We decoded the business behind this influencer’s perfect life

Shaan Puri

When I was at the **Tony Robbins** event, he was like, "You think I just woke up like this? I created this **Tony Robbins** mother [unclear]. I decided that that's who I needed to be, and then I created him."

Sam Parr

Alright. I've got something that every woman listening to this is going to be saying to themselves: *"No duh."* But I think it might be interesting to you. There's a chance that your wife has already indoctrinated you on this, but have you heard of this thing called **Ballerina Farms**?

Shaan Puri

Why does that sound familiar? What is it? What's *Ballerina Farms*?

Sam Parr

Awesome. I love that—you don't know this. Alright, so check this out: there's this woman named **Hannah Neelman**, and I started following her on Instagram along with 20 million other people. She has 20 million followers across all of her platforms, so I definitely was not an early adopter.

Shaan Puri

You discovered her. </FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

Yeah, so—you're welcome. Basically, her content is these warmly lit videos; it's sort of a little "Martha Stewart-y." It's her on her farm talking about how she's making sourdough bread, getting her own milk from the cows, and creating different recipes—just all this amazing stuff. It's blown up, and it's become a whole category of influencer called the **"trad wife."** Have you heard that term, "trad wife"?

Shaan Puri

I've definitely heard *"trad wife."* I've definitely seen the TikToks, which are like somebody's churning their own butter. Yeah.

Sam Parr

So it's sort of like that. Frankly, I don't think even Hannah Neelman would call herself a *trad wife*, but she has 20 million followers across all social media. It's crazy because I think she has nine kids, and part of her videos are her kids running around barefoot. It's a very calming aesthetic. She has a company called **Ballerina Farms** where they sell sourdough mix, electro—like mix, I think they sell meat, and at one point they sold milk. I saw estimates on some pretty reputable sites that say it does about $70 million to $80 million a year in revenue. Her store—she has a physical store as well as an online store—has become a destination that young women are obsessing over, and I find that fascinating for a few reasons. She was just in The New York Times last week. Let me read one of the paragraphs: > "You might recognize Midway, Utah as a storybook backdrop to Hallmark Christmas movies like 'Christmas on Duty,' and if you're from Utah you might recognize it as a village that looks like it's from the Swiss Alps. But if you're a woman with any degree of susceptibility to gingham aprons, sourdough knives, milk cradling on a thick layer of cream, then you might recognize it as this place called Ballerina Farms. Ballerina Farms, which supplies a store in this town, is a working farm about a half hour's drive away from Midway, and it's in between snow-frosted mountains and cow pastures of rural northern Utah. But Ballerina Farms is also a woman named Hannah Neelman, who's a Juilliard-trained ballerina who gave up dancing to become a farmer and mother of nine." The article goes on to explain how Hannah has blown up, but it comes with a lot of hate. The "trad wife" label carries political baggage. It also brings other reactions—jealousy, like "I'm a young woman, I want to live that life," or resentment from people who think it's somehow anti-feminist. It comes with all this baggage. Regardless of what people think, it's pretty amazing that this phenomenon is happening. The article says teen girls were lining up as if this was Disney World. I find this so fascinating. I wanted to talk a little about this traditional-life movement, but more so about how she has gone *all in* on a lifestyle. If you're creating a brand—particularly around content—I want to talk about the tactics I think you can use around this, because I think it's super underrated.

Shaan Puri

So when you say "lifestyle," I almost think—I'm not even sure that's the right word. The words I would have used are either *aesthetic* or *escape*. I noticed this with my wife and my mom: they love to watch *Bridgerton* and *The Crown*. There's this fascination with that kind of royal England lifestyle, or *Bridgerton*, which is a fantasized version of it. In the same way that guys get really into sci‑fi or *Game of Thrones* or different sort of gladiator/era stuff—there's the whole meme around men fantasizing about the Roman Empire—I think there are a handful of these escape aesthetics. If you position your products as part of that escape aesthetic, you differentiate them. You could sell the same commodity product but make it feel different. What I would like to see is this done outside of apparel, which is where it's most common. Apparel is the classic way people do this: you'll find clothing brands that are "golf" brands and people wear them who don't play golf; people buy running shoes they don't run in. People buy aesthetics that feel like "summer in the Hamptons," or whatever. I think it would be really interesting to do this with dental care, with supplements, or with categories you wouldn't expect. I think it could work. If you created the same type of supplement—whether it's creatine or collagen—but instead of looking like every other supplement brand, you made it look like it was part of a different aesthetic, what would happen? The same goes for everyday staples and consumables. For example: imagine you create a milk brand, but the milk brand looks like it's further down the spectrum toward an "old-world farm" aesthetic, or even in a different, less expected direction. What do you think about that?

Sam Parr

Well, what I'm describing is basically this: when I say *lifestyle*, I'm putting an emphasis on *life*. What I mean by that is I have invested in a couple of companies, and I'm also a fan of certain bits of content where the person goes all in. They live a certain life and bring me along with them, and I find that fascinating. This woman, Hannah, gets a lot of hate because her husband's father founded JetBlue. So if he's not a billionaire, he's certainly very wealthy. There's a lot of criticism like, "It's easy for you," which I think is nonsense. What I've noticed is that I've started following these people on Instagram. There's this one kid you actually showed me, and the opening line on his Instagram was: "I just graduated college and I had barely any money, but I've decided to move to rural Virginia and open up an Airbnb." There's this shtick where people actually live the life that they want to live, and then they happen to sell a product that goes along with that life... and what I'm the...

Sam Parr

I want to make the point that I think that is super underrated and not enough people do it. Brands could benefit from doing it a lot more than they currently are. I used to work for this guy named **Mike Wolfe**. Mike was the star of the show *American Pickers*, which, when it was on TV—at its prime—was like the second most popular show on TV. I think they would get like **6–7 million** viewers a week, whereas **David Letterman** was getting like one or two million. The way Mike got the show popular was he would drive around the country, go to old barns, find interesting stuff, meet the people, and find the stories of the people and the objects that he was buying. He would bring a literal camcorder—this was before smartphones—and it got picked up and it became this whole lifestyle. It was called *picking*, and there was this small niche that was quite large of people who identified with being pickers. They loved collecting and antiquing. I also—I'm an investor of this thing called... All right, so this episode is all about excellence. A while back I shared my personal framework for building excellence in my own life and the team at **HubSpot** turned it into a **30-day** operating system that you can check out right now. It breaks down the systems that took me ten years to figure out and shows how exactly I use them day to day. These are systems that genuinely changed my life, so if you want to build a good life, scan the QR code or click the link in the description. Now, let's get back to the show. There's this guy named **Brent**. Brent was partners with **Ryan Holiday**, and do you remember years ago—like in 2013 or 2014—there was an old abandoned mining town that was for sale for like **$2,000,000**? It was **500 acres**. Do you remember that?

Shaan Puri

"In California or Utah? Where, where is [the location]?"

Sam Parr

The pandemic hit, and Brent — who's kind of the main guy leading the charge — was like, "Screw it. I'm gonna go live in that town." Now he has a YouTube channel with millions of followers. If you go to YouTube and type in **"Ghost Town Living,"** every single one of his videos gets a million views. It's crazy. He's documenting how he's turning this town into a hotel, and it's been a huge pain in the butt because that's a lot more work than making a cast-iron skillet to sell. But it's just so fascinating to me because I think that *going all in* on something with your life is more fun and will increase the likelihood that you will succeed. I think there's a framework behind it. You have to find a thing that sings to you — something you're interested in. The moment you start typing on a computer, by the way, this concept gets kind of lame, so this mostly only works for products where the creating of the thing *is* the content. Easy examples are farming or fitness. Those are the easiest ones. For example: I worked in finance and I worked in tech and I said, "Screw it — I'm moving to a farm because I want to eat better meat, or I want to drink better milk, or I want to make some supplement." I thought *collagen* — or not collagen, what's the breast milk that comes out right when the baby's born? *Colostrum.* That's kind of all the rage. There's a story arc: "I was this person; I want to become this person — come along this journey." For the few of you who truly buy into this, I happen to have a product that you can buy. But the making of the product needs to be the content.

Shaan Puri

This is timely because the World Cup is happening. Have you ever seen **"World Cup Dad"?** So basically there's this guy, Zach Duke, and he posts on TikTok one day saying—**I think he's 34–35 years old**—he's like, "I'm a 35-year-old dad who's never played soccer and I'm training to be on the World Cup team." He kind of has a dad bod—he's got a little bit of a gut—but he's also somewhat athletic. He presents this immediate visual hook: an unathletic-looking guy doing pretty athletic things, and he says he's never played soccer but that he's going to make it. What does that mean? He went mega-viral. It became basically: can a dad who's never played soccer make it to the 2026 World Cup? He started training hard every day and posted everything he was doing. He didn't say, "I want to see what can happen." He said, "I will make it." It was very *manifestation-oriented*. The haters loved it in the comments, but there were also people who were inspired—saying, "Hey, he's actually looking way more fit," or "He does have pretty good touch; he's not bad." He kept training and actually made a lot of progress. He got legitimately great shape. If you look at his videos, he got pretty good at soccer for a guy who never touched a soccer ball before. Then he started getting brand deals and opportunities to play in small events—like three-on-three and seven-on-seven tournaments, the Adidas Cup, and so on. All this amazing stuff happened. No, he didn't make it onto the U.S. national team, but he did have a remarkable journey.

Sam Parr

But you don't have to.

Shaan Puri

He transformed his life. You don't have to. I bet his videos get more views than eight of the 11 guys on the starting team of the actual World Cup team. In a way, yes, he didn't "make it" in the traditional sense, but man—that's pretty impressive. He changed his own life just by doing what I call **man on a mission** content. I have different content buckets in my head. One is called **man on a mission**. Another, like you said, is the *escape lifestyle*, where you present it as, "This is just how I live; I'm the type of person who does this." There's a woman who goes viral on Twitter because she walks every day and eats mostly natural food. She'll post a tweet—(I think we talked about her before)—and the tweet is basically: "Walked six and a half miles and ate a chocolate cake." It includes pictures of the scenery where she walked and a giant chocolate cake that looks amazing. That one picture will get 10,000 likes, and she posts the same thing every day. That's her whole content shtick, and I think it's kind of amazing.

Sam Parr

This idea of *you can make this decision to become this person*—you don't have to be that person at first. For example, one of the reasons I love the man, the entrepreneur **Ralph Lauren**, is because he had this great line: > "I'm a Jewish guy from New York City, and yet I sell western wear." He said people would sometimes criticize him, but the fact is he wanted to be more brave. So he would sometimes wear vintage military gear or dress like a cowboy. You could tease him for *cosplaying*, but eventually he would go on a farm and dress that way. You become that thing. He made a decision to become a little bit of a farmer, and he now owns a ranch. The point I want to make to the listener—and to myself, because I'm learning about this and being inspired by it—is that you can change who you are publicly. You don't need to start as that person. In fact, it's probably a better story to start in a horrible place, where you're nothing like the person or the aesthetic you want to be. I think that's more fun to do, and it will increase the odds that you will succeed. There's a guy I'm going to talk with on Thursday—**Mark O'Brien**. When I used to look at his old photos, he was a normal-looking real estate guy in New York City and he wore a suit, but he's...

Shaan Puri

"Got **AI**. He looks like **AI**."

Sam Parr

No, but this guy has a really striking look. Now, in all of his more recent photos he's wearing a white T‑shirt and doing manly stuff like restoring townhomes. His whole *"shtick"* — from an outside perspective (I'm going to talk to him on Thursday so I'll get a better sense of it) — is that he finds old brownstones in **Brooklyn** and you literally see him bring a sledgehammer and start renovating them: breaking things and explaining the story behind it. If you look at his old photos, he was wearing a suit and just looked like a normal real estate guy. He kind of leaned into this lifestyle to the point where I think he actually became that person. I've been enamored by following his journey, and I'm just realizing how powerful it is. There's this other company called **Maui Nui**. They make beef jerky out of venison from Maui. If you go to their Instagram handle, it doesn't say anything about how they're actually making the stuff or how — for hunters and people interested in that process — you could show them doing the hunt, setting it up, how they're doing it ethically, and why this is better. I just don't think there are enough brands doing a good enough job of bringing you along. It's scary; it seems stupid at first and you might look dumb, but it's far more compelling and more people should do it. I think you can figure out the innate feelings we all have right now. There are categories like cleanliness — both in terms of the food you eat and your home, the feeling of being clean and tidy. There's a *mother* category: how do you care for and protect your children the best? There's another category of people who want to master something, be craftsmen, and be great at stuff. I just think there's a massive opportunity. It has always existed to look at what popular shows and content existed in the nineties and 2000s and just redo that with your phone and bring people along with you. You could be like **Anthony Bourdain**, where you look at restaurants and then start selling products. People will often say, "Well, there are so many other people doing this." But there's always room for more, always room for better. It's an underrated tool to go all in on a lifestyle and then eventually sell a product.

Shaan Puri

Yeah. On one hand, what you're saying sounds like there's this great opportunity, which I think makes most people think there's this new... </FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

Opportunity. No — it's *not* new.

Shaan Puri

"And I think, in this situation, it's—no. What you're saying is *not new*. It's being done, it's been done, and it will always be done. And what you're saying..."

Sam Parr

Easier than ever.

Shaan Puri

It can still be done, and in some ways it's easier—because it's easier than ever to create and to be discovered. It's also harder than ever because it's more competitive. You get to choose which part of that narrative you're going to feed your energy into. I have a couple of examples that work here. First, I'm just going to read you from **Robert Greene**, who came on the podcast — a really interesting guy; he wrote *The 48 Laws of Power*. **Law number 25: "Recreate Yourself"** says: > "Do not accept the roles that society foists on you. Recreate yourself by forging a new identity, one that commands attention and never bores the audience. Be the master of your own image rather than letting others define it for you. Incorporate dramatic devices into your public gestures and actions. Your power will be enhanced and your character will seem larger than life." That's exactly what we're talking about here. It's the power to reinvent yourself, to do it dramatically, and to never bore the audience. Have you ever heard of a guy named Anthony— I think his name is **Anthony Maharavik**? You know this guy?

Sam Parr

No, what does he do?

Shaan Puri

Well, Anthony J. Maharavich was born into a family that had a lot of trouble... He ended up reinventing himself as a guy you might know named Tony Robbins. So that's Tony Robbins' birth name. When I was at the Tony Robbins event many, many years ago—ten years ago, maybe—he told a story during the Q&A. It wasn't really part of his script. He asked the audience: > "You think I just woke up like this? You think I was just born like this? You think I just stood up on a stage and suddenly talk like this? You think I looked like this? You think I had the power to compel people like this? You think I woke up with discipline? One day I just had discipline suddenly?" Then he answered himself: "No." He continued: **"I created this Tony Robbins—motherfucker. I created him. I decided that that's who I needed to be, and then I created him."** He went on to say that now it seems like that's just how it is, but you have to decide for yourself who you are going to make yourself into. I remember feeling like that was a very powerful way of saying it: there's no accident. The bitter and the haters will always say, "Oh, it was luck. You were given something." It's easy for them to say that. No—it's actually incredibly hard to do what I've done, and I think people should take pleasure in the fact that you can, today, on the drop of a hat, change. Right now, you could pause this podcast, open the Apple Notes app, and literally write down, "Yesterday I was this, and today I'm this," and start to reinvent yourself. Starting in any given moment, there's incredible power once you realize that.

Sam Parr

**And I think there's a lot of power in labeling yourself.** You wake up the next day... I remember when I was mildly fit, and I woke up the next day and thought, *"I'm an athlete."* I used to joke with you about it, but it wasn't a joke. I was like, *"I'm a fitness influencer now."*

Shaan Puri

"You said it with a smile, but you weren't joking."

Sam Parr

No, I was like... and I—I think that you can tease me and make fun of me all you want, and I think I deserve it. But there's *power* in labeling yourself as something, and you are that, not "I'm working to become this."

Shaan Puri

There's this old-school book — it's impossible to read; it's so dense. But the title itself actually tells you everything you need to know. It's called *"Your Word Is Your Wand"* by Florence Scovel Shinn. That's a great title. The basic idea is that the words that come out of your mouth are like spells you cast. You cast them on yourself; you put yourself in a trance, as well as others around you. So be very careful with the words that come out of your mouth. My trainer always says this: when I say something differently than I used to say it — for example, "one day I'm going to" versus "I am" or "I do" — or when I say "I haven't done this yet," the word **"yet"** is actually very powerful. It implies inevitability. For example, my company — which I named ten-plus years ago, before I had anybody and before I made my first million — my LLC was called **"Inevitable Outcomes."** I basically treated it as an inevitable outcome that I would be successful, and I invest in other things that I view to be inevitable as well — that they will be successful. My trainer made this shirt that said **"I am."** He said the two most important words in the English language are "I am," because whatever comes after them now defines your destiny. Just take it as a test: riff off the top of your head. Start "I'm the kind of person who..." and see what comes out. What follows is what you will define as true. If you say, "I'm the kind of guy who, when things get tough, I fold," then that becomes your reality. Whatever you say will tend to become true. I think one of my superpowers is that I'm a pretty analytical guy by nature and by training. If you can marry that with a little bit of the softer stuff — not just EQ in how you deal with people, but the manifestation sort of world — it might sound like total *hocus pocus*, but when you start to realize that the way you think will shape the actions you take, it changes everything. What you believe will change what you do, and what you do changes your results. Once you realize that, you will approach things somewhat differently. Being willing to go kind of Eastern-Western in that way can take you very far.

Sam Parr

My most annoying trait, according to my wife—and probably everyone who knows me—is I'm a *stickler for words*. So when people say, "Well, it's just semantics," I'm like, "Yeah, it is just semantics," and it's really important. We are purposely using certain words. For example, I'll say to someone, "What do you think about... what do you think about this?" They'll say, "I don't know." It's like, "Well, I didn't ask 'what you know'; I said, 'What do you think?'" So, man, what's the point of words if we're not going to use the right words?

Shaan Puri

That's right. I remember being at Twitch after we got acquired. On the ninth floor at Twitch was the main meeting room, and that's where the CEO, **Emmett**, would sit. The COO at the time, **Sarah**, would sit next to him. They'd sit at the head of the table, and basically every 30 to 45 minutes a new team would come in. So the Trust and Safety team comes in, the Growth team comes in, the Mobile team comes in, the International team comes in. They would come and just dump their problems on the table, and then the CEO and the COO would try to help them work through it. I remember sitting through a bunch of these tense meetings. At the beginning I thought, "Man, this Emmett guy is kind of a genius, but he's an idiot." He was really smart, but he would get hung up on the dumbest things. You could tell the teams hated it when he got into what he called the *Socratic debates*. He would debate the team endlessly about the most minor-sounding things. Over time I came to appreciate it. Yes, sometimes he took it too far—there's a cost to doing it—but there was a great benefit as well. I remember one meeting with the team that decides the homepage. They said something like, "Oh yeah, but that's algorithmic versus editorial," and he got hung up on it. He asked, "What does 'editorial' mean?" They laughed and said, "Well, there are editors who pick it, so it's editorial." He pressed, "Who are these editors and how do they pick it?" It wasn't that he had some destination in mind or was leading them into a trap. He literally wanted to understand the specific meaning of the words coming out of their mouths and get a shared understanding of what each word meant. In his view, "we will never get to the right solution if you say words that mean one thing and I say those same words and they mean another thing." So he would go into these painstaking, semantic debates that, for a while, seemed like we were just going in circles—like, what does this really matter? But there was a method to his madness that played out later—maybe not in that first meeting, but three weeks, four weeks, or seven weeks later—when the teams realized they had to be really precise in their language and really know the details of their work. Knowing that he might ask made sure they came in prepared, knew everything about what they were going to say, and were much more precise in their thinking. Their level of clarity increased because everything would be tested.

Sam Parr

My sophomore year of high school, we had to take a speech class. That was the best class I've ever taken in my life. The best lesson they taught us was: **"You must always define your terms."** I deeply believe that to be true — for anything you're discussing, you have to clearly define your terms. The downside of that is you look like an *asshole*, and it's pretty annoying. It is quite annoying when someone says something, you ask, "What do you mean?" and they just repeat it. It's like, "Those words don't make sense to me — can you use other words?" What you find is that if they have unclear words, they have unclear thinking. So it becomes really obnoxious and annoying, but I do think it's really powerful. I just saw another story — it was on *Sixty Minutes* last night or the week before. You probably have never heard of this: it's called the Mountain Pass mine. The story on *Sixty Minutes* was basically about these two hedge-fund guys. I think they were mildly successful, but somehow they raised money — I think they raised $20,000,000 — and they bought a mine on the border of Nevada and California. If you Google "Mountain Pass mine," I think the company name is MP Materials Corp. It's a $10 billion publicly traded company. The whole story, which was really cool, was that these two hedge-fund guys had to use the platform of *Sixty Minutes* instead of their own — and I think they should use their own. They were two guys who knew nothing about the industry and are now wearing hard hats, driving an F-150, and they're in the thick of it. They're literally learning this as they go. Although it's been ten years now, so they've probably learned a lot, they're like yuppies who knew nothing about blue-collar work — now they're living that life and it's paying off. I heard this story and I'm like, **I'm so in. I'm so in on a mine.**

Shaan Puri

Well, I've heard of *MP Materials*. I didn't know the backstory of *Mountain Pass Mine*.</FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

How have you heard of that?

Shaan Puri

Hedge fund guys — well, it went public. It was like a SPAC, right? It was like a Chamath SPAC, I'm pretty sure. Either he did it, or he did the PIPE or something like that. I'd heard of it at that. It was a rare earth company and I was like, *what are rare earths anyway and how does this work?* So yeah, I've looked at it just kind of in passing that way, but I didn't know the backstory. Another kind of World Cup thing that's going on right now — you've probably seen this — is all of the international tourists that are coming to America for the World Cup and discovering America for the first time. It's sort of like when a friend goes into town and suddenly you're like, "Okay, yeah, let's go to Alcatraz." You've been living here for five years and you've never been to Alcatraz, but because somebody's visiting you suddenly will go that week. Right now on social media there's a whole swath of people going viral. Freddie L.A. is one of them. Basically this guy comes to America for the World Cup and he's just touring the country, kind of like you did when you rode your motorcycle around America. He's also like, "We found another surreal place on our way." I know some people will say I'm too positive about everything, but this place is crazy. He's at an Out—like a Bass Pro Shops Outdoor World—and there are pictures of the enormity of this place: this giant fish tank, "there's a shooting range inside the store," "they're literally selling rifles in here." He's been stopping at Buc-ee's and other typical stops. "We found this river in Chattanooga and we're in a tube and the guy said this, and at the airport we asked this and the guy just gave us a ride — it was incredible." He's saying things like when you have kids you get to rediscover the world again because your kids are discovering the world. It's like, if you take a straw and squish the paper down, then you drop a drop of water on it and it expands like a snake — and their mind is blown. You remember when your mind was blown when you were seven and that happened, but you just took it for granted and forgot about it. This group of guys on Twitter and Instagram are coming to America and posting all these things that are very run-of-the-mill American things, but they're amazed by them. It totally makes you proud to be an American in a way and to rediscover that, "Yeah, you know what? America’s pretty awesome actually, and we have these kind of amazing things." "Have you guys been to Waffle House? I can't wait for Freddie to go to Waffle House," right? You want him to go to the next sort of part of real America. It's more entertaining than the World Cup to me.

Sam Parr

Look at the title: **"German tourist Freddie is going viral as he visits Louisiana on the way to World Cup."** That's...

Shaan Puri

Awesome. Exactly.

Sam Parr

There's this great book.

Shaan Puri

I'm sharing.

Sam Parr

I don't know how to pronounce their name, but it's *Ilf and Petrov's American Road Trip*. I read this a few years ago — it's so good. Basically, it has very few reviews on Amazon: it has 40 reviews, and a paperback copy is $400. In 1935, well into the era of Soviet, communist Russia, two Russians came over and took a road trip throughout America. They described what they were seeing. This book is one of my favorites. It's so good to hear the history of America from people's perspectives and what they're seeing. It's very similar to what people would experience now: everything's huge and big, and there's processed food everywhere. It's funny — the same stuff people said in 1935, people would say today.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I'm into this, so let me show you this one. This is this Japanese guy, and he goes to a Mexican restaurant. We have not ordered anything yet, and yet the food is already arriving: chips, salsa—unrequested, free. I stopped the waiter. “We have not earned these; they just come with the table.” *In my land, hospitality is a debt.* Every gift creates an obligation—*weighed carefully, return to the proper season, season with an interest of feeling.* Here, the gift arrives before you have even proven you could pay for dinner. It is not an appetizer; it is a declaration: “We trust you. Eat.” I eat with the gravity the moment deserved, and then I must report calmly, “This basket is empty.” A new one appears. Did we refill? It's bottomless—bottomless. They have wells of salsa. The supply lines of this nation are beyond anything my ancestors imagined. My friend warned me, “Don't fill up on chips.” Dude, too late. I had accepted three baskets. Honor demanded each one be finished. An unfinished gift is an insult. By the time my actual food arrived, I was a ruined man. I was not hungry. I was not uncomfortable. I had been defeated by courtesy. Generosity arrives before the request can be repaid; it can only be survived. I know the rule now. I made peace with my basket: one basket, two at most. Who am I deceiving? There's no number of baskets I refuse. The trust of a nation is in that salsa, and I intend to honor all.

Sam Parr

"That's beautiful. There's no way that's real — is that real?"

Shaan Puri

I don't think it's real, but it's *hilarious*. I don't know if it's real or... Have you seen all the Japanese lore that's just being honored in America for the World Cup? Have you seen what's going on?

Sam Parr

No man — you're *World Cup deep*. I'm in New York City. I just got done burning down a bus because of the Knicks.

Shaan Puri

It's like, you know, one time I went to this basketball game and I was in the owner's suite. There were all these, like, *Instagram hoes* basically, and they all had their phones out. I was like, wow — they're so into capturing the second quarter of this game. I realized all the phones are pointed at them, not at the game. That's me with the *World Cup* right now. I'm the hoe who doesn't watch the game; I only watch the crowd. There's this incredible thing with the Japanese crowd where they're all waving these blue... well, it looks blue, kind of like — is it flags? What is that? No, it's a trash bag. They use trash bags to cheer at the game. It's kind of like their version of carrying a sign or waving a foam finger or a flag. They were like, "Why are they all waving trash bags?" And the answer was, "Oh, because then we can cheer — it makes sound, it has color — but then we can just clean up after ourselves on the way out." They clean up their whole section using the trash bags at the end. They showed the locker room of the Japanese national team, and every single item was folded properly in the middle. The locker room is pristine, and that's how the Japanese soccer team is leaving the locker rooms. I'm like, God — if Japan couldn't go any higher on my list of incredible cultures and people you sort of have to see to believe, their stock continues to go up. It's untethered from reality.

Sam Parr

Before UFC was a thing there was something called **Strike Force**, and it was a Japanese fighting league or whatever. They're the best videos to watch because in the crowd they're silent, and then you hear the punches. It's really hard to watch—almost painful. They only cheer for the epic, big punches. It's very strange and awesome at the same time. I think a guy who we both admire—he's one of your heroes and definitely one of mine—is **Jesse Itzler**. It's this idea of *"buying into the lifestyle."* I think that, in particular right now, we're in a phase where people are trying to balance: how do I work hard in my job—and particularly women, how do I work hard in my job and be a good mother? But it's the same thing for fathers: how do I work hard, be a family person, and also be fit? I see everyone...

Shaan Puri

"Did you see Jesse's story on Instagram the other day?"

Sam Parr

I just know that, right now, he's like—he's like *Uncle Rico*. Jesse wrote the song, "Go New York Knicks," you know, "Go New York." Whenever the Knicks start playing again, that's his story; that's what it brings up. And I love it. I'm not sick of it.

Shaan Puri

He was at Madison Square Garden when they won — I think Game Four — and when he left he saw a guy giving rickshaw rides in New York. [A rickshaw is where the person pedals and you sit in the carriage behind them.] He hopped in, as billionaires do. The guy was playing, "Go New York, go New York, go." He said, "That's my song." The driver asked, "What's your name?" He looked it up and said, "That's your song." Then he said, "I gotta give you a ride around town." So he just rode around all of New York with this guy, and he posted it. There are a small set of people who, to me, don't have more time than the rest of us but seem to get a lot more out of their time. There's something to be studied and learned. That's why I get interested in people like **Nick Gray** and **Jesse**. A handful of these people seem to go with whatever way the ball of life is bouncing. They seem to experience more and have a sort of *tap-dancing through life* quality. Even when they do hard things, it just seems enjoyable in a way because they are surrendered into it. I don't know what it is, but I think the **art of living well** is not well understood. For me, it's a bit of a mission to understand what gets more out of the hours rather than always feeling, "If only I had more time, then I'd get more." I think that's kind of bullshit. You're wasting a ton of time either doing fake busy work or just being on social media. And even if I gave you an extra four hours, I don't think you'd get any more out of life. You'd just fill it with more of the same — more of the same feelings you currently have, whether they're stress, anxiety, or others.

Sam Parr

I've been meeting these people. I live in a building in Manhattan where there are rich people and poor people, and I really like that. We were contemplating getting a bigger place. We got a great place, but we were like, "Should we get more space for more kids?" And then I met this family — it's a family of four: a husband and wife and twin girls. The girls are now 18 or 19, and they've lived in the same one-bedroom apartment for 30 years. I asked, "How do you guys sleep? What's your sleeping arrangement?" They said, "Mom and Dad get the bedroom, and we have a Murphy bed that we sleep in the living room." Part of me was like, "Obviously, I don't want that." But then they started telling me stories, and I actually went to their apartment and we all hung out. There are a lot of inconveniences, but there are a lot of conveniences too — you guys are all together at the same time, and it's kind of nice. Now we're looking at another place, and I'm like, "There are two living rooms — why? I don't want two living rooms. I want one living room. I want everyone to be in the same room at the same time, all the time." I think there is this inherent want that many of us have, myself included, of *more, more, more; bigger, bigger, bigger*... and I just don't think that is often the answer to creating a memorable life, and there's...

Shaan Puri

An amazing post that's kind of gone a little bit viral. You might have read it—by Julie, yeah, Zhao. </FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

I read your comment on it, so...

Shaan Puri

The blog post is called—yeah, Julie, the blog post is called **"To All the Folks Who Are About to Be Rich"**—and it was released the day before the SpaceX IPO. She basically starts with, "You did it. Congrats." Like, all the hard work... you've led you to this day: your stock is about to be liquid, you're about to be rich. I think when she was at Facebook—when Facebook IPO'd—she was kind of telling it like your older sibling: "Hey, you're gonna go to college; guess what—it's gonna be crazy. A little bit. Here are some things that are gonna happen." So she's almost describing what happens from here. There were so many incredible one-liners in this, and part of it is, like, *scientific studies say that...*

Sam Parr

After one year, lottery winners default to the same level of happiness they had before.

Shaan Puri

She talked about the three groups of people she saw from a Facebook post. Some of my former colleagues "slipped away from tech like aquarium fish being flushed out into the ocean—off to find their true homes." Engineers who decided they're not going to code anymore. I saw people become chefs, hoteliers, artists, therapists, writers, teachers, parents. These groups always fascinated me because I was watching some sort of Cinderella transformation: who would you bloom into once you were given the gift of true freedom? That’s group one—she calls them the "fish." Group two she calls the "leisure class," which are basically people who say, "Oh, I'm going to pursue this lifestyle of leisure." They're going to travel to wonderful places, eat at Michelin-star restaurants, have a sleek new home with all the fancy furniture—forget IKEA. I'm going to do the Disneyland VIP tour, Coachella, buy a $500 hoodie from Japan. Then there are the others who continued on the same track in tech. They become VCs or founders and continue to march, trying to get a higher high for the next few years. They're chasing the thrill of the climb. She's not really saying one is better than the other, but she does have her own take. She says, "I saw it play out in all three groups." For some people, the money simply let them check off some goals—like paying off their parents' house or having enough for retirement. Maybe they upgraded their car or their house, and largely they stopped. They didn't change how they carried themselves. They didn't change who they hung out with. They did not take up the game of... She talks about this idea of *the game of more*. I think the way she said it was: there is a game, and that game is called "more." Once the money lands, a question will be waiting for you to think deeply: *Am I still playing?* If you take this idea—that there is a game called "more"—you must ask, "More of what?" Do you want more leisure? More travel? More challenge? More impact? More authenticity to who you are? More joy? More kids? What do you want more of? It's a very powerful question. If you assume for a second that everybody's playing some game—right—we have not renounced our desires. We all wake up today and we're going to go do some stuff. But in the name of what? I think it's actually pretty powerful to put a name on the game of "more" that you're playing right now. It's a really, really hard question. You might be embarrassed by the answer if you looked at your actions and asked, "What is this action in the game seeking? What am I seeking more of?" For example: if I'm going to post a story of my vacation on Instagram right now, what am I seeking more of? I'm playing the game of more—validation, status, prestige. I don't post stories because I've opted out of that. But I've opted into a game of "more" in other flavors. So I just think this is a really, really powerful idea. I don't know what you think about that.

Sam Parr

Well, I want to know: did she say which one she has found people to be most happy in, and among your friend group? I believe she's mostly referring to people who, *overnight*, are now *liquid* — which is a very interesting phenomenon. I've seen it happen many times.

Shaan Puri

Not rich to *super-rich*.

Sam Parr

Yeah. So, versus someone who has been a lawyer for a long time and has made money throughout their career, I was in the category of someone who wasn't — and then I was, all of a sudden. I think you've been *accumulating as you go*. But we know a bunch of people who have **"overnight made it."** Have you noticed any similarities or commonalities in who ends up in a place that more people would desire to be in?

Shaan Puri

I mean, this is probably the thing I'm figuring out the most. I have some thoughts, but I bet in five, ten years I'll have a much **simpler, wiser perspective** on this than I do today. Is your question "what's the right answer," or what's your question, really?

Sam Parr

Well, there's **no right answer**, but I'm just saying: can you stereotype each bucket of what you've noticed? I only have maybe one friend who has done the first one, where he's *opted out*.

Shaan Puri

Here's a couple of observations. I think there is actually a better and a worse option, even if there's not a single right answer. I would say the *leisure path* doesn't seem to result in anything good.

Sam Parr

"I completely agree."

Shaan Puri

Sure. Take a few trips. Sure, you could upgrade your car or your house — whatever, that's fine — but the diminishing returns are very real and very dramatic on that path. The people who follow that path and seem to wander sort of lose themselves. It's almost funeral-esque when people talk about them sometimes. They're seeking something, but they're in the wrong place. It's like searching for your keys when this is not where you drop them. That path genuinely seems worse. I would say very, very, very, very, very few people can do what I call **"slay the money monster."** Most people think *financial independence* is the ability to buy whatever you want — the freedom to buy, to do, to fly, to whatever. But to me, financial independence is freedom from that. Financial independence is not the ability to buy whatever you want; it's that you make decisions not based on money. Sometimes that means buying what you want. You might order a certain dish or buy organic because you're choosing what you want and not basing it on price. But for the most part, it's that you choose whatever your next project is not because "this could be a 10x" or "this could whatever," but because you genuinely want to do it. That kind of freedom, I think, is very, very rare. By the way, Jesse — whom we've talked about earlier — is a great example. I've talked to him on the phone about ideas that could make a ton of money and we'd say, "Yeah, we could be making $20 million a year if we just did this," and then we're both like, "I don't know, man." I'd ask, "What do you really want to do, Jesse?" He'd say, "I think I just like to ride my bike. I want to go do these races — triathlons, Ironmans. I think I just like riding my bike, actually." And because we both agreed… money, at a certain...

Shaan Puri

At the beginning of your money curve—when you're, let's say, in debt—money has a tremendous amount of utility. When you have no savings and no safety net, money is hugely valuable. As you get more comfortable, money has less utility. But it can become very valuable again if it *buys you back your time*: if you don't have to work, you get way more utility. You're trading very valuable hours of life energy for useless dollars that you have no ability to even spend to improve your life. I find that the vast majority of our friends who have achieved financial comfort still make that horrible trade of valuable life hours for useless dollars. I think that's probably the most common observation: "Man, that must be really hard to kick." Most people can't do that. I'll say one last thing: people need a quest; people need a project. But you have to choose which quest or project is going to light you up. I don't think very many people do a good job of that because we're incredibly *memetic* creatures. If all our friends are starting companies, we start companies. If all our friends are investing, we start investing. We rarely ask ourselves, "What do I really want?" There's this idea of mimetic desire—from René Girard—and Peter Thiel really popularized the notion that we want what other people want. So a very valuable trait I've started to observe is people who are *anti‑memetic*: those who seem to want things from their own internal volition and not because other people want those same things.

Sam Parr

Tell me examples of people you know who fit in that category.

Shaan Puri

**Nick Gray** is incredibly antimemetic. He is surrounded by goofballs like us who are always on to the next company, the next investment, the next thing. Nick Gray was like, *“I'm gonna prioritize hosting cocktail parties, I'm gonna prioritize writing my blog, I'm gonna prioritize going and traveling to India and living like a villager in India.”* He wants what he wants, and he wants it because he wants it. You can tell because he's very lit up while doing it. You can also tell the people who don't have that spark — they have everything, and they're still not lit up. Why? Because they're choosing things that other people want. Tony Robbins once told this story at his event. He was talking about eating dinner with his wife, and she said something like this when the waitress brought out her burger — a burger with pickles and all that — and they started talking about whether you're even doing what you really want, or if you're still programmed and conditioned by your upbringing, by society, by your friends, or by whatever. She said: > "Whose burger is this? Why do I even order with pickles? I don't even like pickles that much. Maybe I should start ordering differently." I think that metaphor applies to a lot of life. A lot of what’s around you is a burger you ordered. Ask yourself: is this even how I like my burgers? Maybe I like my burgers medium or rare. Maybe I like this, maybe I like that. Once you become alert to it, you might start to observe examples of people who operate this way. Like **Palmer Luckey** — he is incredibly anti-memetic. Every project he picked was incredibly unpopular when he picked it. This is sort of the test: how popular is the thing you're doing among the people you associate with or want to be like? Doing virtual reality goggles when he was 19 and living in a trailer park — he was not keeping up with the Joneses. Even afterward, when it happened, he kept wearing his Hawaiian shirts, his jorts, and his flip-flops. He didn't suddenly start wearing designer clothes. He didn't become a venture capitalist. He didn't start worrying about his summer vacations. He then went and worked in the defense industry, started building weapons when that was incredibly unpopular to do in Silicon Valley. You were seen as a bit of a black sheep for doing that. It was hard to get funding for something like that because it was so unpopular. So you look for people who do unpopular things — because to them, it's what they want.

Sam Parr

There's this book I read last year called *Status and Culture*. It explored the idea of what high status means and how that impacts trends, whether in fashion or other areas. One of the author's points was: "To be inauthentic is the lowest-status thing." If you look at the people you admire, they're truly authentic—whether they've become that person or were born that way. Both are fine. If you look at who we admire, for example, I was just reading about this mathematician. Have you heard of this guy? His name's **Grigori Perelman**.

Shaan Puri

No. Who's that?

Sam Parr

Well, he's one of the greatest mathematicians of all time. He won the Nobel Peace Prize—or sorry, the Nobel Prize for math, I guess—or was it economics? I forget. I think there is a math one, and he **turned it down**. He said, "I'm not—I'm not about this. I didn't do this for this reason." Then someone called him to say, "Hey, you won the prize," and his famous quote was, "You're disturbing me from picking mushrooms." He hung up and never collected the prize.

Shaan Puri

"He never collected the prize." "Yeah, exactly."

Sam Parr

He did not. You hear about these guys who are rebellious like this, and what I've noticed is that the worst thing you can do — if you're going to be someone like, for example — is... I think I've fallen partially into two of the categories of the three that you've mentioned, and I've been a little bit *half-pregnant* with them. I think the worst thing you could do is be unbalanced about where you fall, to go *all in* on which type of person you want to be, to not half‑ass it, and to go all...

Shaan Puri

In.

Sam Parr

No haste — it's a very scary feeling. But if you do go all in, for example: I don't like everything Palmer Luckey does or says, but I *respect the hell out of the fact* that he seems **authentic**. He genuinely believes the way he acts and what he says. If you look at other people, sometimes you'll hear Elon say something and you're like, "Dude, that's cringe—why is that cringe?" He's like, "Well, it's cringe because I don't think that you truly feel that way and you're just doing this for laughs." That's the idea of *authenticity*.

Shaan Puri

**Yeah, exactly.** Look at an example of somebody who's incredibly *anti-memetic*: **Warren Buffett**. Warren Buffett became, at one point, the richest man in the world. He lived in the same house in Omaha. He drove the same car. He liked to have his breakfast from McDonald's. He liked to drink Coke. He loved to read, so he read. He loved to play bridge, so he played bridge. He had a certain small set of friends and stayed with them. He stayed true to his principles and resisted basically every fad and trend. He did not participate in the tech bubble; he did not participate in tech altogether because he didn't understand it. He closed down his fund at one point because he said, "I just don't see good opportunities." He said, "I think what everybody's doing in the market right now seems crazy. I can't understand it, and the fools are getting rich, so I'd rather not play than play their way." That's literally the definition of *anti-memetic*. He literally closed down the Buffett Partnership after he'd run it up to about $100,000,000. He'd gone from a couple hundred thousand to $100,000,000 in the sixties or seventies — which is incredible. And practically speaking, it's kind of like when you want to get fit. If you were to advise me, you're like, "All right, Sean, you've been talking about getting fit — let's get real." You want to get fit? Here's the first thing you need to do, here's the second thing you need to do... What would be in the top three things you need to do if you're real about getting fit?

Sam Parr

Probably eat your *body weight* in grams of protein.

Shaan Puri

So, you pick **one metric** that you're going to optimize for. That is a non-negotiable daily set that you're trying to hit. Okay — next.

Sam Parr

I would say *probably* walk 10,000 steps and lift weights three days a week.

Shaan Puri

"And what's usually the *leak* for somebody who's trying to get fit but keeps snacking or they're eating, like... right? What's the solution for that? Because that's the problem—how do you...?"

Sam Parr

**Solve that: you remove barriers.** For example, the day you say you want to get fit, you immediately go to the gym and buy a one-year membership. Or the day you want to eat better, you immediately throw away everything that you think is bad. You have to remove all...

Shaan Puri

Just don't have it in the house. So I think, what's the equivalent of that in terms of living life while we're living this sort of *anti-medic* life [term unclear]? If we take this train of logic — that you'll be most lit up and happiest when you're **living authentically** and in line with what you really want and with your own values — to me it's basically like this: if you spend all day — say, **3 hours a day** — looking at other people on Instagram and TikTok and the way they're living their life, I think you're basically... it's the equivalent of having "a free vending machine of snacks in every bedroom of your house."

Sam Parr

This sounds like such a silly hack, but I've noticed: whenever I want to become something in life, if I unfollow everyone on Instagram and only follow the people I aspire to be, you **100%** get closer to being that person. I remember when I wanted to get fit — my Instagram feed was literally only shirtless, ripped dudes. </FormattedResponse>

Shaan Puri

Yes — **immersion. Total immersion.**

Sam Parr

To dress better, I unfollowed everyone. I only followed people I wanted to dress like.

Shaan Puri

"Did I tell you the story of when we were hanging out with **MrBeast** and he told me the story about *getting fit*?"

Sam Parr

Well, I know that he painted something on his wall, which... you've got to explain. You've got to explain *what he painted*.

Shaan Puri

So I was hanging out with him — we see him once a year. I said, "Dude, you got in incredible shape. Congrats, man. How'd you do it? What was the thing?" He goes, "You see that really jacked dude right there?" and he points to a guy I thought was his bodyguard. "That's my trainer. He's just with me everywhere I go. He's watching everything I eat, everything I do, and I just hang out with him a lot." He told all his friends — his boys that he's grown up with and who he does all his videos with — "Hey, I'm getting fit, and this is gonna be a lot easier for me if you get fit too. You have to be as committed as I am. Otherwise I'm not gonna be able to hang out with you." He said, "Because if I'm hanging out with you and you're eating pizza, that's too hard for me. I'm gonna have to suddenly resist pizza. So how about we just all do this? Or if you're gonna be the guy eating pizza, just know that I'm not gonna be hanging out with you as much, because I just can't do that. This is my *priority*, so I'm gonna do this." Basically, **changing your peer group** usually means you join a different set of peers. You move to a city of really ambitious people if you want to go start a company, or move to Hollywood if you want to be an actor. Or you start to go to the gym with people who go to the gym every day because it'll become part of your lifestyle. For his own friends, he said, "You need to change your lifestyle because I'm changing mine, and otherwise this is not gonna work. We're not gonna be hanging out very much." I just thought that's actually a very direct path to the outcome: you brainwash yourself. You use your good ad [unclear term] — you use your lizard brain or your monkey brain — to your own benefit rather than having it used against you all the time.

Sam Parr

"You're just—I'm just gonna steal this, *word for word*, as some of our ad copy for Hampton. Thank you."

Shaan Puri

"Alright, man. Well, good talking to you on this podcast." </FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

Mahalo, dog.

Shaan Puri

Not in Hawaii, but actually—that's good. *That's good, that's...*

Sam Parr

"Good cover story. Bye."

Shaan Puri

Alright, see you.