- Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. ----- Additional episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

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

• 0:13Ben?

  Hello, welcome to another episode of My First Million Best of the Week Edition. This is Ben Wilson, also known as Producer Ben, and this episode is some of the best clips from our episodes throughout this last week. Nothing new, just a short, rapid-fire recap of everything that went on. To start off with, we've got a clip about the billion-dollar Bitcoin thieves. So Sean had written about this on Milk Road, his newsletter, which you should go subscribe to, it's really good, and he had the full backstory about these people who had stolen billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin. And then strangely, Sam had actually met one of them. It was a husband-wife team, and Sam had run into one of them at a party back in the day. And many of you pointed out that it seems like a strange coincidence that Sam also met Ross Ulbricht, another billion-dollar criminal. And so is Sam actually

• 0:57Ben?

  a criminal mastermind? Is he a real-life Danny Ocean? I don't know, but enjoy this clip where Sam and Sean break down the story of the billion-dollar Bitcoin thieves.

• 1:07Sam Parr?

  I don't even entirely understand what happened, but I have a backstory about the people.

• 1:12Shaan Puri?

  If you read today's edition of the Milk Road, you will get the full backstory and 10 bullet points. So here's what happened. 2016, this crypto exchange called Bitfinex got hacked. And at the time, I think like 120,000 Bitcoin got stolen, that was like 70 million dollars got stolen. And it was like, it was bad. That was like a big hack. The price of Bitcoin that week dropped by 40%. So it was like, it caused like this huge, you know, like a fear shock in the market. But the thing about Bitcoin is Bitcoin is on a public ledger, right? Like it's a, it's a public blockchain. So everybody could see the coins. Everybody saw, oh, the coins are in this wallet. And like, and so all the other exchanges were like, look, this is bad for the industry. We will try to prevent,

• 1:56Shaan Puri?

  like if that wallet tries to cash this out, we won't let them cash out the money. So for many years, that money kind of just sat in those wallets or was moving in like really small, small transactions back and forth between like a web of wallets. Clearly, somebody was trying to like launder the money, essentially. They were trying...

• 2:16Sam Parr?

  But but how how did he how did they even get it the first place?

• 2:19Shaan Puri?

  So there I don't know. I don't know what the exploit was that let them hack the accounts and they didn't hack all the accounts of Bitfinex. They actually just hacked like some of the whale accounts. So they were able to take 120,000 Bitcoin from not all the accounts. And the funny thing is Bitfinex didn't have the money to like make those users whole. So what they did was they they reduced everybody on Bitfinex's balance by 33% or something to like balance it out. Something like horror like imagine if your bank did that, that would be like insane. I'd be like, oh, they robbed that guy's vault and you're taking my money away to like even it out for everybody like, no, thank you. So anyways, it was bad. And there's a reason why Bitfinex is not like, you know, the biggest exchange now. So anyways, that the money kind of sat there now, fast forward five and a half years go by.

• 3:02Shaan Puri?

  Last week, people start to notice bigger transactions coming from the the Bitfinex hack wallets. And so they like, there's these alerts on Twitter like whale alert, whale alert. It's like the coins are moving, the coins are moving 100,000 dollars, a million dollars of the coins are moving 10 million dollars, whatever. And so and so the Fed go or not the Fed, sorry, Department of Justice goes kicks down a door in New York into this this this husband and wife couple's house. And they look like, you know, you're complete like average Joe clean cut like would they? This is not like, you know, doesn't look like a grimy criminal mastermind operation. And I'll explain a little bit more about that in a second, the funny bit about that.

• 3:45Shaan Puri?

  But basically, they seize like their computers, they they find a bunch of burner cell phones. They find like a bag of like $50,000 of cash. They find a bunch of like the hardware wallets that had the Bitcoins in them. And then they found like folders on their computer that were like fake passport ideas and like

• 4:04Shaan Puri?

  places to go, places to run away, like they found like folders that said that shit on their computers. And and they seized three and a half billion dollars worth of Bitcoin because the price of Bitcoin has gone up so much. So that 70 million has become three and a half billion dollars worth. And so these guys were trying to launch, they they don't think these are the hackers, but they were trying to launder that money. They may have been the hackers, I don't know. They that's not proven, but they were trying to launder the money. And the DOJ had been like, if you've seen that meme of Charlie from It's Always Sunny where they had like the cork board. And he's like trying to like find the find the the crime or solve the crime. That's what they had been doing because they had they had this web of all these wallets. And finally, they found that, oh, it's trying to cash out in this wallet owned by this guy. Ilya Dutch Lichtenstein or whatever.

• 4:49Sam Parr?

  But how, how did, what, what type of idiot would use his name?

• 4:53Shaan Puri?

  Eventually you need to get the money out. And so the problem is like, they were trying to get the money out through like Walmart gift cards. They were buying like $500 Walmart gift cards with Bitcoin. They were doing like PlayStation games. They were like, they were trying all these small things, but they could never move the bulk of the money. So if you want to move like in mass, you got to do something that had, that lets you move size. And usually those.

• 5:14Sam Parr?

  Could you buy an NFT and then sell it?

• 5:17Shaan Puri?

  No, you could do that either. You need to get the money out of the wallet. That's the problem. So, so, so the problem, so in order to do that, there's like an off ramp, right? How do you get it into, you know, US dollars? For example, if that's what you wanted to do. And, you know, he left it there for five and a half years and they were probably living off it and spending it in some ways, but like, you wanted to actually like, get a lot of it out and get, get it, uh, and remove the paper trail of the blockchain. You need to get it as an off ramp, but to get it as an off ramp, you have like a, um, you know, your, like these exchanges, they, they require you to upload your license and like, they have laws, they have to comply with called KYC, know your customer. And so eventually they found that somehow the DOJ, they didn't explain exactly, but they, they identified that the money was moving towards a wallet that was owned by a known person.

• 6:03Shaan Puri?

  That's how they ended up finding these guys. Now, the funny part is.

• 6:06Sam Parr?

  That's awesome. So that. Well, so the, I, when I read about this, I was like, wait, that name sounds so familiar. Both their names sound familiar. So the guy, it was, his name is Ilya, I L Y A. I think it was like a very like weird name. His last name is Lichtenstein. So he spoke at the first HustleCon. I never talked to him, but, um, he had a company called Mixrank, which was just a normal startup, went through Y C. And he spoke at HustleCon and then his girlfriend or wife, she was a copywriter. And I remember talking a little bit with her because she, her name's Heather Morgan, I think. And she had a, um, a website all about writing sales emails.

• 6:43Shaan Puri?

  Totally. Is that right? Do you remember her? Before the hack.

• 6:45Sam Parr?

  She had like a red dress.

• 6:46Shaan Puri?

  She had like a LinkedIn post on like five hacks for your, your cover letter for your job interview. Like, you know, like that sort of thing. And so, yeah, she was doing that. She and so they and the funny thing is like, the reason the internet kind of went crazy with it was because here you had two very unlikely characters. So, um, we had a bunch of friends text us or text me because I was writing this, this edition of the Milk Road. And I was like, um, anybody know this guy? And you, you knew him, but some other people knew him. They're like, dude, you would never get vibes of like, this guy might just go launder billions of dollars. It was like, smart, like, kind of quiet, like engineer type.

• 7:24Sam Parr?

  He like, he like showed very little emotion. No, I did not think that this guy like.

• 7:28Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. And, and then her, she's like this, like super strange Kanye West level weird. You know, like person, she, she basically, she had like an alter ego that was called Razzle Khan. And Razzle Khan was her rap name. And then she has like these super fucking cringey rap songs on YouTube. Like, dude, okay, I have, you know, I have, you know, I think it'd be cool to be a rapper. But if I hear myself, there's no way I'm publishing that because it sounds so bad. And so.

• 7:59Sam Parr?

  It's horrible. It, it's so bad. The, the top comment was Paris Hilton. I'm going to prove to everyone that you can have, uh, that having money means you can rap good. And then it said Heather Morgan, hold my beer.

• 8:12Shaan Puri?

  I didn't even know Paris Hilton has, has like a rap song.

• 8:16Shaan Puri?

  So, yeah, yeah, there's just like, she's like one of the strangest characters. Like I watched, I, I went deep dude for this. I was writing this thing and I was like, oh, let me get some examples. And then I couldn't look away because like the, the train wreck.

• 8:26Sam Parr?

  Dude, it's weird. She's so uncomfortable.

• 8:28Shaan Puri?

  And like she, she like forced everybody to like, they built like this golden mini Taj Mahal that she sat in and then her bridesmaids lifted it up on her shoulder and brought her in. But even the, the audience at her wedding is like uncomfortably clapping, like offbeat. Cause they're like, uh, is this, is this normal? There's like, and there's like clearly only 14 people in the room. And then she does a rap performance at the wedding that was like equally cringey. And she's just like humping the air. It was just super weird.

• 8:58Sam Parr?

  To the guy, Elliot.

• 9:00Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, he goes by Dutch, I guess.

• 9:04Sam Parr?

  Dude, this freaking guy, uh, I'm looking at these pictures.

• 9:09Sam Parr?

  That's hilarious. This woman's really hard to look at.

• 9:14Shaan Puri?

  That should have been her cringe city. That would have been like, okay, I get it. You're gonna be the cringiest. Cool. Uh, that's like Henry C. Hudo. The king of cringe. Uh, yeah, that's what she should have done. Like, it is super strange. But, um, but yeah, basically they recovered it. And so now what's gonna, anyways, there's a bunch of interesting little bits to it. So the DOJ is going to give the money back to Bitfinex, it looks like. Bitfinex had, when they, they launched their own token at one point in time called the Leo token. That's like used in their, if you trade in their exchange, it'll give you a discount using the Leo token. So they had to put in a thing when they launched a Leo token, which was like, hey, if we ever recover anything from that hack,

• 9:52Shaan Puri?

  we'll use 80, up to 80% of it to buy back and burn our Leo token, which will cause like the, you know, Leo holders to benefit from if we ever recover from this. And so now they're going to get like three and a half billion dollars to buy back. So the price of Leo token, like shot up like whatever 60% in 24 hours. Cause people are like, oh wow, that's going to be a lot. But they said, we're not going to just cause a bunch of sell pressure in the market. We're going to do a controlled sale over like a multi-year period. Um, so that it's like scheduled and doesn't like affect the Bitcoin market or whatever.

• 10:24Sam Parr?

  God, this is such a good story. This would make, this is

• 10:28Shaan Puri?

  That's what everyone was saying is like, here comes, you know, incoming, incoming Netflix stock.

• 10:33Ben?

  All right. Next up, we've got a story from Sean about a pitch meeting he was in and a very small and simple problem that he saw got solved. And this led him down this idea of what he calls paper cut companies. These are companies that solve pretty small and simple, but very annoying and persistent problems, and they can be extremely valuable. Check it out.

• 10:50Shaan Puri?

  So this founder was pitching me his company. And, uh, he was just like screen sharing. So he was showing me a product demo. And it was like a, it's like a data analytics, uh, tool. And he was like, yeah, so like, check this out. If I go to Excel and then he like, he just opens up the browser. I never see this before. He goes, he's opened up the browser. He goes sheets new, enter. And then he opened up a Google sheet, like a blank spreadsheet. And I go, I go, whoa, whoa, whoa, what's just, what was that? And he goes, oh yeah, I'll tell you guys, I'll show you later. Cause he was like, cause I was, he was so annoyed with me just going on tangents about every random thing he was doing. Like he wanted to be show me his product. Not the fact that you could type sheets new and save myself like.

• 11:28Shaan Puri?

  I fucking Google, I Google Google Drive, then I get to drive, then I click new, then I go down the menu, then I find spreadsheet, then I click new spreadsheet, then I get to a sheet. It's like this annoying thing I do six times a day. And, um, and so just seeing this was like, well, that's awesome. And it reminded me that there's a whole company out there called GoLinks. Have you ever heard of GoLinks?

• 11:49Sam Parr?

  No, what is that?

• 11:50Shaan Puri?

  So, so I saw this in a, um, or when I was working at Twitch, the kind of like whoever the, I don't even know his job title, like VP of everything, the, the kind of that number two guy at Twitch. My boss, this guy Dan, he was like, he's like, God, we have so many documents in this company. And now I just have bookmarks and tabs just with like all these docs open at all times in this company. He's like, and if I ever want to look up like, oh, the annual plan, it takes me like five minutes every time I want to find it. He goes, I don't know why we don't just use GoLinks. And what GoLinks does is it lets you set up a thing that's like go dot annual plan. Or like, you know, you could just basically type in like a human readable link and you could anchor it to any doc. And so let's say, you know, you've, that's anchored to the 2021 doc.

• 12:35Shaan Puri?

  Oh, now it's 2022. Cool. We just swapped the link out. We just, I said, we like, we could still always type go slash, you know, uh, annual plan or go slash plan. And go slash pan will now take us to the 2022 doc. And I saw this, I was like, wow, this is actually so useful to just be able to quickly find and like revoke access properly to, to different documents. And so, um, so I really like this. Most people haven't heard of this and I think it's a very expensive tool. I think it's like a pretty like enterprisy tool. I see at the top here, they raised a

• 13:05Sam Parr?

  27 million.

• 13:06Shaan Puri?

  27 million dollar series A. Okay. So doing pretty well, obviously. So I think somebody could build, this is like a very simple product. I think somebody could build a GoLinks for like the startup level world.

• 13:17Sam Parr?

  More like you, bro.

• 13:18Shaan Puri?

  Indie hackers.

• 13:19Sam Parr?

  I just invested in one.

• 13:21Shaan Puri?

  Oh, really? What is it?

• 13:22Sam Parr?

  Yes. So I told you about it too.

• 13:24Shaan Puri?

  I swear.

• 13:25Sam Parr?

  I, I told you about it. It's called Nira. N I R.

• 13:29Shaan Puri?

  I'm in this too.

• 13:30Sam Parr?

  Oh, I, so that's the same thing, right?

• 13:33Shaan Puri?

  No, so this is, this is slightly different. I don't think they do the, the shortcuts to the links. Maybe this is a feature they should add. What they are doing, what Nira is doing is We all, companies have all these docs and then people get fired or they move teams or whatever, but people still have access. It's like, oh yeah, I still got this link. It just opens up the, like, the numbers for the company or like, yeah, this contractor we hired still has access to all of our files, but like, who the heck can go audit and keep up and scrub the access for this thing? That's like, it's like a very big problem. Like your company's most sensitive data is all in the cloud. And then the cloud, like, access is shared amongst like so many people and there's no central place to see who sees what. And so Nero's building that. They're building the who has access to what?

• 14:18Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but I think the link thing is a feature.

• 14:20Shaan Puri?

  Maybe, yeah, maybe it is a feature. I'm saying I think it's a feature that can be standalone because adopting something like Nero is like something that's going to go through my like, you know, chief security officer type of thing. Like this is going to go through our CIO or CSO. Whereas this GoLinks thing is something that like, you know, me and my one person who I work with, like, we're both just irritated with these super long, ugly Google Docs links that like, um, you know, like we can't find anything. It takes forever to find stuff.

• 14:48Sam Parr?

  They, they have a free plan.

• 14:51Shaan Puri?

  Nero does.

• 14:52Sam Parr?

  No, GoLinks.

• 14:53Shaan Puri?

  Oh, GoLinks does. Yeah, yeah. I think, yeah, I don't know what, at what point they, they do this, but I don't know why this is not more popular. This is like a, like a real problem. And then this also just got me thinking like, what else is like this? What, what are the other problems that are like these? Like, I call them paper cut companies. So, um, you know, death by a thousand paper cuts. So like, what's a thing that's irritating? But you do it so often that it's just a constant paper cut. That's just annoys you. Screenshots is another one that like, sharing screenshots was one that was a big paper cut. Uh, I invested in this company called Bubbles that tries to make that better. Loom makes that better.

• 15:29Sam Parr?

  I remember Bubbles. Is it working?

• 15:31Shaan Puri?

  Uh, I don't know. I haven't caught up with them in a little while. I know it was working initially. They raised a bunch of money, uh, from that, but I feel like it hasn't taken over like, you know, the Loom market yet, but maybe it's going into a different market. I'm not.

• 15:41Sam Parr?

  Dude, the screen, the screenshot one's a good idea. Also, the copy and paste. The copy and paste, I've been thinking for years. How can I optimize a copy?

• 15:49Shaan Puri?

  Better clipboard.

• 15:50Sam Parr?

  Yes, a better clipboard. I've been thinking about that for a long time. Um, it's been, that's always an interesting thing to me is, is, is the clipboard. That, that's really intriguing, but the, the problem with these types of products is you have to truly be inventive. I don't particularly have that muscle to like be that creative. So people who invent things like this or like even like, um, What's that guy named Howie who's got the huge company, Airtable?

• 16:14Shaan Puri?

  Airtable.

• 16:16Sam Parr?

  Creating something like Airtable, which is basically kind of like Excel, but different and better, or even creating like a Notion. I don't like, these people kind of are geniuses who can like come up with like these weird product features and like, they just know that like, if you hover your mouse over this, it needs like that. They're so complicated. They're so complicated. It's pretty amazing.

• 16:37Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, they, they're big on details. And I'll tell you the, the best thing I heard about details like this, I'm, I'm not detail oriented. Like if, if this camera showed my desk, you would see like, yeah, I'm obviously not organized or detail oriented. Like everything is sloppy. Even my camera right now is actually slightly crooked, but I just don't care. I just don't care about details and pretty much anything I do.

• 16:57Sam Parr?

  So that's why you're talking with like your neck a little.

• 16:59Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's why I like often do this.

• 17:02Shaan Puri?

  I end every podcast with a crick.

• 17:05Shaan Puri?

  But you know, like, I'm not a sweat the details person, but I remember the first time I used Slack, I used Slack really early on. It was like in beta. I should have invested in it. I just wasn't an investor back then. I didn't think about it that way. But I used it and I remember the first thing, one thing I did was I was telling our designer, hey, yeah, here's the color for like our logo or whatever, or they sent it to me and they just sent the hex code. So like, you know, heck, you know, like pound, CFF or you know, 373. And it just created, it turned it into a small, tiny color swatch. And I remember thinking, why the fuck did they do that? Like what level of care went into caring that the hex code would just auto format with a little swatch next to it?

• 17:48Sam Parr?

  That's what I mean.

• 17:48Shaan Puri?

  Nobody would do that unless you were like a real product designer who sweat the details, who used this product all the time and just dedicated yourself to like, anytime you could just scratch your own itch and irritate, you know, like remove one paper cut from your own user experience, you're gonna do it. And so this is why also working on your own products, working on products that you want to be the user of helps because you'll get so annoyed at the paper cuts, you'll just get rid of them yourself.

• 18:12Sam Parr?

  All right. Next up, we've got a clip from Max Litvin, the founder of Grammarly. You might have Grammarly installed as a Chrome extension. If not, you really should install it. It's great and very helpful. I use it all the time. But what you might not know is that Grammarly, this Chrome extension is actually a $13 billion company. And on this clip, Sam talks to Max about how he knew this kind of random market could actually be a really big opportunity. What were your girl goals early on like when you started the business for like man I think this can make ten million dollars a year and provide a good lifestyle or like I think this could or was it like I think this could be like a multi-billion dollar thing like what were your girl goals early on?

• 18:51Speaker 03

  I think we decided that it could be a multi-billion dollar business during our conversations with Brad partially. Uh, so kind of Alex and I, we, we, we hoped that it could be, but then once we started talking with Brad about valuation plans and all that. Um, when he was thinking about joining, then it become pretty clear that yes, there is a multi-billion dollar market out there. Uh, are we gonna capture it or not to be, to be determined, but um, at that point, but uh, there is definitely an opportunity.

• 19:29Speaker 03

  So the sizable opportunity became clear fairly early, uh, but uh, past there that, that took years.

• 19:37Sam Parr?

  What was the vision that may or what, what did you see that made you feel that it could be a multi-billion dollar opportunity and what was the vision and were there any? Was there any numbers that you saw early on that would said like, oh my gosh, there's something here?

• 19:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I think the breakthrough moment was when we saw that it is possible to help not just professional writers, people who write for a living every day, but also help casual writers or people who write as part of their job or part of their life, but not like a key part. So writing is not their like main product. They're no, no like novelists or, or researchers who are published and so on. So when we saw that it's possible to make a product that's useful for everybody else, uh, then it clicked. Uh, and the very simple formula, if you look at amount of time we spend communicating, creating knowledge,

• 20:35Speaker 03

  uh, as a humanity, as all people in the world, it is a huge percentage of our time and it's increasing because we spend less time doing things with our hands. Manufacturing is being automated. It's not like we were doing it manually anymore, uh, as much.

• 20:51Speaker 03

  So if you take this time that we spend communicating and creating knowledge and make it even 1% more effective, the impact is in trillions, not even billions. So can we do something that makes communication 1% more effective on average for everybody? That doesn't sound impossible. That sounds like something is doable. That's doable. So.

• 21:15Sam Parr?

  I had that same insight, except I did it in such a horrible, worse way. So basically, I learned how to be a copywriter. So like I read books on copywriting and like on persuasive writing. And my theory was like, oh my gosh, like with texting or like online dating, I was single at the time and 21. So it was all about like dating. I'm like, oh man, if I weren't learn how to write better in my messages to girls who I match with, like my life is going to be better. And then I was like, wait a minute, if I learn how to write better, I could sell more stuff. If I learn how to write better, I can make people feel emotions about like this cause that I want them. I'm like, just writing better, like it changes,

• 21:55Sam Parr?

  it makes it life more practical, but also it, it makes you think better. So like if you can, if you have an idea for something and you're forced to write it out, you'll see all the holes in idea and you'll, and you'll force yourself to like lay it out. And so I was like, oh, I'll teach people how to write better. And so I created a course on how to write better. Of course, like obviously creating a software product was out of my league, but like that was clearly the, the better move to do. But the same insight was like, everything that we do is via a text, whether it's a text message or an email or a website. And even if it's via like the spoken word, I have to write that anyway.

• 22:37Sam Parr?

  So like writing is like the, the most important thing that you can master. I just wish I would have approached it in a software way as opposed to just selling a $300 course.

• 22:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, software is more scalable. That's true. And actually, what you said about writing, it also applies to speech. We, when we do user research, we noticed that people who use Grammarly repeatedly adopt patterns of communication, more effective patterns of communication, and translate it to non-written communication as well. So for example, if Grammarly keeps suggesting that you don't use kind of a wordy or vague or weak sentence structures, you stop or reduce use of them in speech as well.

• 23:20Shaan Puri?

  So I

• 23:20Speaker 03

  So kind of good habits rub off and translate to other modes of communication.

• 23:26Ben?

  All right. Finally, we've got a clip from Sam and Sean. They were talking about whether the Olympics were a waste of time. Sean thinks that the Olympics are a waste of time for many people. And that's not what I'm going to post here. But what this is, is the discussion they had afterwards, where Sean talks about this idea of not accidentally over-indexing on something that doesn't actually matter to you. And I think it's a really valuable point and something important to consider. Let's give it a listen.

• 23:49Shaan Puri?

  I think that there's like, you know, like, for example, if my kid was like, had the potential, if you told me right now, hey, your kid has the potential to be the greatest, you know, like at whatever, the greatest third person in the bobsled in, in the country. But here's what you have to do every day, every weekend, for the, you know, the, the next 20 years of their life is going to go into optimizing their body and mind to be able to do this, which essentially is what goes into like becoming an Olympian, right? You're trying to become the best in the world at an arbitrary game that was made up. And you have to sacrifice a huge amount of your life and focus and attention and energy and talents.

• 24:33Shaan Puri?

  You decide to invest into this. And the thing you get out is Character building, life lessons. And the other thing that is, you know, potentially a moment of fame when, if you won, if you actually did achieve the thing and you have the, you know, sort of the, the, the knowing inside your heart that, that this was, this was good. So like, you know, would I rather be, you know, Steve Prefontaine? This, you know, this good looking mustached runner guy, or would I rather have been Phil Knight? I'd rather be Phil Knight. I think actually he's the perfect example. What did Prefontaine get out of? You know, Nike, nothing. And so

• 25:08Sam Parr?

  He actually, uh,

• 25:09Shaan Puri?

  Where's he now, right?

• 25:10Sam Parr?

  He, he died three years into founding the company from a drinking and driving accident. So yeah, you're, you're right.

• 25:16Shaan Puri?

  Okay. Joke's not so funny now.

• 25:18Sam Parr?

  It didn't work out.

• 25:20Shaan Puri?

  Wait, so he was actually a co-founder of Nike or he just inspired them?

• 25:23Sam Parr?

  Um, he, he, he was, he was in their crew and he was their first sponsored athlete and like their fifth or 10th employee or something like that. And if you ask Phil Knight, who, you know, what's, who's Nike's mentor or sorry, who's Nike's mascot? They'll say it's Prefontaine.

• 25:39Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So anyways, my point is, uh, I think that there's a lot of things that are fun and they're best done as hobbies versus trying to become the best in the world at it. Right? Uh, I can play, you know, Call of Duty and have a bunch of fun with my friends. Um, I can even play, you know, the competitive side of things just because I like to scratch that itch and I play a couple of hours a week, but once I try to become the best in the world at it, the level of sort of sacrifice and over indexing on that thing. And hey, you could do it. You could over index on anything. You can try to become the fastest typer in the world. You could try to become the best photographer of brown leaves in the world. And, you know, like you could do all those things. So choose carefully. Choose which one you want, what you, what you really want to go into.

• 26:19Sam Parr?

  It's like people who dedicate their lives to be an average D3 basketball player. It's like, it could work. You could, you could, you could go to the NBA, but like odds are the papers or the writings on the, on the wall, like it's probably not going to happen. So maybe you should actually like study a real major instead of basket weaving or communications.

• 26:36Shaan Puri?

  Right. And if you enjoy it, fantastic. If you're enjoying every step of the way, fantastic. But a lot of things in my experience are most enjoyable when done as hobbies versus when done with the competitive pursuit of becoming the absolute best in the world at it. Uh, are the guy used to work out of his, his dojo. He used to tell me that. I was like, oh yeah, I really like this. So I might start a business around it. He goes, oh yeah, Dave Grossblatt, he goes, easiest way to fuck up a hobby is turn it into a job. And I remember just hearing that and being like, That's interesting. I actually never really thought about that. Yeah, actually, there are some things that are really fun as hobbies that become really unfun as jobs, right? It's like working at a Cinnabon, right? It's like, oh, I love eating Cinnabon. Working at a Cinnabon, smelling a Cinnabon, eating free Cinnabon anytime you want. No, it's not so fun.

• 27:22Ben?

  All right. That does it. Thanks for listening. Have a great weekend.