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Transcript
50 min read · 9,961 words- 0:00 – 11:01
The wild economics of lab testing on monkeys
- SPShaan Puri
Guess how much a monkey costs.
- SPSam Parr
I don't know, $1,000?
- SPShaan Puri
Almost. 20,000. [laughs]
- SPSam Parr
One monkey is 20 grand? [upbeat music]
- SPShaan Puri
Before we start, can I get a, can I get a wellness check on my hair, dude? I just feel like, I feel like I might have hit the point where I gotta, like, start taking something. You know, when I'm getting the hat on every day, I feel like that's-- I'm wa-- I'm literally waving the white flag with this hat, that, like, maybe, maybe we're getting a little thin on top.
- SPSam Parr
What's the thing that you would take? It starts with an R. Like, is it r- it's the R word. Uh, r-
- SPShaan Puri
Nutrafol. I-- Oh, yeah, the-- Well, there's like a generic name for them, and then there's all the branded ones, but, like, Madoxafil something, something. Does that sound right? That, that sounds like something.
- SPSam Parr
One of the downsides on one of them, I think, is limp, limp wiener.
- SPShaan Puri
Right. Well, that might be two for one. I'm done having kids, so-
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
... so, you know. I, I, I, I was thinking about the vasectomy. Maybe we don't need to do that.
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
It's so funny, dude. Ben, as you know, is-- You'll never catch Ben without a hat, you know, for, for similar reasons. And he met a guy, and he was like, "Oh, I got a-- I'm on a hair protocol from this guy." And I'm like, "What? Like, what you got, a Turkish guy? Who you got?" He's like, "No, no, no, it's my friend. He's got me on this protocol." And you know p- protocol has just become the fancy thing since Huberman-
- SPSam Parr
Yeah, man. [laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
... and Bryan Johnson. It's like, what do you mean? He's gave you a pill? Is that a protocol? And he was like, "No, no, no, I got to, like, red light therapy, do this, put this, serum, blah, blah, blah." Okay. So I was like, "How's it going?" And he's like, uh, he's like, "I don't know, man. You, you tell me when you see me." So I just saw him, uh, yesterday. He's got a beard now.
- SPSam Parr
Oh, thick beard? [laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
He's got, he's got a beard, but his hair looks the same. [laughs]
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
So something's kinda working, which is hilarious. Beard looks great, I gotta give him that.
- SPSam Parr
Have you seen-- There's this app out, and I've been targeted at, by it like crazy. It's qoves.com, so it's Q-O-V-E-S.com. I've been getting targeted like crazy by this app, and I bought it. It's $150. Um, the ad worked.
- SPShaan Puri
"Improve your looks without surgery." And then there's a woman posing. Uh, life-changing transformations. Uh, we're look max-- we're looks maxing? Is that what's going on here?
- SPSam Parr
It's not even an app, really. Uh, b- And I don't even know if it's AI [laughs] or if it's some, like, Filipino who's gonna criticize me, because when you sign up, it takes three weeks for me to get my results.
- SPShaan Puri
Oh, wow.
- SPSam Parr
So I feel like there's gonna be, like, you know, a bunch of guys in the background, like, making fun of me, uh, and I'm like-
- SPShaan Puri
Did you get them?
- SPSam Parr
No, I just signed up for it. I got the ad while I was in San Francisco.
- SPShaan Puri
Instant conversion? Did you just stop on the middle of the street, sit down, and, and download this?
- SPSam Parr
Well, they had an Instagram that has a million followers, and it basically, like, tells you, like, what people can do to improve their looks, and it was in a beautiful Instagram. And a lot of my hot friends f- also follow them, so I figure, let's give it a shot. But I, I don't know if you ever heard of this. Have-
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs] Who are your hot friends? All right. I think we need to let the comments predict, before your results come in, where you're gonna score. So here's some of the things. Cheek activation, zero to 100.
- SPSam Parr
Mm. Mm.
- 11:01 – 15:35
Salad oil crisis
- SPSam Parr
Another thing that I've noticed is that there's companies that do things that I had no idea that they, that they still did it, and it potentially makes a lot of money. So for example, I'm reading, uh, for the first time I'm reading Snowball, Warren Buffett's biography. And I find... You had referenced this, but I didn't quite know what you were talking about, and I didn't wanna ask 'cause I didn't wanna look stupid, but it's the, uh, soybean oil shortage. Um, and basically the idea here is that, um, one of Warren Buffett's best trades ever was, uh, American Express because, uh, at the time, there was this whole scheme where basically there was a, a scam artist, and he realized that he could get loans against his soybean oil, uh, inventory. And so basically what this guy did was he had, I don't know if it was hundreds or dozens of massive tanks where he would store that oil, and let's say that oil was worth, uh, $5 million in aggregate. He could get a $4 million loan against that oil, and he actually went to, I think, 50 different banks and got a bunch of different loans, which is fraudulent. But then he did double whammy fraud because he got, uh, in order to get the loans, he hired American Express- To verify that the oil that he said was in the tank was in fact in the tank. But what he noticed was that when they checked, there was a way that you could kinda like, uh, scam 'em, and eventually he filled these huge tanks with seawater, saltwater.
- SPShaan Puri
Right. [laughs]
- SPSam Parr
And it was fake. The oil didn't exist. And for a variety of political reasons, a deal fell through with Russia where they were gonna import or sell them a bunch of oil. America said, "Nope, we're not gonna do bu- business with the USSR," therefore the price of soybean oil went down, and it crashed, and all these, um, l- lenders said, "Hey, soybean guy, you os- you owe us our money." And he was like, "Well, the thing is, is that none of the soybean oil-
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- SPSam Parr
... actually exists. Therefore, I can't pay you." And because American Express was the guarantor, they were the company that promised that the amount of soybean oil promised to the lenders was there, they were the ones who had to pay this massive fine. And Warren Buffett goes around, and he was like, "You know, American Express stock is down right now, and a lot of people have no idea that they even, like, d- were in the soybean oil-checking business."
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- SPSam Parr
"But I have a feeling b- based off of going to restaurants, and I'm talking to waiters, I have a feeling that the people who are using American Express, they don't really give a shit about this. They still trust that American Express is good for, you know, credit cards." And I was reading about this, and I was like, oh, that's a crazy story, but B, American Express is in the soybean oil-checking business.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs] Right.
- SPSam Parr
And you'd have no idea how many strange variety of businesses exist. And, by the way, it was like a multi-hundred million dollar a year business to, like, be in this soybean-checking oil business.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- SPSam Parr
And it was one of those moments where I'm like, "I can't believe this is a thing. I never..." And I think that crisis was so big that I don't think it brought down the economy, but I think it, like, um, I think it hurt a lot of companies to the tune of, like, many tens or hundreds of billions of dollars.
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah, it's all hidden in plain sight, and the more of those you sort of download, two things happen. One is it rewires your brain to realize, like, it's just the world is full of gaps, and then founders who plug them. And, uh, so you start to realize, oh, that was a gap, and someone plugged it. That was a gap, and someone plugged it. So you start finding gaps and thinking, "Could I plug that?" And, and it changes you. That's what an entrepreneur's brain really, like, comes down to, is seeing the world not as this, like, set, fixed, solved thing that Mommy and Daddy have, like, they'll take care of, but like, no, no, no, there's tons of opportunity. You can go and just change it. You can literally just bend the world, um, and make it, make it anew. And then the, on the other side, you realize, like, wow, there's a lot of business in the weird nooks and crannies of the world. There's a lot of money to be made doing things that are just off the beaten path, because there's this arbitrage between what smart people learn about in their day-to-day life or school, which is why you'll see a lot of programmers who will build to-do list apps and, you know, dating apps and things that... It's like, what's a problem that every smart person runs into? You simply wanna just stay away from that and go into things that they just haven't heard about, they don't know too much about. [laughs] You know what I mean? Like, go into a, a category that is just not ripe with really smart, you know, high-agency people, and you're playing against weak competition.
- SPSam Parr
How do you think you do that? 'Cause that's really hard.
- 15:35 – 24:38
the art of noticing
- SPSam Parr
It's hard to find problems worthy of solving that are 100% outside of your, of your, of your realm. For example, we met, um, a guy in San Francisco, uh, who had a business with dentists. It helped... It, it, it was a-
- SPShaan Puri
Dental back offices, so it's called Daydream, Daydream Dental. What they're doing was you're a dentist, you're a back office, you got Debbie sitting back there, and she spends most of her day calling insurance companies, reading out billing codes, trying to get the claims filed, accepted, checking patient insurance, and that entire process is kind of the revenue lifeblood of the business, and guess what? There's a lot of times where things get either rejected, billed the wrong way, cash not delivered, that sort of thing. And so, you know, there's a, it's a very lossy part of the business. You would think you go to the dentist, you pay money, and then that's it. It's over. But that's not really how the dental industry works. And so what he was doing was he goes to those dentists, and he says, "Hey, let us take over that function for you. We will use AI and smart people and computers to basically do a better job of that than Debbie can. So you don't, you don't have to employ a bunch of people and have a bunch of overhead to do that. We will employ the people. We will specialize in that function for you, and we'll collect 15%, 20% more revenue that you're just leaving on the table." That's the pitch.
- SPSam Parr
And he was doing, I think, in year two, close to $10 million a year in revenue, something like that. You guys can listen to the episode-
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah, approximately
- SPSam Parr
... to get all the, all the details. But we were like, "How did you get this idea?" Because he was a... He's either a Stanford grad or a Stanford dropout. He's, like, this guy-
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah
- SPSam Parr
... who, like, you would think he-
- SPShaan Puri
Looked like my cousin. [laughs]
- SPSam Parr
Yeah, he was, like, not hanging around a bunch of, uh, dental offices. Um, I mean, he had great teeth, but he didn't look like he was, like, doing this, like, dirty work, and he was like, "Oh, my mother was a dentist."
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah, he was like, "My summers when I was a teenager, I just worked in the dental practice."
- SPSam Parr
Yeah, and I was like, the greatest gift that, uh, and your mom's gonna rub it in your face, but the greatest gift financially that you've been given is the fact that your mother was a small business owner, and you got to see firsthand these problems. And how lucky are you that you were, you know, born in the situation where you are just, your eyes are opened. We had another guy who, uh, had a business servicing generators. So basically, like a nursing home who has an industrial size generator, they can't go out for even an hour, uh, 'cause, you know, that's, that's a huge deal, or a hospital. You can't have your hospital generator, or you can't have the hospital power go out in the middle of, uh, heart surgery. His job was installing and servicing generators, and this business might eventually become a hundred million dollar, maybe billion dollar company, and he explained the story of how he got into it, and it was, like, this, like, winding road of, like, "I worked for this company that, like, one time we did a consulting project with this thing, and I got into that, which then I got introduced to this other guy, did this other thing." And I just was asking myself how, like, I was envious of, like, people who do these, like, dirty- tech-ish jobs, and they discovered these problems that I had no idea were even a thing.
- SPShaan Puri
It's, it's the art of noticing. I told you I spent, like, a bunch of months looking up, uh, how some of the world's most creative people work. Uh, how do the best writers work, the best musicians, the best filmmakers? Because, you know, I spent so much of my life studying how great entrepreneurs work, which is a lot of brute force, a lot of high agency, a lot of scaled thinking, a lot of hustle. And, you know, us- there's obviously creativity involved, but I thought, "Well, let me go study the people who specialize in this." If you go listen to, like, what Rick Rubin says, what the great comedians say, it's all about noticing. It is actually why comedians, when they get rich and famous, they fall off. Because it's the struggles of the everyday person that led them to an insight that when they said it in front of a crowd, everybody connected with it. But when you're flying private, and you're, you have four nannies, and you have a chef, and you have this and that, well, you don't really encounter the same struggles that the everyday person does, so the, you stop coming up with the genius insights that make, that resonate, like a truth that you said out loud to the audience. And so you have to really, like, create a system where you are gonna be exposed to interesting things, and then a habit of noticing them, of paying attention to them, of writing things down, of slowing down, of not being too busy, not being too distracted, of being more present. And that's where the great... If you, if you look up, like, a... Remember Mark Manson came on the podcast, and he's got this ca- crazy hit book, right? He made a, like, one of the best-selling books, um, of, of nonfiction in the history of the world is The Subtle Art of Not Giving a [beep] . And he wrote that book, and it's like, he was blogging. He wrote, you know, thousands of blogs, but nothing really resonated. That one, that one... Or nothing resonated the same level as this idea did. And, um, "Where'd that, where'd that name come from?" And he was like, "Oh, I actually really liked this band, and the band had a song called 'The Subtle Art of something.'" It was something, it was like the last part was different. He's like, "And I just noticed that. Like, I just really liked that name, and I remem- I couldn't tell you the other 15 songs on the album, but I remembered that one. So then I wrote that down, and I, that became the book title." And it's like noticing is such a superpower. It's a superpower for entrepreneurs. Paul Graham wrote this essay called How to Do Great Work, and what he describes is, like, a few step system, and I'll just, just... It's like a 3,000-word essay. It's probably one of his most important essays, but it's so long. In it, he basically says, "Look, like, here's the formula. You want to first just follow the path of most excitement, so of most interest to you." And he basically says, "Look, uh, this is twofold. One is that being really interested in something is highly motivating, so you'll work more than other people, you'll have more endurance than other people." Um, and he goes, "Two, it's differentiating, 'cause exactly what in- interests you is not what interests most people. And so you have a specific, like, flavor palette for what you like, and if you follow that, truly, you will end up in a place of less competition." So he says for, "Let your excitement or your interest be the motor of the boat as well as the rudder." So it's like, it's the motor that motivates you, and it's the rudder that guides you of which way to go. He goes, "Okay, so now you took that boat, and you just let it go, and you just follow it, and you follow it all the way to the edge of the frontier of whatever industry you're in, whatever field you're in, whatever technology you play in. Go all the way to the frontier. If it's lead for this pencil, it's lead for this pencil. If it's the conveyor belt thing, it's the conveyor belt thing, whatever it is." And he goes, "When you're at the frontier, when you're far away from the frontier, the f- uh, the frontier just looks like a, like a circumference, like a, like a continuous line. But if you get all the way out there, you notice, oh, shit, you gotta kinda step over these gaps that exist. People don't know this. They don't do, they don't know how to do this. Oh, you gotta do this manually yourself. Nobody does this for you. It's kinda tedious. It's a pain in the ass." And it's only when you're in the frontier there that you will find the gaps, and then you s- the entrepreneurial step is to just decide to fill one of those. And, uh, it starts with noticing.
- SPSam Parr
That's a, that's a very good summary of that article. Paul Graham is another guy who's, like, I don't know if... He might be an artist. I don't know what he considers himsel- I think he does, actually. I think he's a, a-
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah, I think he does
- SPSam Parr
... uh, in terms of traditional art, but also, like, when he writes stuff, it's pretty amazing how he takes something that, um... It's sort of like How to Win Friends and Influence People, where he tell, they tell you certain stuff in the book, and you're like, "That's obvious," but the way that you put it makes it seem so much more important and insightful, uh, than I previously thought, and it is important and insightful.
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- SPSam Parr
And so I've been, I have been wondering how to stay, uh, as Eddie Murphy calls it, sensitive. I told you what Eddie Murphy said, right?
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- SPSam Parr
He had that documentary, and he was like, "I'm a great comedian for a bunch of reasons. One of them is that I'm super sensitive to stuff. If I give the valet my car, and he comes back with the car, and it just slightly smells different, I can make that joke about that slight smell. Uh, or if I notice a slight dent, I can just m- make a, a, a remark about that faster than other people because I notice it better than they do, and they're just not sensitive enough."
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah. Jerry Seinfeld has this book called Is This Anything? Have you ever read it?
- SPSam Parr
No.
- SPShaan Puri
It's, it's... So Jerry Seinfeld has this daily writing habit. Every morning, first two hours of the day, he sits down with a legal pad and a pencil and a coffee, and he just writes. He just writes jokes. And he's like, you know, "Writing is the game." And so he's been doing that for 40 years, so what he did was he compiled all of those yellow pages of just half jokes, which in the book is called Is This Anything? 'Cause, like, most of the jokes don't go anywhere. They're... And he's just asking himself, like, "Is there something there? Is there anything?"
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
"Is that, is this something?" And so he put them all together in a book, and, uh-
- SPSam Parr
Oh, that's awesome
- SPShaan Puri
... one of his jokes is he just noticed that, like, have you ever been on a phone call and it drops, and the other person calls you back, and they're like, "Hey, yes. Hey, hey, sorry. I don't know what happened"? He just noticed we always say that, and he goes, "You know, why does everyone always say, 'I don't know what happened'? Of course you don't know what happened. I don't know what's, I don't know what's happening right now with this phone call."
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
"Do you think I could explain what went wrong? I couldn't even tell you what goes right in it. I don't know how phones work." And so he just noticed how silly it is that we say, "I don't know what happened," as if you had any power or control or knowledge into the way my phone is magically connecting with yours anyways. [laughs] And so the reason I get excited about this is that nobody will ever practice this. Nobody will ever say they're doing this. It doesn't sound cool.
- 24:38 – 27:39
enthusiasm
- SPShaan Puri
So there's a few of these kind of traits where there's, like, high alpha, because they matter a lot But everybody else brushes them off or doesn't even know what to do with them, so they just don't try. And so imagine like, you know, if you wanna be the best Fortnite player in the world, you're competing against tens of millions of other kids who spend every day doing this. You're entering just such a competitive field. But imagine there was another game that had the same prize pool as the world Fortnite Championship, but there's only seven players. [laughs] You know, that's, that's what happens with some of these traits like noticing. I've said another one is enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is such an underrated trait. Everybody knows in that, that it's better to work with somebody who's enthusiastic. Everybody knows that enthusiasm is a positive attribute to have, but it's something that smart people feel stupid when they do it. Like, it's a low-status thing for a smart person to do is be enthusiastic, and you seem l- sort of like dumb, like a golden retriever. Well, guess what? Everybody wants that person around. [laughs] We love go- golden retrievers, and it's actually a very useful trait for going and doing something hard is to have enthusiasm every day versus just being beaten down by the reality of your situation. So there's these like handful of traits that smart people refuse to work on, which makes it like an, an uncompetitive playing field. You could just go dominate with very little effort.
- SPSam Parr
This is something that I think about all the time, and I've never come up with an answer that has been truly effective for me. But how to find a thing that you love. So like you were talking about, um, like this is the step before all of this stuff. But like whenever I read about Jerry Seinfeld and he, you know, he-- I've known about his writing habit each day, uh, I'm like, how lucky are you that you, at a young age, you discovered something that you're obsessed about? And often I ask myself, how do you find something that you're obsessed about? And also, can anyone be obsessed about any, like, anything at all? Like, I get obsessed with something for a short time, but I'm not like... But anything that I've been interested in for twenty years, I would say that I'm like, uh, forty-hour-a-week obsessed. You know?
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- SPSam Parr
I can, uh, [laughs] like I, I'm pretty, pretty a-
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- SPSam Parr
... mildly interested for a long period of time. Uh, but I'm not obsessed. I'm not obsessed.
- SPShaan Puri
You really feel that way? You really feel like you don't have things you get obsessed about? I think you're the exact opposite, dude.
- SPSam Parr
No, I get obsessed about-
- SPShaan Puri
You got, you've gotten obsessed with fitness, you've gotten obsessed with, uh, uh, with denim, you got obsessed with the media business, you got obsessed with researching businesses. H-how... We're almost at a thousand episodes of this podcast. There is no way that you've talked for a thousand hours about niche business ideas. Trust me, you're obsessed with those.
- SPSam Parr
It doesn't feel obsessed.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- SPSam Parr
Like, I don't know. I just like, when I see the other pe- it's sort of like a, "Oh, man, they have it and I don't." And of course-
- SPShaan Puri
Right
- SPSam Parr
... I can like look at my a- my past actions that I, and I could argue otherwise. But I'm just saying, generally speaking, for the average person, have you thought about how to find something that you're obsessed with? Or even can you become obsessed?
- SPShaan Puri
I do think it's, ev- everyone is capable of it, but very few people ever
- 27:39 – 32:32
know thy 8-year old self
- SPShaan Puri
do it. I think there's two, two interesting things I can say about this. The first is look into your childhood.
- SPSam Parr
Yeah, that's what Robert Greene says.
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah, so if you read about people who suggest how to do this, a lot of the times they say, "Look into your childhood or pay attention to what you did in your free time," whether it's your free time as an adult, but as adults, our free time sort of shrinks in smaller and smaller segments and, you know, you fill your free time with errands or things you should do. But when you're a kid, you don't really think of what you should do, you just simply think about what you wanna do. And so when you're a kid, you get obsessed with different things. You go into these different rabbit holes or these different phases, and then you grow out of them, but they often have like similarities. So you know, I got obsessed with one video game, but then I would grow, grow out of that, but then I got obsessed with online poker. And online poker has a lot of similarities to that video game, if you think about it, but I didn't consider online poker to be a video game. And then I got obsessed with business, and now I'm sort of obsessed with investing. And they're all the same through line, right, of it's sort of this game, there's points, whether the points are called stars or points or money or re- ROI, whatever it is, right? Like IRR. It, it is a different scoreboard, but it's the same idea. And there's a competit- game, there's competitors, there's strategy, and it's hard to win, but it's fun to win, and like, you gotta trial and error and try to figure it out. So like, I like strategy games, and I've always liked strategy games. I always-- It's very easy for me to get obsessed with a strategy game.
- SPSam Parr
Are you like a board game guy?
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah, like I'm a... I love board games. I love g- I love social strategy games. I love watching Survivor. I love playing card games where you gotta lie and you gotta do, you know, you gotta sorta bluff. That's poker, but there's also other social card games like that. You know, so, so you start to notice patterns, and you gotta think back. So there's a great story of Dan Brown. You know Dan Brown, the author of The Da Vinci Code, which is like one of the best-selling mystery thriller books ever, and like s- Demons and Angels. He's got a c- he's got a bunch of books like this. So this guy's an amazing writer of these kind of like treasure hunt books where the hero's trying to find something and it's a race to find the thing, and he's getting the clues and he's figuring it out, he's unveiling the mystery. Well, when he was a kid, his dad did something really wonderful for him and sparked this like passion in him. Every Christmas, instead of presents under the tree, his dad would put a treasure map.
- SPSam Parr
Oh, that's baller. [laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
And so he would wake up, and like every kid goes and they just un- unpack the gift, his gift was, "Here's a map. Go find it." And he had a scavenger hunt to go find his gifts. And he's-- And so guess what? Like that like kind of keystone mo- memory and moment like really like triggered a spark inside him of loving the idea of a treasure hunt. And if you look at The Da Vinci Code, what is it? It's a treasure hunt story, and he just tells it better than anyone else on earth. And he, he paid attention to the things he was interested in and loved as a kid. What happens is we find these things that we're interested in, but we blow, we blow them off. We just brush them off as if they're sort of trivial, they're meaningless, they are irrelevant, or they're childish or they're silly or they're not serious, and I should do a serious thing. But it's the people who pay attention to these things that are, you know, on the surface somewhat unserious, but they take a simple idea, they take it seriously, and they turn it into something that actually matters. I'll give you an ac- actually this is a perfect example of this. I just took a trip to, uh, Toronto. And I went to Toronto, and I, I was there to celebrate because we just had this huge win, huge business win. I'll talk about that later someday, uh, when I can kinda be a little more public about it, but we just, this biggest, biggest win of my life in the world of business. And so we flew our team out, you know, me, the CEO, and, and Ben, we flew out together. We're like, "Let's celebrate." But our first thought was, "Let's go to Vegas." And it was like just the thought of it, just the thought, just the thought of Vegas like induces like, like fatigue in my body. [laughs]
- SPSam Parr
Yeah.
- SPShaan Puri
You know, like, I don't, I don't wanna drink. I don't wanna party. If we were at the club, the three of us, it would be the Three Stooges. You know, one guy doesn't even drink.
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
And so we went to Toronto, and one of the reasons we went is 'cause, [laughs] um, we were like, we had this wonderful day where we played, like, padel, which I had never played before. I loved padel. Immediately was like, "Oh, new life hobby unlocked." We went to this escape room that's unbelievable. It's like a castle. There's actors in it. I'd never experienced an escape room like this. Like, the escape rooms I've ever been to, it was like a small box with like, you know, toys inside. I love those. But dude, I loved escape rooms. And so it's like that same thing. The strategy, mystery, s- like unlock the puzzle type shit is what I like, and that was what I chose to celebrate with. And so know thyself.
- SPSam Parr
But w- w- were the other guys like, "Shaan, we'd rather have gone to the strip clubs. [laughs] Like, we're just gonna play Settlers of Catan and try to escape this room"? [laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
Well, no, that's kinda the beauty of it is if you do the shit that's the most you, you will only att- you'll repel people who wanna be at the strip club, but you will attract people who are like you. Those will be the people who you end up working really well with, right? 'Cause, like, you will attra- you will attract like-minded people. It becomes a honeypot.
- SPSam Parr
So what's the second thing though? You said, um-
- SPShaan Puri
So just one is n- one is pay attention to your childhood, notice what
- 32:32 – 37:08
be shameless
- SPShaan Puri
you loved then. The second is don't, uh, sorta brush it off. Don't, don't... Uh, you gotta be a bit shameless about it. And so I'll give you a, a, so why did we go there? Well, our buddy who came on the, the show, Elan Lee. Elan Lee was one of the creators of the Exploding Kittens board game. Uh, he built an enormous, I don't know if he's said the numbers publicly, but absolutely gargantuan business in the business of board games and card games. If you walk in the aisle of Target in the board, card game aisle, he's made like seven of the top 10 selling games in the world. You know, like [laughs] dominant m- Monopoly. Well, what is... So I went to his house. He, he's got a house in Toronto.
- SPSam Parr
I think he was, like, telling us that he was building it. He was, like, showing photos. Is it like a dream house?
- SPShaan Puri
Well, this wasn't the dream house. This was, like, the house he's living in while the giant dream house is being built. And I go up to his office, and his office is like a kid's toy store. Not only does it have all his games, but then there's like these insane Lego things that he's building, and he's wiring LED lights into them. And he's like this unbelievable construction, like he's like a kid, right? He's just still doing the shit he loved as a kid. He's still doing it now. He had a dinosaur egg, like an actual dinosaur egg, a fossilized dinosaur egg, and he's like, "If you kiss it or lick it, you get to sign the book." So I kiss the dinosaur egg, I'm signing the book, and I'm like, "This is, like, worth millions of dollars." He doesn't even have it, like, in this display case. He's like, "How boring." Like, the 8-year-old version of me would think, "How lame. I don't get to touch it?" 8-year-old me would wanna touch it and show my friends. So he's got the egg out. He's letting his friends touch it, kiss it, and lick it. And then he's, he show, there's this Xbox sitting there, and he's like, "That's the first Xbox." I'm like, "Dude, how'd you... How much was that? Did you..." And he's like, "Oh, I got that when I... They gave it to me." I'm like, "Well, how'd you do that?" He goes, "Well, I designed it."
- SPSam Parr
Oh, that's awesome.
- SPShaan Puri
I said, "What?" He's like, "My first job was Xbox. You know, Microsoft handed me a bunch of money and a t- a team and was like, 'Design a competitor to the PlayStation.' So that's the first prototype Xbox we ever made. I'm real proud of that one."
- SPSam Parr
Wait, really quick, to, to give perspective on this guy, he, uh, he's wildly wealthy. Uh, like m- m- who knows? It could be a billion-dollar company. Who knows? Let's just say he's in hundred millionaire, billionaire status. He goes to us, a group of guys, 20 of us, he goes, "Hey, do you guys wanna see my new game?" And he gets on his hands and knees-
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- SPSam Parr
... and he pulls out these glasses where he's trying to, like, look. He's like, "All right, so let's see."
- SPShaan Puri
He pulls out a, a monocle. What you ca- what do you call a monocle when there's two of them? No?
- SPSam Parr
[laughs] Yeah.
- SPShaan Puri
Okay, so these are glasses. These are the sticks, right? You need these to stay on your face. He had glasses that are just two lenses.
- SPSam Parr
Yeah, and they were, like, balancing-
- SPShaan Puri
That he rests on his nose in a perfect balance. [laughs]
- SPSam Parr
And he was wearing, like, sweatpants and socks. Like, it was like, it was basically what I'm trying to get at, he was like an old man kid. He's not actually old.
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah.
- SPSam Parr
But, like, he's a grown man kid, and he's on his hands and knees, and he's like, "All right, so you just got this card. I think that's what this, what it means is you have to do this."
- SPShaan Puri
Well, he, he carried in his pocket a empty deck that he could just take a Sharpie and make a game up on the spot. That's kinda what he was doing for us.
- SPSam Parr
And, and he was, like, testing to see, and he was like, "This means do this." And he was seeing if I would actually go and do it and if I was happy about doing it, and he was, like-
- SPShaan Puri
Right
- SPSam Parr
... prototyping on us. Like, he was getting our reactions, like being a comedian and throwing out j- uh, jokes to see if they're any good. And it was so funny that he was doing this, like, uh, it was very natural to him, and I found that to be very inspiring.
- SPShaan Puri
And so if you think about, like, you know, that guy, he's, he's still, like, he didn't brush those things off as like, "Yeah, I like that, but now it's time to get to work." He just kept doing that until it became his work, and he became the best in the world at doing that, at making games, playing games, making games that people love, so he didn't, like, brush it off. And when we were hanging out, he was telling me about escape rooms, so I thought I liked escape rooms. And I thought us going there to go to an escape room was like a pretty indulgent thing in this, like, passion of mine. Dude, he travels the world with a group of like 15 neck beard guys, testing every escape room. The, whatever the best escape rooms in the world are, he travel, he goes on like, like a bachelor party every couple years, testing the world's best escape rooms and trying to escape them with his friends, and that's, like, how he vacations. That was like one of the things he does. And I was like, wow, this guy is, if you took the governor off or the filter off of like, "Yeah, that's me, but that'd be a little too weird, so let me just keep a little bit of that in," it's like, no, dude. What, what was it you used, you used to say at your office?
- SPSam Parr
Let your freak flag fly, baby.
- SPShaan Puri
Exactly, and that's what he does, and I think that's the second part. Notice what lights you up, and then let it fly.
- SPSam Parr
This, this... That's so cool.
- 37:08 – 45:19
Sam goes to SF for 7 days
- SPSam Parr
Dude, all right. So I just got back from a seven-day trip in San Francisco. Can I tell you one of my biggest takeaways?
- SPShaan Puri
Please.
- SPSam Parr
So you, you did this with New York. You had a bunch of them. I had one major one.
- SPShaan Puri
Okay.
- SPSam Parr
So San Francisco is the best city on Earth, in my opinion, to induce the emotion of awe. So the definition, or the par- paraphrasing the definition, it's basically experiencing both vastness, which means something that's really large, something that feels, like, endless or incredibly old, while also being a thing where it sort of breaks your mental framework, your mental schema. And so it basically, your brain has to do this thing called accommodating, where you have to change how you think in order to fit what you are looking at into your, your schema, and it's sort of like we use the word frame breaking, and it can't... But it can't be just, like, impressive. You know? It can't be something that's just big. It has to be so big or so epic where it's different than from what I, what I'm used to and how I define how life is, and that is the emotion of awe.
- SPShaan Puri
Well, I was g- I just looked up the... I have the exact definition now, which is ex- very much what you said, but with a little extra. So it says, "Awe is a strong feeling of deep respect, wonder, and amazement, often mixed with a bit of fear or nervous dread," which also happens a lot in San Francisco.
- SPSam Parr
Yes, and I felt that, but I wanna explain why, like, I felt awe in the good way, because not all awe is bad. Like, you can be in awe of, like, an atrocious act. Like, when you read about World War II-
- SPShaan Puri
Mm-hmm
- SPSam Parr
... you can be in awe, and it's not necessarily good. But basically, awe is interesting because I have found, and I think that... I can't dis- I, I've read about, a little bit about this, but also some of this is my opinion, uh, is that it reduces anxiety and depression because it creates this self-diminishing emotion. So a lot of times anxiety and depression, it exists because you are the center of all your problems. It's basically me, me, me, and you're constantly thinking of yourself, and I think that we all have to do, like, self-rumination, and we have to think about issues all the time. But when you experience, uh, awe, uh, opportunities that exist, they either seem much bigger than you think, or they just seem not important, and you stop thinking about yourself, and you start more so thinking about, like, the stuff that you see. And when I'm in San Francisco, I drive through or I ride through the Presidio, and you see these massive hills, and you see views, and what I've noticed is that seeing horizons, particularly when it's, like, a large view, and it's an ocean, like it's, uh, you're above an ocean, and you can overlook, it gives me this, like, deep sense of calm, this deep sense of, like, um... well, of awe, and I find it to be incredibly addicting, but also a very inspiring emotion. And I left s- I left San Francisco b- thinking, like, "This is the greatest feeling on Earth."
- SPShaan Puri
Well, well, you, you describe the nature side of it. I was surprised you didn't talk about the entrepreneurial awe that you also get. 'Cause we sat there for a, a whole day, and just every 20 minutes, a new founder came in and sat in the seat in front of us.
- SPSam Parr
Basically, we did this episode where we had nine founders come and explain what they were working on.
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah, it's sort of like sit in the hot seat, tell us what you're doing, tell us the numbers. We kind of nerd out about your business. What did you think of that? 'Cause, uh, you know, you're a New Yorker in the hustle and bustle of things, but the types of businesses people do and the types of people who do business are very different in San Francisco.
- SPSam Parr
I thought it was, was fantastic, more so than the businesses that they were working on. What I like about San Francisco is there seems, to me, an outsider, it felt like there was a significantly higher quirky attribute, a significantly higher nerd attribute, against-the-grain attribute that I particularly love, and I get a huge amount of inspiration was, um, from. Like, we met a guy who was an Indian guy. He made a machine that made basically for us fettuccine Alfredo, like an Italian dish, and I was like-
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- SPSam Parr
... how silly and wonderful is this that this, like, Indian guy who talks about growing up in India is now m- using, like, a robot to make us Italian food? And, like, I thought that was, like, a really quirky, cool thing, and we talked to all types of quirky, cool people, and that was in abundance.
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah, San Francisco has the most startup ideas that will sound terrible and probably be terrible than anywhere else where you find entrepreneurs. 'Cause, like, a lot of other entrepreneurs will be doing... You know, like, if you go to New York or something, you'll meet a lot of, like, let's say, media entrepreneurs, and they're doing media, and media is something you can understand, and it's something that's good. It's really an execution-based thing, whereas San Francisco, it's like, you know, you're just digging for gold, and most of the time you're just gonna find dirt and sand. And, uh, and I coulda told you, "There's just probably dirt there," but every once in a while, someone finds gold, and that's what keeps everybody out there doing these kinda weird, undiscovered, uh, random-sounding ideas. The, the, the spread of the ideas is, is just so different than anything you would see in most other, like, places where you're gonna find business.
- SPSam Parr
I think if I was 22 years old or 20 years old and a recent college grad, and I was remotely interested in technology, I still, without a doubt, think it's the place to be.
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah, agreed. Agreed.
- SPSam Parr
I just started reading... Have you heard of this book called The Art Thief?
- SPShaan Puri
No.
- SPSam Parr
Very, very popular book. I'm still, like, very early on into it, but it's a story of a guy, it's a true story of an art thief who stole, I think it was $3 billion worth of art. And what makes this book amazing and what this c- makes this guy s- uh, spectacular to read about, he did not sell one piece of art ever. So he stole it, and he felt... He had, like, a, a code. He felt it was the right thing. He's like, "It- you can't steal art and hurt people, and you should just do it in the middle of the day while the, uh, museum is open. Like, there shouldn't be, like, a big heist." And so, like, he was, uh, a genius, I guess you could say, at, like, going to a museum, and when the gua- He would study the guards for weeks, and when they were on their, like, routes where they would have to change, he would like, "Hurry up and unscrew one screw," and he would take the screw out and put it in his pocket-
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- SPSam Parr
... and then just, like, walk around, and then he would do it a bunch of times, where he was able to get the art. And what's crazy is that when he was arrested- He had his girlfriend who was his accomplice. They lived in his mother's apartment in a r- rinky-dink room. And in this room was roughly $3 billion worth of art. It was like paintings-
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- SPSam Parr
... trinkets, and he was like, he had this famous statue. Look up the statue of Adam and Eve. It's like the size of a shoebox, but it's this beautiful statue, and I believe it's worth tens of millions of dollars. And he had it on his bedside table because he said-
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- SPSam Parr
... "This art shouldn't be in a museum where there's gonna be some tour guide telling you some, like, written story about it, and you're barely even going to be paying attention." He's like, "It should be in my room where I can wake up, and I can rub my hands across it and, like, truly experience this piece of art."
- SPShaan Puri
Is it weird to just really honor and admire this absolute criminal? 'Cause I do.
- SPSam Parr
Yeah, it's weird, but that sort of goes back to the point about, like, awe and, like, how not awe, not all awe is good. Um, and so yes, I can, like, a- acknowledge that what he did was wrong, and also I can still, like, be in amazement as to how pure your code was, even when it came to being a thief.
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
Episode duration: 45:19
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Transcript of episode qwbepa5A3xc
