Elon’s wildest interview yet — our reaction

- February 18, 2026 (29 days ago) • 01:05:04

Transcript

Start Time	Speaker	Text
00:00	Shaan Puri	He goes, "If you get things done, I love you; if you don't, I hate you." I thought that was so great.
00:07	Sam Parr	What a weirdo.
00:10	Shaan Puri	When I heard it, I was like, "That's how Sam is." Can I tell you about this Elon Musk podcast? Did you listen to the Cheeky Pint episode with Elon?
00:24	Sam Parr	I saw it. I didn't listen to it.
00:26	Shaan Puri	You gotta listen to this thing. This is an amazing podcast. I think—who's... </FormattedResponse>
00:30	Sam Parr	The Indian guy — I started seeing him pop up out of nowhere.
00:34	Shaan Puri	Dorkash. Dorkash is a podcaster. He's got his own YouTube channel and whatnot. He is this unicorn because he's a really good podcaster — he has great energy and a good vibe; you enjoy listening. He's like an authentic nerd in a way, but he's also technical. One of the reasons this podcast is really interesting is because normally Elon says something and he'll be like, "I predict that in four years we will have... ten more data centers in space than we have on Earth cumulatively." Then what me or you or Joe Rogan or any of us would do when he says that is go, "Whoa."
01:12	Sam Parr	Yeah.
01:13	Shaan Puri	"That's crazy, man. How are you gonna do that, right? It's like—come on, bro. You know, that's all we're capable of. Our little peanut mind can only do so much."
01:23	Sam Parr	But, Elon, that doesn't make sense because electricity doesn't work the same way in space... or whatever.</FormattedResponse>
01:29	Shaan Puri	Yeah. He was pushing back the whole time, to where I was like, "Is Elon gonna throw his drink in his face? What's going on here? Is he gonna get mad that this guy keeps pushing back on every idea he says?" The pushback went like: "But why do we need that? We can—you're talking about this much energy that could be done by this many solar panels that could fit in just Nevada. So why do we need space to power this?" Elon would respond: "Well, here's the reason why: permitting…" and then the other person would counter, "But won't there be other problems in space that are just as difficult? How are you gonna fix a broken GPU when it's in space? What are you gonna do for maintenance? That's gonna be incredibly difficult to do when floating in space." Elon then had to come back with a counterpoint each time. That was one remarkable thing about the podcast: somebody with enough technical acumen to respond on the fly. For example, the line of questioning went: "So if you're gonna do 10,000 launches, that means you're launching a Starship every hour. Every hour you're gonna do a Starship launch. How many have you done? You've done, like, three or whatever in the last year. Is that even possible—to do one every hour?" Elon would reply, "Well, you know, there's more planes than that taking off from airports."
02:41	MFM	So.
02:41	Shaan Puri	Yes. Then they would go into why that's either correct or incorrect. It's really funny because the founder of Stripe is sitting there. It was all—like a collab; it was on "Cheeky Pint," which is made by the Stripe guy. He probably asked five questions total in three hours, and Dwarkesh asked 500. Baby, did Dwarkesh—but it was exactly what was needed. Shout out to the guy from Stripe for letting that play out the way it did. I thought it made for a great podcast.
03:07	Sam Parr	Did he best Elon in anything?
03:10	Shaan Puri	No, no, it wasn't like one-upmanship, but it was definitely "I'm not just going to let you say that shit" — like, "wait, so what do you know that I don't know?" Because I would just think this, and he would earnestly ask the question. He'd be like, "Okay, I buy that that does this, but I don't see the connection you made to this." So he forced him to keep going, which I thought was great. </FormattedResponse>
03:30	Sam Parr	Did you feel the same sense that I feel when I see a white guy with a 100-meter — or, like...?
03:35	Shaan Puri	A sense of national pride, yeah.
03:40	MFM	Like, yeah... When Chris Anderson—what's the white?
03:43	Shaan Puri	"Cornerback in the NFL is..." [unfinished thought]
03:47	MFM	Is that how you felt? </FormattedResponse>
03:49	Shaan Puri	> "A little bit. If I'm being honest, a little bit actually. I felt scared for him — I was like, 'Dude, tone it down; it's a little crazy.' You just get a little... you get a little feisty here. > > But he was also autistically unaware, so I can't not ask this. I have to ask because I want to know the answer to it. I thought that was so great. He's so earnest in the way he does everything — it's great."
04:11	MFM	Alright, so you're like, "What? What? What?" High-fiving your wife, watching it like a WorldStarHipHop video. "Yeah — where we at? Where we at next?"
04:21	Shaan Puri	I may or may not have bought a Dwarkesh, you know, hoodie after that. So, can I tell you some of the crazy things that Elon said?
04:32	Sam Parr	Did he mention Epstein at all?
04:34	Shaan Puri	They did not— they didn't go into it. They basically said, "We're going to use this time to talk about technology, not the 'woke' stuff... politics, Elon," and they did a very minimal amount of that. They did a little bit on Doge at the end, but not much. I'll tell you first just a useful thing, and then I'll tell you some of the crazy things, because the crazy things you're gonna be like, "Whoa, man." But let's just do the useful thing. They asked about hiring, so they were basically getting into their process. "So how do you do it? What are you doing differently than the rest of us? What is it that you're doing that's leading to all of this incredible—" Any one of your companies is doing incredible things. Right? SpaceX, a trillion-dollar company. X AI came into the AI game, like, I don't know, seven years late or something like that and became a $250,000,000,000 company.
05:25	Sam Parr	"I saw that X.AI thing. I didn't even know what it is."
05:30	Shaan Puri	Have you ever used Grok? It's Elon’s competitor to ChatGPT. The product is called Grok — it’s his "revenge" company because when OpenAI kinda screwed him and did exactly the opposite of what he wanted. OpenAI was supposed to be open-source AI, a nonprofit, and now it’s a for-profit closed-source company. He funded $50 million and now owns none of it. His revenge company was xAI, but it was seven or eight years late to the game and still catching up. Tesla, obviously, is worth more than the next 20 car companies combined. So it’s like — any one of these companies dominates all of the others. A supernova. What is this? What’s even happening? They were asking about hiring. They said, "You must have incredible people, because just by logic there’s no way you could be in five of these companies at the same time doing the things yourself." So: how are you getting these people? They asked, "What do you look for when you hire?" Because he hired, I guess, the first thousand people at SpaceX — a thousand-plus — he interviewed them himself. He said, "I’m looking for evidence of exceptional ability." Sometimes I would see a resume and think, "This person sounds great." But he learned you trust the conversation, not the resume. He said if, in that first twenty minutes, he’s not thinking "wow," then the resume doesn’t matter. "All I ask them for in the interview is: tell me about something exceptional you’ve done. I’m looking for evidence of exceptional ability." If they can’t tell a story — if they can’t name one to three things that make you say "wow, wow, wow" — that’s all he’s looking for.
07:08	Sam Parr	Does he define that?
07:10	Shaan Puri	Of exceptional ability.
07:11	Sam Parr	Yeah... could it be, like, I was an NCAA athlete, and I was— I won. I won.</FormattedResponse>
07:16	Shaan Puri	He's looking for technical achievements — things you've built or done technically. He said, "It's not that I'm batting a thousand. I make a lot of mistakes. But I've probably — to use AI terms — I have the most training data out there for hiring technical talent. I've been doing this for a long time; I've interviewed so many of these people myself and I've gotten to see what worked and what didn't. I revised my training — I have a big training set and I RL'd myself. I redid reinforcement learning on myself in order to figure out what I should actually be looking for, what I actually want." They asked him a great question: "What do you look for in a sparring partner? What does it take to work well with Elon? What do you want?" > "I don't want a sparring partner. I want you to execute well. If someone executes well, I'm a huge fan. If they don't, I hate them. I don't care about my own idiosyncratic preferences. If you get things done, I love you, and if you don't, I hate you." I thought that was so great.
08:31	Sam Parr	"What a weirdo."
08:34	Shaan Puri	"You say that. I feel like you're the same way, dude. I literally feel like, when I heard it, I was like, 'That's how Sam is.'"
08:39	Sam Parr	Well, I just took Andrew Wilkinson's personality test. </FormattedResponse>
08:42	MFM	You see him tweet that thing out the other day?
08:44	Sam Parr	"Yeah, your boy's autistic, apparently. That's so... literally — what's the test?"
08:50	Shaan Puri	"Wait — why didn't we lead with that?"
08:52	MFM	Yeah, and the good news... Breaking: tell [unclear: "tbpn"] I need to.
08:57	Sam Parr	Get one of those little announcement things, yeah.
09:00	MFM	"I get the date."
09:01	Shaan Puri	This is.
09:01	MFM	Better than your.</FormattedResponse>
09:01	Shaan Puri	Birthday: February 9 </FormattedResponse>
09:02	MFM	That was.
09:03	Shaan Puri	Your awakening day.
09:04	MFM	A day. The good news: the big day. </FormattedResponse>
09:08	Shaan Puri	Maybe now our podcast can get into the top, top charts. We need to break into the top 10—we've been lacking. </FormattedResponse>
09:15	Sam Parr	"Yeah, it turns out—yeah, capital‑A Autistic. So maybe Elon and I... I don't know. Maybe he's got the 'good' type of autistic, though." </FormattedResponse>
09:23	Shaan Puri	I—yeah, he's got the math one. And you?
09:25	MFM	Have. Yeah, we both got.
09:26	Sam Parr	The one where we're just awkward in social situations and we say things like, "I was wanting to go to the social one."
09:31	Shaan Puri	And you got the math one, by the way. For anyone who's a fan—we say this with extreme love and a sense of humor about this—there's a long-running joke. In San Francisco, it's one of the highest-status things you could have, and that's where the origin of the joke comes from.
09:47	Sam Parr	Alright. A lot of people watch and listen to the show because they want us to tell them exactly what to do when it comes to starting or growing a business. A lot of people message Sean and me and say, "Alright, I want to start something on the side — is this a good idea?" What they're really saying is, "Just give me the ideas." Well, my friends, you're in luck. My old company, The Hustle, put together 100 different side-hustle ideas and appropriately called it the Side Hustle Idea Database. It's a list of 100 pretty good ideas, frankly. I went through them — they're awesome. It explains how to start them, how to grow them, and things like that. It gives you a little bit of inspiration. Check it out. It's called the Side Hustle Idea Database. It's in the description below — you'll see the link. Click it, check it out, and let me know in the comments what you think.
10:33	Shaan Puri	Can I tell you another thing he said in this? He said they kept asking, "Okay, so what are you doing differently?" He replied, "I just have a maniacal sense of urgency." He continued, "I shoot for a deadline that I have a 50% probability of success." People make fun of him because that means half the time he's late, wrong about his deadline, and misses his deadlines. But it's worth it, because he says, "Work is like a gas — it expands to fill the time you give it, and so I just don't give it much time." Okay, that was good. Now let me tell you about some of the crazy stuff.
11:03	Sam Parr	So, wait — that's actually really interesting. I get criticized within my own company for doing that: creating these super urgent situations, and people get worn out. Then there's Hermosy, who I think is a really smart business guy. He preaches all the time to "have patience" and take things slow. It's a hard dichotomy to handle. </FormattedResponse>
11:19	Shaan Puri	Yeah. I think it's sort of a long-term patience — as in, you're not going to give up and you're going to stay at it. I think short-term, a maniacal sense of urgency is on the task. So: patient with the mission and maniacal about the task is probably the way to do it. Here's another thing I picked up. He might have said the phrase "limiting factor" 400 times in three hours. Have you ever heard that phrase? If one thing came out of this, it was how Elon thinks and works. You have a huge mission, right? "We're going to Mars. We're going to build the first electric car company. We're going to build artificial general intelligence." Whatever it is — huge mission. You have a maniacal sense of urgency. That's the second component. And the third is this idea of the limiting factor. At any given time, all he's doing is scanning for: what is the limiting factor — what is the bottleneck that's preventing us from getting to the outcome sooner? For example, with AI right now, people say, "You're building these space data centers, data centers in space — that sounds crazy. Why are you doing this? Why can't we just do it on Earth?" And he's basically like: to make AI smarter we need bigger datasets, more compute. You're either going to be limited by chips. Initially, we were limited by chips, so I started building chips. Tesla's building their own GPUs — the equivalent of NVIDIA chips. He bought huge orders of NVIDIA chips and told Jensen, "Give me everything you got." The second thing is power. So the limiting factor becomes power, not chips. He said he suspects that in the next 24–36 months there will be more GPU chips that can't be turned on. The limiting factor will no longer be chips — we'll be constrained by power availability. Then they walked through it: "Why can't you just connect to the grid?" He explained you can't connect to the grid for these reasons. "Okay, well why can't you do it off-grid? Why can't you just buy a power plant and power your own chips, not connect to the grid?" He said there are three companies that make the power plants and they're all booked out until 2032. We can't build power plants fast enough. There aren't enough people, projects, and time to build as many power plants as we'll need. Specifically, it's the turbines inside the power plants that we cannot procure in time. There are only so many companies that make the turbines, and within the turbine it's the blades and veins that you can't source. We're going to try to make them at Tesla, but even that will take time. So we're limited by this. I'm throwing all my weight into whatever is the limiting factor at any given time in this business. It ended up with, "F it — we're going to launch these data centers in space." That's a way to get around the limiting factor. Over and over in the whole podcast, the formula is: identify the limiting factor and then go ape shit to get over it. Most people don't do either: they don't correctly identify the limiting factor, and even if they do, they don't go all-in on it. Ever since this podcast, in any meeting I've had — when I check in with my portfolio companies — I've gone full Elon on them. I'm like, "We want this outcome. What's the limiting factor?" The CEO will talk for five minutes and I interrupt: "Cool, you didn't answer my question. What's the limiting factor?" "Well, the limiting factor is X." "Okay, great. Why are you talking about all these other things besides X? X is the limiting factor. So all we're going to focus on is X." Once you identify it, you need to drop everything else and just focus on X, then go ape shit on it. He said, "In my companies, if something's going well, you won't see me. The Boring Company is going well — I don't spend any time on it. If it hits a roadblock and there's a limiting factor and they can't solve it, then I will come in and I'll throw my full force, my full weight at it." I thought this simple operating philosophy can serve a lot of people: identify the limiting factor and then figure out how to throw your entire weight against it. If you have to go over the wall, through the wall, around the wall, under the wall — whatever you have to do — you have to get past that wall. I don't know if you want to play the game, but right now let's take Hampton, for example. What's the limiting factor in Hampton? Thought exercise.
15:49	Sam Parr	Yeah, so we basically only do two things. We get the best people to join a core group, and then we allow them to have good conversations. For us, the limiting factor in expanding to chapters globally is getting more of the best people—so, more people.
16:03	Shaan Puri	What's the limiting factor on more good people?
16:04	Sam Parr	Well, I could probably make a list of five things that we could do. For example: - Ask for referrals more than we do. - Spend more on advertising.
16:11	Shaan Puri	So, okay. Those would be solutions, but aren't they just one level deeper into the problem? For example: we have a lot of people who aren't good, or we have good people but we just don't have enough of them — we don't have enough people applying.
16:21	Sam Parr	We're limiting our prospects to only 13 cities, so we need to open that up. We have thousands and thousands of people applying every single month, but we limit it to only 13 cities.
16:33	Shaan Puri	"So, what's the limiting factor of opening up 13 more cities?"
16:36	Sam Parr	It's just bandwidth — probably having someone really focus on a particular city. Once one person joins, or a prospect shows interest in, let's say, Birmingham, how do we find seven other people who are interested? The way we will eventually scale is we will pivot our business so that moderators are basically franchisee owners. They have to go and help recruit seven other people once we give them one person, and so they're running their own little coaching business.
17:01	Shaan Puri	Right. So a useful exercise in this case would be: basically, what's stopping us from doing it tomorrow? So, let's say tomorrow you wanted to open ten cities—what would actually break if you opened ten cities tomorrow?
17:16	Sam Parr	Well, a customer would potentially be angry because they'd have to wait a long time until we found seven other people in, let's say, Birmingham. </FormattedResponse>
17:22	Shaan Puri	And so then you say, "Is that true? Is there—or is there not? Or do we have...?" So, to have 10 cities, how many members do you need to activate each city?
17:32	Sam Parr	Well, you just need one core group of eight people.
17:34	Shaan Puri	So, you need 80 people—so you need 8 per city. Do you have 8? Do you have 8 that are ready to open one city tomorrow, or no? Could you open one tomorrow? Yes? Could you open two tomorrow?
17:49	Sam Parr	Probably—maybe. But it would get hard. I would need more... I would need more people. Then the question would be, "Well, why do I need more people?" Well, you know...
17:57	MFM	"Why can't I just do it with less people?"
18:00	Shaan Puri	Yeah. Okay, so you start to get into the nuts and bolts of it, right? But even if we just look at what just happened, it started with a high-level problem: we need more power. In your case it was we need more good people. Then you got to turbines and blades and veins — the limiting factor — which was like, actually, Mississippi has four people and we need eight. That's the turbines, the blades and veins level of detail. So, if we want to do 10, could I do one? Yes. Could I do two? No. What happened at two — why did one to two break? There's a limiting factor somewhere between one and two. What's different? What happened there? Also, a second ago you were like, "we could ask for referrals, we could do X, we could do Y." It's almost like we jump to solutions really quickly. What I think actually happens in these companies is we already have in our minds a bunch of pet projects — generically good ideas, but not specifically problem-solving ideas. I think one big sign of waste in companies is when everybody wants to do their pet projects, or everybody wants to do their generically good ideas, rather than the specifically effective ideas that are going to solve the current bottleneck right in front of us — the thing we could unblock by tomorrow.
19:16	Sam Parr	I think this makes sense, but it's hard to pull off. I think it's hard to pull off because of interpersonal relationships. A lot of people would approach this and say, "Well, I'm doing all these other things—how dare you tell me to just do this one thing? You don't understand; how are we going to keep the business running?" That's the pushback mostly.
19:32	Shaan Puri	Totally. And I think that's, by the way, a very real thing: "Hey, we're going to focus on this," and it's like, well actually you don't realize I'm holding up this entire ship by keeping these six trains running on time. I have to keep doing that. A lot of times I've seen this where the good people in my company will say, "Yeah, I hear what you're saying and I'm going to do that," but they also add, "I'm going to have to keep some of these trains running." They don't want to discuss it — they just know it needs to get done. What I found to be pretty effective is to address the trade-off on the call. So what I'll do is explicitly state the trade-off. I'll say, "Here's what that means: by focusing on this, this other area where we actually know how to improve and have good ideas — maybe even two things that are in flight — we're just not going to do any of those. We're going to accept mediocre progress here for exceptional progress here." Nobody wants to say that out loud, but I'm going to say it out loud because it's true. We have a trade-off of energy, focus, and intention. If we're going to move it all over here, that's what it means over there. When we all say out loud, "Yes, we understand and accept this," it's like accepting the terms and conditions when you sign up for a website — "yes, you're going to sell my data." Over here, we're going to make far less progress than we want. This happens throughout life. You have a kid and you're like, "Wow, this is really important." Well, guess what's going to be a little less important: your work for the next three months, and your gym routine is going to go out the window. If you don't accept those trade-offs, you'll feel a constant underlying anxiety or you'll stretch yourself too thin and do a poor job of everything. It's actually better to say, "For this season, this is what matters, and I'm okay with a less-than-stellar rate of progress." Decide: I will only do this amount to keep this running, but beyond that I will not be doing more for the next [period of time].
21:25	Shaan Puri	Of time.
21:26	Sam Parr	Are you good at not bitching at them about why this thing sucks? For example, for the hustle it was "grow email list," therefore social media does not matter. And then I... why does our social... [sentence trails off] </FormattedResponse>
21:36	Shaan Puri	Media suck.
21:37	Sam Parr	"Why does our social media suck, yeah?"
21:39	Shaan Puri	Yeah. Well, I give them permission to — I mean, we put the thing right in front of us, front and center. I'm an obnoxious repeater, so every day when I start my day I will say, "Hey, here's our goals for the year; here's the things we said matter; here's what matters this week." I'm like a bot, because I realized if I don't keep repeating it, people don't even know what we're trying to do and we don't. So I try to get a really crisp, clear set of things we're doing, and I will repeat it so much that I myself remember. We said, "social media doesn't matter — all that matters is growing the email list," and they have permission to be like, "Wait, but social media doesn't matter? All that matters is the list?" It takes some time to work together. You kind of screw that up — you reflect: why was last month not as productive as we wanted? Then you come to the powwow and realize, well, it's because we said we were going to focus on these things but we kept getting distracted and wanted to also do these five other things. And guess what: when we try to do it all, we can't have everything. We just can't have everything all at once. You learn that the hard way once, twice, and it's like, you know, George Bush: "Fool me once, shame on me; fool me twice — don't fool me again." It becomes that at a certain...
22:56	Shaan Puri	So, the good thing is—I’ve worked with Ben for six years, so we kind of know... "yo, we’ve stepped in that gum before." Do we really want that on our shoe again? I can kind of see it coming if we’re going to do this, or if you’re saying this, but remember this is like that other time. So, let’s just stay focused.
23:11	Sam Parr	You see that George Bush quote, and they're like, "You're rapping."
23:14	Shaan Puri	Seamless
23:16	Sam Parr	That was great. What's the quote?
23:17	MFM	"Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, don't fool me again."
23:20	Shaan Puri	Yeah, he, like, loses the quote. He's like, "Fool me twice — you can't keep fooling me." It's like an old-timer. Can I show you one other clip that I thought was, just... I don't know, wild?
23:35	Sam Parr	"From Elon? Yeah. Is it the clip about how he lied about not going to Jeffrey Epstein's island?" </FormattedResponse>
23:42	Shaan Puri	No—did he go, actually?
23:46	Sam Parr	I'm not sure if he went or not, but he said that.
23:48	MFM	He refused to go, but the emails say that he was actually begging to go.
23:53	Shaan Puri	Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hey — we're going to be around town. You guys got anything going on? Yeah? Definitely. Alright, watch this.
23:59	MFM	Vastly more intelligent than humans, so in some sense you're...
24:02	Sam Parr	Like a doomer... and this is like...
24:03	MFM	The best we've got... it's just like it keeps it around because we're interesting. I'm just trying to be realistic here. If AI intelligence is vastly greater—let's say there's a million times more silicon intelligence than biological—I think it would be foolish to assume there's any way to maintain control over that. Now, you can make sure it has the right values, or you can try to have the right values.
24:33	Shaan Puri	Okay, so... I don't know. I think I might have picked the wrong timestamp a little bit there.
24:37	Sam Parr	Here's what: minutes in, they barely drink their drink.</FormattedResponse>
24:40	Shaan Puri	No, there's refills. There's refills. One of the funny jokes is that Dorkash doesn't touch his pint — he just keeps bringing it up to his mouth, it wets his beard, and then it goes back down with the same amount in it, while the other guys are just crushing them. Alright, so here's what he says about AI. The topic is: how do you make sure that AI ends up being good for humanity? They were like, "Do you stay in control?" He says, "If you have intelligence that's 100 times smarter than any human, it's hard to imagine that the humans stay in control." Then they go, "So wait — are you like a doomer here? You know, you just think we're doomed?" He goes, "I'm just trying to be realistic here. If AI is vastly more intelligent — like there's a million more times silicon intelligence to biological — I think it would be foolish to believe that we can maintain control over that. All you could do is try to make sure it has the right values." Kind of like... basically, it goes on like...
25:40	Sam Parr	"You're crazy, kid."
25:41	Shaan Puri	That it would keep us around. I just thought that's a pretty stunning admission for a guy who's building AI to basically say out loud: "This thing is going to be so much smarter than humans." And when it is, the idea that humans—like chimps—are going to stay in control, that humans are going to be in control of this thing that's 100 times or 1,000 times or a million...
26:07	Sam Parr	Sometimes it doesn't make any more sense to me because it's foolish. The ego is the reason why—like Napoleon, you know, the desire to dominate. Does a computer have the need to dominate?
26:20	Shaan Puri	"It's not even that it dominates; it's that we don't control it. For example, if we say, "Cool — I want you to run all decisions by me," but it makes decisions a thousand times better than any human alive in the history of mankind, realistically, if you gave it the mission of being successful, is it actually going to run the decisions by you?" </FormattedResponse>
26:37	Sam Parr	That's what I'm asking: does it actually have the mission to be successful like a human has?
26:41	Shaan Puri	Well, you're going to give it the mission — even if the human is the one prompting it, say...
26:45	Sam Parr	Got it.
26:45	Shaan Puri	"Hey, I want you to make this thing really... I want you to help me become president. I want you to build this successful company. I want you to build this technology. Do you think after that it's going to care what you—" [Sentence trails off.]
26:56	Sam Parr	Well, you say, "could turn it off if you turned it on." That's like—the humans have a compulsion to be right, too. A lot of humans have a compulsion to be nice, to reciprocate. It doesn't have compulsions. And so, can you churn it the way that you just told it to—to dominate or to win? Can you also say, "win less"...?
27:15	Shaan Puri	"Might then the next guy says, 'No, I wanna win. Stay on.' All it takes is one guy to not turn it off, right? That's the same thing with one country not having safeguards on it."
27:25	MFM	Have you?
27:25	Sam Parr	Have you seen the AI social network where they're all AI guys talking about how they're going to dominate humans?
27:30	Shaan Puri	Yeah. Although that might be kind of faked—it's unclear if that's fake or real. It might be that humans are saying something like this because it freaks everybody out and goes viral. Have you seen this? Elon tweeted this meme: "I don't want to live in a world where someone else makes humans irrelevant before we do." </FormattedResponse>
27:48	Sam Parr	That does—kinda how it feels, yeah. But I hope he's wrong.
27:54	Shaan Puri	Yeah. Even with SpaceX, he's talking about the goal. The original mission with SpaceX is to preserve what they call the "candle of consciousness." Basically, if something happened to Earth—if we're a single-planet species—all consciousness could get wiped out. It should be really important that we're a multi-planetary species so that...
28:14	Sam Parr	Really good phrase.
28:15	Shaan Puri	Human consciousness or intelligence lives on. In this interview, he kind of backs off that, saying, "Consciousness is — we don't really know what that is, so let's just say intelligence," because xAI just merged with SpaceX. He's like, "At least intelligence will propagate through the internet." It's basically that the robots and the chips and the AI will definitely be multiplanetary whether we are or not — that's his argument. Dwarkash asks, "Why do you think that they would care that humans survive?" He replies, "Well, there's no reason to kill us." Dwarkash responds, "That's not very reassuring." Essentially the way he put it was, "Humans are interesting and we're part of consciousness, so if you want to maximally expand consciousness you would keep humans around, right? There's not a big advantage to doing it." It's like, "Whoa — if that's the last moral victory we're clinging to, this is a pretty startling thing." I thought that was kind of a crazy admission he was making. Can I tell you two other just insane things from this? He's talking about what he's doing with his AI project, which I don't think he's ever really talked about before. Have you ever heard of this "Macro Hard" project?
29:20	Sam Parr	No — what's it called? "Macro Hard." Yes. It's like the — like the "70-for-70," or what's that called, "70-for-70," where you have to run a mile every day for seventy days: 70 Hard.
29:30	MFM	75 Hard
29:31	Sam Parr	"That's what it's on."
29:31	Shaan Puri	No, no — he made it the opposite of Microsoft. He's like, "What's the opposite of Microsoft? It's Macrohard." Basically, what he's doing is building what he calls human emulators. Here's the Elon philosophy or strategy that came out during this podcast: the strategy is, how do you win? He says, think in the limit — what is the most that AI can do before you have full robots [like artificially intelligent robots]? Tesla is building Optimus, which is the robot that can do any of the work that a human could do. So what's he doing with his software play? He says: think in the limit. The limit is anything a human can do on a computer. He believes that within 12–24 months, AI will be able to do anything a human can do on a computer. He calls that a "human emulator" — an AI that can do anything a human could do with a computer. For example, I have an executive assistant. The idea would be that the AI could do everything she does for me: researching, booking, making things happen. Also, you and I doing this podcast online means AI should be able to do this online too. It should be able to produce an interesting podcast twice a week about business trends, opportunities, and ideas related to entrepreneurship — have a sense of humor and bring three or four really interesting topics per episode. Because this is done online, he says anything that's moving electrons the AI should be able to do. When asked how he's trying to solve that, he replied something like, "Do you want me to just give away all my secrets on a podcast? That would be sort of stupid." He's in the most competitive game right now: what he calls the highest-ELO battle in the world — ELO like the chess rankings [ELO = a rating system]. He's positioning himself as the highest-rated player in that battle.
31:40	MFM	"Elo needs a wedgie, man. This guy's hilarious. [Unclear phrase: "macro hard humid emulator"]. This is crazy."
31:47	Shaan Puri	So he said, "It'll take at least three more beers for me to reveal that, but it'll be something like the way that Tesla solves self-driving." They asked, "Okay, unrelated question: how did Tesla solve self-driving?" He replied: > "What it did was use very basic sensors — the same sort of sensors that humans have, in this case mostly cameras: eyes, vision. It watched humans drive a lot — millions and millions of miles — and then it tried to emulate what they would do. While you're driving, it tries to guess what you would do, and anytime there's a difference it notes it and tries to learn from other people in similar situations until it can basically match what a human would do while driving. That's what Tesla self-driving does." He continued: "Similarly, what they're doing with the human emulators is they're basically getting tons and tons of data of humans using computers, and they're using that to teach computers how to use computers. That's where this is going for Macrohard [possibly 'Microsoft']." Then he talked about the robot side and started to say, "How did you..." (trail off).
32:49	Sam Parr	Do that. Is Macrohard a company?
32:52	Shaan Puri	I don't know if it's a project or a company. I think it's a project within xAI. I don't think it's a separate company. </FormattedResponse>
32:58	Sam Parr	How many people work at X.AI? Is X.AI considered Twitter now?
33:02	Shaan Puri	Same company — they merged xAI and X, and now that merged with SpaceX. Crazy. Okay, now let's talk about the robots thing real quick. He said the Optimus robot—he called it the "infinite money glitch" because labor is the biggest market in the world. If you can have robots that can do human labor, and specifically once the robot can build more robots, that's the infinite money glitch. So basically, once Optimus can build more Optimus, it's over. They asked, "How will you do the emulator thing?" because Tesla made sense: humans bought the cars and drove them around, which gave you all the training data for how to drive. With Microsoft, theoretically you could have a bunch of humans using computers to emulate it, but how do you do the robot one? There aren't enough robots to learn from. So he said he's building this warehouse where 10,000 robots will be able to self-play. It's basically this giant warehouse where 10,000 robots are...
34:04	Sam Parr	A bunch of toddlers.
34:05	Shaan Puri	Walking around, trying to figure out how to do tasks — like pick this up, move this here, try this, work together on this. Build this box without it breaking... whatever. They're not going to tell them how to do it. They're just going to self-play over and over and over until they figure it out, same way they're going to...
34:21	Sam Parr	"They'll come in after three weeks, and they're going to be trying to solve the bars to get out — you know what?"
34:27	MFM	I mean.
34:27	Sam Parr	They're like escaping prison.
34:30	Shaan Puri	So, like, this is how they built the best chess engines and Go engines: instead of telling them strategies and rules, they just said, "Play 10 million games and figure it out." All you tell it are the rules of where the pieces can move — for example, the pawn can move forward and the bishop can move diagonally. That's all we tell it, and we tell it that winning is good. It played about 10 million games and became the best chess player in the world. They did it with Go [the board game] too; it became the best Go player ever. Now he's doing the same thing with robots. I thought, how crazy is that going to be — a self-play warehouse where the robots are trying to figure out how to do stuff? </FormattedResponse>
35:05	Sam Parr	"Like... Where is it going to be? Where is this going to be?"
35:07	Shaan Puri	"I don't know—he didn't give me the address, but it sounds pretty awesome, right?"
35:11	Sam Parr	You gotta put—like, you know—they've got puppy cams at live-cam doggy daycares. </FormattedResponse>
35:17	MFM	Know we need that. We see some tell.</FormattedResponse>
35:19	Shaan Puri	"Me, I wouldn't be watching that thing four hours a day." </FormattedResponse>
35:23	Sam Parr	This is like... whenever we talk about this, my fight-or-flight response goes up hardcore.
35:29	Shaan Puri	Can I ask—what's the... okay. So I have this theory: basically, a thing happens and we give it a meaning. The meaning just decides the feeling. You told me about the thing happening—hearing about all these exciting AI breakthroughs—and you told me the feeling, which is like kind of fight-or-flight: fear, anxiety, exhaustion. What's the meaning you're putting on all this that's making you feel that way? What does it mean that Elon is doing this or that? These tools are rapidly advancing, and there are new tools every day. What's the meaning you're putting on that? "I'm falling behind."
36:00	Sam Parr	You—yeah, you... either gotta get on or get off. You have to adapt faster than ever in order to keep up. All these opportunities are flying by. And, you know what's the phrase? "Opportunities are trains." Thankfully there's always another one, but these trains are moving real fast. I don't even know if I can grab it if I don't catch on when it's at... this top.
36:19	Shaan Puri	"And what happens if you don't catch on?" </FormattedResponse>
36:22	Sam Parr	Well, I'm lucky—I'm in a place in my life where, if I don't catch on, there's... nothing. I'm safe. But as an opportunity-loving entrepreneur, you do feel FOMO. There's also fear. There's a bit of fear. It's weird; you have to think about it. I'm lucky I'm not entirely fearful for myself, but I still feel that humanity is changing, and it's scary. It's just change. Change is both good and bad, but it's the speed of things that's incredible. I mean, I remember in 2021 my friend was telling me about OpenAI and thinking about joining the company, and I was like, "I don't know— is it legit?" Who knows. That was only five years ago, and now our parents use it. You know... it's pretty...
37:07	Shaan Puri	Mom uses it constantly, which is crazy.
37:09	Sam Parr	It's astounding. It's crazy. It's wild. There's a different tool every single day, and they're so good.
37:16	Shaan Puri	Yeah. I guess I just... I think we should leave it with the optimistic version of that: there's never been more opportunity than this. If you're good, you get to lever up. Whatever your output was going to be, you can tend to 100x that using these tools. You don't need to use all of them. You don't need to catch every opportunity. Catching any piece of this is going to be huge. Catching any piece of this at all is going to put you in the top 1%, because if we're feeling this, you have to remember the whole world is not. If it's all about change and adaptation, who better than us—who better than the type of person that listens to this podcast—to take advantage of that? You know, 99.99999% of the world doesn't even listen to a podcast like this. If you're listening to the podcast, you're already in the... 1% of adaptability, of change, of future promise. So you're better positioned than anybody to take advantage. The problem is we compare to the—two decimal places over—and we're like, "but Elon's doing this, but this guy's doing that." It's like, you don't have to be them to win. In fact, we sort of stand on the shoulders of giants.
38:28	Sam Parr	I have a friend who was telling me his father owns a nursing-home company or something like that—what it's like, at-home care. He's like, "My dad's in his seventies. He lives in the Midwest, in Missouri. The business does $90,000,000 a year in revenue and $8,000,000 a year in profit." I told him about AI and he had never heard of it; he didn't even know what that word meant. He said, "I went to his office and it was like 80 employees and they all looked like the same woman over and over and over again. Have you ever seen Ferris Bueller's Day Off? Like the secretary with that haircut." They literally didn't know what the word "AI" was. It's just crazy how much they spend on payroll. He's like, "They spend $8,000,000 a year on payroll," and I'm like, "What are they doing?" He explained, and I'm like, "That's crazy. That's just that one little business you've never even heard of in the middle of Missouri that just unlocked $8,000,000 a year, probably in value, that someone can go and do."
39:27	Shaan Puri	Right, right.
39:28	Sam Parr	"Alright, listen, Sean — you're getting dumber."
39:31	Shaan Puri	Am I
39:32	Sam Parr	Well, we all are. So, I'm reading this book called Stolen Focus because I'm basically incredibly depressed by the fact that I get 10,000 notifications a day, and it's impacting my mood. I saw this book called Stolen Focus. Have you ever seen it?
39:46	Shaan Puri	Well, I saw it, but then I looked away.
39:48	Sam Parr	Great — good joke, but it kind of got me interested. It's coincidental: just last month a neuroscientist testified in front of Congress and said something striking. He basically said: > "This is the first time in the history of measuring this since the 1880s that the current generation, Gen Z, is dumber than the generation above them." Have you heard of the Flynn effect? Basically, since the 1800s — since we started measuring IQ on a large scale — every generation has been roughly 10 points higher than the previous one. That breaks down to about 10 points every 30 years, or roughly 3 points every 10 years. That’s kind of cool because it means the average person today would have been considered gifted around 1900. The increase has been attributed to a variety of reasons: better education, improved diet, and a bunch of other factors. But starting around 2010, researchers noticed a decline. This decline isn't just in America — it's been observed in Norway and many other countries. I think about 80 countries have studied the same pattern. So since 2010 there's been a decline, and now, according to a sample size of roughly 800,000 test subjects, Gen Z is the first generation since the 1800s to have a lower IQ than the generation before. Is that insane?
41:06	Shaan Puri	Alright, so the Flynn effect is the long-term study showing an increase in standardized IQ test scores observed through the twentieth century — about three points per decade. As you said, this is primarily due to environmental factors such as education, nutrition, smaller family sizes, and more technology rather than genetic changes. It's most significant in tests measuring fluid intelligence (problem solving) rather than crystallized intelligence (acquired knowledge). It highlights that intelligence is heavily influenced by environment… okay, great. And then you're saying recently it's not holding. Gen Z is the first generation to score lower than their predecessors, and they have this — just this picture of someone as the headline article, which is always great.
41:56	MFM	Gen Z is, like, gayer than ever before. They, like, zoom in on you — yeah.
42:01	Shaan Puri	"They're like, 'Dude, I'm never just gonna— I'm never just gonna pose for a picture without asking what it's for again.'"
42:08	Sam Parr	"What—okay. So Gen Z is, I think, 2010 onwards. So people who are like 16 years old—maybe ages 10 to 16? Something like that. Is that right?"
42:21	Shaan Puri	I thought this is like Gen Alpha — 1997 to 2012. </FormattedResponse>
42:26	Sam Parr	Sorry, I got that way off. Yeah, you're right — Gen Alpha. Okay, so they're like, what, 25 right now... And so, you can probably guess. What do you think has caused this?
42:36	Shaan Puri	Well, yeah. It just seems like the sort of brain-rot — the brain-rot consumption, right? It's like diet: why are we getting fatter? Then you go to a grocery store and you see that a grocery store is basically lead gen [lead generation] for a hospital, right. It's just the sugar factory.
42:52	Sam Parr	Yeah.
42:52	Shaan Puri	So, you know, it's not a big surprise.
42:54	Sam Parr	So, the correlation — and I think there's causation proof — is certainly the rise of smartphones and social media. It kind of got me thinking. I think we talked about inflection points on this podcast about businesses. Inflection points mean a tech inflection: everyone has a smartphone and thus we all have GPS. Therefore new businesses can launch, like Uber, because of it. Or a regulation inflection: during COVID, doctors were able to prescribe medication virtually, which created telehealth. I think that we haven't gotten to the inflection yet, but in the next 10 to 20 years we're going to see an inflection with a variety of cultural changes — a cultural inflection — and potentially a regulatory inflection. I actually think there might be something there where we're going to see a lot of different opportunities in businesses and just cultural change due to the lack of focus. So we call this the focus or attention inflection.
43:50	MFM	I think that we are at...
43:50	Sam Parr	The very early stages of that, and I had some ideas that I think could thrive there. But I wanted to hear: have you noticed this in your life? Have you noticed that you are changing—like, is there a... a household inflection going on?
44:05	Shaan Puri	"We're all getting dumber, you mean?"
44:07	Sam Parr	No. Well, you're like combating this.</FormattedResponse>
44:09	Shaan Puri	Well, yeah. So the first thing to combat this: over the weekend my wife was like, "Oh my God, did you see what Trump tweeted?" and I was like, "No." Then, about an hour later, that conversation happened again. They said, "You hear about the news anchor whose mom got kidnapped?" and I was like, "No." Then there was a third story, and again I was like, "No — I don't know anything about that." I think I've been totally fine about it. I kind of realized I had this... I don't know, you know when you get happy that you're better than everyone else? That's kind of where I was — in that beautiful, smug state of mind. </FormattedResponse>
44:51	Sam Parr	Smug state, yeah. The company has a smug problem, doesn't it?
44:54	Shaan Puri	Yeah, exactly. I went to the admissions shop, and sure enough—smug check.
45:00	Sam Parr	"You did not pass the smug check."
45:02	Shaan Puri	I did not pass the smug check because I don't listen to the news. I don't watch the news. I was thinking about this and I was like, dude, imagine if every day you just woke up and instead of focusing on your life you said, "distract me with everybody else's problems." Then the people would tell you about a problem happening 3,000 miles away, another one happening 9,000 miles away, another one that happened ten years ago, and one that might happen ten years from now. Your brain gets to think about all that instead of what's going on in your life. That's essentially what it is if you're a regular consumer of the news. The news is one of these things that today, at least, has a half warning label on it, but the warning label's like "fake news." What you need is less news — you just need way less than you're currently consuming. You don't need to know the stock price right now. You don't need to know the Bitcoin price right now. You don't need to know what's happening in D.C. You don't need to know any of that stuff. I think some people will argue the exact opposite. They'll say, "Oh my God, you're so uncivically minded and you really need to care about what's going on with other people in the world."
46:08	Sam Parr	"And you're like, 'Guys, it's not my ability to not hit the snooze button—it's the fact that I lied to get out of jury duty. I told...'"
46:13	MFM	I told them that "my wife is a drug addict," and I had to be with the kids. That is why I'm not civically minded.
46:21	Shaan Puri	Yeah, this is not the correct argument.
46:22	Sam Parr	This is.
46:23	Shaan Puri	That's not the correct evidence. I've given you the right evidence for it. I would say, on the whole, overconsumption of news is—I've seen this as one major leak people have in their life. I guess the answer is not zero, but definitely not the set that most people have. It's like your thermostat is set to 88 degrees in the house and you're wondering why you're sweating all day. There's just an overconsumption of content in general—one of which is news and the other is social media. I told you my challenge this year: I deleted all the social media off my phone. That definitely changes things, right? I get back a couple of hours a day of time and attention, but it's not even really the hours—it's the moments. Every time I open my phone, I press "x" to open Twitter.
47:06	Sam Parr	That's weird, right?
47:06	Shaan Puri	And that... all my phone has is the Xfinity app, and I'm like, "I guess I could check my internet speed right now." That's all I could do.
47:13	MFM	"It's like when you were a grown-up and you would sit."
47:15	Sam Parr	Down, and you'd start reading the back of the cereal box.
47:17	MFM	Or when you're on the toilet, you read the shampoo ingredients.
47:19	Shaan Puri	No, seriously — that's happening to me all the time now. I'm like, "Okay, what the hell am I going to think about?" Then I think about important things, things that are really meaningful to me: what I'm going to do that day, my time — my precious asset, I think about my kids and where they're at. I start thinking about other things because I created space. I think that space is the thing most people are lacking nowadays. So yes, in my household I have felt this, especially this year, because I deleted social media. I was, like anybody else, a social media addict, right? It became more obvious than ever that you don't notice the addiction until you feel the withdrawal. That's the phase I went through in the first month of this year when I deleted all those apps — the withdrawal of constantly checking my phone. I just kept getting into the Xfinity app, right?
48:02	Sam Parr	"Dude, I'm like a fact-checker addict. I get addicted to social media, but then someone will be debating something..." </FormattedResponse>
48:12	Shaan Puri	Try to see if...
48:13	Sam Parr	It's right—like, how old is Tom Brady?
48:15	MFM	You know what?
48:15	Shaan Puri	I mean.
48:16	MFM	I'm like, "Well, I'll just tell you right now... or you..."
48:17	Sam Parr	You know, like, you know, like, we were debating. You, like, "Man, Trump's, you know, 76 — that's so old, right?" Actually, you know, like, you...
48:27	Shaan Puri	Useless facts. Yeah—if I type "I" right now in Instagram, I get Instacart and I get Aqualink, which controls my pool temperature. Those are my options—those are my options for distraction, for voluntary distraction from the world.
48:42	Sam Parr	So, my prediction is that we are going to look at this problem the same way we look at obesity. We're going to look at this stuff and say there are some people who can just put it down and walk away. There are some people who say, "Just stop. Just don't do it." It's like... this processed food is addicting; it triggers something in my brain and makes it almost impossible. I think what we're going to see is that this will shift from what it is now — where we either ignore it or think it's just a small problem — to seeing it as an environmental problem that requires changes. I have a few ideas on what could be cool, but I think that this is...
49:21	Shaan Puri	You referenced another study before that I thought was fascinating. Explain that again — the "train-classroom study." I thought this was really important. Do you remember this one? It was about the noise from a train: a train going by the classroom lowered students' scores. What was it again?
49:37	Sam Parr	Yeah, so basically the hypothesis was: does noise interruption impact people's focus? A study looked at something like 200,000, 300,000, or 400,000 children in school, in fourth grade. They compared kids who were under an overpass or near a train to kids who weren't. They found that the kids who read silently without the interruption of a passing train retained information significantly better. I don't remember the exact numbers, but basically the decibel level—even if intermittent—significantly impacted their ability to retain the information they were reading.
50:15	Shaan Puri	Right, but did you see the Pavel Durov tweet he had for New Year's? Did you see this thing? Okay, so Pavel is the founder of Telegram, which is one of the biggest messaging apps in the world. He also started one of the biggest social networks in the world before that — it's like the Facebook of Russia, and...
50:34	Sam Parr	Isn't he, like, the father of 100 kids too?
50:37	Shaan Puri	Yeah, and he's built like a Greek god. He's brilliant, super rich, and has a great jawline. I can't say enough good things about this guy. Alright, so I don't know if you know the story. When they asked him for access to all the data and wanted a backdoor, he said no. They sent him an official notice, and he sent back an official response: a dog wearing a hoodie flipping off the camera. Then he left the country, and they took his social network. He was like, “Take it, but you're not going to get access”—he wasn't going to give them access. He tweeted this year: > "This year I wish you less—less information, less food, less entertainment, less communication, less stimulation. You already have too much of that, and it stands in the way of your certainty, health, sleep, and creativity. Merry Christmas." I remember that really stood out to me. I liked it, and I obviously agree with it. But the part I think is more interesting is that this guy created, you know, one of the biggest messaging apps and social networks in the world—and he doesn't use his phone.
51:37	Sam Parr	"What? So, I don't know anything about that. What do you mean—he doesn't use his phone?"
51:40	Shaan Puri	He doesn't have a phone. He's like, "If something needs to get to me, somebody will bring me the message if it's really important." He's like, "I just don't use or look at my phone." I think it's most of the day—he does not look at a phone. And then, you know, Steve Jobs—he'll invent the iPad and the iPhone, but at home his kids don't use them. Zuckerberg: his kids aren't on social media. It's like, do as they do, not as they say you should do. "You guys should use this, but we're gonna do this." I don't know what the executives at Kraft or the food scientists at Kraft do, but I don't think they're giving their kids Kraft Mac and Cheese every day. It's like, "You should have it for sure, please buy it," but we're not gonna eat that shit. I think that's kind of where I stand with the social-distraction folks. It's obviously super hard, but it seems like the fight worth fighting is what you're bringing up here.
52:41	Sam Parr	Well, I personally think that—yeah—I think it's a fight worth fighting. But I'm also acknowledging that this is going to be a trend. I think what we're going to see is classes form: the upper class, the rich people who don't have to be on their phone or computer all the time. They're going to know that this is an issue. It's a little bit different now, but it's similar to the nineties and early 2000s when Whole Foods was a luxury—health food was a luxury. So I think that's what's going to happen here, which is sad. But I think that's probably naturally how things tend to play out almost all the time.
53:11	Shaan Puri	We've seen this on the podcast. We've had guys who come on here. I remember one guy who owns an NBA team — he's a billionaire. We were like, "Are you doing this podcast from a phone?" He was like, "Yeah... I don't— I don't own a laptop." Then we were like, "Can you move the thing?" He's like, "There was somebody... I don't know what this is. Somebody set this up. I'm here, and then I'm leaving. I don't really even understand what's what." Last week I did a call with a guy who's the richest person in a country — not the biggest country in the world, but the richest person of that country. So, you know, he's very wealthy, probably worth $1.02 trillion. He was trying to screen share during our call and he was like — we were in Zoom — "I'd like to show you this, but... I know I can, but where do I go?" I was basically tech support for this guy. I said, "Look at the bottom of Zoom — there's a thing called Share. It's like a little square." He's like, "Okay... oh, it says I need to have a different browser." We were like, "Are you not using Chrome?" He said, "No. What is Chrome?" I was like, "Wow." He said, "Yeah, usually I just let people do this stuff for me." He's abstracted himself away from his computer, from tech problems, from having to set these things up and do the stuff himself — to be hands-on with it. I feel like, like you're saying, there's almost a wealth or status thing here: the wealthier you get, the more you're going to be able to abstract yourself away from some of these tools — from digital, you know, digital dopamine.
54:53	Sam Parr	Yeah, yeah. I for sure think this could happen, and I think that it will get to the masses eventually. I think that's just how things work. So listen—tell me what you think about these "two or three" ideas I have. Have you ever done a VO2 max test? No? Do you know what it is?
55:08	Shaan Puri	Yeah, you put on, like, a Bain oxygen mask and run on a treadmill, I think.
55:13	Sam Parr	Basically, yes. No different than the combine idea you have. It's just a way to measure how good your heart is. You use it often to figure out where your max heart rate is and at what level you can run comfortably in Zone 2 for an extended period of time. That's...
55:26	MFM	Like... okay.
55:27	Sam Parr	Why endurance athletes use it.
55:28	Shaan Puri	So, you exercise on a treadmill or bike with increasing intensity, and the mask you're wearing analyzes your oxygen consumption and CO₂ production until you reach exhaustion. Okay—gotcha.
55:38	Sam Parr	And so, I think that we can... I think here's a business idea. I think that we're going to see, like, a VO2 max test for attention. It sounds hilarious. I'm telling you, I think this is a good—what?
55:50	MFM	Would that?
55:50	Shaan Puri	Even, be you just sit in a room, and they see how long it takes you to... it's like the marshmallow test — how long it takes you to pick up the...
55:56	Sam Parr	"Have you ever felt like this? I don't know exactly how to explain it, but have you ever felt like your nervous system is being fried — like your anxiety was just too high? Like you've been in fight-or-flight too much? Have you felt that feeling?"
56:08	Shaan Puri	100%, yeah.
56:10	MFM	Do you ever get that?
56:11	Sam Parr	Looking at your phone.
56:13	Shaan Puri	I get it all the time. I feel like... it almost should be that you're in the normal state — I think it's called the parasympathetic nervous system — and then you go into fight-or-flight when there's an extreme stimulus. For me it's almost the opposite. For most people, it's probably the opposite in modern day: you're always running with this sort of baseline anxiety, a fight-or-flight type of response. Then you remind yourself to take a breath, go for a walk, put it away, and you sort of come down off of it and re-regulate yourself. Maybe I just live in San Francisco and I'm around too many tech... addicts, but I think whatever the ratio should be — like 90/10 or whatever — it's almost the opposite, or maybe 50/50. Of course, it's a terrible ratio.
56:59	Sam Parr	And I believe that one of the best ways to lose weight is to weigh yourself every single day. What gets measured gets changed. I think we could also measure your nervous system. There are ways to measure it — for example, resting heart rate. Just pulling up your phone could make your heart rate go up. There are ways to do it; I don't know exactly all the ways, but there's this huge group of people doing—like a "pre-novo" [unclear transcription]—these measuring things, right? I think we are going to see this for the nervous system or attention. It'll be advertised as "let's see where you rank" or "where you are" in terms of attention. We're going to tell you how "fried" you are, and then we're going to give you a plan on how to get "unfried." You can come and measure it; you can come in and remeasure your body fat in six months.
57:40	Shaan Puri	Yeah, I think that's very true. When I've been coaching this basketball team, one of the things I find myself saying a lot to the guys is: concentration is a skill. When the players come into the gym, they think, "Oh, through the legs, behind the back," whatever. They think that's the skill they need to do well in the game. I'll tell them, "How often do you do this move? Pretty much never. That's not even your role on the team. It's not to do moves like this to score. For the most part, what we want you doing is playing really, really hard and concentrating on the task at hand." That means being where you're supposed to be during the play, focusing on where the ball is versus your man, and so on. We have some really talented guys who don't get in the game because we don't trust their intensity or their concentration. I've been trying to tell them that those two things are skills. They don't sound like skills — they sound like effort — but effort is a skill. All of these things are skilled. There's a guy on our team, Sam, who's not the most talented, but his ability to ratchet up his intensity and then sustain it throughout the game is huge. He's puked during three games this year; he just plays so hard he throws up in the middle of the game. That's basically the only time he comes out of the game — to throw up — and he goes right back in. I'm like, "Do you need a towel or some water? What's going on?" and he just goes straight back in. It's incredible. I've realized that intensity, concentration, and the ability to be maximally present are not just nice-to-have, soft things. They're hard skills, and you actually need to practice them and get better at them. If it's a skill, then it can be measured, and if it can be measured, it can be improved.
59:25	Sam Parr	Alright. I'll give you two — two quick ones more. I think we're gonna see. Remember, you know, what's it called: "q q mon"? [unclear]
59:31	Shaan Puri	Q: "Mon, yeah."
59:33	Sam Parr	"C'mon — it's got the worst logo ever. It's like a sad kid's face."
59:38	Shaan Puri	They hired the artist. They were like, "Just observe and then draw what you see."
59:42	MFM	Yeah, I think we're going to...
59:45	Sam Parr	I see a Kumon for focus for kids. I think kids are going to be impacted by this time, where they're going to learn exercises and stuff for focusing. I think we're going to have, like, a Marie Kondo—but remember Marie Kondo... I think we're going to have a Marie Kondo. You know, Marie Kondo was this—I think she was a Korean lady who was famous for organizing.
01:00:02	Shaan Puri	"I guarantee you're saying her name wrong, by the way — Maria Kondo."
01:00:09	MFM	Marie Kondo
01:00:10	Shaan Puri	That's like a Latina who's a real estate agent — Maria Kondo. Her name is Marie. Oh.
01:00:16	MFM	Come on, dude... I was a Korean lady, and all I got wrong was "Maria" versus "Marie." Hey, Maria — come on, give me a break.
01:00:25	Shaan Puri	Alright, it wasn't as far off as I thought. Yeah—so, an influencer who's all about the tidiness of the mind.
01:00:32	Sam Parr	Yeah, they're going to use their program to create coaches who are going to come and talk to you and do...
01:00:37	Shaan Puri	It makes sense. I think that probably the number one affliction for kids is ADHD. Then you have to medicate and all this stuff, and it explains why they're bad at school. But I've seen that same kid focus on Fortnite and Roblox for four hours straight. So what's up with that? Perhaps they're just not that interested, or the school is not interesting to them. When they're interested, they seem to lock in. </FormattedResponse>
01:01:01	Sam Parr	And also, they haven't used that skill, and they need to learn that skill because they've been, like, fucking on TikTok — it's swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe.
01:01:08	Shaan Puri	Yeah, so I think you're— I think you're absolutely right about that part of it. I also think this is going to happen for adults. The idea of a gym today seems totally normal, but if you rewind 200 years or so, you'd be like, "See, what's going to happen is we're going to spend all day sitting because we'll have this box that we work on." You could use only your fingers to type on the box, and because our bodies won't get any— we're not doing any actual work like the kind of work you think of today, like agriculture or any sort of lifting of objects—we'll go to this other place where they just have weights on the ground. You'd be like, "What do you mean, weights?" It's just a heavy thing you pick up and put down. Yeah, you could do it 10 times for three sets, and then go home. You'd be like, "What, why would they do that? That's crazy," right? But that's basically what happened. The more we moved away from manual labor, the more we created a demand to stimulate our bodies with weights. I think the same thing is going to happen for intellectual stuff. Already people are like, "Well, I could even think about this, or I could just ask ChatGPT to think about this," and they just outsource critical thinking. I think there will be a place that's essentially a gym for your mind—a place you go with a bunch of puzzles, thought experiments, riddles, and so on. It's where you go to keep your mind active because most of your thinking will be done by the AI chip in your brain. If you fast-forward 50 years, either we're gone, or we have to come up with some way to exercise our minds, because so much thinking is going to be done by digital intelligence.
01:02:50	Sam Parr	And the last thing: Justin Mares came on our podcast and told us about a business he has—or helped fund. I forget his exact association, but basically, for the listener, he's our buddy who's a health freak, and he has an amazing company called Lightwork. I gotta give him a shout-out. [Website: lightworkhome.com]
01:03:09	Shaan Puri	"Okay, what is this?"
01:03:11	Sam Parr	My wife did it. They come to your house and inspect it to figure out where things are not healthy and where they are. They looked at some basic stuff, like, "Do you need different air filters on your AC?" — which, like, everyone does. But then they did other things. For example, they educated us about my Wi‑Fi router: I had a router right in my bedstand, next to my head, and they were like, "Check this out — the EMF is coming to your head right here."
01:03:38	MFM	"I was like, 'I didn't know that.'"
01:03:39	Shaan Puri	He is wearing a hat right now that says "Midwest Trash" on his head.
01:03:45	MFM	Or they'll be like, "Look." </FormattedResponse>
01:03:47	Sam Parr	"At your pillows — what they're made out of. You're sleeping on plastic. For us, it was that we needed more plants in our house because the CO2 levels were shit. It was a bunch of stuff like that. It's pretty interesting."
01:03:59	Shaan Puri	Did you end up—like, here's my fear with this, right? I do this and then anytime somebody audits my thing and tells me where something's bad, I'm immediately... the sale is done. It's like, "Well, alright, is this a $100 fix, a $1,000 fix, a $10,000 fix, or a $100,000 fix? What's the damage here?" So, did you end up doing a bunch of changes?
01:04:20	Sam Parr	My thing was mostly reorganizing or small fixes. I'm also renting, so I'm not going to change the paint. I think we're going to see what he's doing, but for digital products...
01:04:32	Shaan Puri	Feels to me like, today that's something we should do, but nobody wants to do it. And "at some?" [unclear]. You're right — the inflection will tip; it'll go that way.
01:04:40	Sam Parr	It hasn't happened yet, but it...
01:04:41	Shaan Puri	It's not there yet.
01:04:42	Sam Parr	Alright, is that it?</FormattedResponse>
01:04:44	Shaan Puri	That's it.
01:04:45	Sam Parr	That's the pod.

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