Best of This Week: March 4th

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: (01:30) - David Friedberg on the power of thinking big (05:15) - Raoul Pal on network effects and crypto (10:45) - Sam and Shaan discussing how the Russian oligarchs came to power ----- Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. ----- Additional episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

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

• 0:13Ben?

  Hello and welcome to another episode of My First Million Best of the Week Edition. This is Ben Wilson, also known as Producer Ben. In this episode, we have some of the best clips from our episodes throughout the week. Nothing new, just a short, rapid-fire recap. To start off with, we have David Friedberg, founder of Cana, talking about the power of thinking big, and more importantly, how to actually do it. How to think big and why more people don't do it. Let's give it a listen.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  Your team is only as good as you challenge them to be. And so, if you're not challenging your team and you're asking them, "What do you think you can do?", they're only going to achieve a fraction of what's possible. Great coaches and great leaders need to kind of... And technology leaders in particular have this unique ability to, I think, understand the technology and leap several iterations forward, to speak to the team about where we're headed, and then bring the timelines in. And that makes for an incredible sense of urgency and outcome.

• 1:07Ben?

  Why do you think most people don't do that? So, thinking big, that sounds easy enough to understand, sounds fun to do. I could hear that advice. Why do you think that's hard advice to follow and practice?

• 1:18Speaker 01

  It's a really important question. So, one of our principles at TPB is "Dare to Dream." So, it's all about creating that audacious perspective. How big can this be? How big should we be? And what happens when you set a big goal? Like, let's say I have to go climb to the top of a mountain, and I can't see the path from here to the top of the mountain. There's 100 permutations or 1,000 permutations on how you might get up that mountain. And you don't know which path is going to work. Most people that are smart have been successful. And most people that have been successful are not used to not succeeding. And so the orientation at that point is that success is all about doing something and getting an action that you expect out of what you just did.

• 2:00Speaker 01

  And so you want, you are inclined naturally as a smart person, as a successful person, to only do things that you know what you're gonna get as an outcome. And guess what that does? That limits your horizon. So then you end up saying, "I'm not gonna take the more circuitous, challenging route or path that might get me to the top of the mountain, but I can see that this particular path gets me, you know, a quarter of the way up the mountain." And that may not, and you might know, however, that that means you're giving up going to the top of the mountain, but at least you know for sure that if you do X, you're gonna get Y. And I see this all the time. I see this all the time at businesses where the teams end up compromising on their big vision, and they compromise on the moonshot because they're more likely to succeed and

• 2:44Speaker 01

  they feel more comfortable taking a shorter range, narrower horizon, and minimizing the opportunity set significantly and saying, "I'm just gonna go do this, because I know if I do X, I'm gonna get Y." And that feels comfortable, and I know it's gonna happen. And so they minimize the dare-to-dream circumstance. And then they always say, "Well, you know what? We'll come back and dream big later." But guess what happens? Let's say you're thinking about, um, I'll give you a very specific example, because this relates to the business we're announcing this week, Cana.com, which is our molecular beverage printer. But early on, there was a hard push to say, "Look, we know restaurant owners will buy this device." I don't know if every consumer's gonna buy this device. It might be too expensive, it might not taste good enough, consumers are so, you know, fickle.

• 3:27Speaker 01

  If we make a device for restaurants, we know that there's an economic advantage, there's an ROI enterprise-based sale. Let's go sell in restaurants. And we'll make a bigger device so it can hold more, and we don't have to worry about shrinking and getting all the technology into a tiny form factor that fits on a kitchen countertop. The problem is, if you do that, and you start selling to restaurants... You've now significantly minimized the opportunity to go into the consumer channel because you now have a customer and the customer is the restaurant and the restaurant's going to say, "I want this feature and I want this feature and I want this feature and I want you to do this for me." And all of a sudden, your whole team is going to be inundated with product and feature requests that focus on that much smaller, much narrower market. You're going to end up going deeper and deeper into that market and you're going to lose out on the opportunity to go build for the big market, to go build for the 100x market that can actually

• 4:11Speaker 01

  change the world and improve the problems that we're trying to address with this business. And so, you know, I've seen this at many different businesses where taking on a lot of technical risk, taking on a moonshot project is often foregone and you end up, you know, trading into a much smaller pie and a much smaller opportunity. And then you often miss out on that bigger opportunity. And so, I think it's really important for entrepreneurs to continue to dream big and find aligned capital and aligned shareholders to let you dream big and shoot for those bigger, higher risk opportunities because if they work, they're 100x.

• 4:46Ben?

  All right. Next up, we got a selection from an interview with Raoul Pal, a former hedge fund manager turned entrepreneur. And Raul is someone who's really interesting. After he had made it kind of big as a hedge fund manager, he put all of his liquid net worth into crypto and managed 10x's money or something like that. And so, on this clip, Raul is talking about how network effects ensure the success of crypto going forward.

• 5:09Speaker 02

  You know, you notice certain characteristics like crypto tends to be exponential in price. So you put it under logarithmic chart, it starts to make sense. You know, you look at things like copper and lumber, they tend to be mean reverting assets because they get met by excess supply with high prices lead to excess supply. So right now with oil at 100 bucks, everybody wants to make as much oil as possible. So the price comes down over time. It doesn't happen with crypto because you can't. So you need to understand the structure of markets, where the sentiment is. Is it overly bearish? Like a day like today, it got overly bearish. And so, suddenly you start to see a reversal. So these kind of things are interesting. But my big discovery and why I really started loading up on Ethereum was another chart, which was a understanding that Metcalfe's Law...

• 5:57Speaker 02

  Was the primary driver of all crypto markets and in fact, almost all of the tech stocks that we've known today.

• 6:04Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 6:05Speaker 02

  And once you realize that these are basically networks, and once you realize that crypto are networks where you actually own the network, so Facebook is a great network stock and it works perfectly on a log chart and it's an exponential, does all the things as you imagine, you can value it in Metcalfe's law terms, but the fundamental difference is shareholders and network users are not aligned. The shareholders make the money, the network users get the utility. Along comes crypto, you marry the network user with the owner. Okay, now you've got network effects upon network effects. It's like behavioral economics.

• 6:41Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 6:42Speaker 02

  Man of heaven.

• 6:43Shaan Puri?

  Religion meets Metcalfe's law, right? It's like, now I'm tribal about the thing.

• 6:49Speaker 02

  It's religion meets capitalism. It's basically what it is, right? So that is incredibly powerful. So I start looking at the fact that Bitcoin and Ethereum charts just at different points when they, at the same point in the adoption cycle were remarkably similar, and then it dawned on me is they're all the bloody same thing. They're all about adoption. So then, so if you look at it and if you're honest with yourself, Ethereum, if you think about Metcalfe's law, it's about the number of users and then the kind of connections between the users and the applications built to create those connections. Well, Bitcoin's kind of a one-sided one, which is a bunch of people own it as a store of value, like gold, nothing wrong with that, but there's not many applications built in it.

• 7:34Speaker 02

  When you look at Ethereum, it's like, holy shit. I mean, this is like the internet.

• 7:37Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 7:38Speaker 02

  That moment is like, okay, this is far superior a bet. And so that's why I took that bet and then I eventually shifted majority into Ethereum and then took other bets in the space to express macro views.

• 7:54Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's funny. I have one tenth of the intelligence of you, but I did the exact same pattern. So, you know, heard about it in 2013, bought a little bit, dabbled, sold during when I went to a wedding and my aunt was telling me about how great Bitcoin and Ethereum was. I was like, oh, it's probably a bubble 2017, 2018, sold for a nice profit, was patting myself on the back. You know, in retrospect, worst trade I ever made, should have just held everything. You know, started buying back in, in 2019, 2020, I kind of announced that I've, I had moved 25% of all my liquid net worth into the thing, but that was right before, you know, another, another run up. And so that became quickly 50, 60%. And, and, you know, peers and some people are telling

• 8:37Shaan Puri?

  you, you're crazy. I'm sure you had the same. And same thing, you know, why are you betting on this? Are you just kind of speculating? And I said, no, like, basically, I spent my whole career studying the power of network effects, right? I'm trying to build marketplaces and social networks in Silicon Valley, because I know that a network effect is the most powerful force imaginable. And, and then I see this chart, this adoption chart of this new money network. I said, well, if this, if the, if the social network was worth X, and the information network was worth Y, and then the merchant network, which is like, you know, basically Amazon, it was worth, you know, Z, then, then this thing is going to be, the money network's going to be worth a lot. I can tell you that. And so I was like, I didn't know much more than that, but I just knew, if you can bet early in a network effect, that's still going through,

• 9:21Shaan Puri?

  it's kind of like, you know, adoption curve, you know, you'll do pretty well. And so that was kind of my, my, my bet, coming from a completely, you know, sort of a different, different take, but ended up at sort of the same conclusion. And I remember being impressed that you were talking about network effects, because I didn't really see a lot of people in kind of traditional finance talking about that at all. And I was like, they're missing the point, you know?

• 9:43Speaker 02

  Really one of the first people to really start saying, unless you understand network effects, you don't understand what this is at all. Because everyone was

• 9:53Ben?

  And finally, we've got Sam and Sean talking about the Russian oligarchs. These are a handful of billionaires in Russia who control not only the economy and a bunch of the money in Russia, but also a lot of the power and the politics as well. So Sam is going over how it is that these oligarchs got their money and their power.

• 10:09Sam Parr?

  So something that I've always been interested in is the Russian oligarchs. So have you ever studied those folks?

• 10:17Shaan Puri?

  Not studied, but you know, okay, tell me about it.

• 10:20Sam Parr?

  Okay, so this starts, I'm reading a thing, so you're gonna see me look off. This starts on November 3rd, 1995, in a remote Siberian town called Surgat. Basically, what happened in this small cabin, an auction took place for the right to lend the cash-strapped Russian government tens of millions of dollars. So basically, in 95, the Russian government wasn't doing so hot, and they needed money. And so they got these banks to come to this meeting, and they said, "We need some money. We need to borrow some money, and also, as collateral, we're gonna put up shares of some of the large state-owned companies."

• 11:00Sam Parr?

  Because at this point, Russia was basically going from being a communist nation to being a private country, and so they still had some like state-owned oil companies, mineral companies, basically like if you think of ExxonMobil, they like, the government like owned that, and at this point, they were trying to figure out, "How do we make this so private individuals can do this?" And so, at this meeting, basically only two bidders showed up, and if more bidders wanted to come, it was kind of a pain in the ass, because conveniently, there were no more flights. The airport shut down, and you couldn't even book a flight to come into this small town. By the way, your camera's, okay, you're there.

• 11:42Sam Parr?

  And so basically, what happened at this like small cabin is, one company made a bid to buy a, or to loan money to the government. They loaned, they loaned something like $500 million, and that was like $100,000 above the opening bid, so people were bidding to loan money. And so this bank loaned money to the government, and then the government had to pay back the loan at a certain point, like something like a year later. And if they didn't... The bank then was given the collateral, so the shares in this company to auction off, and they could keep 30% of the profits. So obviously, the government didn't pay back the money. And there's like a lot of like wondering why they didn't pay it back.

• 12:27Sam Parr?

  Basically, the idea is that the current president was like, obviously, this is all like, we're all planning this, so don't pay this back and give us a little bit, whatever. So they don't pay back.

• 12:38Shaan Puri?

  You're saying it's collusion, that basically there was a handshake, wink, wink agreement, basically of what's gonna happen here.

• 12:45Sam Parr?

  Yes, and so the government doesn't pay back the loans. And so now this bank is basically now has a minority ownership in like 12 large state-owned corporations. And they basically holler at eight to 10 guys, guys who are already relatively successful. And they basically said, do you want to make a bid on this company? I'm gonna make sure no one else bids on this company, but I'll give it to you. You interested? And that's exactly what happened.

• 13:15Shaan Puri?

  And why would they do that? Why would they hook up these individuals in that way?

• 13:18Sam Parr?

  They did it for three different reasons. The first reason, and a lot of this is just like hearsay. The first reason is the person who was president at the time, who was it, Ben? What was his name? It was the fat guy who had a heart attack.

• 13:31Ben?

  Boris Yeltsin.

• 13:31Sam Parr?

  Yes, he was basically said to these eight or 10 businessmen, I'm gonna hook you up? You guys hook me up. When I'm, when I'm, when I'm in office, hook it up. I'm gonna hook you up, whatever. So that's one theory. The second theory is that they wanted experienced managers in, in, to run these companies. And the third theory basically is even though these eight to 10 oligarchs put bids on these companies, and basically they bought the equivalent of ExxonMobil. So we're talking about like a company that's worth billions of dollars. They paid $100 million for this company. And so these managers, these oligarchs, these eight to 10 folks, a lot of them were mildly successful, but they were all in on the government. They were all friends and friends, you know, they're all homies. They basically, they did take on risk.

• 14:13Sam Parr?

  So like these companies did have debt, and like they had to go and like collude with other people and fire the rest of the managers of the company. So it was basically almost like a PE thing, but it was like pretty dirty. And the government was like, yeah, we need, we want like these mercenaries to be in power because if they make these companies better, our, you know, our government's gonna be better, the Russia's gonna be better. And so. They basically profits after after this whole deal profits to these companies grow by 50x market caps go up by 100x and so there's here's an example the reason I got interested in this is there's this guy named Robin Abernathy what's his name Ben how do you say his last name?

• 14:53Ben?

  I think it's Abramovich.

• 14:55Sam Parr?

  We're gonna call him Roman.

• 14:57Shaan Puri?

  So Roman. Even knows what the hell you're talking about right now is impressive and he's like a he's like a part of your brain that's like outside of your body and you're like, uh, brain, what's that name? Oh, yeah.

• 15:07Sam Parr?

  Roman's famous Roman owns we're just gonna call him Roman. He owns Chelsea, the soccer team. So he's like a famous guy and he owns like this like, you know, 200 foot yacht. He's like a big deal and basically he paid 100 million dollars him and his partner Boris paid 100 million dollars and they've just they came up a little bit of money and then they went and hollered at like other rich people and they said, hey, loan us some money. Let's buy this company. They paid 100 million dollars for a company that is now like the eighth or 10th largest oil company in the world. So imagine paying in the mid 90s, imagine paying 100 million dollars for Exxon Mobile.

• 15:44Shaan Puri?

  Right. Insane.

• 15:45Sam Parr?

  And so the these companies explode. Now they explode partially because basically what these owners did, these eight to 10 oligarchs, what they did was they purposely tanked the company. So it sucked for a long time and then they bought out the rest of the minority shareholders. So it's again, cronyism there. And second, these were government run companies. So they're shit. And so these private individuals, they did a pretty good job of making them better and they became far more profitable. And this created like eight to 10 guys that were worth like up to 40 billion dollars. So at one point, one of them was worth 83 billion dollars and you know, things have changed, but it created so much wealth between these few folks and it also like trickled down. So here's the craziest part is that a bunch of the managers

• 16:27Sam Parr?

  of the company. So basically there was like the there was like the the Minister of Oil or something like that as a government official, he becomes he sets up this these one of these companies, he eventually becomes president of one of the companies and now it's worth 8 billion dollars, even though he was like a government official. So. I thought it was interesting because I actually wanted to read a book about these folks. I'm like, oh, who's this like rich guy that owns Chelsea football? Let me like go and learn from him. And what I realized is like, I pretty much can't learn from him. I mean, I could maybe learn some stuff, but like his process is not like replicable. I can't replicate it because he was like 38 and Russia had just fallen and he basically turned $0 into, he's worth now like $20 billion all through this cronyism.

• 17:11Sam Parr?

  But I thought it was incredibly interesting. Have you not heard about these folks?

• 17:15Shaan Puri?

  I've never heard any of that in my life. It's crazy. It's like, it's like the big bang for like Russian rich oligarchs. It's like, there was this one meeting and it kicked off this series of events that like, you know, seems kind of unfathomable how that would be allowed to happen or just happen. But then they also consolidated power, right? Like, didn't Putin basically like take all their money and consolidate all their power?

• 17:42Sam Parr?

  Here's the second interesting part of the story. And I actually learned this from listening to Ben's podcast. So basically Putin was considered like the anti corrupt guy for, for, for a minute. Like when he was elected, he was like, you know, I'm not going to stand for that nonsense. And he made an example of one of the guys, one of the billionaires, his last name starts with a K. I'm not going to try to pronounce it. It's, it's a challenge. He put this guy in jail for 14 years and he literally put him. And so in Russia, for some reason, they put you in these like cages and you could like take pictures of these folks. Have you ever seen that? Like a, like a Russian serial killer picture or anything like?

• 18:14Shaan Puri?

  Wait, so it's like visible from the outside, you mean?

• 18:16Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's like the mugshot, but it's like literally a cage that sits on you and people can come and like take pictures. It's weird. And anyway, this guy was worth at the time, like $15 billion. And Putin arrested him for not paying taxes, things like that, and put him in jail for 14 years. And he goes to the other guys, he goes, you want that to happen to you? No, all right, let's play. And so a lot of people think that Putin is the richest man in the world. And he owns one of the most expensive homes in Russia and in the world. It's like a billion dollar, $2 billion house. And people are like, whoa, how'd you do that?

• 18:48Shaan Puri?

  It was a billion dollar house?

• 18:50Sam Parr?

  Yeah, Ben was telling me all about it.

• 18:52Shaan Puri?

  There is a billion dollar house? Wow, I didn't even realize that.

• 18:55Sam Parr?

  It's.

• 18:56Ben?

  It's got like, it's got. It's, yeah, it is like this full complex. It's got private beaches. It's got like pools on pools. It's got guest houses, basically got a hotel on it. It's like a house is maybe not the right way to think of it, but it is a house. It's a private residence for Putin.

• 19:12Sam Parr?

  And but basically, like, there's no proof of this, but a lot of people, because even when the Panama Papers released, they couldn't find Putin's accounts. But basically, a lot of people are like, well, so he made an example out of this one guy. And he went to the rest and goes, y'all want to play? Let's play. And, and, and now, Roman, by the way.

• 19:32Shaan Puri?

  I was really hoping you'd attempt a Putin accent there. Kind of disappointed, not gonna lie. The story is good, but it's just missing that little something.

• 19:39Sam Parr?

  I think Ben could do it.

• 19:40Shaan Puri?

  You are Ben giving it a shot. Ben, I think you have a little, little bit of the Russian twinge in your speaking.

• 19:46Ben?

  Yes, they say me, I, they tell me I speak good in Russian accent. I will try. Is this like racist? Can I do this? Is this okay? I don't know. It's borderline. I don't think it's a race.

• 19:56Shaan Puri?

  This, we, we have the, the cancellation vaccination. You're allowed to do a funny, funny accent here and people.

• 20:03Sam Parr?

  As long as it's Russian.

• 20:03Shaan Puri?

  If you're listening and you took that too seriously, just swipe over and delete the podcast and go on with your life.

• 20:08Sam Parr?

  And to wrap this up, basically, the way that these guys all work now is, a lot of these oligarchs are part of like the peace keeping, like they're, they're part of, they're helping Putin like negotiate peace. So like the inner, the way that this shit's intertwined is just bananas. It's crazy. And I was like trying to learn about these folks and I was like, oh, well, like, there's nothing to learn here. I can't, I can't do this. Like, this is just crazy. And these guys are so wealthy. And, and so it's trickled down. But if you basically, a lot of them, when that happened, were in their 30s, like 35, 38 years old. And that's why I got interested in this, because I was, I remember years ago, reading about these folks. I'm like, how does a 38 year old become worth $3 billion? What the hell?

• 20:51Sam Parr?

  How did a 38 year old become CEO of a diamond mining company?

• 20:56Ben?

  Okay, that's it for this week. Thanks so much for listening and have a great weekend.