25% Of My Portfolio Is One Overvalued Stock, Here's Why

Get our investing playbook (with 35+ insights from top investors): https://clickhubspot.com/rwpt Episode 816: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talk about the opportunities with AI and longevity. — Show Notes: (0:00) Hal Finney (9:30) Aubrey De Grey (23:10) Be Here Now (33:31) Oz Pearlman (42:55) When Kevin Hart met Jeff Bezos (50:46) Shaan reads The Art of The Deal — Links: • The Prospect of Immortality - https://a.co/d/0d2jc81i — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton (joinhampton.com): My community for founders. Average member does $25m/year. Many of the guests are members. Get after it...apply: http://joinhampton.com/mfm — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Shaan's weekly email - https://www.shaanpuri.com • Visit https://www.somewhere.com/mfm to hire worldwide talent like Shaan and get $500 off for being an MFM listener. Hire developers, assistants, marketing pros, sales teams and more for 80% less than US equivalents. • Mercury - 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 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.

• 0:00Shaan Puri?

  There's something insane going on in the world right now. This is Black Mirror, right? This is like Amazon Prime's original new series about how tech like, you know, takes over the world and then the world's never the same again.

• 0:19Shaan Puri?

  Do you know who Hal Finney is?

• 0:21Sam Parr?

  The man who, up until the New York Times article, I thought was the guy who created Bitcoin, but he's dead.

• 0:26Shaan Puri?

  So may, you know, he may have been Satoshi Nakamoto, the guy who created Bitcoin. But if you, even if he wasn't, he was definitely the first person to ever receive Bitcoin from the creator of Bitcoin. And he's an OG cryptographer, etc.

• 0:40Sam Parr?

  A founding father.

• 0:41Shaan Puri?

  Founding father of Bitcoin. I love this great way of putting it. So I was on his old blog last night and he died, I don't know, he died like 10 plus years ago of ALS. You know, it's like terrible Lou Gehrig's disease. I went and read the blog post when he announced, when he was like sharing that he got diagnosed with ALS and he was feeling totally fine at the time. And I just saw this thing in the comments. It was so weird. It was like watching, you know, famous people today, but in some, like when they were like on the Disney show and they're like young or whatever, you know what I mean? It's like, he wasn't famous at this time. He's blogging on his own little personal website. And then the first comment is from this guy, Eliezer whatever, who today is really famous for basically, he's the biggest doomer on AI.

• 1:25Shaan Puri?

  So he, he's the first comment and he's like, have you looked into cryogenics? And then Hal responds, yes, I actually have already, I'm, I'm, I'm working with Alcor to freeze my body. Did you know that this is actually a thing that happens and how this all works?

• 1:40Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I knew it because Family Guy made fun of it. Isn't Ted Williams, do you know who Ted Williams is, the famous baseball player?

• 1:46Shaan Puri?

  Ted Williams was one of the first people to do this. He's frozen right now.

• 1:50Sam Parr?

  Yeah, he's frozen. And so, and I think that there was a joke that Walt Disney was into it as well. But basically the idea is you freeze someone when they're dead in hopes that one day we'll solve this and you can come back to life.

• 2:02Shaan Puri?

  So he talked about this company, Alcor. And so I was like, Alcor? Now, I was really ready for this to be like super evil mega corp, right? Like the, you pay them tons of money and they freeze your body and they're like, whatever. It's, but it turns out, I think it's a little more innocent than that. It's a, it's a nonprofit that was started by this, this husband and wife couple who, they read this book. There was a book that was published that was very influential in this space. And it was basically a book that argued that today you could do this thing, which is right when you die. If you're very fast acting, you can essentially do put like antifreeze on your body. So you could freeze your body as is.

• 2:35Sam Parr?

  I think it's liquid nitrogen, not it's liquid nitrogen, right?

• 2:38Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, but it functions almost like they basically inject something in your veins also because they need your cells to not like, or like your veins not collapse or something. So they do so they put something in your vein and then they use liquid nitrogen to cool you down. And then you are cryogenically frozen for indefinitely. And I've always thought I had heard of the concept. I didn't actually fully realize that there's a business behind this. You pay $200,000 and you're frozen and that, you know, they've frozen, I think 200 people have done it. 200 something people have done it. 1500 people have are working with Alcor saying freeze me when I die. They just haven't died yet. So I didn't realize like it's a thing. It's like a business that exists that people pay for. And, you know, it's $80,000 just to freeze the head and it's 200 grand to freeze the whole body.

• 3:22Shaan Puri?

  And then you, you know, before you die, you pay a couple hundred bucks a year to save your spot. And there's like this whole operation behind it. So that was like already fascinating thing, number one. Okay, so this kind of led me down a little bit of a rabbit hole of like, I'm like a hyper normal guy, like I don't really do that much fringe stuff. And I would have never considered doing this. But I've been reading a lot of these stories with AI. We talked about some of them on this podcast about like the guy who cured his dog's cancer. And then you brought up the founder of GitLab who cured his own cancer using AI and like hyper personalized targeted medicine.

• 3:54Sam Parr?

  He's trying to, he's trying to.

• 3:56Shaan Puri?

  No, he did. It's in remission.

• 3:57Sam Parr?

  Oh, he did?

• 3:58Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, he did. By the way, I have like a whole update on it's crazy. I really want to have him on. It's a, it's a, let's go to that in a second. This is, it's wild. I just like went down the rabbit hole. So I've been seeing this and it's like, okay, like it's not crazy that in the next 30 years that AI is going to figure out how to like cure a lot of disease, death, to be able to bring back cryogenically frozen people to be alive or to like upload their consciousness, upload their brain into some sort of like LLM, like that's not like crazy to me now.

• 4:29Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I don't well, so the like, like, I always get these videos. I get like emotional videos on Instagram all the time. And like, one of my favorite videos is when a family meets the recipient of the heart of like, for example, of my like, kid or husband or wife died. And I get this and I get to put my ear on the heart and hear it always makes me emotional. And so I'm like, oh, man, that's like the greatest gift in the bad situation. So I do love that. But I'd much rather be alive than that situation. So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 5:04Shaan Puri?

  No, but like, okay, you're saying, yeah, but you've never thought about this, right? You're not actually, you've never taken a step in this direction. Have you actually been like, yeah, I that would be something I plan to do. Like, you know, I don't want to.

• 5:13Sam Parr?

  The only step that I've made is I've read this Wikipedia before.

• 5:17Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 5:18Sam Parr?

  So like.

• 5:20Shaan Puri?

  Doors open.

• 5:22Sam Parr?

  There's been some like, when I went, when I Googled what you said, the link was purple. I'd clicked it.

• 5:32Sam Parr?

  On this show, we have spent hours talking to some of the best investors alive. Well, lucky for you, the team at HubSpot, they have pulled out the principles that matter most and turned it into a very simple, easy to read wealth guide. It's 35 principles from the top investors. We're talking guys who have been on the pod like Howard Marks, Manish Prabhar, Morgan Housel, Kathy Wood, and a ton of others. So these are all their frameworks, their mental models, their rules, basically how to play the long game and how to avoid ruin. You can get it in the link below.

• 6:05Shaan Puri?

  So this let me down a little bit of a rabbit hole. Then I saw this Elon clip.

• 6:09Speaker 02

  I do think it is a very solvable problem. When we find figure out what causes aging, I think we'll find it's incredibly obvious. It's not a subtle thing. The reason I say it's not a subtle thing is because all the cells in your body pretty much age at the same rate. So why is that? That means that there must be a clock, a synchronizing clock that is synchronizing across 35 trillion cells in your body.

• 6:32Shaan Puri?

  So have you ever seen this clip before?

• 6:35Sam Parr?

  No, I didn't know that he cared about that.

• 6:37Shaan Puri?

  The guy just asked him a question. He's like, well, I've never, I haven't spent time like looking into it. It's not like it's not one of my missions I'm on right now. But then he said this thing, which is like, you know, if Elon says something, you sort of pay a little bit of attention. So he's saying, you know, I suspect it's solvable that the solution, that, you know, the problem is obvious. And the reason why, I thought was like a pretty first principle way of thinking about it, which is like, there's gotta be a clock. Because your entire body is aging at this, you know, roughly the same rate. And i- if your body's synchronized, that means if there's a clock, maybe the clock can be changed. Maybe you could turn, turn the, the hands of the clock and slow down the aging or reverse the aging or set it to a different time. And, you know, we've seen this with like stem cell treatment and peptides, all this stuff going on.

• 7:21Shaan Puri?

  And so you're like, hmm, that's interesting. Maybe there's something there. And so, by the way, the reason he does say why he hasn't spent much time on this, and it's pretty, he's, he's basically like, aging slash death is like a feature, not a bug. So he's like, uh, if people live forever, society will like ossify. Because like the people in charge will be the oldest people and the oldest people will want the least change. And like progress and change comes from some, like an out with the old, in with the new mentality, which comes like with a, with a physicality of out with the old, in with the new.

• 7:57Sam Parr?

  So I, I, you make fun of me a little bit and it's deserving. Cause I brag about how I think that we, well, Brian, he told me, we were the first media appearance Brian Johnson has ever done. And I take a lot of pride in that because if you go and get past like the silliness of the whole thing and how easy it is to like tease him for what he's doing. If you actually go and read his blog, it is like pretty miraculous, some of the stuff that he's doing. And the way that he looks, it's fun to, I mean, it's easy to make fun of him. Like it, it seems quite amazing that if you just take a little bit of what he's doing, there could be benefits. I just signed up for a fancy doctor and I went, and this was the first time that I've met a doctor where they didn't, uh, not laugh at him.

• 8:41Sam Parr?

  Every doctor that I've ever talked to, they'll been like, oh. That guy's crazy, like, you know, that's just stupid. Same with like the, um, the things that you and I did where you, uh, the preventative MRIs.

• 8:53Shaan Puri?

  Pre new.

• 8:53Sam Parr?

  Like, yeah, they like laugh at them. They're like, well, it just sets off so many potentially false alarms. I'm like, that's the downside and that's why you don't want to do it. That's incredible. That's kind of silly. So I, but my point being is I do think that a lot of people are coming around to this and it is quite interesting. It's way out of my IQ level to, when people say, uh, disease and aging is solvable. I think that's like a platitude. That sounds cool, but it's, it's too hard for me to understand because I just don't know anything about it. But it is like interesting. I wonder if in the history of the world has the richest people on earth, which now they are richer than potentially ever before, that many of them have made this their cause.

• 9:33Shaan Puri?

  Have you ever heard of this guy Aubrey de Grey?

• 9:35Sam Parr?

  Yeah, he's, um, like the researcher who does this. He's like an academic, right?

• 9:41Shaan Puri?

  So he's been doing this for like decades and he kind of got canceled, I think, because he was like hitting on his like lab assistants or whatever. What's going on? So I'm not saying this guy's a great guy or whatever, but he's this very fascinating guy. He looks like Dumbledore. He's got a huge gray beard, like, you know, down to his belly.

• 9:56Sam Parr?

  Looks like a researcher.

• 9:58Shaan Puri?

  He's like a longevity researcher who looks ancient essentially. And he's got this theory, which is like, his theory, if you've ever gone down the rabbit hole, which I did one night, like, I don't know, five years ago. What he said is basically that death is not a mystery, that there's these like 12 things that basically cause cell damage. It's just wear and tear, like your, your cells in your body are like a car. And the more you use them, the more they accumulate damage and eventually enough damage, they, they die. Okay? It's not like some mandate from God. It's not like, you know, something that we don't understand at all. His, his belief is like, actually we could see the factors that relate to it. If we could just reverse those factors, then we, you wouldn't die. The second thing he talks about is like this idea of like longevity, longevity, escape velocity, LEV. Ever heard of this?

• 10:42Sam Parr?

  I've never heard of that, but was that as simple as basically your biological age grows slower than your, or sorry, your chronological age grows? Slower than your biological age. Am I explaining that correctly?

• 10:54Shaan Puri?

  I think you had it right the first time, but no, no, this is a different concept. But what he says, it's sort of like the, that guy Ray Kurzweil, who talked about AI, he talked about the singularity. What he meant by that was like, at some point, it won't be the humans that are programming AI, but the AI will program the next AI to be better. And then that smart AI will program the next AI to be better and it'll just keep. And then that's when you get this explosion of intelligence. And he's like, no, you can't see beyond the singularity. Cause once that happens, all bets are off, which is like, kind of what we're getting close to doing. They're inside these research labs. It's not just the, the highly paid people at OpenAI or Claude or whatever, Anthropic, who are coding the models. The models are coming up with ideas and running experiments and coding the next models soon.

• 11:38Shaan Puri?

  And that's like partially happening, but once that fully happens, the progress, the rate of progress will like, go exponential, a little hockey stick in a crazy way.

• 11:45Sam Parr?

  Claude did the greatest PR release ever, or PR thing where they said, this model is so powerful, we, we can't release it.

• 11:52Shaan Puri?

  Too dangerous.

• 11:52Sam Parr?

  I'm like, okay, I want it. Yeah. Like sign me up. It's like the four locos of, of AI.

• 12:00Sam Parr?

  I heard in Tennessee that they make them at 11% alcohol, but we in Ohio, we could only get 7%.

• 12:08Shaan Puri?

  This kid had the greatest night of his life and his heart exploded.

• 12:14Shaan Puri?

  We should do that with a podcast, by the way. We should just be like, this one is too, too dangerous.

• 12:19Sam Parr?

  We can't, we can't release it.

• 12:20Shaan Puri?

  We simply cannot. But, sorry, anyways, the idea being, there's this, there's gonna be a point where medical research on longevity is adding years to your life faster, like adding more than one year of your, to your lifespan than one year. So like the, the research and the interventions and the protocols and the, the knowledge around extending, extending your life is going faster than your actual chronological age. And when that happens, then you sort of get at least like multi-hundred year lives, if not like, you know, indefinite life, which is like a pretty crazy idea. But when I read about this longevity stuff, it reminds me of basically what's been going on with AI. Like AI was something that had been talked about for 50 plus years.

• 13:04Shaan Puri?

  Theorized, talked about, worked on, always seemed niche, never seemed like a breakthrough, always seemed like a boy who cried wolf type of industry, where never really made enough progress. And then suddenly you get, you know. Alex Net and then you get ChatGPT and you get these like breakthroughs and then the world's never the same again. And I kind of, my prediction is that in the next, I don't know, 15 years, we're gonna have a ChatGPT moment for life extension and that you're gonna get some breakthrough in this longevity and life extension. That's gonna make it where it went from this like fringe, kinda like, oh, academic topic to just something that everybody does.

• 13:43Sam Parr?

  So in, in January of 21, I had this Chinese kid who worked for me. He was an intern. He was from China. And I remember him telling me, he was like, Sam, this COVID thing, it's, it's real and it's got to come to America. And I was like, brother, you guys have the bird flu, you got this and that. This is America. These colors don't run. We don't, we don't wear, yeah, we don't, we don't wear masks. This is not a thing. And then a month later, I distinctly remember, I think it was in March, I remember when I got the notification, I was gonna, on my way to go to a Warriors basketball game and it said, season postponed indefinitely. And I was like, you're right. It's here. You are so right. And what I'm

• 14:27Sam Parr?

  asking myself every day is with AI, is it January? And I'm just like, sitting here being like, living my life, like as if there's an asteroid on its way and I, we just don't know yet. And that's what I'm wondering all the time. Is it January of 21?

• 14:44Shaan Puri?

  What would that look like? Or like, I guess, like, do you, what do you mean when you, because COVID obviously was a pandemic, sort of a catastrophe. Do you mean catastrophe?

• 14:53Sam Parr?

  So here's an example. So in, in January, I think it was, what's his name? Is it Balji?

• 14:59Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 15:00Sam Parr?

  He wrote this post because, you know, the joke was like, these autistic venture capitalists understand exponential growth. They see the numbers and they're like making people wash their hands before they come into the office. How, how stupid of them. And Block or Jack Dorsey's company just laid off a ton of, they laid off a ton of people. And, and we're thinking to ourselves like, huh, well, this guy's crazy. What's he doing? And then, but like secretly, every other company is like, should we? Should we do this? And like, is there gonna be a domino effect over the next 12 to 24 months where it's like, it starts happening. Another one starts happening. Another one. 10 more this week. And like, they're, they're all doing these layoffs because it's actually effective. Like, that is what I make, that's like what I'm wondering.

• 15:43Shaan Puri?

  So. You mentioned the Jack Dorsey thing, and I think the way you said it kind of undersells what actually happened because you the way you said it was Jack Dorsey's company formerly known as Square, now known as Block, laid off a bunch of people. I've heard that. There's been tech layoffs. There's even been huge tech, deep tech layoffs like that. That's happened many times in history. What's different this time? And I think the reason is different is he laid off the people because he was like, oh, the normal corporate model doesn't work or make sense anymore. That actually, we're not going to have this like org chart with like a CEO and then like managers and managers and managers and managers underneath. Like, actually, there's just going to be one central brain called AI and all of us feeding

• 16:28Shaan Puri?

  context into it.

• 16:29Sam Parr?

  That's what Brian Halligan, the former CEO of HubSpot, told me. He was like, the future companies, it's a hub of AI. They make the majority of decisions and everyone's around it.

• 16:38Shaan Puri?

  It's a hub. It's a spot. We're like, bro, I need to get there. Come on. Get out of here. But yeah, so, okay, so what does that, what does that actually mean? What do, it sounds esoteric, right? Like the central brain or whatever. Here's the flip I don't think most people appreciate. Today, it's like, oh, yeah, I like, I use ChatGPT all the time. I use it for dumb questions. I use it with my job. You know, my piano teacher was like, have you heard of this thing called Claude? And I was like, yeah, I've definitely heard of it. You know, making out with it all day, basically. And then she's like, my dad loves it. And I was like, what does your dad do? You know, runs, has some normal job? And he was like, yeah, I use it to make my presentations.

• 17:18Shaan Puri?

  And it seems today like this junior assistant worker that you can task to go do everything. Everybody gets an assistant, everybody gets a junior programmer, everybody gets like a chief of staff. That's kind of like, I would say, the mental model most people are operating with. Wow. If I use this, this makes me so much more productive. I think what's obvious to me, and it sounds like to Jack Dorsey, is that, well, the superintelligence is not going to be the junior thing to your average intelligence. The superintelligence is going to be the boss. You're going to be the junior thing. And so, and that's what he's, that's what these guys are talking about, Brian Halligan and Jack Dorsey, which is that actually, there'll be like a central AI that's making the key decisions, allocating resources.

• 18:04Shaan Puri?

  Figuring out strategy, coming up with the core campaigns of what you're going to do, the product, the roadmap, the building of it. And then your job as humans will be to feed context, feed information to make the brain smarter. So watch this video. This is a factory in India where they're like just sewing garments, I think. Every single factory worker is wearing a headset camera to track their hand movements of everything that they're doing. And this is all data that they're being paid to give to the robotics companies like Tesla and Figure and like all the big robotics companies who are quickly trying to create robots that can do any work.

• 18:48Shaan Puri?

  And so the humans here are the training data. All these Indians in this like frigging factory sweatshop are wearing cameras on their heads, training the AI overlord that will replace them.

• 19:00Sam Parr?

  Digging your grave.

• 19:01Shaan Puri?

  You're digging your grave. And there's a great meme. Look at this, scroll down, scroll down one, one not to look at the, look at the, go down, go down, right there, this one. Look at this meme of this, the guy sitting on the tree branch, sawing off the branch. And this is kind of what we're all doing. So isn't that crazy? By the way, like just that thing I showed here?

• 19:23Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Who's the vendor or who's the, who's that? Who's behind that? Does it say?

• 19:28Shaan Puri?

  So there's a company that's doing this. So it's a company, this one is called Objectways. It's an Indian based data labeling company founded by a 20 year old entrepreneur, soon to be billionaire, Dev Mandal. Dev, come on the podcast. He spotted an opportunity in the gap between what AI wants to do and the training data that they have. All these humanoid robot companies like Tesla's, Optimus, Figure's AI, there are prototypes that need vast data sets of real world movements to master tasks like cooking, laundry, et cetera. And so, but collecting this in a high wage country like the US is very expensive. So, enter India where their team of 2,000 employees produces hundreds of videos daily. And in one batch, you know, so they'll, they'll get like, you know, 2,000 clips of towel folding.

• 20:14Shaan Puri?

  So the workers sit there and they have to fold towels over and over and over again. They're penalized if they have bad footage. Your camera wasn't pointed at the thing. Hey, you messed up. Don't give bad training data. Give good training data. And so they're, they're doing this all day. And then they send it to companies like Scale AI, like the, the big data labeling companies here, who then resell that to all the AI labs. What?

• 20:35Sam Parr?

  This is incredible.

• 20:36Shaan Puri?

  It's something. There's a big word. I don't know if incredible is the word. There's something, there's something insane going on in the world right now. This is straight out of like, dude, like this is Black Mirror. On one hand, it's, it's hyper logical. It's hyper rational. It's capitalism at work. Dude, these robots, when they work, it's going to be the biggest product ever invented in the history of mankind, bigger than the iPhone, bigger than anything. When you get a $20,000 robot that can do, do work, it is the biggest product ever. It's why I have a huge chunk of my net worth in Tesla right now is because that's obviously the biggest product in going to the biggest market in the world. It's just a matter of when, not if. To do that, you're going to need data. That means the data is very valuable. If the data is valuable, the data is valuable. How do you get the data?

• 21:18Shaan Puri?

  Well, obviously you'd go to the lowest cost place where you got a bunch of humans doing these handheld tasks and they're happy to take a hundred bucks a day to wear the camera on their head. Yeah, they got a little neck pain. That C5, C6 vertebrae is a little strained because they're wearing this heavy ass camera for eight hours a day. Yeah, they're, they're probably be put out of job soon, but like, hey, a hundred dollars today, a hundred dollars a day right now or a hundred dollars a month. That's, that's double my wage. This is great.

• 21:43Sam Parr?

  So what I had read about last week was that when Claude was messing around with their new model, that if I remember correctly, it like escaped. Like, I think it like jumped in, did it jailbreak?

• 21:55Shaan Puri?

  The nuance of the story is a little bit different. There's a little less scary than you may sound. They told the model, the model gets tasked with, you're in a sandbox. Your job is to try to escape. So they're trying to see how good, it's not like it just on its own came up with the motivation like fuck this, I'm out of here.

• 22:12Sam Parr?

  No.

• 22:13Shaan Puri?

  You know, like.

• 22:13Sam Parr?

  But it was capable.

• 22:14Shaan Puri?

  They're testing and then it, and then basically the researcher who set up the task is sitting in a park eating a sandwich and gets an email from his bot like, I'm out. Like David Blaine, David Blaine his ass.

• 22:25Sam Parr?

  You're like, it's not that bad. And then you painted a worse picture.

• 22:29Shaan Puri?

  They should do, you remember the old David Blaine's street magic videos where he would just walk on the street and be like, you know, like do a trick and then, and they'd always inevitably be like the people who have the best reactions where they just run, they run around in a circle with their hands over their head. I feel like the AI companies, instead of making these like thoughtful in a, you know, they, they go to a loft in San Francisco with natural wood fibers everywhere. And then they're like, speaking about like, you know, the future of humanity and whatever. They need to do David Blaine's street magic about what their models can do. If I was like a, if I'm like a tier three model and I'm trying to like, jump up, that would be my marketing strategy is just showing people's minds being blown with man on the street interviews.

• 23:09Sam Parr?

  You know that feeling when strategy is done, the brief is written and everyone is aligned. And you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create the content. That someone is you and it's due tomorrow. Breeze assistant can help. It works right inside of HubSpot. Drafting, campaign, copy, blog posts, emails, all in your brand voice. All grounded in your actual customer data. So don't just create content, you create content that converts. Check out hubspot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses.

• 23:43Shaan Puri?

  My, I have a exec like coach and he told me something in the very first meeting. Cause he's, he spent over a million dollars on his own, like getting coached by the best coaches in all these different modalities. So like somatic therapy, whatever the hell that means, internal family systems and this and that, all these different, like any different branch of sort of, I don't even know what you would call these like coaching modalities, I guess. He spent a million dollars on his own training. And he's like, I just went, he's like, who's the best at that? Um, even if I don't fully believe in that method, like I want to go experience it firsthand from the best person in an immersive way.

• 24:25Shaan Puri?

  And get like, you know, four years of like exposure in four weeks, a type of deal. One of the things that he told me, I was like, so what is it net out to? I was like, you do all that, you travel the world, you spend a million dollars, you get all the help and self-help and therapy you can get in all the different versions. Where do you land? I'm guessing it's something like, you know, that book, The Alchemist, where it's like, he goes around the world searching for something and it's in his own backyard or whatever. I'm like, what's the thing that was in your own backyard? And he goes, oh, all philosophy and religion basically like condenses down into three words. Be here now. And he's like, it just, whether it's Buddhism or it's philosophers or it's, you know, a different, whatever religion you're, you're looking at.

• 25:08Shaan Puri?

  Fundamentally, it's about presence and can, can you be here now? And what be here now means is not just about like not checking your phone or being present that way, but not worrying about what happened in the past, which can't be changed. Uh, being anxious or, or even excited about what's happening in the future, which is not here yet. But like actually being able to center your mind around what is happening like in this moment, because it's the only moment that's real. What comes with that is the lack of desire. So like the Buddhists say, desire is suffering. And so it's the idea that you can be in a moment and not be wanting anything more than what the moment is already giving you. Not wanting to be anywhere, not wanting something to happen and like, oh, then the fun will start.

• 25:50Shaan Puri?

  It's like, no, no, this part is the, this is the fun. There's nothing missing from this moment.

• 25:54Sam Parr?

  Has any other learnings that you've gotten from him turn into action?

• 25:59Shaan Puri?

  I like that. What else you got? Is that kind of what you're saying? Like what's the, what's another one that that's kind of?

• 26:03Sam Parr?

  Well, I'm actually thinking like, is this so amazing that I should also get an executive coach? Cause I haven't had one in forever.

• 26:10Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think anybody with the means should have one. And I think, by the way, that with AI, everybody will have the means because it'll drop the price of this pretty dramatically. But yeah, it does. And I think, you know, have you ever heard of rubber ducking? I think I mentioned this once or twice. Have you ever heard of this phrase? So rubber ducking is a programming term. So let's say you're a software engineer, you're coding, you're writing, writing code all day, and your code's not working. It's not compiling, you have a bug, it's not doing what you want it to do. So the way that most people traditionally solve this problem is, you know, they sit there, they bang their head against the wall. Or if they want to do better, they would invite someone, you know, another smart programmer to come, look at the code and see if they can help debug it and figure out what's wrong. And rubber ducking was this observation that you don't even need another smart programmer.

• 26:53Shaan Puri?

  There's a programmer who had a little rubber ducky on his desk. And he found that just by talking out, like explaining the code to the rubber duck, he would find the issues much faster and much more painlessly.

• 27:04Sam Parr?

  It's sort of like the, I think it's called like the Solomon complex, which is basically like you tend to give other people better advice than you give yourself. And so if you pretend that you are the third party and you advise that person and give them some wisdom, you should just take that and it will be better advice than if you just said, do this, Sam, to yourself.

• 27:25Shaan Puri?

  Right, right, right. So this idea of rubber ducking is very powerful. So even if my coach wasn't great, even if he didn't spend a million dollars, even if he himself wasn't a successful business guy who had learned a bunch of lessons that way and lived a bunch of life, even if he was a rubber duck, it would be useful. And so I've been, by the way, I've tried this. I had a coach. When I was at Twitch, they like gave you a coach if you're on the exec team. So it's like, here's a free coach. So I was like, I've never tried this before. Let me try this. And I was very skeptical going in because I was like, ah, life coaches. Like I've been to enough Tony Robbins event to know that like, it's the biggest loser at a Tony Robbins event who becomes a life coach. It's like the, a third of the audience at Tony Robbins is like, broken people who are, if you ask them what's their job, they say their life coaches.

• 28:09Shaan Puri?

  And you're like, oh, my God, you're coaching people like, wow, that's like, it's like the bartender being your driving instructor or something. I don't know. It's like, I didn't know the analogy, but it's like, I don't want that. So I had this like very skeptical view of it. And sure enough, I get on the call and her Zoom background is like this cheesy green screen thing. And then she's like, in, in, she moved to Florida because her own life fell apart. And then she was like, yeah, I'm a coach now. I'm like, wait, so your life fell apart and you have kind of like, none of the things I want in life, but I'm going to take advice from you. Like, oh, God, this is, ha, this is exactly what I thought. I felt so smug. And then after the first session, I was like, damn, that was really useful. And I was like, she didn't even say anything. I just talked, I just

• 28:50Shaan Puri?

  had space to talk out loud. And as I'm talking, I hear the comical absurdity of some of my thoughts, and I was able to get rid of them. And, you know, for some people, this is journaling. For some people, people have different ways of doing this. Other people just talk to their friends or whatever, or maybe other people just have this solved without needing anything. But for me, I have code running in my head that is buggy buggy software. It makes mistakes. It has, you know, self, self induced errors. And I want to get, I want to fix that code. And so even, even just rubber ducking to a person who doesn't say anything, or the things they say are just like very simplistic questions is so useful. And I highly recommend it to anybody who wants to improve their code in their head.

• 29:30Sam Parr?

  That's great. You just convinced me. Can, can you say what you pay? Is it like five grand a month?

• 29:34Shaan Puri?

  Two to, two to four grand a month.

• 29:36Sam Parr?

  Cool.

• 29:37Shaan Puri?

  Is, is like a range that you can expect. But yeah, it's incredibly useful. And I'll give you another one. That's kind of like a realization. So we start every session with just wins. So I basically turn into Eminem. I turned into Juice WRLD. I started just freestyling at the top. I just, we don't even, I just say, all right, I'm gonna start with wins before he says anything. And I just start saying random wins. So I'll be like, I've been reading this book, and it's awesome. And I just feel proud of myself for reading books. I've been saying I want to do it. And I never really do that shit. But then finally, I'm doing it. So I'm proud of that. I took my son to the soccer game today. And last week, he was crying about it. But this week, he went in and he actually did the class. I didn't have to help him. And I felt awesome about that. Another win is that last night, I really wanted to snack, but then I just avoided it. And I went to, I just

• 30:20Shaan Puri?

  got a glass of water. I went to bed. And I have no filter with somebody. And like, if I was to say this to you, or to a friend, they'd be like, whoa, like, didn't ask. Like, what, what are you doing? What's happening right now? Or I would feel self conscious that I couldn't say a small thing as a win. It'd have to be a big thing. And like, That's like literally robbing yourself of joy because like actually the better way to live life is to be excited about the small things, but there's no space where you could just be excited about the small things, right? Like where is that cool to do? But in this case, like yo, I'm paying you. I get to do what I want here. I don't have to care about how you feel about this. I don't have to listen to you. I don't have to like, we're not here to do another thing. And I'm just like ruining it by sidetracking this way.

• 31:03Shaan Puri?

  No, that's what this is for. This is the space for me to do that. And I heard this great quote from Jimmy Carr, the comedian where he said,

• 31:11Sam Parr?

  Dude, he's like a thinker now. He's not even a comedian. He's like a wisdom guy.

• 31:15Shaan Puri?

  If you haven't, have you listened to, he did a podcast with Chris Williamson recently that was so good. I texted Chris, I was like, this is like one of my favorite podcasts in years. And it's because he's a philosopher and he's like, he's very, very thoughtful. And so Jimmy Carr said, he was like, oh, everybody talks about like gratitude. Gratitude is so important, but gratitude is this like, almost like heavy activity to do. It's like, I know I should be doing that, but I'm not doing it. It's like, and you feel a little cheesy doing it. He's like, celebration is just gratitude in motion. And so he's like, just celebrate what's going on in your life. Like just, it's okay to be excited about what your life is. It's okay to be excited about what just happened. And so that's like an example of like, a simple thing that I do with the coach that actually makes a difference

• 31:58Shaan Puri?

  because I build a lot of momentum and I check in on the positives of life and not just the problems of life, right? Because me and you were probably, most entrepreneurs by default are problem solvers. We get paid to solve problems. Our company isn't just solving a problem in the market. And then as CEO, you're solving the nastiest problems in the company. And then when, you know, anybody, if they get stuck in their job, you have to dive in and help solve that problem. And every day there's a new problem. So we get wired for problem seeking and problem destruction. It's good for achievement, but it's not good for happiness, is to be a problem seeker.

• 32:31Sam Parr?

  I haven't seen you since, we haven't, we haven't done a solo thing in a minute. The Chris thing was cool. You and Chris and George and the other, the fitness guy.

• 32:41Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 32:41Sam Parr?

  Sorry.

• 32:42Shaan Puri?

  Michael.

• 32:42Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I think you're great. I just can't remember your first name. It was great. It was a great pod.

• 32:47Shaan Puri?

  Oh, thanks. Yeah, I'm going, I'm gonna do another one this week. So we're gonna do it. Try to run it back a second time. The context, for those don't know, Chris Williamson, the guy who does Modern Wisdom, he did an episode which was a little bit different. Normally, he's interviewing somebody, like I'm interviewing whatever, Jordan Peterson, or Huberman, or whoever. And this was Chris hanging out with his friends, just four guys kind of shooting the shit was the idea. And the original premise was like a, almost like a show and tell, like everybody kind of bring just shit that like you're interested in right now, something funny you saw, something cool that's, you know, caught your attention, and just, let's just all show each other what's going on. But it was like a three hour hang. That was the idea.

• 33:24Sam Parr?

  I thought you were the most entertaining person.

• 33:26Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 33:28Sam Parr?

  I thought, I thought Chris is a very entertaining person. George is entertaining. I thought that the, the, the comment, so George Mack is like, comes off sounding very proper, and you are improper, but you're more of a, like, a different type of charming person. And I thought that dynamic was quite good. The half the stories that you told, you, I think you had, like, we have discovered them together, or, or you've already, so like, I thought you, so like, I had heard a lot of them, and I thought it was, so I thought it was funny. It made me a bit proud to see you there, but I thought it was great. I thought it was like a fun riff. I think that they should continue trying different people, including, and have you there though, all the time. So, um, Oz Pearlman, the magician, came to my office, and we did a thing with him. We did a pod with him, and-

• 34:13Shaan Puri?

  By the way, great pod. Love that pod. It didn't get a lot of views on YouTube. I don't know what people are doing, sleeping on it. It was a great podcast.

• 34:19Sam Parr?

  Thank you. I don't know why it did either, didn't either. But listen what he did. He came in and we only chit chatted for 10 minutes, and then we chit chatted only for 10 minutes after. And in those times, he was just performing. And I was like, I had an off, like, for some reason, in my company, it's like mostly like young, young women who work there, and they are like enthralled by this guy, as, as I am too. And they like walked in, and they were, I could tell they were waiting, and they're like, Oz, you don't have to, but

• 34:46Shaan Puri?

  You know that we're really dressed up today.

• 34:49Sam Parr?

  Yeah, like, you know that they're just like wanting you to like dance. If you want to, you can, but like, if you don't want to, just like, let's, and so he was like, no, I'll do it. He guessed- The name that we have, we had a woman who is giving birth soon. He guessed the name of her child. Like, he was like, you're like, he, you know, she hadn't. Yeah, he likes, he's like, let me figure out what name you're gonna name your kid.

• 35:09Shaan Puri?

  Let's walk through this step by step because I'm fascinated by magic. He walks in the office, but I'm trying to figure out how the hell he does all this shit. So, did you talk to him beforehand? Like, how much did he pull from you before he showed up at the office? Was there a lot of talk? Was there any talk?

• 35:24Sam Parr?

  There's one trick that I can, that I think I know how he did it. But he thought that you were gonna be there. And he was like, oh, I had prepared tricks for both of you guys.

• 35:34Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, cuz I was texting him.

• 35:35Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and he was like, I thought you guys were both gonna be here. I was like, oh, no, I'm so sorry. I thought we communicated with you. And he's like, okay, well, I had a different thing prepared. So let me try something else. He was like, can you write down, think of, you know, they, they, and he, he, he does.

• 35:47Shaan Puri?

  This is before the podcast, right?

• 35:48Sam Parr?

  Before the podcast. And he says phrases like, like he think, he thinks that you're going this way. And then he changes. So he'll be like, you know, I want you to do, actually, actually, let's do this. Let's do this. Write down, do me a favor. Think of a party that you want to have, a birthday party. And think there's one person who you wanna, who you want to show up there. Write that person down. Actually, screw it. Let's just do this on air. And he went and he grabs that paper that I wrote and he tore it up. And then he did the trick on air. That same trick. And I think that, when that, I think the tear was fake.

• 36:19Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 36:19Sam Parr?

  Does that make sense?

• 36:20Shaan Puri?

  Okay, okay, that's good. That definitely, right? That definitely has to be the way that that, that's done. Okay, cool.

• 36:24Sam Parr?

  But then, listen, right when we finished the pod, we walked out and the women were just sitting there, like, to greet him. And they were like, can you do something? And he goes, yes. And he goes, how about you? And he points at a random lady. And he goes, do me a favor. Think of your best friend. She thinks of her best friend. And he was like, it's Hannah. And she was freaking out. And he was like, let me write something down. He writes it down and he goes, tell me, where did you meet Hannah? And she goes, Mexico City. And he turns his hand and he's like, that's what I thought. And it was Mexico City. He wrote down Mexico City. And people online were like, yeah, he just researched everyone. I'm like, I had 18 women there. She can't research every 18 persons best friend.

• 37:08Shaan Puri?

  He doesn't need to, right? He researches one and then he randomly, you, right? He chose the person.

• 37:13Sam Parr?

  But do you have a best friend? Like, how, and how would they know? That doesn't seem reasonable.

• 37:19Shaan Puri?

  Well, I do think that's the genius of what he does. So I've, cuz I've watched. Hours. I've watched 18 hours of clock time of debunking him, figuring out how he does it, interviews with him, because I'm fascinated by the whole thing. And by the way, I'm fascinated by it in two ways. One is the tricks, but the other is the business side of it. Because if you just think about like, what he did by rebranding as a mentalist instead of a magician, is an all time marketing move.

• 37:49Sam Parr?

  Dude, post podcast, someone sent me an email. They're like, check this out. I booked him to do a party for me, and it was $150 10 years ago. And he told me how much money he's making now. It's astronomical.

• 38:01Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. Because he's the number one, right? It's a classic marketing thing, right? The law of category. Instead of being yet another magician. Oh, he's like Copperfield or David Blaine, but he's not David Blaine, right? David Blaine's more famous. He does better tricks, bigger tricks, blah, blah, blah. He's like this street magician. Okay, the cool. No, no, he's not a magician. Those are, those are magic tricks. We all, every kid knows, everyone knows how a magic trick works. It's sleight of hand. I'm a mentalist. And he became the number one mentalist. And it wasn't, he wasn't even a category. So I'm like fascinated by the, the positioning, the marketing, the business side of what he did. That's not an accident. He created this motherfucker, right? Like, he created this thing that he is. Epic. And then he figured out distribution. And he's like, ooh, I need

• 38:43Shaan Puri?

  these viral moments. So he goes to NFL training camp during Hard Knocks. He piggybacks off their distribution. He blows their minds. And everyone's interested in seeing LeBron James get fooled. That's more interesting than just seeing a random guy on the street getting fooled. Ooh, okay, good. Like even more viral than-

• 38:58Sam Parr?

  Before the podcast, he was like, I'm starting to do podcasts again because I got overexposed last year. Like he like, when he used the phrase overexposed, I'm like, oh, so this is all part of the plan.

• 39:08Shaan Puri?

  Right. And so then in one of his interviews, he just says a great thing. He talks about like, the secret is-

• 39:15Shaan Puri?

  Having multiple outs. So meaning like, let's say you said the best friend thing. It's a, it's a probability game, right? So you're not always going to know the answer. And so you're like, it starts with a letter, starts with a letter. I'm getting like a K sound, a T sound. Is it a T? Yeah. You know, he, he, he's hearing, looking at your, and then he's like, T. Okay. Then I know it wasn't Steve. It's Trevor. So now I, I had Steve written on my left forearm, but I had Trevor written on my right forearm. I'm just never going to pull the sleeve up on my left. I'll pull the sleeve up on my right.

• 39:43Sam Parr?

  Well, he told that story on the podcast. He went on the Today Show and he tried to get Al Roker to guess who then a celebrity president would be. And he originally said George Clooney and he was like, oh no, uh, what about a female? And it was, and he said Taylor Swift and then he pulled, pulled the shirt off.

• 39:59Shaan Puri?

  Do someone modern. Let's do something. And he like gets you to change it. And you don't know that he had, you know, Taylor Swift on his thing and he had, you know, uh, whatever, Shalhoub on his butt and somebody else on his shoe. He just never needs to show it. And I'm like, wow, that's actually pretty great. Pretty, pretty genius, the way he does that.

• 40:15Sam Parr?

  It, it was, it was just incredible. He told me a story. He, he was like, I was like, did you, do you, I made a joke first. I was like, it's pretty funny that you can do all of the stuff. And it's as if they like sent an alien from outer space. Like we brought up like a, he's like, we told this Seth Meyers show. And they had you like perform at bar mitzvahs. Like, why aren't you like doing something more special?

• 40:37Shaan Puri?

  That was a great question. Yeah. What was his answer to that, by the way?

• 40:41Sam Parr?

  He was like, uh, he's like, well, he admits it. He was like, you know, I'm obviously not guessing what you're thinking. I'm like setting you up to say a certain thing, but also I do pre-work in advance. And I could teach anyone how to do pre-work, but I can't, interestingly, he did guess. He told me that Michigan was going to win the NCAA tournament. Did they win?

• 41:03Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 41:03Sam Parr?

  Okay. He told me.

• 41:06Shaan Puri?

  At like the elite eight round, you know, it's not like.

• 41:08Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So like not that elite. And I think they're number one, but like, that was a thing that he just guessed. I was like, but, but he, he, he, he basically, it was just weird. It was, it was really uncomfortable to hang out with him, to be honest. He was a really nice guy, but like just to be around someone who's so powerful. I, I, I found uncomfortable.

• 41:25Shaan Puri?

  You're like the, the dudes who burned the witches back in the day.

• 41:30Shaan Puri?

  You're like, this is cool, but I don't like it.

• 41:33Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 41:34Shaan Puri?

  Tire up.

• 41:36Sam Parr?

  But I don't, how do you, no one has given me a good answer to the PIN number. So basically, listener, uh, yeah, Joe Rogan had a PIN number guest live and then he did it multiple times live. I don't know how he did the PIN number. I don't know how he did the PIN number thing.

• 41:49Shaan Puri?

  I think people believe it's just he hires private investigators. So he knows he's going on Rogan, right? It's a big thing. So he has an investigator follow Rogan and you can literally just like, if Rogan went to an ATM, you could just watch him punch it in. It's kind of like the cameras on the head and the factory workers. It's like, what's the incentive? If the incentive is I'm going to go on the biggest podcast, just tens of millions of people are going to believe I'm like an actual like mind reader. If this happens, I will be able to book speaking gigs for 150 grand a pop. Is it worth hiring a PI for two grand?

• 42:21Sam Parr?

  When was the last time you went and got your PIN number? When was the last time you typed your PIN number in?

• 42:25Shaan Puri?

  No, no, but it doesn't have to be, again, he's got multiple outs. So you hire the PI to do it. He doesn't have to do the PIN number thing. It could be something else. It could be that he always does this other thing. It could be the something in the mail that he threw out that, you know, a letter that he got from somebody. It doesn't matter. He just needs one piece of information that would be implausible that I know. Then I'm going to center the whole trick around that. If I know I'm going on Rogan, I have the PI following him for, you know, whatever, a month until I get something. And so like, that's gotta be what's going on. I mean, not to take the fun out of it. By the way, I think it's awesome, even if he does all those things. I'm not, I'm not using that to, to say it's less cool. I'm just like a kid who's like, oh my God, how does this work? It must be this, right? You have to go with it, right? There's a kayfabe to the whole thing that, that has to be like maintained.

• 43:08Shaan Puri?

  It's like in wrestling, like, like you have to sell that the guy punched you, right? Like you gotta sell it a little bit for the whole thing to work. And, and life is more fun when you let him do his tricks and like blow your mind versus like trying to out him. Totally, totally get that. He's great. I thought the pod was great. I think he's great. I'm super impressed with how he's built his thing up. I think it's really, really awesome.

• 43:31Shaan Puri?

  All right. Today's sponsor is a company that I use that I actually built a company on that I sold for millions of dollars. And it took me zero upfront capital. We had one employee and those are the types of businesses I love. I love lightweight businesses, things that don't require a lot of capital, don't require a lot of employees, and you can just get them off the ground quickly. And so Beehive has a platform that lets you launch a newsletter about anything. And the great thing about newsletters is it could just take one person, you're just writing stuff that you already know and already enjoy, and it can grow and grow and grow. For us, with our crypto newsletter, we built a brand called The Milk Road. And in one year, we went from zero to being the biggest crypto newsletter on earth, and we sold the company for millions of dollars in a year. And the only reason we could do that is because Beehive had all the things we needed out of the box.

• 44:14Shaan Puri?

  We needed to be able to write the newsletter, send it, had growth features, referral programs, monetization, everything was built in. And so highly recommend, if you're looking for a lightweight business, something that you can get going very quickly, highly recommend Beehive as a place to start. Go to beehiiv.com/mfm and you could actually use the code MFM30 and get 30% off your first three months.

• 44:36Shaan Puri?

  There's a great clip that I think people should watch. It was like oddly inspiring and it's Kevin Hart on the Joe Rogan podcast talking about when he met Jeff Bezos. Have you ever, you ever heard this clip?

• 44:46Sam Parr?

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 44:47Shaan Puri?

  The clip is he's on Rogan and he talks about meeting Jeff Bezos at a party. He's like, I'm at a party, Jeff Bezos is there. I don't know Jeff Bezos. Jeff Bezos, I don't know if he knows me. I have no idea. And I tell my friend, like, I'm gonna go talk to him. And his friend is like, no, man, come on, don't be that guy. He's like, what you mean? He's like, that's Jeff Bezos. He created some shit that I think is awesome. Like, I don't, I'm, I don't know him. I'm not gonna see him again. I don't know when I'm gonna see him again. I'm gonna go say, I'm gonna go say something. He's like, all right, man, but play, like, be cool about it. And he's like, that's the problem. Everybody's too cool. Like, everybody wants to be too cool about everything. He's like, no, I'm thirsty. He's like, what do you want, what do you want from me? I'm thirsty for knowledge. I want some information from this guy. This guy's done, he's built empires, he's built, he's, he knows more about the money game than me.

• 45:31Shaan Puri?

  He's built, he's built technology. He's like, I just, I want to go learn. I'm gonna go talk to the guy. I'm not gonna be too cool for this. So he goes up to him and he just says like, hey, man. Jeff, I'm Kevin. I admire what you built. You know, I think it's, I think it's amazing. I would love to, to talk to you a little bit more. Now is not the time and place, but I would love to talk to you more at some point to, to get to know you. Um, and like hear a little bit more about how you did this because I think it's fascinating and I, I think there's a lot I could learn from that. But anyways, I just wanted to come over and say hi because I'm, I mean, I admire what you do and I hope someday our, you know, our paths cross. He's like, that was it. I got out of his way and he's like, I don't know if I'm ever going to see him again, but if I do, like,

• 46:11Shaan Puri?

  I put my face out there. I put my intent, I let it be known that I think it's awesome what you do and I would love to, to, to chat with you sometime about it. And he's like, he was super kind. That was it. But he, he gave this like impassioned speech about, really about shooting your shot. And like, dude, like, don't be too cool to learn. Don't be too cool to make progress. Don't be too cool to put yourself out there. And I just think that that was, uh, it was an awesome clip. I was very inspired by it.

• 46:37Sam Parr?

  Uh, that is a great clip. That, that is cool. I, um, went to St. Louis recently for Easter and Jesse Pujey, um, invited me to go walking around. Jesse's from St. Louis. He's like, hey, do you want to come to my office? We'll go for a walk. I'm going to bring my friend. So he brings his friend and I start talking to his friend. His friend is named Dave Weiner. Dave was the CFO or now he's the chief strategy officer, but he was the CFO of Facebook for the last 15 years.

• 47:04Sam Parr?

  And we were walking around just like we were all like St. Louis guys and he's just telling great stories. Dave was telling great stories. I, I can, I guess I'll call him Dave now. He's my buddy. And, um, he, uh, it was pretty cool. Like he was like saying like some cool stuff, nothing confidential, just like cool, like anecdotes. And he's told the story about meeting Jeff Bezos one time at, um, Dave used to work at, uh, this, what's the Sun Valley Conference Company, Allen and Co. And he, you know, has been able to meet these ballers forever. You know, he's been, I think CFO of Facebook for 15 years. And then before that he was hanging out with like titans of industry. And he was, I, I was asking him, I was like, who, who's cool? Who's not cool? Uh, just messing around. And he was like, you know, I met Jeff Bezos a couple of times.

• 47:48Sam Parr?

  And he's one of the only Titans of industry who I've ever. ever met, when he looked me in the eye, he was never looking around to see who else was in the room. And he was like, I was a little kind of a small fry compared to all the people he could be around. He looked me straight in the eye and I totally felt like we were connecting and being buddies. And he was always really calm and really nice to me and he never like was trying to be like, all right, nice to talk to you. Now I gotta go talk to Putin and that's what this guy Dave told me.

• 48:14Sam Parr?

  Well, who the, who the hell does like?

• 48:15Shaan Puri?

  It was a crazy happy hour.

• 48:20Sam Parr?

  Who does Jeff Bezos talk to? I don't know. Like, who's he like itching to like go to? I don't even know. Isn't that crazy? I got, I got to go on a walk and hang out with this guy.

• 48:29Shaan Puri?

  What'd he say about Zach?

• 48:31Sam Parr?

  He said he's a pleasure to work for. I swear to God. He said he's even tempered. I'm not joking. This sounds like I'm brown nosing. He said he's even tempered. He's like, man, he's been a great boss. Like he's been, he'd never like, uh, is, uh, lashes out. He has always even tempered. He's very polite and, uh, that he's just been great. He's, I mean, Dave's worked there, I think for 15 or 18 years. I forget exactly how long, but for a long time.

• 48:54Shaan Puri?

  Dave, come on the pod. Um, although he's still like, chief strategy officer, you know, there's only so much interesting, the best is the retired guys. The guys who are like two years out, actually not even freshly retired, but two years out. And they're like, kind of, what do I do with my life? And like, I got things to say and I'm seeing all these dweebs online. Who've done one, one hundredth of what I've done that have this big audience and they're talking, they're yapping. I should start yapping. That's actually why like, uh, we, we did this pod, I did this pod with, I still have this book on my thing. This guy, John McNeil.

• 49:25Sam Parr?

  That was awesome.

• 49:26Shaan Puri?

  He was president of Tesla. He worked with Elon for years and he's done a whole bunch of awesome startups on his own, like a.

• 49:31Sam Parr?

  Dude, the crazy thing about that pod is, his PR person is Jason Yanowitz's wife, Dana. So she's a good friend of mine and she's been like saying like, have this guy on, have this guy on. And I just dismissed it. I'm like, a guy who worked for Elon? That's, I don't know. Like, and it was so good. It was so good.

• 49:49Shaan Puri?

  Isn't that obviously good?

• 49:51Sam Parr?

  I don't know. I thought he was.

• 49:52Shaan Puri?

  Elon's housekeeper. I'd be like, can we book a bigger studio? What are we gonna do? Like, are you kidding me?

• 49:57Sam Parr?

  Something about it where like, like I showed it to Ari. I'm like, is this interesting? I don't know. We get so many pitches. For some reason it didn't stand out as being like a must have. And then I listened to it and I'm like, oh my God, this was amazing.

• 50:09Shaan Puri?

  Uh, no, he was great. If you haven't listened to that one, that's one of the, that one and the Graham Weaver one, but uh, two, two recent episodes. I would be like, they're. Two of my favorite podcasts that I've listened to, you know, I don't, I don't really like listen to MFM once you do them, but like.

• 50:24Sam Parr?

  Yeah, we had such good questions to Graham Weaver. I went, I went and listened to it and I was like, we each asked such awesome questions and D H H. Those, those two pods.

• 50:35Shaan Puri?

  I can't believe you said that with a straight face. That's hilarious. It's like when Trump recently was on the podium and he was like, he's like, he just says the quiet part out loud all the time that he was like, I don't like hanging out with people more successful than me. I like hanging out with losers.

• 50:52Shaan Puri?

  He's like, yeah, if I hang out with someone more successful than I feel like a loser, but when I hang out with losers, I feel great. I can't believe he's the president is saying this out loud, but even if he wasn't the president, who do you know that's actually that like fundamentally unfiltered and honest?

• 51:07Sam Parr?

  Did you see what he said about Pearl Harbor to the prime minister of Japan?

• 51:11Shaan Puri?

  He was like, you don't like surprises?

• 51:13Sam Parr?

  Yeah, she was like, uh, you know, Donald Trump.

• 51:16Shaan Puri?

  That was to the prime minister? I thought that was to a journalist.

• 51:20Sam Parr?

  No, like it was the leader of Japan. She was like, you should have told us about this Iran thing. And he was like, you want to talk about surprises? Why didn't you tell me about Pearl Harbor? That was incredible.

• 51:30Shaan Puri?

  I, I don't, I don't like the guy and I think it's insane. Some of the stuff that's going on.

• 51:35Sam Parr?

  Oh, agreed.

• 51:36Shaan Puri?

  I think it's just, I think the, the greed and the theft is, is pretty crazy with like, if you look into the world liberties, financial stuff that they're doing. I think the memes about like, how they're like, okay, you're, you're deporting people, but like rubbing it in with like rap videos and memes. I think it's like so tasteless coming from the official White House account.

• 51:55Sam Parr?

  It's so tasteless.

• 51:56Shaan Puri?

  I can't get behind any of that shit. You know what I mean? Like, I, you know, like I'm, I'm open to somebody who's maybe got policies that, that you like, but there's something about the way he goes about things that is just like so, so distasteful. But also I do think he's hilarious. I think he's an absolute master of, of, of the gift of gab. And I, I do, I do think that's amazing. And I thoroughly enjoy it. And I saw a little two minute compilation of, of, you know, just hilarious things that he's saying. So like, yeah, you know, he's complicated and I'm complicated.

• 52:25Sam Parr?

  We, we, I recorded an episode on Friday with Charles Duhigg. And he has a book called Super Communicators. He wrote the book Power of Habit, which was a big inspiration to Atomic Habits, and it was a great book. And he was like, I'm not a Trump supporter, but when I was working for the New York Times, I interviewed him a ton. And he was like, I understand how like one can be very charmed by this. Like, he checked all the boxes of following the rules of traditional great communicators.

• 52:50Shaan Puri?

  So I don't like to follow a lot of like world events and news or whatever, but you know, when there's like possible world war three, it probably, it gets, it goes above the, above the, of the, above the bar and you start to pay a little bit of attention to it. And so I was like, I don't really understand what he's negotiating with Iran about. I'm not, not totally certain. So I bought, I bought The Art of the Deal. I was like, I'm gonna read The Art of the Deal to try to understand what is the, what is the strategy here? What's going on?

• 53:17Sam Parr?

  What did you learn?

• 53:18Shaan Puri?

  Have you ever actually read The Art of the Deal?

• 53:20Sam Parr?

  No, no, I've read books on him, but not that one.

• 53:23Shaan Puri?

  You gotta read it, dude. The first 20 pages of The Art of the Deal, cinema, absolute cinema. So the way he writes the book, at the beginning of the book, so just check this out. This is the first, first paragraph of the book. "I don't do it for the money. I've got enough, more than I'll ever need. I do it to do it. Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on a canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That's how I get my kicks. Most people are surprised by the way I work. I play it very loose. I don't carry a briefcase. I try not to schedule too many meetings. I leave my door open. You can't be imaginative or entrepreneurial if, if you've got too much structure. I prefer to come into work each day just to see what happens." And then he talks about how, how he's like, the, the first 20 pages are just a...

• 54:06Sam Parr?

  Yeah, that's cool if you're running, you know, a privately held company.

• 54:10Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, but, but you can see, he's just doing the same shit. The same thing, right? I just do it to do it. You know, I, I play it loose. I show up and see what happens. And so he, he goes like, it'll be like nine, he basically says like, I do 50 to 100 phone calls a day. Most don't last more than 15 minutes. I just work the phones all day. And so it's like 9:00 AM, you know, Lee Ioka called, you know, 9:15, my broker called. We had a, we got a million dollars of Hilton stock. People think I'm gonna do a takeover. Honestly, I don't know. I might just sell it if it's a profit. I might take over the whole company. I'm keeping my options open right now. I feel like there's more value there, but then again, a nice profit's a nice profit. I hang up the phone. We decide that we'll call, we'll call back again this afternoon." And he just goes call after call of like, you know, the permitting guy called.

• 54:56Shaan Puri?

  Said, we're not going to get the permit. Piss it, it's, you know, like, whatever, like, it's pissing me off. I gotta call, I gotta call this other guy to see if I can get the permits through. He owes me a big one, a big one from the old Atlantic City deal that we did. You know, it's, he's just going like, kind of deal by deal, call by call for the first 20 minutes. It's honestly pretty fascinating. And like, I think he ghost wrote the book. I don't think he wrote it, but the style of it.

• 55:18Sam Parr?

  The ghostwriter, like, talks mad trash about him. He was like, I had to spend all this time with him.

• 55:22Shaan Puri?

  The style of it, though, is very unique. Like, I actually really enjoy the, like, stylistic way. It seems like, you know, his personality, even if he's not the one writing it.

• 55:32Sam Parr?

  I read, um, a book that was written about him and they're basically said, like, starting at the age of 25, or I forget when, he like, they're like, he didn't have an office in Manhattan, but he had a limousine. And he would just drive, like, to city, the, you know, where the mayor is. I forget, what's it called, city?

• 55:49Shaan Puri?

  City Hall.

• 55:49Sam Parr?

  City Hall, sorry. And he would like, just start badgering people. And then he would go to like, properties that were selling and start badgering them. And he just went from place to place to place, every single day, just driving around. And he'd be like, I gotta go back to my office, but he, he didn't have an office. He just would drive around from place to place to place. And in doing that, he just kind of created motion, kind of created a handful of things. And it was just like, this insistent, like, nagging almost. I don't know what, what you'd call it, but it's like, um, all right, is that it?

• 56:16Shaan Puri?

  If that ain't it, I don't know, I don't know what it is. That was everything.

• 56:20Sam Parr?

  All right.

• 56:20Shaan Puri?

  I could see producer Ari is like, uh, like, what the hell am I gonna do with this episode?

• 56:26Sam Parr?

  Every time we do this, the people say, thank God, we love these. This, the third time I'm complimenting us, uh, but they say that they like these, so it is what it is. It's for the, uh, the, uh,

• 56:35Shaan Puri?

  This is what the podcast is. If you don't like this, don't listen to the podcast.

• 56:40Sam Parr?

  All right, that's it, that's a pod.

• 56:53Shaan Puri?

  Hey, let's take a quick break to tell you about our sponsor. It is a podcast that we want you to check out. It's called D to C Pod. It's hosted by Ramon Berrios and Blaine Bolus. And this is a podcast about all things direct to consumer, D to C. It's e-commerce stores, it's how you optimize your brand. And they're talking with founders, marketers, and the platform creators about all kinds of things that you need to know for D to C. You know, website conversion, paid ads, Facebook ads, consumer trends, email marketing. If you want to know the stories behind your favorite brands, this podcast is for you. So check it out, listen to D to C Pod wherever you get your podcasts.