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Business Tricks We've Learned From Gamblers, Pickup Artists, & Feynman

📈 Steal our playbook on how to spot business trends Episode 602: Sam Parr and Shaan Puri talk about how to 10x your odds of success.

Sam ParrhostShaan Purihost

Jun 28, 202458mWatch on YouTube

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Transcript

70 min read · 13,907 words

0:00 – 7:51
Ed Thorp and the mathematics of gambling
1. SPSam Parr
  All right, we're live. Shaan, I've got a story for you, and this story, I'm gonna take a weird take on this. I have a weird take on this, and I'm gonna appeal to all the young, single men out there.
2. SPShaan Puri
  All right. This is your specialty.
3. SPSam Parr
  [laughs]
4. SPShaan Puri
  Young, single men. Let's go.
5. SPSam Parr
  [laughs] [upbeat music] All right, listen. The story's about Ed Thorp. Have you ever heard that name, Ed Thorp?
6. SPShaan Puri
  Sounds like a swimmer. No.
7. SPSam Parr
  It does sound like a swimmer, but he's not. So Ed Thorp, I'm reading his biography called Man For All Markets. So Ed Thorp, today he's 91. So what does that mean? He's born in the 1940s, 1930s. Ed Thorp, he grew up as a math whiz kid. He was like a, a, a prodigy at a young age. Grew up in a very poor household, didn't have a lot of money, but as a young kid, when he was like 12 and 13 years old, he got moved up a bunch of grades and he took, uh, a bunch of standardized tests. And at the time, when he lived in California, he got something like the highest scores in California for high schoolers when he was like 13 years old. And at the time they didn't have calculators, but they had like little counting devices, and he would take these tests without these counting devices because he couldn't afford them, and he still crushed it. He killed it. So eventually, Ed Thorp, he gets a scholarship to Berkeley, and then he goes to UCLA where he gets his PhD in mathematics. And he becomes a professor. And he starts going down this track where he's in his 30s and he's this brilliant professor and whatever, but then he does something interesting. He gets interested in applying his theories to real-life situations because he's like reading these academic papers and he's like, "This is cool and all, but we gotta apply this stuff." And his specialty was probability and statistics, and he got super interested in how he could use his theories to beat blackjack.
8. SPShaan Puri
  Oh, this is the gambling guy. I saw this guy on Tim Ferriss.
9. SPSam Parr
  So this guy's interesting. It's because he's done so much more than just these few little stories I'm gonna tell. But basically, you could actually verify this. Blackjack is, what, 51% chance the house is gonna win? Is that right? Is it like 51/49?
10. SPShaan Puri
  Something like that. 51, 52, something like that.
11. SPSam Parr
  Yeah, so it's a small, uh, margin. But back in the '60s when he was kinda getting going, he had this theory where he thought that if he saw the, the cards on the table, he could have a higher probability of getting 21 because he basically could count cards, changing the ratio of 51% in the, uh, user's, uh, perspective. So he... It was 51% chance of winning. The house was 49% chance. So he creates this paper where he explains all this. And inevitably, people are like, "Man, this is just some academic theory. There's no way that you're gonna be able to do this." And so Thorp is, is, is a fun guy and he's like, "We gotta prove it." So he builds out this blackjack table at his house, and he gets his wife to smoke cigarettes and blow cigarette smoke into his face while she's talking to him and, like, annoying him. And then he has friends come over who, like, are drinking alcohol and, like, yelling in his face as if he's at a casino to distract him. And he spends a handful of months doing this, and it starts working, and he's like, "I think this actually can work. I think I can do this." And he publishes this paper, and all these people reach out. He gets hundreds of letters. But eventually he gets this one letter from this guy named Manny, and Manny, he doesn't really know it at the time, but after a while Ed kinda realizes that Manny is basically in the mob. He helped make bootlegging a thing in the '20s when alcohol was illegal. And Manny goes, "Hey, Ed, let's see if you can actually pull this off. I'm gonna front you 10 grand and we're gonna split the winnings." 10 grand at the time, the '60s, is something like 80 grand, so it was a lot of money, particularly for a professor who's making the equivalent of $100-... $150,000 back then. And so they go and they spend this week, this weekend at a, a casino in Las Vegas, and they make $11,000 in profit. And Ed's like, "Holy moly, this thing works." But he doesn't really wanna become, like, totally a professional gambler, but he's really interested in proving his theories. And he eventually, he writes a book, uh, on this. And if you Google Ed Thorp blackjack book, he wrote this book in the '60s that was a massive hit. And to H- to Ed, this was all just a big, like, fun game, a way to, like, prove that his research wasn't just academic, but it could actually be used. And this book was a massive hit, and it was one of the first times that academic research was, like, used in real life, and it went straight to the masses as opposed to him publishing more papers. But this meant now that he was known in the casino world. In the casino world back then, Vegas was just getting going, and so it was small enough that they, all the casinos could know what Ed looked like, and all the dealers would know what he looks like and what his name is. And so he eventually goes back e- every handful of weekends, and he has to wear a disguise, and he's... But he still ends up, ends up cleaning them all out. And next he goes, "Well, blackjack was cool. Let's see if I can do this with roulette." And so he goes, you know, roulette is a little bit l- unlike blackjack where I don't even know if there is necessarily, at least it doesn't appear as though there's a lot of skill because it's all, like, where the ball lands on this spinning wheel. But he has this weird theory that if he can see, if he can, like, quickly count how fast the wheel is going and where the ball starts and where it hits the wheel, somehow he's able to calculate 51% in his odds where the ball is going to land. And this sounds like a crazy idea, right?
12. SPShaan Puri
  I mean, that just sounds, uh, impossible to me, as somebody who has spent a lot of time at a roulette wheel. Being able to figure out wh- [laughs] while the wheel is turning where the ball's gonna land, and it... I mean, when the ball hits, it bounces, like, in a random direction based on the spin and the speed and everything. Like, for somebody to do that in their head would be... I'd have to see that to believe that.
13. SPSam Parr
  It sounds impossible, right? And that's what interested him, is, is he was a math nerd, and he was really fascinated with the game of proving his theories correctly. And so what he did was he took a small, uh, computer, and he basically assembled a small computer. And the way it worked is he would have a two-person team. And so he would be at the table placing the bet, and he would have two people on the side, and they had these little small computers, and they had little buttons in their shoes. And they would calculate where they thought the ball was gonna roll to, and they would tap their feet. In order to keep the cadence of the wheel.
14. SPShaan Puri
  Right.
15. SPSam Parr
  And it would help him predict where the ball was gonna go, and that music, the, the, the taps, it kinda sounded like music, would go into his, his earpiece that he was wearing, and he would make a bet. And this was actually the world's first wearable. You know, like an iPhone-
16. SPShaan Puri
  [laughs]
17. SPSam Parr
  ... or a, like a, like an iWatch is a wearable. This was the world's first wearable, and it worked, and he killed it. He made a lot of money, and he wrote a book on this. He did it again. But now we're gonna fast-forward to him 10 years doing these experiments. He's got some money, something like $100,000 at the time, which was a lot of money for a professor. And he needs to invest his money, 'cause he just doesn't want it sitting there. And so he spends a few months learning everything he can about investing, basically just reading books. He just read lots of books, and as he said, he wanted to understand the math behind all of this. And so he starts in- investing in publicly traded companies, and he loses a lot of money at first. He said, "I had to pay my tuition to Mr. Money Market," because he gets a lot of it wrong. But then he discover- discovers options, and this part is a bit out of my expertise to explain how he does this. But it involves both shorting a company and buying the company's actual stock. So predicting the company's stock is going to go down while buying the stock, but in doing that, he studied the, the, the option that he was going to purchase as well as the current stock price. And in doing that, he was able to hedge it, so he would only lose a little bit amount of money but make a whole bunch of money. And for him, he actually didn't look at any of the stock information, as in what the company was selling. So, you know, you have guys who, like, do value investing, and they're like, "Well, I think that this brand is undervalued." That wasn't him. It was all just a math game to him. But after a year or two, it starts working, and he starts making a little bit of
7:51 – 12:12
World's first hedge fund
1. SPSam Parr
  money. And so now we're in the '70s, and there's another professor at his university who starts hearing that Ed is now investing in stocks, and he's doing quite well. He tells some of his coworkers. He's like, "I might make more of my, more than my salary this year investing. It's going quite well." And so one of his professors has invested his money, the professor's money, in this small little fund called Buffett Associates.
2. SPShaan Puri
  Hmm.
3. SPSam Parr
  And of course, it was run by this guy Warren Buffett out of Omaha. And this professor was like, "Hey, this guy who I invested in, Warren, he's gonna r- uh, wind down his fund. He's crushed it for me, but he just wrote this letter saying he can't find any more good deals," which in the '70s, Buffett actually paused investing for, like, five years. He didn't want to invest, 'cause he's like, "I can't find any good deals right now. I'm just gonna sit and do nothing. I'm gonna wind down my fund." And the professor goes, "Hey, look, this guy's running down his fund. Why don't you... You know, he's got some free time. I'm friendly with him. I'm gonna invite him over to my house. I'll invite you over, and we'll just shoot the shit, and maybe you'll have a new friend in the investing industry, 'cause you don't really know anyone else doing this. I'll, I'll help make the introduction." Buffett comes over for dinner, and Ed Thorp and him get along beautifully, hand in hand, like pots and pans. They're, they're really close. They become great friends, and they love hanging out that day. And a few weeks after the, the dinner, the professor goes, "Hey, look, Ed, I was kinda testing you. I kinda wanted Warren to, like, s- like, kinda see what's up with you. He gave a, he gave a thumbs up. He said you're really smart and that your i- ideas are good. Can I take this money that I got back from Warren Buffett and give it to you to invest?" And Ed's like, "Taking other people's money, that's not really what I, I'm been doing. I, I've just been doing this for my own. I guess I'll try it." And so he teams up with another guy, and they raise something like $5 million over the course of six months, and they have Buffett's stamp of approval. And so they start basically one of the very first hedge funds ever, and particularly a, he's a quant, which is common nowadays. But Ed Thorp was the first quant, where he didn't really look at the companies. He just looked at the numbers, and he killed it. So over the course of 30 years, he made something like 20 to 25% per year, which is massive. I don't know, what has Buffett made? Do you know? Probably something like that, but over the course of-
4. SPShaan Puri
  Buffett's is, like, 20. Yeah.
5. SPSam Parr
  Yeah, it's like 20, but over the course of, like-
6. SPShaan Puri
  A long time
7. SPSam Parr
  ... 60 years.
8. SPShaan Puri
  Yeah.
9. SPSam Parr
  Yeah, for a lot longer. All right, guys, really quick. So back when I was running The Hustle, we had this premium newsletter called Trends. The way it worked was we hired a ton of analysts, and we created this sorta playbook for researching different companies and ideas and emerging trends to help you make money and build businesses. Well, HubSpot did something kinda cool. So they took this playbook that we developed and we gave to our analysts, and they turned it into an actionable guide and a resource that anyone can download. And it breaks down all the different methods that we use for spotting upcoming trends, for spotting different companies that are gonna explode and grow really quickly. So if you wanna stay ahead of the game and you wanna find cool business ideas or different niches that most people have no idea they exist, this is the ultimate guide. So if you wanna check it out, you can see the link down below in the description. Now back to the show. And so Ed Thorp basically invented counting cards with blackjack.
10. SPShaan Puri
  [laughs]
11. SPSam Parr
  And then made a book on it. He invented, uh, this roulette game and the world's first wearable, which all of these things, by the way, eventually became illegal. They weren't illegal, or I don't know if it's illegal or against the rules, but they basically are banned in casinos because of him. And he parlays all of this learning and all this experience into creating the world's first hedge fund and becoming one of the first quants, and he knocks it out the park. The guy kills it. I think he made something like $800 million. And then eventually, fast-forward to today, or, uh, more like 2005, he shuts down his fund because he's like, "I have enough. I don't need any more. This has been fun while it lasted. I'm out." He's one of the few guys to just be winning, and he just says, "That's enough. I'm done." So he completely shuts it down. So now he's 92 years old. He still does pushups and pull-ups. He's really into fitness.
12. SPShaan Puri
  He does not look 90. I, I saw him on the Tim Ferriss podcast. That can't have been that long ago.
13. SPSam Parr
  He was 89 then on that Tim Ferriss podcast.
14. SPShaan Puri
  He looks like a, he looks, honestly, like somebody who's early 60s.
15. SPSam Parr
  He looks great.
16. SPShaan Puri
  Yeah.
17. SPSam Parr
  And here's the part where I promise I'm gonna try and weave this into advice to the young man. Ed Thorp is so fascinating to me, and the reason he's fascinating to me is because... I don't know if you'll admit to this. You probably will
12:12 – 16:06
Sam and Shaan revisit “The Game”
1. SPSam Parr
  if you did it. Did you ever read that book The Game? Did you ever read, like, books on, like, how to meet women?
2. SPShaan Puri
  Not only did I read The Game-
3. SPSam Parr
  [laughs]
4. SPShaan Puri
  Not only did my girlfriend in high school buy the game for me before I went to college as a goodbye gift, uh-
5. SPSam Parr
  Was that her breakup gift?
6. SPShaan Puri
  Before like, "Hey, we're not gonna stay together."
7. SPSam Parr
  It's all between us, but I wish you well.
8. SPShaan Puri
  "We're not to stay together, but let me help you out here." Not only did those two things happen, two nights ago I reread The Game, and I'm a married man. I reread The Game 'cause I was like, "That book was amazing back then." I wanted to learn the style of it. I was like, "What was great about that book?" So I went back and I reread it two nights ago, so it's crazy you brought it up.
9. SPSam Parr
  So it... That's a great book. So anyone... Most men in their, in their 30s nowadays probably read that when they were 14. It was like the Bible, because all of us nerds were like, "I desperately wanna be loved. How do I be loved?"
10. SPShaan Puri
  Yeah.
11. SPSam Parr
  Whatever. And there was a lot of bullshit in that book.
12. SPShaan Puri
  Bro, the number of-
13. SPSam Parr
  But-
14. SPShaan Puri
  ... times I used the cube test, like, there's not a woman-
15. SPSam Parr
  Which one-
16. SPShaan Puri
  ... on Duke campus that didn't get the cube test from me. [laughs]
17. SPSam Parr
  Which one was the cube test?
18. SPShaan Puri
  It's like a cold read where you're like, "I want you to close your eyes. Imagine a cube. It's, uh, it's floating in the desert. H- how big is the cube? And if they say it's big, they're self-confident. If they say it's small, they have no ego. Is the cube see-through? Is it colored? Oh, it's, it's kind of see-through? Well, you d- [laughs] you don't let people in easily, but when you do, you really do connect with people at a deep level." Ah, that's so me. And then you just go on, so on and so forth about their relationships and about their, the way they view the world, and by the end of it, they're like, "This guy, this guy's gonna be in the friend zone." [laughs]
19. SPSam Parr
  Okay.
20. SPShaan Puri
  It's really what happened to me, but this... I think for, for better-looking people, it'd probably work better than that. [laughs]
21. SPSam Parr
  They are like a cat, and you are just holding a string just, like, trying to entertain them, and they're like, "Yeah, I'm done with you."
22. SPShaan Puri
  That's another thing in the book.
23. SPSam Parr
  Uh-
24. SPShaan Puri
  Cat string theory. That's actually another principle they have.
25. SPSam Parr
  Well, the... and this is where it gets really nerdy, but one of the parts of that book and that whole movement, there was a lot of bullshit in that book and in that movement. Um, but one of the parts that I always took to heart was the best way to attract others, both men and women, is to be an interesting person, and what that means is basically people like ambitious people, and being passionate about hobbies is under that umbrella of being ambitious. And I remember as a kid I loved that, 'cause I'm like, "Wait, you're telling me I can just, like, work on myself and I'll attract others? That sounds like the greatest thing ever."
26. SPShaan Puri
  [laughs]
27. SPSam Parr
  And, and, and I believe it to be true. As I've gotten older, I've noticed I've gotten less interesting, and the reason I've gotten less interesting, th- there's a few reasons there. The first is that I've developed higher expectations towards most things that I do, or rather, I've just developed expectations as opposed to just doing something just for fun. Like, you do things as a kid just because you're intrigued and you're like, "I don't know where this is gonna go, but I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna follow it." Whereas now, there's expectations for everything that I do, and I wanna have... I'm, I'm a little bit more interested in the outcome. The other thing that I've noticed lately about me and why I've become less interesting is because I've been distracted with social media, just like how you're typing right now as I'm talking to you. It's so much easier to be distracted nowadays with Twitter and Slack and email and text. I find myself getting so distracted, and so I don't have a significant amount of, like, deep thought or, like, going deep on something. It's more so, like, I'm being on the defense where people throw information at me and I react to it as opposed to, like, spending time pursuing something that interests me just because it interests me. And so the reason why Ed Thorp, the reason why I, I like reading about him, and particularly for young men listening, is he's kind of inspired me to just pursue more hobbies just for the sake of learning, and here's an example. When he was developing his roulette game, he basically went and bought a old roulette table at an auction for, like, $500, and he just sat at home in the evening with his wife, and they were like, "Hey, let's just see if we can, like, count this game." It, it was almost like... What's that one g- board game called? Settlers of Catan.
28. SPShaan Puri
  Yeah.
29. SPSam Parr
  You know how, like, people just, like, get into that random stuff and they're like, "Let's just see if we can master this game. It sounds fun"? And that's exactly how it started with him. A lot of these things that became massive outcomes for him, they were just, like, interesting little hobbies for him, and they started very rudimentary.
16:06 – 21:14
The Feynman technique for learning
1. SPSam Parr
  Have you ever read about Dr. Richard Feynman?
2. SPShaan Puri
  Of course.
3. SPSam Parr
  So Feynman was one of the guys who was important for a variety of reasons, including helping make the atomic bomb and all these things, and he had little, like, weird things about him where he's like, "Why can dogs smell so good?" He's like, "Well, I asked myself that, and then I just put my head close to the floor, and I noticed I can smell things on the floor." And like-
4. SPShaan Puri
  [laughs]
5. SPSam Parr
  ... that's like, like, it's like really simple ways to, like, prove or disprove a theory where you start at, like, very basic principles and you're like, "Let's just see if this works."
6. SPShaan Puri
  You know, Justin Kan used to call himself, uh... He had some tagline for himself when he was making content. He used to say, "Hey, it's me. It's Justin, your favorite founder's favorite founder." And that was, like, how he always talked about himself. "Your favorite founder's favorite founder." And I feel like Feynman is kinda that. It's like your favorite guru's favorite guru or your favorite thinker's favorite thinker. It's like everybody who you love their thoughts, they love Feynman and the Feynman technique, and they love all of Feynman's books and his writings. Everybody you respect respects Feynman.
7. SPSam Parr
  Yeah, I think Tim Ferriss's holding company is called Feynman, Inc. or something like that.
8. SPShaan Puri
  [laughs] Dude, that's actually genius to just be like, "Yeah, it's Feynman and Ferriss Associates."
9. SPSam Parr
  Yeah. [laughs]
10. SPShaan Puri
  Just put yourself with them. Just be like, "Ah, yes, this is the Puri and Musk Consultancy. Well, how can I help you?" [laughs]
11. SPSam Parr
  Yeah, just, like, borrow from their, uh, credibility. But there's guys like Feynman, and Ed Thorp is now in that sphere, where they just get interested in some things that seem so silly, and they do it at a very rudimentary level, and it goes from level to level to level to level, but it starts at level one.
12. SPShaan Puri
  You know who's exactly like this? Jack Smith.
13. SPSam Parr
  Jack Smith is like that, yeah.
14. SPShaan Puri
  Jack Smith is w- he's one of these guys. Jack is a buddy of ours. You're really good friends with him. I think you've known him for a lot longer than, than I have, but he is such an interesting guy. He built companies. He's, like, built a company called Vungle, sold it. His whole origin story was one of the very first podcasts on this th- feed. So if you go back, Jack was in there, and he talked about, you know, when he was a high schooler, what he was doing, flipping things on eBay, and then how he hacked his way into an accelerator. Then once he was in the accelerator, how he figured out this ad tech company, how the experts told him, "There's no way. Son, you don't understand how the ad business works." And he's like, "Yeah, that's my strength. I don't understand how this works, so when I approach it, it's, I'm gonna approach it differently." And what he did was the whole, the way the whole ad industry worked was all based on CPM, impressions. So it's a billboard. How many people are gonna see this billboard? That's how I charge you. And he's like, "Well, that's kinda stupid. If I was advertising, I don't want people to see it. I want people to buy from me, or I want people to download my app. I want the action. So what if we just paid for the action and it became CPA instead of CPM?" And so he reinvented, in a way... I, that's a little bit generous, I would say. There's other people doing this, but- Jack and his co-founder created Vungle, sold it for $700 million, and it was really based around this mobile gaming ad network that was gonna do things a little differently the way other people were doing them.
15. SPSam Parr
  He sold it for $750 million when he was 29 years old.
16. SPShaan Puri
  For ex-
17. SPSam Parr
  Like, crazy stuff
18. SPShaan Puri
  ... and for example, again, thinking from first principle, so, like, what should the ad be? Everybody else did video ads. And so you would be playing a game, it would stop, a video would take over the screen, and it would be a video commercial. And then you'd be like, "When, when can I click the X so I can get back to playing a game?" And what Jack realized was, he's like, "Well, the best way to advertise a game is actually just play the game for a second." Oh, it's, it's about shooting the ball into this hoop? Well, like, let them try to shoot a couple times. They miss, then they wanna make it, and they make it. And then now they got a sample. So they created an ad unit that was just a mini version of the game that worked way better than the video ad. And it was, again, many times over of just thinking from first principles, "How can I do this?" But now, since selling the company, he had his Thorp enough moment, where he did not need to go create another company, and instead, got really into other things. He's like, "You know, I need to buy an office chair." He goes and he looks. He's kinda uninspired. He's like, "Well, certainly there's been some studies on the best way to sit, so what is the best way to sit?" And he'll go and he'll read research papers about the best way to sit, and then he'll test chairs, and he ultimately ends up building this crazy ergonomic chair himself in his garage over the period of about six or eight months.
19. SPSam Parr
  Did you see the chair?
20. SPShaan Puri
  It looks like a dentist chair. He's laying down in this crazy position, and it's like a, a work chair. But at any time, if you ask him like, "Hey, Jack, what are you up to nowadays?" He felt zero pressure, or at least caved to zero of the pressure of having some important sounding answer. 'Cause he just did what was important to him rather than what sounded important to others. So he'd be like, "I'm just, you know, just messing around." You're like, "No, what does that mean? Like, what do you do every day, Jack?" He's like, "Well, I'm really working on trying to build a chair. You know, I got really interested in chairs and, you know, sitting." He says, "I, I sit for six hours a day, and I just thought well, why don't I sit in a better chair? And so I got started th- researching chairs, so I bought 52 chairs and I've been testing them, and then I've decided to, to build my own that's the best of each of these." That's what he'll do for one year, and then next year he'll do something completely different just off of his curiosity.
21. SPSam Parr
  And the cake one year for his birthday, the cake that his wife made for him at his party was shaped like an Amazon box because he'd orders so many chairs or so many whatever things that he's interested in that the, he had a room in his home just dedicated to all the boxes. [laughs]
22. SPShaan Puri
  Yeah, he had a small, like, FBA, Fulfilled by Amazon, facility in his, in his pantry just to test out every single product. [laughs]
23. SPSam Parr
  And at one point they banned him on Amazon. They banned him on Amazon for returning too much stuff 'cause he would buy all of this stuff to test it out. But yeah, Jack is perfectly like that. But does this resonate with you, where you're like, "I need to just pursue more things without having an big outcome in mind"?
24. SPShaan Puri
  We haven't been talking a ton,
21:14 – 24:58
Shaan's one criteria for action
1. SPShaan Puri
  but that's become the theme of my, I don't know, the last 12, 15 months or so. I heard this quote. Naval said this thing on some podcast, and he goes, "Too many of us live where we're doing things today for some future reward, some f- some future payoff. I'm not doing what I want to be doing now, but I'm putting in the time, I'm putting in the work, I'm putting in the effort for some future payoff." And he goes, "That's understandable. We all start there." He's like, "B- but the day you start doing things where the th- the thing you're doing in and of itself is the reward, that's the day you've retired." People think retirement is when you stop working and you go sit down, you chill, you do nothing. It's not that you do nothing. It's that you do the things you wanna do because the act of doing them itself is the payoff, and you're not ... Sure, there might be some upside in the future, but that's not why you did it. And when I heard that, I was like, "Okay, that's what I need to be doing. I don't know how I'm gonna get there," and I've many times had little detours off of that where I start to do something opportunistic 'cause, oh, it's gonna pay off in the future. But I've just continued to bring myself back to that m- that moment, which was I want this next chapter of my life to be all about I'm doing things where the only criteria is the act of doing it has to be rewarding enough for it to have been worth it. And that one criteria eliminates, like, 98% of the possible things I wanna do, because if I'm honest with myself and I say, "Well, why do I wanna do this?" It's because it might make a bunch of money or it might pay off in this thing later. It doesn't even m- it could be business-related, it could be relationships related, it could ... You know, why do I wanna meet this person or go to this event? Oh, because it might lead to something. No, no, no. I'm only going to this event if the event itself is the payoff. I'm only hanging out with this person if the hangout is the payoff, not because it's gonna lead to something else. It can be a different-
2. SPSam Parr
  But did you determine what that is? Do you determ- have you f-
3. SPShaan Puri
  Well, what I realized was-
4. SPSam Parr
  'Cause that's actually, that's actually really hard is figuring out what the play is.
5. SPShaan Puri
  What I realized is it's less of a thing. So I thought, like you're just asking me this question, I thought it's a thing. I gotta find my thing, my new thing that's the thing I just love to do, and I'm doing it for the sake of doing it. What I realized is, is it's fundamentally different. It's not a thing. It's a approach and it's a filter. And so actually it's a question that I ask at the beginning of anyth- anything I'm gonna do that day, which is am I doing this for some deferred payoff, some deferred benefits, or am I doing this because I actually enjoy doing this? And so it changed the way I did everything. So for example, with my workouts, there was a version of workouts that I did because whatever, just, just bite, bite the bullet, just do this and you're gonna ... It, it'll pay off later when you get fit. Versus well, why don't I just do workouts that the workout itself is so satisfying? And of course if I do that, I'm gonna do it more often, I'm gonna do it with my full effort, and I'm gonna still get the reward in the end. So I started working with this, like, boxing coach or playing basketball, different things that I wasn't doing before because I was willing to settle for doing something that today kinda sucks, but in the future maybe it's gonna turn out great. And I realized I had lived basically, like, 35 years of my life with the, "This kinda sucks now, but oh, it's gonna, it's all gonna pay off in the end." I realized it's a false choice. You don't have to do that. You can just filter every activity on is the act of doing this gonna be worth it, even if it's challenging. It doesn't mean everything is so happy. But is the act of doing this the reward, or am I doing this only for some future payoff? So it became a, a filtering criteria, not a one thing. So for example, I told you I was reading the book The Game the other day. Why did I do that? Why was I reading a book in the middle of the day, especially an old book that I'd already read before that had no relevance to me 'cause I'm not trying to be a pickup artists or, or hit on women anymore, right? That's not what I was doing. But it was the thing I was most interested in that moment. And so I did it because the act of doing it was the reward 'cause I was most interested in it. And I've done that with other hobbies, like picked up playing the piano, and I started doing other things that are all falling into this bucket, and I've never been so... You can hear it in my voice. I've never been so switched on after making this sort of shift in the way I chose what to work on.
24:58 – 29:06
Why you don't need privilege to start
1. SPSam Parr
  And that's a very, I'm gonna say the P word. That's a very privileged way to go about it, which is if you hit the lottery, like maybe we have, or, I mean, we've worked hard, but we've got lucky as well, where that's a very privileged way to go about it. And so I do think you have to eat shit for a certain period of time and also get some luck, but yeah, I'm very drawn to this way of living.
2. SPShaan Puri
  I'm not sure that that's true.
3. SPSam Parr
  It's 100% true.
4. SPShaan Puri
  The reason I say that is, first, whenever somebody calls you privileged, I'm like, "That's a compliment." I think they, they mean it as an insult. They f- people s- use it as a neg- Not you in this case, but I'm saying most people, if you call someone privileged-
5. SPSam Parr
  Yeah
6. SPShaan Puri
  ... you're trying to tear them down. I want my life to be described as one of privilege. That's the point. [laughs] You're giving me a compliment. That's like saying, "Wow, you're really good at this," or, "This comes effortlessly to you," or whatever. I want my life to be described that way. That is a goal of mine. And I just mean that because most people will treat that as a negative, and they, they try to make themselves smaller, right? So a little bit of like the tall poppy syndrome, where if you have the freedom to do something and you are not doing it because you're worried about how it looks or how it sounds or how it... Others don't have that privilege, you're wasting your privilege, and I think that's a, it's a bad thing. Let me, let, let me answer the other part, which is I would say that the most successful project I've ever done, more than any of the companies I ever d- built or any job I ever had, has been this, this podcast. This podcast from a usage, like people listen to this, they like it, so customers are happiest. Financially, it's a very lucrative product that affords a very good lifestyle. But also just the, my enjoyment of it, the act of doing it. I don't do this episode for some future payoff. I do this episode 'cause it's gonna be fun to do. I enjoy this conversation. This conversation enough, by the time we click stop, I've got my payoff. And when I started the podcast, I literally wrote down that I'm gonna lose money doing this, that I expect that nobody will listen to this, and I'm gonna do it anyways 'cause it'll be so fun to record these episodes, talking to interesting people and learning, that it'll make it worth it. A- and I wrote down, I me- I have this Google Doc. I'll share it. It says, "My forecast is I will lose $10,000 a year doing this. My forecast is that really nobody but my mom is gonna listen to this thing, and it's still worth doing."
7. SPSam Parr
  What were the other predictions?
8. SPShaan Puri
  So I got into this position because I made a choice like that four years ago, right? Like, that, that... And so I don't think... I also thought, "Well, you gotta eat shit for a while before you get to go do the fun things." I don't believe that that's actually true. I know a lot of people-
9. SPSam Parr
  That's 100% true. Think about it. Let's say you're a, a 40-year-old landscaper with three kids-
10. SPShaan Puri
  It is one way to do things. It is one way to do things. I know a bunch of engineers who work on projects that they are personally interested in. They build f- personal projects, and one goes kinda nowhere, two goes kinda nowhere, but it doesn't matter. They're building up their skills. They're having fun doing it, and sure enough, by the third, the fourth, the fifth, either they've built up skills where they're a highly valuable person that gets brought into a project that's already working, and they get paid handsomely for it, or their, one of their projects takes off. But the whole time, they were just doing the thing that they really like to do. I think that there is one way to win, which is grind and eat shit, and pay your dues, work up the ladder. Pick whichever cliche you want, and that that is a way to win. I know several people that from the beginning, they were driven by working on the things that were interesting to them, like an Ian Thorp type of guy, right? Um, and when they, when they're working on the things that were interesting to them, it led to good outcomes. Because when you work on things that are interesting, you work on it longer, harder than, than a person who's just doing it for a reward. You get better at it, and when you get really good at something, that's when the payoffs tend to come.
11. SPSam Parr
  Well, I believe that can be true, and also it can be true that it's more challenging logistically for certain people. For example, you're a blue collar laborer with three kids. At 40 years old, you work from 6:00 AM to 7:00 PM, and you're like, "There's just no time, and I just gotta pay the bills." I do think that it's just more challenging. For many of the people listening right now, I believe you are totally right, which is we probably have a lot of college-educated, particularly college-age kids who don't have too much responsibility, and they should lean into this, this thing, and I completely believe that to be true. And I believe it also to be true that as you grow, this type of mindset gets stamped out of you. The world wants you to be vanilla.
12. SPShaan Puri
  Yeah, absolutely.
29:06 – 33:37
Playing "the game" of business
1. SPShaan Puri
  Let me ask you a different question. Of the people we know that are successful, just give me a rough number, what percentage do you think got there through the grind, do shit they didn't like that paid off in an unsexy way, and then now they work on things that are more interesting, pleasurable, that they're driven by curiosity, they're driven by passion, they're driven by whatever, versus people that made it by following things they were curious about? Maybe it was a bit of a lonely road for a bit. Maybe other people, maybe it wasn't a hot market, but it became hot, but they were there already, right? That happens a lot. What percentage would you say in each? I'm just curious roughly how, how you would think about it. Is it, like, only 5% w- got successful through following their own, their own interests fundamentally, or do you think that it's 50/50 that got it, got successful following their interests versus following what was more proven?
2. SPSam Parr
  If I had to guess, 60 to 70% of the people who we know who we would consider wealthy enough that money doesn't really matter probably made money in a way that looking back, they were like, "That was really hard and miserable, and I don't think I can do that again."
3. SPShaan Puri
  [laughs]
4. SPSam Parr
  And then a large percentage of them now, I would say only 50% of them then go and pursue something that truly interests them, and the other 50% just do the playbook again and are miserable while earning a great living.
5. SPShaan Puri
  Yeah, so r- roughly, let's say, 20, 25% you think maybe were in the, the bucket that I'm talking about, which is they were just doing what's interesting to them, and that happened to become something that was very successful, versus people who-
6. SPSam Parr
  Yeah
7. SPShaan Puri
  ... chose things that were not as interesting or not as fun for them, but they thought were gonna have a payoff, and it did.
8. SPSam Parr
  And here's why. Y Combinator is like the stereotypical Silicon Valley like story. You go to Y Combinator. How long is Y Combinator? 8 or 12 weeks? Three months maybe?
9. SPShaan Puri
  Yeah, three months, yeah.
10. SPSam Parr
  Okay. So you go with one idea, and you only have 12 weeks to decide if this is gonna work or not, and by week six they say, "Dude, this sucks. You should pivot this amazing idea you had to do credit card processing or to do something else that people want to give you money for." And so they just go, "Ah, fuck it. Whatever. I gotta go down that path." But that path that they're signing up for is a 10-year journey or more, and so there wasn't too much thought with it. And so they're just like, "Man, I just gotta get a win however way I can, and I only have s- another six weeks until I've gotta go do demo day. So I've gotta just settle on something and move forward and do it." And I think that that mentality is often what a lot of internet-based businesses are built on.
11. SPShaan Puri
  So I think that's a little unfair to YC, 'cause for example, if... I think that does happen. But one of the things that happens in those pivots, 'cause I've invested in a lot of w- YC companies that pivot. And also if you read Paul Graham's essay, one of the things Paul Graham a- advises heavily against is the, what he calls playing startup. It's like playing house-
12. SPSam Parr
  Yeah
13. SPShaan Puri
  ... where you sort of just try to manufacture a startup idea that you think might work or think might be good. And he's like, "The best way to figure out a startup idea is to scratch your own itch, and to look at your own life and figure out w- in what place am I already living in some future that other people aren't, but I could build a product that would help them get there. Or what's a pain point we've discovered along the way of doing this that we could solve?" So yes, they pivot quickly and they pivot in the middle of YC, but usually the advice is that you should pivot to something, the pro- like, the itch that you want scratched, the problem that you are currently having, or the thing you, you uniquely understand because of the way you live your life versus, uh, what other people do. And the biggest successes out of YC have typically been that, right?
14. SPSam Parr
  I agree that that-
15. SPShaan Puri
  Um, the, the Airbnb guys-
16. SPSam Parr
  Yeah
17. SPShaan Puri
  ... renting out their own apartment to make w- way, or Brian Armstrong doing Coinbase 'cause he lived in Argentina and dealt with the currency issues and was interested in Bitcoin. These were not ideas that fundamentally s- sounded good.
18. SPSam Parr
  The biggest successes I think are done that way.
19. SPShaan Puri
  Yeah.
20. SPSam Parr
  But not the average success.
21. SPShaan Puri
  I think that's exactly right. I think the most successful people work that way, but the average or the majority are not that way. Um, and I think that's probably the true statement.
22. SPSam Parr
  I, I would have to go look through the Y Combinator companies, but there's not that many 23-year-olds that know anything about payroll processing software. But there's a lot of 25-year-olds or whatever who have created something really cool like that. Our friend Jack, why did he do Vungle? I think he was curious of solving problems, but he didn't have a problem.
23. SPShaan Puri
  He, he wanted success more than he wanted to solve a-
24. SPSam Parr
  He wanted su- He was like, "This just seems, like, intriguing I guess. Like, yeah, let's just put some time-"
25. SPShaan Puri
  So he, he, he's someone who made a shift. I would also say some... there's a con- confounding factor, which is that for a lot of the people who are our friends, the thing that they are interested in is the game.
26. SPSam Parr
  Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
27. SPShaan Puri
  So it's not the industry that they... that was the passionate thing. The passionate thing was playing the game of business.
33:37 – 36:15
Switching to better games
1. SPShaan Puri
  Can I give you two related things that came up for me? I don't know if you remember this, but when the OpenAI drama was going on when they fired Sam Altman, one of the things that came out was maybe they have AGI internally. And everyone's like, "No, they probably don't have AGI internally." But maybe there was some breakthrough, 'cause he had gone at some conference and said, "There are these moments with OpenAI where you're sitting in a room and you get to see a demo and your mind gets blown. You've seen the future. The world is not the same because of what you just saw." He goes, "That just happened about three weeks ago." And people didn't know what it was, but he was kinda just, like, teasing a little bit, and just... He wasn't even trying to make a hype thing. He was just trying to say, like, what it's like to work there. He was, he was trying to use it for some other reason, but people took that and they're like, "Man, they must have something."
2. SPSam Parr
  Sam Altman said that or an employee said that?
3. SPShaan Puri
  Sam Altman had said that. And so people started speculating, what is it? And then these leaks happen, they start talking about this thing called Q*. Do you remember this? Do you remember this Q* thing?
4. SPSam Parr
  Yeah. I don't know what it is, though.
5. SPShaan Puri
  So Q*'s... I, I mean, I'm not a AI PhD researcher so I don't know exactly, but the idea is, like, there are different algorithms or different methods you can use to do something, and Q* is a certain technique. And so people were like, "Oh, Q*. Does that mean they're using the Q- either the Q technique or the star technique or whatever? That's not what people are using today, but maybe there's something there." And so this thing leaks. It's not been confirmed yet whether that's was or wasn't a thing. But what ended up happening was there was a whole bunch of smart people that suddenly started sniffing around that technique. And v- just recently a bunch of research papers got published saying that they're seeing amazing performance using this technique. And so this guy came on and he talked about that this is actually a phenomenon that happens frequently. So uh, I'll, I'll just tie this together. This guy Robert Quansoy once tweeted this. I don't, I don't know this guy, but he tweeted this little story that I liked. And he said, "Claude Shannon once told me that as a kid he remembered being stuck on a jigsaw puzzle. And his brother was passing by and said, 'You know, I could tell you something that would help you with this puzzle, but nah, I'm not gonna do it.' That's all the brother said, but that was enough of a hint for Claude to solve the puzzle. The great thing about the hint is that you can always give this to yourself." So basically there's this, this phenomenon that happens in human behavior, which is that if you knew that there might be a win, you don't even need to know what the thing is. That alone will increase your probability of success.
6. SPSam Parr
  Do you know, wanna know what else Claude Shannon did? Do you remember how I told you Ed Thorp went to the roulette table and it required two people to be in the crowd?
7. SPShaan Puri
  He was his buddy. [laughs]
8. SPSam Parr
  That was the other guy. So in fact, if you look it up, the, there's like... It's called, I think it's, like, the Thorp Shannon principle, and it's, like, the theory of... So Claude Shannon, who this guy is referencing, he was the guy who was tapping his foot to tell-
9. SPShaan Puri
  Right
10. SPSam Parr
  ... uh, Ed Thorp, which is pretty
36:15 – 40:13
How the Roger Bannister Effect crushes limiting beliefs
1. SPSam Parr
  funny.
2. SPShaan Puri
  So the second story that's the s- same principle is about Kaggle. So Kaggle's this online competitive place for solving, you know, problems, riddles, puddles, puzzles, whatever it is. I think... I don't know if it's all coding or if it's just math puzzles. So this guy replied in the thing, he goes, "One of my favorite Kaggle facts is that any time that the leaderboard gets stagnant for a while in, in any competition, if one team suddenly makes a jump, that will automatically cause multiple independent teams to quickly reproduce the same breakthrough with no knowledge of how the first team made the breakthrough And isn't that kind of amazing how it's like, it's the four-minute mile, right? Uh, what's the guy's-
3. SPSam Parr
  Yeah
4. SPShaan Puri
  ... name who ran the four-minute mile?
5. SPSam Parr
  Roger Ban- so when, uh, prior to Roger Bannister running four-minute miles, people were only, like, three seconds, like 4.03, 4.04, which is quite a long distance away from four minutes. But basically, when Roger Bannister did it, roughly four other runners also broke four-minute miles within, like, three months of Roger Bannister doing it.
6. SPShaan Puri
  Right. So the same thing just happened to me in one of my businesses. So in one of my businesses we had... There was a marketing tactic or channel that we had looked at, we'd even kind of dabbled with, but we di- didn't exactly know how to do it. It kind of seemed like a puzzle we didn't know how to solve, so we put it on a shelf for a while. And then I heard a whisper that somebody else was just crushing it using that channel. Now, I don't know what they're doing, I don't know the technique that they're doing, I don't know how much they're crushing it. I just heard enough to know that they are crushing it. And immediately, we mobilized. And that same channel that looked kind of like a dead thing before to us, we didn't really know how to make any progress, we still didn't have any technique. Nobody gave us a tool of how to make progress, just the knowledge that somebody else was making progress in that same channel fired us up, got us going, and we immediately found a breakthrough. And over the weekend we did, like, 30 grand in revenue on this one channel. And it reminded me of the same principle of just the knowledge that there is a solution actually increases your probability of getting to a solution. [laughs] Just the knowledge that somebody else has found a solution without telling you how at all will increase your probability. And I think that's one of the things about this podcast that should help people. That's one of the ways to use this podcast, is that you're not gonna do exactly what any of the stories we tell on this podcast do, but just hearing other people's success, just hearing other people ran a four-minute mile will make you run a four-minute mile. We've had this with our friends too, people who are saying, "Within, um, you know, I'm gonna make X amount of money in Y months." Right? We had a friend that was like, "I'm gonna tr- try to make a million dollars in three months." And just hearing that question, p- I didn't have that question before. Just hearing that question got me to start thinking about ways you could do it. Then hearing that somebody did it immediately made me wanna figure out how, and even though I was not gonna do any of the things that they did, it allowed me to figure out a solution that would be able to do that. I think that's one of the most underrated learning techniques you can have, or, or, like, success techniques you could have.
7. SPSam Parr
  What's that called?
8. SPShaan Puri
  The MFM paradox. That you can-
9. SPSam Parr
  Yeah [laughs]
10. SPShaan Puri
  ... become more successful following somebody else even though you don't know what they did. [laughs] Just the fact that they did it.
11. SPSam Parr
  We, uh, this is, and this is, like, way less cool than artificial intelligence, but similarly, when Morning Brew and The Hustle were first getting going with the newsletter business, w- we had the exact same thing happen multiple times, where eventually I became... One time Austin came over after we had both sold and I was like, "Hey, you wanna see something cool?" And I go, "Pull up your computer, I'll pull up mine. I know you got a document that shows everything that you guys were doing per month. Let me show you mine and you show me yours." And it was the exact same thing, by the way. It was, we were, we were seeing little inklings of what the other person was doing as it was happening, and we kinda replicated each other's success, and it absolutely happened the same way. Before we started this podcast, you said, "What topics do you have? I- I'm feeling a little uninspired." And I have to say you win a blue ribbon today, because you have completely put a beautiful bow tie on this thing that I brought you. You've brought so many good, interesting tidbits to add to the story of Ed Thorp. That was pretty good.
40:13 – 58:50
Step 0: Believe it can be done
1. SPShaan Puri
  Well, can I, can I leave you with one framework and I have one story. So the framework is, you know when Ed Thorp was beating blackjack or beating roulette, what's the first step that he had to do before he beats the house? What is step, absolute step zero before he even figured out how to beat the house?
2. SPSam Parr
  I don't know, just how to do it at home?
3. SPShaan Puri
  Believing that it could be done.
4. SPSam Parr
  Yeah.
5. SPShaan Puri
  Right? [laughs] Believing that it could be done. And this is cheesy, but it is very true. And by the way, things that are cheesy but true are underrated, because smart people write off cheesy things 'cause they're cheesy. Because they've heard them before but they haven't actually acted on it. So their underpriced assets are things that are cheesy and true, because they're ignored by other smart, ambitious people. I remember when I went to this Tony Robbins event. On the second day there's another guy who, who hosts it. So the other guy, he starts off with a game of Simon Says to kinda warm up the audience, and you just think this is a warm-up because they want you to be engaged as an audience, they want you to be active, do something interactive, a little crowd work to start. So he starts with Simon Says. "We're gonna play Simon Says." Now, this is a room of about 6,000 people. So there's 6,000 people who are gonna play Simon Says and he's like, "The winner gets to come on stage." Or like, that the, yeah, "The w- winner gets to come on stage and you're gonna get this thing." I forgot what it was, some, some good prize. But again, there's 6,000 people, so, you know, whatever. Good luck. So he starts and he says, "Simon says," blah, blah, blah, and then, like, he immediately gets, like, half the people on the first one. So for example, he goes, "All right, you guys ready to play? Stand up." And everybody stands up. He says, he didn't say, "Simon says stand up." So you only do the thing-
6. SPSam Parr
  Got it
7. SPShaan Puri
  ... when he says, "Simon says," but if he just says an instruction and you do it without saying Simon Says, you're out.
8. SPSam Parr
  This guy clearly read the book The Game.
9. SPShaan Puri
  Exactly. So he's got us on the cat string theory. We are just obeying his commands.
10. SPSam Parr
  [laughs]
11. SPShaan Puri
  So the game starts, half the people get out on the first round, it whittles it down. Within five minutes he's down to the winner. Winner gets up on stage, blah, blah, blah, and he had the final 10 people. He said, "Stay standing. You don't get to come on stage, but stay standing." And, um, then he called on somebody. He's like, "The guy who's standing, you got to the final 10. The guy next to you, when did you get out?" He's like, "I got out in, like, the second round." He goes, "Let me ask you something. Did you believe you were gonna win?" And the guy was like, "No, I mean, s- so many people. Uh, it's a silly game. I, I don't know. I didn't even think about it." He goes, "That's interesting." Asks next person, "Did you believe you were gonna win?" "No." He goes, "So raise your hand if you, when we started the game, you believed that you could win." Only, like, you know, 5% of the audience raise their hand. He goes, "So all of you thought you were competing with 6,000 people? The only competition was amongst these 50 people who actually believed that there was a way to win." And he's like, "I'm gonna leave you with two, two ideas. Number one, if you're gonna play the game, decide to win."
12. SPSam Parr
  That's so funny.
13. SPShaan Puri
  He's like [laughs] he's like, "You don't have to win every game, but if you decide to play, you should decide to win." And he goes, "The second thing is that- In life, you believe you're competing with a much bigger pool of people than you actually are. Because the majority of people aren't even playing the game, and of the people who are playing the game, most of them don't even believe that they can win. You are only competing with the people who actually believe that there is a way to win. And so similarly with this guy cracking blackjack, cracking roulette, that's a game I thought was impossible to crack until I read the book, I think it's called Bringing Down The House or something like that. That's the other blackjack card counting book. And immediately my mind shifted into, oh, blackjack is a beatable game. We can beat this game. And suddenly I started to learn things. Suddenly I started to, to understand how do you actually beat the game of blackjack, and it compelled me into action. All right, let's pause real quick. I gotta do the Thrill of the Shill, where I'm gonna give you a thrill here. I'm gonna teach you something that I think is a very important principle that any founder should know, and I'm gonna tell you about a company that's doing it well. All right, so the Thrill of the Shill is, have you ever heard of the law of category? Are you familiar with this?
14. SPSam Parr
  I've not.
15. SPShaan Puri
  I think it's from the book The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, and in that book it's talking about marketing. How do you actually stand out? How do you do the hard thing in business, which is stand out, get your brand out there, get customers, and get them coming to you versus you just chasing them down and hunting them one by one. How do you get market pull? And the law of category is a very simple principle, which is that you'd rather own a category than participate in one. If you can't be the first in a category, you'd rather create a new category altogether, and that is something that many people have done. So, for example, I'll give you, I'll give you one in the podcasting space. So we're, we're a podcast, and this podcast started off very undifferentiated. We started off just as interviews with successful people. Guess what? That's what every business podcast is, interviews with successful people. How did you do it? It's all past, past facing. How did you do it? We started to stand out when me and you got on here. We started going a little future facing, which is, hey, what trends, what opportunities do you see? What's going on right now in the market that you think somebody could be capitalizing on? So suddenly we were in a new category. So how many podcasts were there that were talking about stuff that you, you know, opportunities and trends that you could be capitalizing on for the next 12 months versus what did you do 15 years ago, successful person? And even when we invited guests on, we said, "You gotta bring some ideas. What opportunities do you see today? Now we're not just gonna ask about the thing you did in the past." Even further than that is, you ever seen Hot Ones, that show where the guy interviews celebrities, but instead of just interviewing them, they're eating hot wings while they're doing it-
16. SPSam Parr
  Yeah
17. SPShaan Puri
  ... escalating in, in hotness? It's the law of category. That show became super popular. It gets millions of views on YouTube, and he gets the best guests because he's the only podcast that does that. He's the only show doing that. He created his own category. And now if you came in and you tried to do a show like that, guess what they would say? "Oh, it's kinda like Hot Ones." They own that category. They own that, that niche. And so the law of category is a very small principle, which is that without taking more effort, if you simply just define a new category, um, you now have a, a reason to buy, an RTP, a reason for a customer to come use your product, come use your service. Well, the company that sponsored today's podcast, Wander, is a great example of exactly that. These guys basically said, well, you have luxury hotels. You got the Four Seasons, you got... What's that fancy one, Aman, that everybody's going to nowadays? You got the luxury fancy hotels, and then you have stay in a house like Airbnb where you get the ho- you know, you get to stay in a home, multiple rooms and a kitchen and all that, but it's not as luxury and turnkey and just a beautiful everything's taken care of you experience. So they created a new category, which is hotelified homes. So luxury homes that are on par with the nicest luxury hotels, but it's a house instead of being in a building in a skyscraper. You get a, you get a, a, a backyard, a pool, a sauna, you get a kitchen, you get everything you want in a home, but you get the guarantee that it's gonna be luxury, unlike an Airbnb. So I think that they've done a great job, and that's why they've grown so fast. They did, I think, like, 12 million in bookings in the last 12 months because they created their own category. There isn't anybody else who's really in that category where they actually manage the property and therefore can guarantee a certain quality of service.
18. SPSam Parr
  Great thrill. Pretty good shill. I love the shill.
19. SPShaan Puri
  [laughs] Improve my shill, please.
20. SPSam Parr
  No, I think your shill was great. So if you wanna use them, wander.co- wander.com/mfm. What do they get? I think they get $300 off their first stay.
21. SPShaan Puri
  Yeah, if they, if you go to wander.com/mfm, so that's our personal code, that's just for listeners of this pod, you download the app. If you, if you do that, you get 300 bucks off a stay, so you get 300 bucks off, and you're entered into a giveaway that's gonna be... They're giving away a free Wander stay. So if you're one of the people who are doing this, and remember the principle that's in this podcast, you, if you enter, you gotta believe that you can win. Go ahead and enter and you might win the free Wander travel thing. So check it out, wander.com/mfm.
22. SPSam Parr
  I think you said last time, I go, "You know, I'm not sure how many people are gonna do this." So if you're one of the people that actually does it, you've got a pretty good-
23. SPShaan Puri
  [laughs]
24. SPSam Parr
  ... chance of actually winning.
25. SPShaan Puri
  Exactly.
26. SPSam Parr
  So that's W-A-N-D-E-R.com/mfm. All right, back to the episode.
27. SPShaan Puri
  So I have a funny story to... I'll, I'll tie it up with this, which is that people have heard of a vicious cycle.
28. SPSam Parr
  Yeah.
29. SPShaan Puri
  Oh, that's a vicious cycle. And they'll say it's, you know, uh, poverty is a vicious cycle. You don't have money, so therefore you don't, um, you can't buy the best food or, or, or, uh, education, and therefore you end up staying, you know, you, you don't get the best opportunities, and therefore you stay poor. Vicious cycle, right? We've all heard of vicious cycle. Well, a good thought experiment is what is the opposite of a vicious cycle? A virtuous cycle. What's a virtuous cycle? And a virtual cycle, a virtuous cycle is, again, a Tony Robbins thing, is basically if you believe, so if you have high conviction that something can happen, we've all had moments in our life where we're, we are like, "I am convinced that I could do this or that it can happen," then you'll take a different level of action. So belief drives action. The amount of belief drives the amount of action. So little belief will drive little action, which drives a little result. A lot of belief takes you to dri- take a lot of action, which drives a bigger result. And guess what? Once you see that result, it reinforces the belief. So if you start with a little belief, you take a little action, you get a little result, you'll be like, "I knew it. I knew this shit wasn't gonna work." It lowers your belief even more, takes even lower action, lower result. And the opposite happens, where if you're a heavy believer, you take a shit ton of action, shit ton of action will start to yield a result, and your belief will say, "I knew it. I knew we could do this. I d- I knew we'd get progress." You take even more action And it just becomes a virtual cycle. And so that is one of the things that I think is most important. If you are stuck, or if you're at a plateau, or you're not exactly where you wanna be, step zero is you have to somehow trick yourself into raising your level of belief that it is possible. One way is to read books about other people who have already done it, or talk to other people who have done it. Imagine yourself doing it, whatever. Ask yourself questions until you are worked up into a fever that this, that this is gonna work, because that's the only chance you have of taking enough action to actually get a result.
30. SPSam Parr
  I wanna hear from the listener, the people who have made it this far, if they feel like I feel right now, which is like I wanna run through a fucking wall.