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EVERY SPOKEN WORD
35 min read · 6,689 words- 0:00 – 2:15
Intro
- SPShaan Puri
Can we talk about the incredible scam that is the diamond indus- industry? [laughs]
- SPSam Parr
Yeah. [laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
[upbeat music] So I don't know if you've seen this, but diamond prices are just absolutely crashing. [laughs] So they're down 70% from their peak, and just, like, 50% from, like, COVID times till now. Do you know how much a two-carat lab-grown diamond costs now if you wanna buy it?
- SPSam Parr
Lab grown?
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah.
- SPSam Parr
Oh, I don't know. Uh, 10 grand a carat?
- SPShaan Puri
10 grand a carat, so that'd be for a two carat, you think about 20 grand?
- SPSam Parr
Yeah.
- SPShaan Puri
Try $148.
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
It's the price of dinner. [laughs] You could have a diamond ring or dinner is the trade right now. By the way, just the, the whole, this whole thing is a marketing masterclass. Lab grown versus natural, uh, you know, versus blood diamonds, versus... You know, there's so many different ways they position these things, it's crazy. But, um, yeah, I, I kind of went back down this rabbit hole of the diamond industry, and I just continue to be blown away that this exists, that this is what happened, and, uh, yeah, just wanted to talk about it.
- SPSam Parr
I don't buy jewelry or diamonds, really. You don't either, right?
- SPShaan Puri
For myself, not really. I mean-
- SPSam Parr
Like, for your wife. She doesn't seem like a-
- SPShaan Puri
I bought this chain off TikTok Shop, so you know, there, there's that.
- SPSam Parr
But your wife, your wife is, doesn't seem like a particularly, like a... Like, that's not her, her love language, I don't think.
- SPShaan Puri
Terrible read. Absolutely her love language. I'm thinking about this because-
- SPSam Parr
Oh, okay
- SPShaan Puri
... I was at a diamond shop the other day, 'cause she's definitely into it. She probably wears, like, 10 pieces of jewelry at all times on her body.
- SPSam Parr
Okay. Terrible read, you're right. Whenever I get into this though, it, like, I start becoming a little bit socialist, because I'm like, "Why is this diamond, uh, worth it?" Like, who says that? Like, well, the market says it. It's like, but that's weird that we've assigned it value. And then I started thinking, I'm like, well, but gold has value, and all cash is based off gold, and I start, like... That's kind of weird that we've collectively-
- SPShaan Puri
Right
- SPSam Parr
... agreed that this is, like, a thing that we want, versus I have a friend who owns a diamond business. He's like, "Lab-grown is stupid." And I'm like, "Why?" And it starts, like, kind of messing with my mind a little bit. I don't know if it does with you, too.
- SPShaan Puri
Right. Well, that's
- 2:15 – 8:25
A Brief History of Diamonds
- SPShaan Puri
kinda why I wanted to talk to you about it, 'cause she won't listen to me when I'm like, "But the prices are going down of the commodity." And she's like, "I want the ring." [laughs] So she's not really l- listening to it. I think there's a lot of amazing marketing that goes behind this, and I wanted to tell the story. So, so the, the brief history of diamonds is li- is as such. Diamonds used to be very, very rare, and it was worn by, like, kings and queens, royalty. It was a sign of extreme power and extreme wealth. It was-
- SPSam Parr
And it was purely aesthetic?
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah. They're very shiny, they're very unique looking, and they were rare at the time, so not a lot of people had them, so the people who had them were the people in power. It was not a thing about love or a proposal or anything like that. It was literally just, like, kings and queens. And that was the case for a long time, until sometime in the late 1800s, there was a huge discovery of diamonds in South Africa. So there was, like, this... Diamonds went from extremely rare to plentiful. You could just go down there, get a scoop like it's Baskin-Robbins, and come out with, with diamonds. And so th- this was very bad for the diamond industry. Why? Because people who own diamonds or sold diamonds, they depended on the fact that they were rare to charge extremely high prices for these things. And so this was very bad for a small period of time, but a couple of founders, uh, this guy like Cecil Rhodes and this o- other guy, they basically started trying to consolidate supply. So they go and they started buying up all the mines and consolidating the supplies. It took about 20 years after the discovery of the, of the huge new discovery of di- diamond deposits till they had consolidated and they formed the De Beers companies. If you've ever heard of De Beers diamonds, that's kind of the, the com- the merger of these two guys who were consolidating the industry trying to, trying to lock up supply.
- SPSam Parr
Huh.
- SPShaan Puri
And what they did was brilliant. From, like, a business perspective, it's kinda like, uh, you know, like, in science where they study twins? And it's like the twins is, like, this really remarkable thing because n- it's like nature versus nurture. Well, the nature gets held constant and you're, you can only look at the differences in nurture, especially twins that were somehow raised apart. It's like gold for scientists. Well, the same thing is true, I would say, from a business and marketing s- case study around diamonds. 'Cause here you have this thing that is not actually rare, uh, that was not, uh, popular. So today, a diamond engagement ring is incredibly common. Majority of people do it in the Western world. But, uh, this was not the case for a, for a long time. I mean, less than 10% of people would buy, um, a diamond engagement ring, you know, before the marketing machine kicked in. It was a very, you know, single digit percentage of people, uh, that would do this kind of odd thing. And there was actually all kinds of other ways that people would propose.
- SPSam Parr
I've talked to hundreds of entrepreneurs on this podcast, and I've got a bunch of takeaways, but one of the big ones, one of them that shocks a lot of the people out there who are product nerds, which frankly I am myself, is that oftentimes in order to turn something that's going kinda good into something that's absolutely amazing is to fix the marketing, not the product, and in particular fix how many people know about the product. That's, like, the big thing. It's called attention. Say it with me, attention. And so this team at Starter Story, they put together a free guide, they call it the $1M Attention Guide. It's this pretty amazing 39-page document that's filled with 15 tactics to get eyeballs on what you are building. And so there's a, even a 30-minute recording from Pat, who's the founder of Starter Story. He has interviewed hundreds and hundreds of entrepreneurs, so he's able to put this together through a bunch of research and experience. And so if you're interested in getting more attention, which frankly you should be, everyone should be, then you should click the link below in the description or scan the QR code right here.
- SPShaan Puri
So a marriage proposal went from a legal contract between the families. So it really wasn't about the husband and wife getting down on a knee. It was two families sitting in a room drawing up a contract and usually paying some sort of dowry, some sort of price [laughs] to literally buy, buy the bride or buy the groom. And so that's kind of the, you know, V1, but then there was all these other ones. They would do maybe a simple, like, a, a ring made out of iron, 'cause iron was seen as this, like, strong, and it was a strong thing, it was like a commitment. Uh, there was this thing called a regard ring, and all the letters of regard. It's like ruby, emerald, uh, gold, you know, like, for, for each one of those, D being the last one, and they would try to put one of every stone, the tiny one, on, on a ring. So there's all... In the history, there was, like, rings were not particularly common, and even amongst rings, definitely not a diamond ring. And so what changed was the marketing machine behind De Beers and the jewelry industry.
- SPSam Parr
Was it, like, um, a small... Like, it started as a small mom-and-pop business, or did it, like, combine and it was a conglomerate from day one?
- SPShaan Puri
Well, I guess before that there was, like, independent miner- miners, right? So the independent miners would find, you know, deposits, they would be mining them, they'd be selling them kind of centrally. But when the two founders started acquiring up all the supply, by the time they merged-
- SPSam Parr
Got it
- SPShaan Puri
... they owned a lot of the supply. And so that roll-up was, was really, really key. And so they had, you know, basically they owned 90% of the world's diamond supply. Like, it's in- it's insane. It's like a complete monopoly. And what they do is they, they ration out how much diamonds hit the market. So they, they want diamond prices to remain very high, and the way they do that is they control, almost mafia style, who gets diamonds, when, and how much. So the jewelers come together. There's, like, this once-a-year thing where De Beers would then set, like, for each kind of jewelry market, pick the winners, give them a certain supply of d- diamonds, make sure that they're selling it at certain prices, otherwise you're out.
- SPSam Parr
Wikipedia says De Beers controls 80 to 85% of diamond d- uh, distribution and is, and was considered a monopoly. I, I'm ignorant. Can a foreign gov- uh, foreign company be an American monopoly, and does that matter?
- SPShaan Puri
Well, they're doing it, so I don't think it's [laughs] I don't think it's outlawed because they're doing it. And so, you know, w- what happened from there, you know, for, for a while, business was really good when this was going on. And then the Great Depression happens, and consumer spending obviously tanks during the Great Depression. So De Beers goes
- 8:25 – 18:15
The Marketing Genius of De Beers
- SPShaan Puri
and hires this marketing agency, I think it's called NW Ayer, A-Y-E-R. And they basically say, "Look, we need something drastic. Uh, you can't do, you know, nothing sm- we don't just need, like, an ad or a campaign. We need to reposition and reimagine how people are gonna think about diamonds," because fundamentally, you know, the Great Depression is going on. People are being very cost-conscious, and like, are you gonna buy this tiny rock, or are you gonna pay for, you know, your rent? Are you gonna pay for food? Are you gonna pay for these other, like, utility purchases? So how do we get it out of the utility category? 'Cause it just doesn't have any utility. And so they came back and they said, "All right, well, let's position this around emotions. We're gonna re-link diamonds instead of to royalty and wealth," because people don't have, there's not enough people who feel wealthy right now, "we're gonna re-link it to love." And that's where the, the idea came of a diamond is forever. You know, this, this famous copywriter who c- came up with this diamond is forever line, and this incredible marketing machine kicked in. I don't know if you've ever heard of this, but they actually sent a woman to schools where she would speak to young teenage girls and educate these girls about diamonds and what they mean and how they work and the four, the four Cs. This woman, um, Gladys, she went around the country and she became like the diamond whisperer, teaching young girls to care about diamonds when they were in high school. And she ended up writing this book called More Sales of Bigger Diamonds [laughs] which is an incredible book title. And she-
- SPSam Parr
So did De Beers invented the four Cs as well?
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah. So th- they had an insight. So here's some of the marketing insights. So the first insight was m- uh, market to the emotion, not to the utility, and so they marketed to, to the feeling of love. The second thing was, um, market to the moment. So they figured out to do it around engagements. So a proposal, how do you make it where there's a must-have event where you gotta buy it? Sort of like chocolate being sold around, uh, you know, Halloween and Easter, and, like, all the, all the chocolate sales happen then. And fireworks are sold around 4th of July.
- SPSam Parr
Or like, uh, the Wall Street Journal used to say, "Whenever you graduate college, you have to get a Wall Street Journal subscription."
- SPShaan Puri
They tried, yeah, yeah. They tried [laughs] they tried to do that. That's smart. And so De Beers, what they would do is they would go to Hollywood, um, directors and actors, and they would bribe them with money or free diamonds, and they would say, "Cool, but here's the, here's the catch," as they're wining and dining these directors and these actors, is that they would say, "At the climax of the movie when the man's gonna profess his love to the woman, he's gotta do it with a diamond. And you have to really zoom in on the diamond, and you have to show that it, the diamond is the symbol of him saying, 'I love you.'" Right? And then they created campaigns around this. So they created an agency, a standalone mar- uh, like, uh, publication that would every week send news of celebrity engagements and diamond bu- uh, purchases-
- SPSam Parr
Oh, wow
- SPShaan Puri
... to 125 different magazines and newspapers so that they would know what to put in the magazine and the newspaper, this news. They, they made news out of it. And, and there really wasn't, like... So it was a coordinated PR machine. So they had the high school teachers. They had, uh, the Hollywood ins- moment of inception where you're watching these stories and in the moment of love he gives her the diamond, and you just assume, "I guess that's how we do it." Right? That's, "I guess that's how it's done. That's how a man..." And so the girls start to expect it, and the guys start to realize it's expected of them. And then they created the, um, the PR machine that would s- every week send the news stories about, "Did you hear? This guy gave her a four-carat ring. This guy, after he was found out for cheating on her, gave her a six-carat ring." Right? Like, you know, that became the news that they would... They made diamonds into news. So the insight was they realized It is much easier to get somebody who's buying a $6,000 diamond to go up to 12 than to get somebody who's not buying a diamond to spend six grand on a rock all of a sudden. So they said, "All right, forget trying to get, you know, we have one layer of marketing that's getting you to s- realize you need to buy a diamond, but now we need to get you to have," as Gladys said, "more sales of bigger diamonds." So how do we do that?
- SPSam Parr
Dude, that's exactly how I felt, by the way. Did you feel that way? Like, when I bought a ring, I thought, "Yeah, $3,500. That's plenty." And then-
- SPShaan Puri
Right
- SPSam Parr
... it wasn't even close. Like, it, it-
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs] Well, you've heard the kind of rule of thumb. What's the rule of thumb?
- SPSam Parr
Three times your monthly salary.
- SPShaan Puri
Exactly. Completely arbitrary. So what they realized is, like, if I just told you you need to spend 15 or $20,000 suddenly, that's a big pill to swallow, and it's pretty tough to swallow that. But if I just said, "Look, you're gonna marry this woman. A diamond is forever. This is a forever commitment. Should you not spend 10% of what you're earning? Should you not spend 15% of what you're, of what you make this one year, two months of salary?"
- SPSam Parr
Dude, 25%.
- SPShaan Puri
Two months.
- SPSam Parr
25%.
- SPShaan Puri
Well, uh, so they, they started with two months-
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
... is, is the way that they, they talked about it. It's now got, it crept up, inflation, to three. So check this out. So, uh, look at these ads. This first one says, "She married, she married you for richer or poorer. Let her know how it's going." [laughs]
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
And then, and then, uh, this one is, "He still knows how to send chills up and down my spine," and it's a picture of the back of the necklace that's sitting at the top of her spine. Good, you know, this one, "Good things take time. The best take a billion years."
- SPSam Parr
That's great.
- SPShaan Puri
And, and that, like, you know, how diamonds are made. And they would say, like, you know, look at this last one, "How two months of salary wound up on Julie's finger." And they really started to anchor that the expectation, the r- 'cause nobody knows. How much should I spend? What's a good amount? And instead of leaving it up to the opinion, they created the benchmark, and then you could be a cheapskate and go less, or you could step up and be a man and do it. Uh, or you could, hey, you could over-perform. Go ahead. Spend six months instead of two. And so this idea of just two months of salary for this forever commitment was a totally different anchoring, uh, than basically saying, "Put a car on her finger," right? Like, you could either, either have this car, or you could have this rock, and, uh, they, they figured out how, how to reposition that.
- SPSam Parr
The takeaway, uh, basically one of the most famous advertising books of all time is ogilvy on advertising, and I think it's, like, chapter 11 or something, David Ogilvy says, um, the headline of the chapter is, like, Long Form Direct Mail Copywriting, and then the subheadline is My Secret Weapon. And it all started with this direct response long form mailing copywriting because you start learning what motivates people, and you can express your ideas a little bit more, and what you're seeing there was not long form, but, like, that's the exact stuff he's referring to.
- SPShaan Puri
Exactly. You're, you're exactly right, and if you look at, like, if you made a list of the business problems on the left and then the marketing persuasion solution on the right, okay, so here's what it would look like. So diamonds were discretionary, and so they fluctuated. Good times, people would buy, and in bad times, people would not buy. Well, they turned it into a expected purchase for an engagement. So that was the bus- the marketing solution to the business problem. Uh, next one. Diamonds are expensive. Well, they needed to make the expense mean something beyond the cost of it, so diamond is forever, that it became a symbol of, of love, that it was gonna be, you know, your commitment to this woman, and it was a symbol of how committed you were. The next one. Consumers are not sure which one to buy. Is this one good enough? Seems good enough. I can't tell the difference. Like, if you ever l- hold up two of the diamonds, can't tell the difference in, you know, in, in, like, whether it's VVS1 or VVS2. You know, like, to the naked eye, this is not something you could tell. I mean, we, we walked out of the diamond shop, and I brought my mom with me. The first thing they do is they clean their rings, 'cause just, like, if you... Like, you're, you're supposed to basically, like, put it in Dawn soap and then clean it with, like, a toothbrush every week or two, and most women don't do it even every six months really. It's just like, you know, when do you make time for this? And as soon as you do it, your ring looks totally different. It's like you, you know, "Hey, you got a ring upgrade just from a toothbrush and some Dawn soap." Um, but, like, you know, these, like, s- small distinctions of, like, flawless versus virtually flawless versus internally flawless, like, these, these things can drive the price up. But to the naked eye, I mean, you need a microscope to, to even see the difference between most of these things. And so they created the four Cs, right? The four Cs gave them language to use for pricing discrimination, and this is very common. This happens with wine as well. The reality is most people were not able to distinguish between what's a better wine and a worse wine just from a taste test. And so they created a huge gradient of pricing, uh, of the pricing curve by introducing language, distinct language, an insider club of language where literally you could become a sommelier, which is like getting your PhD in wine, and you could... because you know, you understand this language of wine better than anybody else. And so they created entire professions around it and, uh-
- SPSam Parr
And what's interesting is there's, I, I, I remember this, and I was curious about it, and now I had to remind myself. There's this, it's called GIA. That's the third, there's a third part. So the three Cs are done via a third party, which is called the Gemological Institute of America.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- SPSam Parr
It's a nonprofit, uh, that does, uh, hundreds of billions of dollars a year in revenue, and it's, like, the grading system of this, which is, like, pretty brilliant.
- SPShaan Puri
Right, and yeah, they, these things work symbiotically. They're in cahoots, right? [laughs] It's sort of like Michelin star restaurants. Well, you have the Michelin Guide, right? So you have the, the grader, and then you have the restaurants that achieve it. Once you achieve it, your line is gonna be, you know, out the door, and you can charge absurd prices for it. And so these things work together in a way, right? Like, the, the, the, the rankers and then the, the rankees can benefit from each other in, in this way, and they often will fund, often in different industries, they'll, they'll sort of fund or, um, promote the, the nonprofit neutral party because it's good for everybody if you, if you have that versus if it was absent, if there was none of these, right?
- SPSam Parr
If a diamond is worth, uh, you know, how much y- you show your love
- 18:15 – 20:00
Lab-Grown Diamonds
- SPSam Parr
for her, what's a lab-grown diamond worth?
- SPShaan Puri
Well, it's actually pretty interesting. So lab has become 60-plus percent of the market.
- SPSam Parr
Wow.
- SPShaan Puri
It has grown like crazy. And so it's just, it's growing. It's a freight train. It's the majority. It's already the majority. It'll be the super majority soon because what you can get for the price you can get it, I mean, a lab will be 80 to 90% cheaper than the same quality, um, natural diamond.
- SPSam Parr
Can... And you can tell the difference with the microscope or, you know, however they do it?
- SPShaan Puri
It is indistinguishable. You really cannot tell. [laughs] Uh, you can't tell. The naked eye cannot tell at all. I think a jeweler can, with enough testing, figure, you know, te- uh, figure this out. And so this, it presented a big problem for De Beers. So what did De Beers do? First, they tried to just discredit it. So they were like, "Ugh, who w- that's phony, fake. We are real, natural." Um, and so they tried to use language to discredit it, but the value proposition was too strong because you put it on your finger, it looks fantastic. It is a real diamond. It is chemically indistinguishable, and the price was so much better that people started gravitating towards it. So then De Beers switched their tactics. [laughs] They then launched their own lab product and intentionally undercut the lab market by a lot to almost even further create a big spread between natural and lab so that they would distinguish between real, quote, and not real. And so that was the, the sort of second marketing attack they did on it was to say, "Okay, okay, you like lab? Here, have lab dirt cheap. Just take it. Just take it. It's, it's worth nothing." [laughs]
- SPSam Parr
You go to the De Beers store, and they take away... You're like, "Where's the lab section?" And they take away your glass of champagne and hand you a cup of Kool-Aid. [laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- 20:00 – 23:15
Shaan Goes Into the Back Room at the Jeweler
- SPShaan Puri
It's so funny. We went to this store, and it's like, they're like, "Do you have an appointment?" And I'm like, "You realize there's nobody in the store, right? There's no one else here. There's two of you, and there's two of us. There's nobody else here. We need an appointment?" And then they're like, "You need an appointment." It's like, okay, cool. So we get an appointment, 'cause I'm, like, on my phone, five seconds, I'm like, "Hey, I got an appointment. Guess what?" [laughs]
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
"I, I went to Wetzel's Pretzels, and I got a, an appointment-
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
... in the meantime. I'll be back." So I walk back in, and they take us to this private room. So there's, like, secret door, private room. What's in the private room? I have, I have no idea. It's the same th- again, there was nobody in the public room, so we didn't need any privacy. There's nobody in the store. But the aura of, like, you are entering the vault, you're making a very considered decision here, and congratulations on this decision that you've made. She actually, I think she literally congratulated us-
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
... on sitting down for, like, for going on this journey with them. [laughs] I was like, "I don't know what's happening." And then, um, you know, takes out her gloves and the felt thing to handle everything. The whole thing is, it's Cirque du Soleil. It's a show. The whole thing is theater, and I love it. I appreciated all aspects of it, and I was just like, "Kudos to you." And I was like, "So what do you think about the prices of lab gr- you know, of, of, of, uh, of diamonds nowadays? They've fall, you know, fallen off a cliff." And then she's like, "Well, you know, I just work here." [laughs] And I was like, "Okay, fair enough." [laughs] But, but actually, very interestingly, even though the wholesale prices have dropped off like that chart, if you go to the jewelry store, they're still roughly the same price. They're down, like, 15, 20%. The jewelers, the retail stores are just keeping the markup [laughs] because they don't wanna cave and offer lower prices because for most people, it's pretty hard to access a wholesale diamond, and then, then what? You gotta turn it into jewelry yourself. It's, like, kind of complicated. So very interestingly, even though the price of the diamonds has fallen off, the price at the store has not, and they're just capturing a fat margin right now.
- SPSam Parr
Whenever I hear these stories, I have, like, sort of a, a takeaway is that you can actually change perception, and I still think that you can do the same thing today with a variety of topics. It will take forever. I mean, De Beers is 180 years old, I think. Uh, but there is something interesting about changing mass perception and potentially starting small.
- SPShaan Puri
What do you think, what's an, what's another example where that might either is being done in the modern day, where you feel like this kind of switch is being made, or this, this persuasion is happening, or that it could happen? What's, what's like an-
- SPSam Parr
Well, I can give you a bunch of e- well, here's an example of one. I mean, like, the vitamin industry, right? A lot of vitamins and a lot of, like, supplements, I don't know if there's actual proof. I don't know if you actually feel a difference, but they'll do certain things, like make it taste a certain way, where you're like, "Ooh, it, it must be working." Uh, so I think that's happening. But if I was working in the data center industry, I would go and study all this stuff. I'm like, how do you change perception? Because that has to be one of the most hot topics, uh, there is right now, and it's very divisive, and it seems unilaterally unpopular, at least amongst, uh, 70% of people. And so I think the data, or the data center industry can take note from a lot of this stuff.
- SPShaan Puri
Well, yeah, I, I think that's, uh, supplements for sure. It, it
- 23:15 – 26:55
Bitcoin’s Marketing Genius
- SPShaan Puri
fits there. I would say also, I think Bitcoin. Uh, if I watch the last kind of 10, 15 years of Bitcoin, you know, Bitcoin went from this, like, very fringe, anarchist, sort of cyberpunk, like, thing, where it's people who, uh, you know, f- you know, don't trust the government and want their own money and self-custody and cryptography, and all these things that are, like, pretty hard to access. And I feel like they created different narratives. The, the industry almost like, not like there was one person, but the g- the group of Bitcoiners basically over time created different narratives and memes, right? So it, it used to be seen as a currency, and that really wasn't working because it was hard to transfer, and the price fluctuated too much to be useful as a currency. And so the reframing of it as digital gold was, like, a very important thing to happen because you could see it. Oh, it's, it's like gold. It's like bars I need to stack up. And then they added on top of that, like HODL, right? Like hold. Hold is the thing. And then they called it, you know, instead of being the loser who held it at a s- you know, 100 grand, and now it's at 20 grand, and you're just sitting on it like a-
- SPSam Parr
Yeah, that's funny
- SPShaan Puri
... like a, a, a punk, and they were like, "No, you have diamond hands."
- SPSam Parr
Yeah. [laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
"You hold diamond hands. That's what it means to hold through adversity." And, and actually, this is a big part of... Same thing with diamonds, where because diamonds are forever, one of the key parts of that, the key parts of linking it to love and engagement, is that they, they killed the resale market. Nobody resells their diamonds.
- SPSam Parr
And yet we all buy, we buy the real ones because we say appreciates or holds value. No one, no one sells them. I, I mean, I don't wanna think.
- SPShaan Puri
Well, no one sells them because if you bought a used diamond from some other failed engagement, what does that mean about... You know, that's like not a good sign-
- SPSam Parr
Yeah
- SPShaan Puri
... y- for your, for your engagement.
- SPSam Parr
It's like naming your boat Titanic.
- SPShaan Puri
And then same thing, like even if you no longer wear your ring or like your ring, you don't just go pawn it, because ooh, that was, that was sentimental, right? That was our engagement. I'm always gonna keep it. I'll pass it down like a family heirloom. So what does that do? Takes supply off the market. And the same thing happens to the Bitcoin industry. Diamond hands and HODL is about taking supply off the market. It's about not having you quick to sell your, your, your coins. And then they did things like how do you get social proof? So the way that diamonds in Hollywood movies showed up, well, Bitcoin figured out how to get people to put the red laser eyes picture on their profile pictures, so you could kinda identify, like who's a Bitcoiner.
- SPSam Parr
That's awesome.
- SPShaan Puri
Oh, he, he is. He is. He is. She is. Wow, all these people that I kinda know and see and respect. So they created a s- a way to signal that, yeah, I'm part of the club. And then for those people, you get to be part of a club. Belonging, one of the most powerful motivators [laughs] for people is a sense of belonging. And so they ga- they created a thing that worked. And then i- every cycle, I feel like there's a new narrative that pops up. Or they'll, they'll use phrases like, "This is the super cycle." It's like, yeah, the last cycles were good, but oh, we're about to go into the super cycle, or the final cycle, or the [laughs] shit like that, where you're like, "Don't-"
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
It's basically like a huge FOMO machine, where it's like, "Don't miss out." Um, [laughs] and, and-
- SPSam Parr
The stupidest words, man. Like, "Oh, it's a, it's a triple Sirius decker." [laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
All the other coins try to do it, too. Like Ethereum, there's like this thing called The Flippening, where it's like the day where the Ethereum market cap will flip Bitcoin's market cap. And yeah, these are like kinda subculture. Most average people haven't heard these, but if you're in the industry at all, you, you kind of have heard these. And there's a part of you that'll think twice before you get out, 'cause you're like, "Is it time? Is this the super cycle? Some smart people are saying this is the super cycle," or, "The Flippening might happen, and when that happens, it's gonna do this." You know, like, and so you don't wanna miss out, uh, which is, which is obviously important for the thing to work. It's like a self-fulfilling prophecy in the same way that the marketing
- 26:55 – 28:10
The Greatest Generation
- SPShaan Puri
machine behind diamonds became self-fulfilling.
- SPSam Parr
Dude, words are so great, man. I was reading this book about The Greatest Generation is pre-Boomers, so it's the, the, the folks who... Go ahead, make your joke. I can tell. [laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
No- nobody sa- nobody says that about us. [laughs]
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
The Millennials didn't get that distinction. [laughs]
- SPSam Parr
[laughs] I could just see that, like, coming out of your lips. Uh, well, well, I was reading about this like, um, The Greatest Generation, which is, uh, World War II, um, basically World War II folks. And, um, you know, people talk about like, "Oh, it was so much better back then." Not a chance.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- SPSam Parr
Not a chance. Like, first of all, it was like 70 or 65% of soldiers were like, "We shouldn't be here. We should not be doing this." Uh, racism was rampant, obviously. Uh, there was like huge amounts of strikes and walkouts, way more than nowadays. And it was just this whole thing about like this idea of The Greatest Generation. Crime was way higher. Juvenile delinquency was way higher. Like, we are... It was not the greatest generation. It was a good generation, just like every other generation-
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- SPSam Parr
... can be a good generation. It was just this idea about like when you and I were 21, Millennials were shit on. Now Gen Z. Soon it'll be, I don't know what the next name is. But this idea of like these words and phrases that we use to look back, it, they're just mostly nonsense.
- SPShaan Puri
It's so powerful. I mean, imagine if you could just convince
- 28:10 – 32:12
Pronoia. Be It.
- SPShaan Puri
everybody bout- that we're about to have the golden decade. Whatever that means.
- SPSam Parr
Yeah. Whatever that means.
- SPShaan Puri
But like just imagine if everybody believed, if, if you got that to be incepted in people's minds. Because what happens is the opposite of paranoia is something called pronoia. Paranoia is feeling like everything is working against you, and pronoia is feeling like the universe is kinda conspiring in your favor. And so imagine if you believe that, oh, this is it. This is what people have been talking about. This is the golden decade, that really great things... There's more opportunity than ever. Great things are gonna be happening. The news, the good news, for the first time, will be outweighing the bad news. Well, what do you do? You start pay- you start looking for evidence that supports the belief. And that changes the way you will live and the way you will act. And it will like, again, it'll be a bit self-fulfilling in that way, where you can get kinda like manifestation to happen at a, uh, like a civilization [laughs] scale, right, rather than an individual.
- SPSam Parr
Well, that's it.
- SPShaan Puri
By the way, have you seen this site, Any Human Ever? So check this out. So it's just anyhumanever.com. So watch this. We'll do it. So Sam, we're gonna... It says 100... What is this? 100... Is that 100 billion? Yeah.
- SPSam Parr
Yeah.
- SPShaan Puri
100 billion people have ever lived in the history of the world.
- SPSam Parr
Okay.
- SPShaan Puri
Choose one. So you're gonna draw a random life out of all of the lives that have ever been lived. All right, ready?
- SPSam Parr
900... Oh, you're doing it. All right.
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah, yeah. Ready? I'm gonna click it, 'cause I'm screen sharing here. This is, this is for you, though. We're gonna see how you do. We'll compare what you get to your current life. [laughs]
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
All right, so, uh, if it was luck of the draw. So the first question is when would you have been born? So there's this, you know, long timescale, but you know, population boom means that most people were born kind of in the last, I don't know, uh, you know, few hundred years. So let's draw a birth year.
- SPSam Parr
No, that's, uh, 10,000 years or so, I think. Uh, yeah, this is, this is hard. There's a lot of math. Okay, so I got 1200 CE. So-
- SPShaan Puri
I don't even know what's CE. What is CE?
- SPSam Parr
Be- before, uh, year zero, so, uh, th- 3200 years ago.
- SPShaan Puri
Okay. So, [laughs] okay, so there was 26 million people born that year. Um, so already you're kinda screwed. Uh, let's see. What else? Where would you have been born?
- SPSam Parr
Is that Morocco?
- SPShaan Puri
In present day, present day Yemen. [laughs]
- SPSam Parr
Yemen, okay.
- SPShaan Puri
So, so there was two million people living there back in the, the year 1200 CE. Um, you're a boy. Congratulations. Uh, here's what your life would've been like. You would've been married at 25. Uh, you'd have six and a half kids. Uh, unfortunately, life expectancy was only 29 years. Half your kids would die before the age of five. Um, let's say, uh, and how would they die? An unnamed fever was the most likely cause of death. After that, pneumonia, dysentery, smallpox, and other, other, uh, other calculations. Oh, your child was born and died at nine months.
- SPSam Parr
Oh, my God.
- SPShaan Puri
I'm sorry. [laughs] So this is like just a put-in-perspective, um, style of, of website about, like, how lucky we are literally to just have been born where you're born in the year that you're born. Um-
- SPSam Parr
This is awesome
- SPShaan Puri
... how, how incredibly lucky you are out of the 100 billion people that have ever lived, of humans that have ever lived in the, in, in the history of, of time.
- SPSam Parr
My name is Tariq. I was born in the A- Arabian Peninsula, peninsula around the 1200 CE in a stone-
- SPShaan Puri
Honestly, six, six-bedroom stone house.
- SPSam Parr
Yeah, I mean, that's-
- SPShaan Puri
This is, this is pretty stacked.
- SPSam Parr
Yeah, that's all right. [laughs]
Episode duration: 32:12
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Transcript of episode buSoAraMSBg
