I Spent 24 Hours With The Most Intense Billionaire Alive

Sam Parr

I have felt a bit of a *pinch-me* moment where I've realized...

Shaan Puri

"Don't say that — *'pinch me'*." "Don't say that one: *'pinch me'*." "Yeah. I will pinch you if you ever say that again."

Sam Parr

And I'll just say, "Ow."

Shaan Puri

What's going on over there?

Sam Parr

"What has been going on? We haven't seen each other in seven days, and we've both talked to a bunch of interesting people. Have you enjoyed your time away?"

Shaan Puri

By the way, people ask why we do these separately. It's because we live on opposite sides of the country: I live in California, Sam lives on the East Coast. For us to record in person would mean flying across the country for a single day just to record the podcast. Both of us have little kids, so neither of us wants to do that. So if you see us doing one-on-one interviews with people, don't worry — Sam and I are still good; we just **live really far apart**. Here's the deal: in the last ten days, both you and I have done podcast recordings that have not come out yet. I think this episode will come out before those. The guests were incredible — I think all of them are either billionaires or soon-to-be billionaires — but the money is almost the least interesting thing about them. What they did, how they roll, and how they live are more interesting. We did those interviews in person. For example, I went to Las Vegas and Tahoe. I basically stayed at the person's house and hung out with them all day. The podcast is usually just a one- or two-hour recording in the middle of that day, but I'm spending 12–24 hours with the person. When you do that, you pick up a lot. Neither you nor I have talked [about this], and both of us are kind of *students of the game of life*. One way to be a student of life is to not try to run all the experiments on yourself — that's a pretty slow and painful way to learn. A faster, easier way is to go and get a little *Costco sample* of somebody else's life: "I've never had a fig before, let me try" — "Is this something I like? Am I an almond-butter guy?" I went and sampled these people's lives, and you did too. What I want to do, if you're down, is this: we each have three names of people we hung out with, and I want to take the one thing that stuck with you that was not in the podcast.

Sam Parr

Man, we get to hang out with so many amazing people, and it absolutely wears off on you. Our world is business, but frankly I find the *money* part to be a little bit empty, and I think you agree—life is more rich than just money. It just so happens that we like being people who are experts in their field, and the field is business. There are probably only 3,500 or 4,500 billionaires in the world, and I feel like every year we get to hang out with about 30 of them. Again, the money is not the important part; the fact that there are only 4,500 people on Earth in this category makes it pretty exciting to be around someone who's the best at their field. It 100% wears off on you, where you start normalizing being in the **1%** of whatever activity you're trying.

Shaan Puri

To be totally clear: even if I ran into Kobayashi on the street, I'd be like, "This guy is the—" I'd tell my partner, "This guy is the greatest hot dog eater of all time." Now, she wouldn't care, to be clear, but I would. It'd be like meeting Kobe—he's the Kobe of eating hot dogs. Excellence in any form is interesting to me. Anybody who gets an outlier result in a field that many people try to choose—there's always interest: how did you get that? If you're interested in becoming an outlier in your field, you can actually learn from it in any field. So you're right that our quote-unquote job gets us access to this. The giving part here is we don't want to be selfish and just keep what we picked up to ourselves. So let's jump in. I went to hang out with this guy, Hayes Barnard. Most people don't know who Hayes Barnard is, but his story is pretty crazy. The short version: he grows up with a single mom, kind of from the dirt in Missouri, and he ends up hustling his way into a job—first a sales job, then a tech sales job. He ends up at Oracle and he works there in the nineties when Larry Ellison and Bill Gates were trading places as the wealthiest person in the world. He becomes a competitive salesman and a top sales guy at Oracle just by working harder than everybody. He said, "I would just get in earlier. I would stay later. I would work every weekend." Most of the sales guys who were doing well would leave by 3 p.m. to play basketball, tennis, or racquetball. He would stay the extra three or four hours every single day. It just added up. He ends up becoming a top guy at Oracle, but he sees other top guys leave and start huge companies. Mark Benioff leaves and starts Salesforce; another guy leaves and starts a different company. He starts thinking, maybe I'm like them, and maybe I should go do that. So he leaves and starts a mortgage company. He thinks maybe the same way he could sell complicated enterprise software—using a call center and some online ads—he could sell mortgages. Most people at the time felt mortgages were too complicated and required an in-person local bank branch with a banker who would hold your hand. Hayes thought, "I don't know. With radio ads and a call center in Sacramento, I think I could just sell mortgages over the phone the same way I've been selling Oracle databases." </FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

Did he know anything about mortgages or...?

Shaan Puri

No, but his friend from childhood—his best friend since like fourth grade—kinda knew a little about mortgages, and Hayes knew a lot about selling. They left to start this thing during the 2008 mortgage crash. He survived because they had been underwriting conservatively, so they were the one mortgage company that was not giving out subprime loans. They survived the mortgage crisis. But during that time he diversified because he thought: > "Instead of just selling mortgages, what if I go into the energy business? What if I branch out? What if I diversify? Instead of just selling mortgages, could we sell solar and help people with their utility bill? What if I gave you something that's cleaner for the environment and saves you money on your electricity?" So he starts a company that does solar. That solar company gets bought by **SolarCity**. He ends up driving—he's not actually installing the solar. SolarCity would actually go install the solar. [If you don't know, SolarCity was started by **Elon Musk** and his cousin.] He was selling the solar and then SolarCity would go install it [unintelligible: "at one"].

Shaan Puri

I think they made up about 50% of SolarCity's revenue. It was insane—he was driving so much revenue for them. SolarCity acquired them; SolarCity then ended up getting acquired by Tesla for $2 or $3 billion. And then, you know, Tesla's gone on this crazy run-up—like, now, whatever, thirty seconds in. So here's this guy Hayes. He grew up nowhere in Missouri. He has dyslexia—a form of dyslexia where he ended up flunking out of first grade because he couldn't read properly. He worked on a farm; he was a Subway sandwich artist; and somehow this guy is now one of the wealthiest men in America. He's a **self-made billionaire**. So I go, I want to do a podcast with Hayes, so I hit him up. I'm like, "Hayes, would you do this? I know you don't do a lot of these—would you do this?" He says, "Yeah, sure, no problem." Now, the thing about Hayes, though, is that Hayes does not do anything at a chill level... so like—

Sam Parr

Dude, he was the most *un-chill* person I've ever been around.

Shaan Puri

Well, he's fun to be around. He's actually *extremely* fun — he's very funny. He's fun, but if he chooses to do something, he doesn't have to do anything, you know... he's only — and this is his thing — he says, "we play full out." So, Sam: normally when we book a guest, especially one toward the higher end of the success range, what is the normal prep experience like, maybe a week before? Just walk through that.

Sam Parr

Well, sometimes we want to do a call with them. But other times, if someone's really successful, you're embarrassed to ask them, "Can I spend an hour of your time just brainstorming?" So sometimes **Ari** will call; sometimes one of us will call, depending on how successful they are—to avoid disrespecting them. It's quite challenging. The more successful they are, the more you wonder, "Can I waste an hour of your time just to prepare, or do I just show up with stories I ask your friends and hopefully it goes great?"

Shaan Puri

Yeah, sometimes we send them a doc that says, "Hey — here's some information; can you fill this out? This will help us." I would say *half the time* they do fill it out, but the other half they either give us nothing or a half-filled form. We just show up and say, "Alright, we gotta make it happen. We understand."

Sam Parr

We hope it works.

Shaan Puri

This experience was completely different. Hays not only calls me—he calls Ben two or three times before the podcast. He starts discussing, "What can we talk about? Tell me what's going to be interesting. How do we make this amazing?" He just keeps asking that question: **"How do we make this amazing?"** So instead of just asking, "What are we going to talk about?"—the average question—his was, "How do we make this amazing?" He keeps calling back, and he's basically like, "Yo, I don't say yes to many things, but if I do say yes, I go all out." In the pre-production [pre-podcast prep], he's really active and keeps asking, "How's it gonna be amazing?" The idea he comes up with is: most of the time you sit down and people ask the same five questions—like, "How'd you do it? What do you think about AI?"—blah blah blah. You get these robotic, tech answers from these tech people. He's like, "Let's do it different." So he's like, "Why don't you just come out to Tahoe, come to my house, and let's spend the whole day together? Come do my morning routine with me. It's amazing—you're gonna love it. It's gonna be great."

Sam Parr

Alright — a few episodes ago I talked about something and I got thousands of messages asking me to go deeper and to explain. That's what I'm about to do. I told you guys how I use **ChatGPT** as a life coach or a thought partner. What I did was upload all types of information: my personal finances, my net worth, my goals, different books that I like, and issues going on in my personal life and businesses. I uploaded so much information that the output is a GPT I can ask questions about issues I'm having in my life — like, "How should I respond to this email?" or "What's the right decision knowing my goals for the future?" I worked with **HubSpot** to put together a step-by-step process showing the audience the software I used to make this. I had ChatGPT ask me all this stuff, so it's super easy for you to use. Like I said, I use this *10 to 20 times a day* — it's literally changed my life. If you want that, it's **free**. There's a link below: just click it, enter your email, and we will send you everything you need to know to set this up in about **20 minutes**. I'll show you how I use it again 10 to 20 times a day. Alright, check it out — the link is below in the description. Back to the episode.

Shaan Puri

And so we go to Tahoe and we're like, cool — we'll be there Tuesday, we'll see you Wednesday for the recording. He goes, "Awesome. Be at my house at 5 a.m." "Oh my God, 5 a.m. — what are we doing?" So we show up at 5 a.m. and he's like, "Boys, good morning." He's already awake — I'm rubbing the boogers out of my eye — and he's like, "Let's go down to the lake." We go down to the boat, take the boat out for two minutes into the middle of Lake Tahoe, and it kills the engine. We're like, okay, what's happening? It's completely dark out, by the way — the sun hasn't even risen yet. He's like, "So we're gonna do my morning routine. You're gonna love it." He didn't just say, "I hope you guys like this" or "Thanks for coming" — he was just like, "You're gonna love this. This is gonna be amazing." He basically brainwashed me before I'm even out there — like, *I do love this, this is kind of amazing.* He was so charismatic. He was genuinely excited. He wasn't trying to sell us on anything; he was doing us a favor by inviting us into his life, and he was genuinely excited for us. He was like, "My friends are out here. This is great — you're gonna love this." So he kills the engine, turns to us and says, "There's a little woo-woo, but would you guys be willing to play ball? Let's do this today and you'll like it." He puts on this breathwork routine and says, "I met this guy on an island — the breathwork guru, with the guy who started Cirque du Soleil, or whatever his name is. I've been doing this for twenty years since then." We do this fifteen-minute breathwork, and then he's like, "Alright, boys — stand up, let's go." We jump in the lake and do this kind of cold plunge in the lake, basically.

Sam Parr

And Lake Tahoe in the summertime is so freezing.

Shaan Puri

Yeah. So we jump in immediately and I lose all feeling in my body. Then he's like, "Okay, we're gonna go down and do a breath-hold underwater for a minute. This is gonna be great — it's gonna feel like you're in space. Open your eyes." I was like, "Oh, I don't have goggles." He's like, "Open your eyes." I was like, "Okay." So we go underwater. I open my eyes and it literally looks like you're floating in space. He's right. By the way, I can only hold my breath for, no joke, **seven seconds**. I don't know what happened.

Sam Parr

Yeah, well, when it's freezing, it's hard.

Shaan Puri

So I immediately go down and I'm like, "Nope, I'm done." I pop back up; he's underwater. He comes up and says, "Okay, let's do that again." I was like, "Okay, yeah — I need a redo because that was pretty short." So we do it again. Then he's like, "You know what? I heard this amazing thing." He said basically that as you get older you really want to make the most of your life. "You guys are still a little younger than me; you'll feel this too." You get a sense of urgency when your friends start getting sick and your parents get older. You realize time is really precious. He offered a *time hack*. We asked, "What's the time hack?" He said: "If you do something new every day, you sort of mark the day. If I ask you, Sam, what did you do five days ago, it's probably pretty hard to remember. Even yesterday is hard to remember. That's because when we're in routines — and routines do serve us — they cause all the days to blend together. If you do one new thing a day, it marks the day. You won't remember every single day, but it makes those days more memorable." She said, "Let's figure out what we could do new today." We're back on the boat, shivering. He's like, "You see those rocks? I always see those rocks when I do this routine, but I've never gone out there. You guys down to swim out there?"

Sam Parr

"Oh my."

Shaan Puri

God. Okay, yeah—let's go. I'm not gonna say no. We jump in the water and start swimming. He's swimming like, you know, a shark out there. We're like—I'm basically dying. Behind me, I don't even know if Ben can swim. I look back at Ben: his glasses are foggy. I don't know what's going on. Diego has shoulder dislocation problems. I'm like, Diego's for sure gonna dislocate his shoulder and just sink like a rock to the bottom of Tahoe. We're all dying. Then we're swimming from rock to rock like little kids. He's playing tag, basically—"Let's go over there. Alright, race you to this one." We go, and he wants to get to the big rock: "Look at that big rock, let's get to the big rock." He gets to the big rock, jumps off, and we have this great moment. We come back to the boat, and this is all before 8 a.m. He said, "I do this every day." I remember having this feeling that this guy basically lives his life at a level—he plays at a full-out level. He plays with a level of intensity in everything he does, whether it was the podcast, his morning routine, or each little thing. I would do things at a seven; he just does them at a ten. If you think about that, how does that stack every single day? That extra three units of intensity he puts in—by the way, it's not like it's hard work in the usual sense. He just goes for it. He's having more fun; he's willing to play more than us. We went and played pickleball with him; we did whatever we did that day. He was like this. He told the story during the podcast where he was a certain way, but he said, "Once I worked for Elon"—and he worked for Elon for 10 years—"it broke my frame of reference." I was telling him, "You kinda broke my frame. I have a morning routine, but it's not like this." And I was like, by the way, *it's not the money*…

Sam Parr

Was it a sick house?

Shaan Puri

Oh my God, dude — unbelievable. So he was like, "Yeah, I prefer not to film this. I'm not trying to show off." And I'm like, "Yeah — the people who try not to show off have the things worth showing off, of course." Even so, I asked myself: *even if I had that house, would I act like this?* This is an honest question. Even if I had that house and that boat and this little Willy Wonka elevator to get down from the house to the boat — would I **wake up at 5 a.m.** every day and do this? No chance. I'd be cuddled up in bed, the little burrito tucked in, just my eyes peeking out of the covers at five in the morning. But he does it. That's kind of the difference between him and me: he plays full out. That was the big takeaway for me from that whole experience.

Sam Parr

Do you want to live like that? I think so. When I'm around—I’ve been around people like this—they're crazy people, and I admire so much about them. I want to take little bits, but I don't want to replicate that. I'm not a *high-energy* person like that all the time. I'm only a high-energy person like that some of the time. **Hayes** was like that all the time when I was around him.

Shaan Puri

He's **energy rich**. Yes—I do want to be like that because... well, first, the feeling I had by 8 a.m. was, "Oh, so I've conquered the world already." What could you do to me today that's going to make me feel bad? Is anything really going to mess with my mood or myself today? It's pretty hard to do that when you conquer the morning like that. But forget the morning routine. I'm like, waking up at 5 a.m. is sort of secondary. If you're going to do something, just actually do it fully. The prerequisite for that is to be **energy rich**, not energy poor. I went there thinking, "Oh, this guy's so successful—he's money rich." When I walked away, I realized the money-rich thing is a byproduct and a complete secondary footnote to being incredibly energy rich. Two of the guys said the same thing. Don't forget—I said this when we went and hung out with MrBeast: "This guy's like the Energizer Bunny." We were talking about how literally his walking pace is faster than the average human being by, like, two notches. Two of the guys who came with us were like, "Do you see how fast Hayes walked out? It's hard to keep up with him." He's just literally got a pep in his step. I think being **energy rich** is one of the more attractive things. You see people who are contact rich—"Oh wow, they know all these famous people." You see people who are money rich—"Oh wow, they got all this money in the bank." To me, energy rich is very, very appealing.

Sam Parr

To give an example: this guy **Hayes**—he's not talked about at all. He's very under the radar for how big a shot he is. We — you and me and a bunch of people — were with **Jesse**, who is very gregarious and loud in a great way; he's full of energy. I remember being in a sauna with these guys, and Hayes took over the room with his stories and his energy. One thing led to another, and it turned out, apparently, Hayes's hobby is hip hop. He used to be into it and he loves to freestyle rap, which is a very strange thing because this guy looks like me but maybe fifty-five — a blonde-haired Missouri guy. And he is an amazing freestyle rapper. They went into freestyle: he was beatboxing for six or seven minutes and they did this whole thing. It was so good. I remember talking to him and being around him, and I don't think I've ever met someone whose "oven burns that hot" — he was on fire the whole time.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, exactly. He's an *incredible* dude. The other amazing thing, by the way, is I hung out with him for maybe 12 hours straight...

Sam Parr

Did he work at all? *Literally* taking the day off.

Shaan Puri

I was like, "Dude, Hayes, you don't gotta do this, man. I appreciate it, but you don't have to. It's not normal for a podcast to do this." He said, "No — you guys came all the way out here. I want to make the time. I know you guys took time; I want to make the time." He added, "I thought it would be so rude if I just showed up or recorded and then you leave. No — I want to make the time." One thing about him: **he did not check his phone a single time in 12 hours.** I told him at the end, "Is that normal? I know you're getting emails, I know you're getting Slack messages — like all of us, right, but ten times more. You run a $10 billion company." He's the CEO of a $10 billion company, and he did not check his phone a single time. He was just like, "Well, you know, if I'm with you guys I want to be with you guys, and if I'm working I'm going to be working." I said, "Well, if you say it like that, then yeah — guess I'm a little bit for it. Let me put this away then."

Sam Parr

There's no amount of people or stories that I can tell—or probably you can also tell—from that. The *Hayes Carl hang session* was really good. Did Ben and Diego have a great time, too?

Shaan Puri

Oh, I think Ben is at home making Valentine's cards for Hayes right now. He's just like, "I love that man." I was like, "I do too — honestly, I do too. *What a guy.*"

Sam Parr

If you Google his name, too, this is all public. His side hobby was owning a famous hotel in Tahoe [or maybe Reno] — I forget exactly where — and he owns it. He was telling me about the renovation and everything, and it sounded like an *epic* project. I forget the exact details.

Shaan Puri

The story is this: he's in the lake doing his morning routine every day. He says he didn't even think about *"manifesting"* — he didn't really know what that word meant. But while he's in the lake he was thinking about his life and about what he wanted. He was filling up with the feelings he wanted. He says, "Can I see this hotel?" There's a hotel over the hill, on the other side, literally about one minute from his house. He sees that hotel while he's doing his cold plunge in Lake Tahoe and, looking at it, decides, "I'm going to buy that hotel. I don't know how, but I'm going to buy that hotel." He starts working on it and then finds out it's owned by Larry Ellison — his old boss.

Sam Parr

**"That's right."**

Shaan Puri

His old boss's boss's boss, or whatever, goes and purchases the hotel. They're turning it into a proper hotel in *Tahoe*, and he walked us through the construction of it… or whatever. Even then, you know, he's *architecting his life*. It's not like he's doing it to make money. He was like, "Are we gonna put pickleball, career pool here, this here, this here — all these activities?" He's like, "Want a place to do activities? I want a place for my friends to come and stay during the summers. This will just make my life so much better if we generate this, if we make this happen." **Incredibly generative guy.** Alright, let's do the next one.

Sam Parr

Alright, man. This is gonna... you started off really strong there—it's hard to follow. This person I actually just hung out with. I didn't do a "pod" with them yet because they refused to come on, so I'm gonna say a little bit of information about them—enough to make it awesome. Not that I'm going to totally blow up their spot, but have you heard of the company **Buck Mason**?

Shaan Puri

"Buck Mason—I’ve heard of it. What do they do? Is that a jeans company?" "No. What is it?" </FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

Sorta, sorta. So they started in 2013, selling something very simple: a T‑shirt. Their goal was just to make the best T‑shirt. I'm actually wearing one of them right now. They tried to raise money. He said, "I tried to raise as much money as I could. I got lucky because I was horrible at fundraising and I could raise no money." So they **bootstrapped** the company. I think it actually started with a Kickstarter or some type of pre-order—like a "pay and then we'll make it" vibe. They built this company, and over time they've grown it and grown it and grown it. I suspect—he didn't tell me, but I suspect—they do somewhere in the $150 million-a-year range. He has 42 stores now. So, when you go to Buck Mason's website (buckmason.com), what do you see?

Shaan Puri

Yes. Well... I see this is, like, *nostalgic*. I see— I see this video of these guys. From what is it? Maybe the eighties? I don't know what era this is.

Sam Parr

"It's like a *California cowboy '80s* vibe."

Shaan Puri

Yeah, exactly. I see a bunch of **T-shirts**, collared shirts, and jeans/pants.

Sam Parr

So I love this brand, and I became friendly with him because I'd DM'd him to get him to come on the podcast. He refuses to come on, and I asked him why. He said, "I just want the brand to be the face. I don't want to get too popular. I don't want to be the face of the brand; I want the *brand to be the brand.*" Which is always — like, whenever I hear someone say that, I'm like, "Oh, you're the best. You're... oh, you're going to win."

Shaan Puri

**You're amazing.**

Sam Parr

Yeah... so you're—yeah. Whenever you hear someone say that, it's like, "Okay, so you're absolutely going to win and you have the right attitude." He started this company in 2013. Clothing companies are a pain in the butt. You and I know people in this industry—we know e‑com guys—it's *really, really hard*, and it takes a long time to figure out. They've basically gotten to the point—ten or fifteen years in. Now, from 2013, twelve years later, it's *really starting to fire on all cylinders*. He's grown it to 52 stores. I started talking to him about the history and everything like that, and I started realizing it's not that crazy to do this. It's really hard, but I was thinking about every project that I've started since 2013. So in 2013 I had just graduated college. Do you remember where you were? It was 2013—**Sushi Era**.

Shaan Puri

No, no — that's when I moved to San Francisco: "Monkey Inferno."

Sam Parr

So, what was *Sushi Era 2011*?

Shaan Puri

Yeah. 02/1011.

Sam Parr

So imagine you starting a sushi store in 2011 and you were chained to that company. You just had to stick with it; you had no other options. I have a feeling it would be a huge success. I also have a feeling that if I had done the same with whatever I was doing, there's definitely a world where I would be five or ten times more successful than I am now because of the compounding of *sticking with something*. I sort of felt for the first twelve years — it sounds like not a long time — but when I thought about where I was in 2012, 2013, I realized how much I had jumped from thing to thing. Should I have just stuck to one thing and done that the entire time? Where would I be now? He was telling me his story, and I love where this guy — his name is Sasha Cohen — is now. He says things like, "I've got this amazing team, we're firing on all cylinders, I just get to work on the really exciting projects, and it's just going great. Cash flow is not an issue," etc. It doesn't feel like that leading up to it. Obviously it's really, really hard, and the majority of the time I would think you'd want to quit. I would guess a guy like him — he didn't say this, I'm guessing — if someone offered to buy the company from him at different weeks throughout the year, I bet he would have said yes, just because it's really freaking hard. But I just remember thinking, like, I wish I had the foresight to... </FormattedResponse>

Shaan Puri

Stick with this.

Sam Parr

Yes. I wish I would have... I *regret that a little bit*. When I see where you are, I'm like, "I don't exactly want to pay the price you had to pay," because that was really hard. But when I see where you are now, it seems **very attractive**.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, that's a great one. Honestly, that was pretty common among all the people I've met with. Two of them even said this: **"I have a very high pain tolerance."** They weren't bragging. They were saying one of the problems is that because they have a really high pain tolerance, they keep doing something even when it's not quite right or when there was probably a better way or a better idea they could have done. "I don't know, I'm just— that's who I am. I just keep going." Hayes even said this, kind of off the record. I was like, "Dude, what do you think is the difference between you and a bunch of other people?" What I was really interested in—and I probably didn't say this right—was when we were talking about the morning routine. He said he has a different friend come and do it with him every morning. He was like, "Yeah, whatever it is—Tony Gonzalez did this with me yesterday," the Hall of Fame tight end. Over the week he said, "Oh yeah, he had this thing on his knee," and I was like, "What happened to your knee? You got cut up there?" He said, "Yeah, I was mountain biking with Lyndon, Elon’s cousin from SolarCity. We were mountain biking yesterday. We went—you see that mountain? We went all the way over there." I was like, "God, this guy's so active. He's unbelievably active." He's hanging out with Hall of Famers. He was talking about Elon and his son who went and worked at SpaceX. I was like, "You didn't have him come work with you?" He's like, "No, I wanted him to go see what it's like to work with Elon. I just wanted him to go. It took me a while to go see what the hardest-working person who tackles the biggest problems on earth is like. I worked ten years of my career, fifteen years of my career before that happened. I wanted my son to see it right away." There's just incredible stick-to-it-ness for all of them. My next one: Hormozi. I go to Las Vegas and I hang out with **Alex Hormozi**. A lot of people know Hormozi because he makes so much content. </FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

I don't think—actually, I think **Alex Hormozi** doesn't get enough credit. Every time I hang out with him I think, "Dude, you're really wise." Like this.

Shaan Puri

Is — yeah, not actually very legit. Okay, so I have a bunch of things I could say as my takeaway, but I promised one. So here's my one: *Hormozi — student of the game.* Okay, so what does this mean? We were talking and I asked him, "You put out so much content, you have a much bigger audience — you must be getting a hundred emails a day from entrepreneurs who want advice, help, or want you to invest." He does these workshops every weekend with a hundred entrepreneurs, so I was like, "So you're seeing another maybe 500, maybe 1,000+ entrepreneurs in your workshops in person, and then you have all the deals that you look at — maybe another few thousand deals. You're probably meeting, I don't know, 5,000 entrepreneurs a year at minimum." I asked, "What do you think is the biggest mistake you see them make?" He said, "They're only studying their business. They're not a *student of the game of business.*" He explained: when you start a company you're very narrowly focused on your business — your industry, your business model. He said, "Sam, you're doing the Hustle newsletter — you probably know a ton about newsletters. You knew everything about other newsletters and maybe about the media industry as a whole. I think you're very good about being a student in the game. Most people are probably even one-tenth as curious as you." Then he said you might also have gone and looked at the events business and the SaaS business and other businesses to try to understand, "Oh, is that a better business to be in?" He went through that path: you started in the events business, then you went into the media/blogging business, then you found your way into the newsletter business and decided that's a better business to be in. Now you're in a paid community business, which is an even better business than the one before. The reason is because you're a student of the game of business — not just your business. Alex basically said he made this mistake. He was basically a gym operator: one gym, then two, then three, and he got really good at owning and operating gyms. But the best thing he did was go to a mastermind — I think Russell Brunson was there — and they basically told him, "You're a 10 out of 10 entrepreneur going after a 2 out of 10 opportunity. Forget opening and running gyms. It sounds like you're amazing at getting a gym to have tons of members. Why don't you sell that? Create and sell the ability for any gym to fill up and get more members." So he learned about other business models and realized he should do this thing called "Gym Launch," where he would fly to a gym and say, "If I can get you 500 more members, can I keep the first month of their membership?" The gym would get the recurring membership revenue thereafter. He positioned it as no risk: "You pay me nothing, I'll run my own ads, but I get to keep what I kill." That became Gym Launch, which was really successful, and then he moved into an even better business — private equity — buying SaaS companies. So he got into an even better business than that. He thinks most people aren't students of the game of business. At the end, we basically talked for, I don't know, two and a half hours. We did a two-part episode, and he had done two podcasts before that. This guy had done, like, basically eight hours straight of talking. Where I think most people would be passed out on the floor, ready to go home, or just want to eat, he was super curious still and asking me a ton of questions after the pod. He asked me, "What would you do differently if you were me?" You know me — I can't hold my tongue — so I gave him a blunt and honest answer: "I think you're amazing at this, but I think this part of what you do doesn't do you justice. I think it actually looks bad for your brand and you shouldn't be doing that."

Sam Parr

"How did he receive that?"

Shaan Puri

Extremely well, and this is kind of like kudos to him for a) being curious and b) not being defensive. He texts me the next morning — I hadn't even given him my number, but he gets it from somebody — and he says this: > "I just want to say thanks again for the pod. I've been thinking a lot about what we talked about at the end." > "It's Hormozi, by the way." > "I'm going to make some content changes. I appreciate you caring enough to say something." I thought that was a really kind message, but also a testament to him for being extremely open-minded and being a *student of the game*, having the mindset of "I'm here — I'm going to try to learn something from every single person I meet." That's such a **positive attribute** to have in general.

Sam Parr

I'm good friends with a guy who bought one of Alex's companies. Alex started this thing called *Alan Software*. My friend was the buyer of it, and that is an interesting place to be in. So the person who buys your company — the buyer — they know all of your... they know the truth.

Shaan Puri

They know all your dirty secrets, yeah.

Sam Parr

They know all the dirt. They know everything. I was like, "Lloyd..." This is when Alex first started getting popping—before we ever even had him on the podcast. I was like, "Lloyd, is this guy legit? This seems too good to be true." To this day, Lloyd is like, "He's the smartest person I know about business." He knows everything about due diligence. He knows everything, and he still says, "This guy's the best when I need advice."

Shaan Puri

It's like your doctor's giving you a colonoscopy. He's like, "Yeah, he's got a great gut."

Sam Parr

Yeah... that tells a lot about him. What's funny is **Alex** comes off as a very serious guy, and he is a pretty serious guy, but he's a lot more fun. I'm able to have fun with him whenever I'm with him — he's *way* more fun than he gives off.

Shaan Puri

That was one of the things I told him. I was like, "You come off so serious, but you're actually—you have a great sense of humor. You should show that and show yourself *having fun*, and not just, 'I paint the windows black and I grind.' That is part of you, but there is *another part of you*, and I think you don't really do yourself justice by not showing that side."

Sam Parr

This is so funny. As we were texting, my friend **Lloyd** just texted me about **Alex** — a compliment about Alex, the same guy I referred to this.

Shaan Puri

Just *out of the blue*, just now.

Sam Parr

*Out of the blue*—12:49. This is... it's 12:52 right now. He just texted me about how Alex just gave him some great advice, which is pretty funny. That's hilarious. That's pretty awesome. Did you hear their seminar business? So basically—well, a lot of people don't know this—but **Acquisition.com** either buys or invests in companies. That's pretty normal. But they also have, like, a seminar business which is, on paper, if you were to think about it, the worst business to be in.

Shaan Puri

"Oh, you're *selling your time for money*, yeah?"

Sam Parr

Yeah, they own UFC's old headquarters. People spend $5,000 or $10,000 to come for a three-day seminar. According to Alex — and I just ran the math and you can see the schedule and how full it is — I think that thing is **killing it**.

Shaan Puri

So that was my runner-up takeaway, which is: **turn your cost centers into profit centers**. He said two things about this. First, on the workshops or seminars you were talking about: we're doing Acquisition.com and, because of that, we're talking to all these companies and diligencing all these deals. That's a big cost to me. I have a team of people diligencing all these businesses — we meet the entrepreneur, ask them a bunch of questions, dig into their business — and we're only doing one deal out of every so many. All the others are just the cost of doing business, and it's costing me a few million dollars a year. So he had the idea: do I turn my cost center into a profit center? He said, “Let me just try this.” He invited 50 entrepreneurs out to their headquarters to spend two days with them. They would dig into each business, learn what's working and what's not, and help unblock issues. Maybe if someone was a great fit, they'd have a conversation about a deal, but the focus was really on understanding the business and helping unblock it. That change basically turned something that was losing him a few million dollars a year in people costs into, I think, $10 million+ in free cash flow. He said the same thing about content. “I don't make content because I enjoy it — I make content because it builds my brand.” I said I do it because I enjoy it; he replied that in the old world — the TV era or the radio era — you had to spend millions of dollars to build your brand in the consumer's mind. The crazy thing about social media is you get paid to build your brand. So he said, “I make all this content; I'm building my brand and I'm making money doing that.” Again, he turned a cost center into a profit center on the content side too.

Sam Parr

He — he loves it, by the way. **He absolutely loves it.** I think you and Alex actually have very similar attributes: you both like teaching. I've been talking to him — I've been buddies with him for a little while — and we'll just be talking about what's up, what you're doing. He's like, "Oh, I'm making a Google document for my staff on how to sell better or how to do this." He loves process and he loves teaching.

Shaan Puri

Yeah. That's... the part I think he really loves is *writing*. I actually like writing out the stuff—almost in *textbook style*. Alright, you wanna do another one, or do you want me to go?

Sam Parr

Alright, here's a quick one: do you know the company **Zapier**? </FormattedResponse>

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I do.

Sam Parr

**Zapier** was founded in 2011. Another company, by the way, that was founded way—it's way older than I thought. Zapier is basically an **AI** company now. They make ways for you to connect different AI tools. For example, with **ChatGPT** you could say, "Whenever I get a calendar invite, do this," and use ChatGPT to do it. They started in 2011. Now I think they do something like $400 or $500 million a year in revenue, and they've only raised $1 million of funding. They founded the company out of **Jefferson City, Missouri**, which is the capital of Missouri and near where I'm from—the smallest town you could think of. It's like nothing. When you think "in the middle of nowhere, Missouri," you're going to think of **Jeff City**. I met **Wade** because, years ago, I used to host this event called **HustleCon**. You spoke there; a bunch of other people spoke there; and Wade showed up. Wade wasn't supposed to speak until about 2:00, and he showed up at around 8:00 AM. He and I sat backstage the entire time. It was a two-day event; he sat with me the whole time. The reason he sat with me is I would have all of the speakers come to the green room two hours in advance, and I always lied to them. I think you know the story where I would say, "You have to come for mic check," but, of course, there is no mic check—the mic works perfectly. We just wanted to hang out. There's no mic check for a conference; you just put the lapel mic on and it works.

Shaan Puri

It works.

Sam Parr

I would tell people, "Oh, you have to speak at three. Make sure you're here at one for mic check." The reality was I just wanted to hang out with them backstage. There was one time I distinctly remember: it was Casey Neistat, the founder of WeWork; it was Wade from Zapier; then the founder of ClassPass; and Tucker Max, if you know Tucker Max. We were all in a room and I was like, how wild is this? I wouldn't say a word. I would just listen to all these conversations people were having. Wade was the one guy who stayed the entire time with me. We just sat and listened to people talking. It was so fun, and that's how I got to know Wade. I had him on the pod last week because I wanted to see how he's using AI. It was crazy. This guy—Wade's a billionaire. He's probably 35 years old. I think he started the company when he was a senior in college, and I think he graduated college in 2011. Zapier—they did a funding round I think three years ago at a $6 or $7 billion valuation. I asked them where they think they're going to be in five years. He told me a billion in revenue. I don't know what that means for the company's worth, but I know that it means that on paper he's a billionaire. I was like, "Why are you living in Jeff City, Missouri?" He was like, "Well, it's where my family lives and I like it here." I was like, "Wait, does anyone know how big of a big shot you are here?" He's like, "No — the people here don't use Zapier. They have no idea." I was like, "Do you have a fancy house? Do you stick out?" He said, "No — no one has any idea. I'm just a guy." I thought that was so cool. I was hanging out with Sasha, the guy who started Buck Mason, a very cool brand. I was hanging out with Eric, who founded Ramp and is the hottest thing going—everyone in the tech world knows Ramp; it's one of the fastest-growing companies. People know Zapier and everything, but they don't know Wade, the founder. It was so interesting how he was just a guy. He had that every-man mentality, that every-man vibe. He came on the pod to talk about AI and he was just... a nerd. He was in the weeds and he loved it. He was incredibly passionate. He didn't have a fancy webcam; it was him, and it looked like a very small office in his house. It was totally unassuming and I loved it. So I think my **biggest takeaway** with him was how passionate he was about this game that he turned into a career, and how inspired I was that he was not flexing. It was the opposite of Hayes — not that Hayes flexes, I mean Hayes is just full of energy and he's like, "I wanna manifest, I wanna do this." This was the opposite: an introvert, nerdy guy who just did what he loved, and it worked out. He was really happy-go-lucky. It was really fun because I'm used to these Hayes-type guys — the alpha, "let's get it, let's get after life, let's manifest, let's have fun" vibe. It's awesome to get the opposite of that. When people listen to this podcast, I hope one of the takeaways is that **there's a million ways** to get done what you want to get done. There's a million ways to achieve your dreams, a million ways to get rich, a million ways to go where you want to go. Where you want to go could be anywhere. There may be some best practices, but I can give you tons of examples of people doing the exact opposite and they're just as happy and just as effective. That was my big takeaway with Wade.

Shaan Puri

I like that. Yeah, there's a—you get to create your own little *heaven on earth*, and that's one of the cool things. When you go and meet these people, you get to sample what they chose for themselves and you pick up, "Oh, I really want that," or in some cases, "Oh, I really wouldn't want that." There was one guy—won't be named, not on this trip but on a previous one—who had this huge house and fancy cars and all this stuff. But also: huge headaches with all of that. "Oh, I gotta get this repaired," and then "that car got a scratch," and then "this has this." It was like, man—you own these things and then they own you. For me, that would be a total trap to fall into. I'm glad I saw it firsthand so I can avoid that. Whereas for other people, for them that is their *heaven on earth*—they want that. They actually prefer that trade-off. So it's good to sample the different styles so you can get a feel for what you think is going to work for you. I think people have this idea of, "Oh, you just gotta do what you want." Reality is, you don't know exactly what you want until you're exposed to certain things. Then you sort of develop taste about what you like and how you want to be. You can modify yourself based on what you're exposed to.

Sam Parr

Alright, so let's do Eric Lyman. For those who don't know, **Ramp** is a company that does credit—it's basically a credit card for startups. They're worth something like **$10 billion**, and I think they do **$800 million** in revenue. Eric, who's the founder and CEO, is 35 years old. It's just absolutely breathtaking how fast they've built this company, because I think the company is only four or five years old—it's brand new still. My biggest takeaway: I had two takeaways. The first is that he was so nice. So if you Google "Eric Lyman nice," there's all these posts that talk about how nice this guy is, but it's very...

Shaan Puri

Did you go home and do that? Did you Google Eric Lemmon? Nice.

Sam Parr

Well, I was like, surely everyone talks about, like, "he was the kindest person I've ever met." When he looked at me, it was like I was the only one in the world that mattered at that moment. I talked to Ari. I said, "Ari—who?" [Ari only talked to him on the cell phone.] I asked, "Ari, was this guy the nicest guy you've ever met?" He said, "When he talked to me, I fell in love. I wanted to keep talking to him. It felt like I was the only one that mattered to him at that moment. He did such a good job." He even wrote a follow-up email: "I was truly blessed by our conversation. I am so thankful." He was so nice. But what I found strange was you don't meet people who are *nice and intense*. I asked him a question about something and he goes, "Look, Ramp is 2,053 old and we're only just now..." I was like, "Wait, what did you just say?" He goes, "Yeah, Ramp is 2,053 old." I was like, you know exactly to the day how old Ramp is. He said, "Yeah, of course. I'm trying to get this done by this amount of time. I know exactly to the day." I just found it very strange that you can be both incredibly intense about running a company and intense about life, and also be a very generous, kind, nice person. Those two things typically are not in the same package. My big takeaway with **Eric** was how you can *not* be a jerk. You don't have to be, you know, a chest-pumping, big-ego, highly confident guy. You can be very soft; you can be really kind but also a complete killer and savage. It's a weird dichotomy, but you can be both.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I talked to him before. I think I've told this story before. I bet I met him many years ago, before he ever started **Ramp**. He's also a super sweet guy. The other thing I've said before is: I can't believe **Ramp** won in that same way, because at the time I remember that **Brex** looked like the runaway winner. It was the YC [Y Combinator] company; it was based in Silicon Valley; it had raised a bunch of money. I think it launched earlier than **Ramp**, and it just seemed like **Ramp**—this company out of New York—was the natural second-place winner. Instead, **Ramp** has crushed it, and actually **Brex** is the second-place winner in that space, or third, or whatever.

Sam Parr

And he had a whole answer to that. Most people, when they start a company, it's like, "it was cool" or "I had this problem" or whatever. He had a **four-point list** where it was like—well, because I asked the same question. I was like, "no, Brex was already around, this was already around," and he's like, "well, the Dodd–Frank Act or something like that was passed, which meant this, this, and this, and that also meant..." Then he laid out the four-point list. It was **incredibly intentional**. He said, "I saw at Capital One it took this many days to approve an account. I figured if we could reduce that to only seven [unclear: 'seven. Three days'] and since there's this many potential businesses in the world, if we do that and we do this many businesses per day..." It was **incredibly detailed and exact and precise**, which isn't typically how I think about building a company. A lot of times it's about energy or vibes—like, *this feels a certain way*. He did not have that at all. It felt like everything was calculated, and it was very intense.

Shaan Puri

Amazing. Alright, let me do one now. This is a *more practical business* one, I'll say.

Sam Parr

"Was this with your brother-in-law?"

Shaan Puri

Yeah, this is my brother-in-law, **Sanjeev**. I think this episode—well, I think this one will have come out already—but in the middle of it he tells the story where... okay. The headline here is: this guy, basically my brother-in-law, has built a real estate portfolio. He owns basically over a billion dollars of real estate that he accumulated in about ten years with no outside money. He did have lenders, but no investors at the time. He's incredible—just an absolute animal at what he does. I always knew he was smart, ambitious, and a winner. I've known the guy for ten-plus years, so yeah.

Sam Parr

But the fact that you're as successful as you are, and you're... second place, too, in your own family.

Shaan Puri

Maybe third. I think **my wife's dad** is a pretty amazing guy, too. He wins—not just in the success sense, but the guy's a saint. He wins in his own way. So, what is it about this guy that I picked up? The short version of this story is: he goes to law school, gets his MBA, and interns with a lawyer. He was working on the Scott Peterson case [the Laci Peterson case]. He also had a second internship with a real estate guy. The real estate guy always seemed to be home at a good time, involved in his kids' lives, and had passive income. It seemed like the better model, so he gravitated toward real estate. He went into real estate with no money, so he couldn't buy property. He started off as a broker. He did his first deal and made $60,000. By the time he was 25, 26, 27, he was making millions of dollars a year as a broker. He would say things like, "You got this empty space? Let me lease it for you. Want to sell this? Let me be your buy-side and sell-side broker and I'll lease it for you." He would take all three roles and collect all three commissions. Somewhere along the way he basically made a mistake, and youth and ego caught up with him. There was one client who was a *Jack in the Box* franchiser—he owned about 30 *Jack in the Box* restaurants. My brother-in-law, **Sanjeev**, was doing deal after deal with him. Finally, the guy just... [transcript cuts off]

Shaan Puri

Instead of just leasing the place to him, the guy would say, "I wanna be over there." So he'd say, "Okay, cool — I'll buy it, I'll build it for you, and then I'll sell it to you." He'd say, "I'll buy, I'll develop it, I'll sell it to you," and the guy's like, "Cool, I want these 20 locations." So he goes and he takes out $15,000,000 of debt to go buy 20 locations. Three days after it closes, that guy gets popped — he didn't pay his payroll taxes or something — he goes to jail. Now my brother-in-law had borrowed $15,000,000 and now has these 20 Jack in the Box locations that the deed is tied to that guy's name. That guy's now in jail; he can't develop them, so he's basically kind of screwed. He doesn't want to declare bankruptcy, so he decides he's going to try to pay off $15,000,000 even though he has nothing. He's depressed and his wife is like, "I don't know, I've never seen you like this. You need to go to the gym. I don't know what we're gonna do in business, but just go to the gym so you get out of this funk." He goes to the gym. He used to work out at eleven or midnight at night because after work he would go there, but today he went in the daytime because he doesn't have anything else to do. The guy he always sees working out is behind the desk. He says, "Yo, you work here?" The guy replies, "Yeah, dude — I own the place." He's like, "What?" The owner says, "Hey, come check out the office." When he's there, the guy tells him he's ready to sell — he actually wants to sell the business. My brother-in-law works out a deal to basically buy the business from the guy with little or no money down. He pawns his wife's wedding ring and they go all in.

Shaan Puri

They're living in their parents' — in his old childhood bedroom — and they owe **$15,000,000**. They're like, "I don't know how we're gonna get out of this pickle, but I'm gonna... basically, I'll use the cash flow from this gym to just pay the monthly thing we owe, and then we'll try to open up a second gym, maybe, and we'll figure out how we do this." Anyway, he ends up building the largest private gym chain — **82 gyms in California**.

Sam Parr

By the way, is your brother-in-law, like, *really* jacked?

Shaan Puri

He was one of the first Indian bodybuilders. Basically, in college he was going to go pro, then he decided not to go full-on. He was huge before; he's big now, but he's like, "Oh, this is the deflated version of me." I was like, "Wow, that's crazy." Again, whatever this guy chooses, he does with crazy intensity. With real estate I was like, "So how did you—okay, all that you told me so far is the gym business. How did you do the real estate side?" This is the business lesson. He said, "Along the way, when I would go lease these gyms, I realized I had a little bit of leverage. I'm coming in as the big tenant in the shopping center, so I just added to the lease an option to buy." He added, "I just added a **no-risk option**, whereas I have the option to buy within five years or whatever. I can buy this at $4,000,000." At the time that sounded like a high price; the guy had no problem putting it in a free option. He continued, "By the way, I have no money and no plans of how I would ever buy this place, but why not? Why not take an **asymmetric bet** where I have no downside but possible upside?" So his start in real estate was: he was working at the gym and a guy came in to buy the building, and the guy assumed that he owned the building, which he didn't. He said, "We would make an offer somewhere around the ballpark of $7,000,000."

Sam Parr

Oh, got it.

Shaan Puri

He said, "Oh, amazing," and then, "Cool — I have an option to buy this for $4,000,000, but I don't have any money, so I actually cannot physically buy this. I'll do a **double escrow**. If you agree to buy it on this date, it basically works like this: I'll sell it to you for $7,000,000, I'll take the $7,000,000 and give this guy $4,000,000, so I'll own the place. Then I'll buy this and I'll sell you this thing. I'll keep $3,000,000 as my profit."

Sam Parr

It's the old: "Hey — Mom says I can go if you say yes," or "She'll say yes if you..."

Shaan Puri

Say yes. Right, exactly. The entire empire he built was because he baked in **one asymmetric bet — one no-risk option**. I thought that was kind of inspiring. By the way, he probably had ten of these that didn't pan out, but the one that did got him his start. He took that $3,000,000 and then he used that to buy, buy and buy, flip, buy and flip, buy and flip, and flip. He compounded that over ten years into a billion dollars of real estate from that one option. I just thought that was an incredible lesson or takeaway. And, by the way, I invest with him now. It's probably my biggest investment over the past two years — investing in his deals — and I'm getting incredible returns. One of the reasons is that he keeps doing the same model. He's the master of **de-risking**. He goes into a split. Let's say there's a shopping center with two big vacancies. While he's putting it under a purchase contract, he already has it leased. He has a signed lease and a signed purchase contract. So the same day we buy, he has the tenant in place and he sells the thing. We get these incredible returns because he's de-risking all these properties so far in advance. It's the same thing: you find one unfair advantage and then you just keep playing it.

Sam Parr

"Does he have an awesome house?"

Shaan Puri

Oh, he's got a *crazy* house. His house is *crazy*.

Sam Parr

**Real estate guys always have, obviously, amazing houses.**

Shaan Puri

There is one other little hack he had that I liked. I think there's another tidbit people can take. When he's doing these things, I'm like, "Dude, how do you do this? You're buying these properties — maybe there's a vacancy — and how are you cutting these deals beforehand to get them?" He would say, "Oh, it's just relationships." He always used that vague phrase: "Real estate's a relationship business." I hate answers that sound general, so I dug in and asked him to explain how he approaches the idea of *relationships*. He said this great thing: > "If you think about the words 'commercial real estate,' it sounds like this vast universe — this huge industry. The trick is: how do you make a big thing feel small? How do you break it down into a chunk that you can actually digest? > One day I sat down with a piece of paper and realized, 'Alright, who's my ideal person to know?' Well, it's a national retailer that's still expanding and growing and doesn't want to own their own real estate. I'm a developer — I want to own the real estate and lease it to them. > Once I did that, I realized there are actually, like, 150 names. I took this big idea of commercial real estate that felt like an ocean and turned it into a little goldfish pond — 150. I could fit 150 people in a room. I could meet 150 people over the next two years if I tried, form relationships with them so they know me and I know them, and they'll call me and I'll call them when we have something that fits." That's literally what he did, and I thought that was a great approach. I don't know where else you could do that in other businesses, but I suspect this idea — taking something big, reframing it, and realizing it's actually much smaller and more achievable than you think — probably applies to a lot of businesses.

Sam Parr

Is he a billionaire or billionaire-ish?</FormattedResponse>

Shaan Puri

I would say, *like*... not — not — not there himself, right? Because, you know, if you own a billion dollars in real estate — in his case I think about 40 or 50% is equity and the other half is debt. So, on paper, that's whatever — let's say $500,000,000. I don't know; I'm just... I don't know his actual situation, to be clear. But, *like*, hundreds of millions of dollars net worth. </FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

Of the six people we talked about, five of them are there—or give or take. I just think that's... I think it's crazy. I don't know how many billionaires there are in the world—five, or 10,000—I'm not sure. Whatever Forbes has, I'd like to multiply it by some number. It's crazy that over the past ten days we hung out with five of them or something like that and got to learn from these people. Again, I'm almost embarrassed when I say the name *"My First Million."* What I tell people is, you know, **it's actually not always about money**. It's actually about things greater than that, because I do think life's richer than just money. But it is interesting to be able to rub shoulders with people who are in the 0.001% of their field, and we're lucky.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, and also, I think now we're a little bit like, "Oh, you know, it's *not about the money."* But us ten years ago... </FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

Very much, it is about. </FormattedResponse>

Shaan Puri

**The money goals** were like, "Yo — get that money, get that money," and then you figure out that money doesn't make you happy. Sure, I believe you. It's not the end-all, be-all, but I still want it. I'm still gonna try to get it. I'm still gonna try to make...

Sam Parr

That happened. **Awesome.**

Shaan Puri

It's definitely — yeah, exactly. It seems pretty great to have, but I'd rather have it than not. I think, as much as we're like "oh, you know," **both are true**. It is true that there's a lot more to life, but for these people you pick up a bunch of different things. It's kind of crazy to make that happen, and it's fun to make it happen too. If business is your sport, how are points tallied? They're **tallied in dollars**, right? </FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

There's a guy—I don't pay attention to *golf*, but I'm sure you do. Do you know Scotty? Is it Schaeffer or Schaeffler?

Shaan Puri

Schaeffler

Sam Parr

"He won? What did he win this weekend — the **US Open**?"

Shaan Puri

Or open, yeah.

Sam Parr

I don't know anything about sports, but I saw his one-year-old kid crawling up the green [golf green] to give him a hug and a kiss after he won. I guess *Scotty* won. He set the trophy on the ground, and his kid crawled up to play with the trophy. *Nike* took out this *amazing* ad.

Shaan Puri

So good.

Sam Parr

The best ad ever. It was a two-page ad—or two swipes on **Instagram**. The first one shows a picture of **Scotty** holding his son and it says, "**You've already won.**" The second slide is, "**But another major doesn't hurt.**"

Shaan Puri

Doesn't hurt.

Sam Parr

And I think that's kind of the takeaway here: yeah, it feels good. *I've won already* — I have a loving family, I feel secure. It doesn't hurt to succeed a little more. I thought that was such a great ad, and I thought it was a representation of this episode. That was a beautiful ad, wasn't it?

Shaan Puri

Oh my God, **Nike** is at the top of its game when it does stuff like that.

Sam Parr

Yeah, it was pretty good. Alright, that was a good episode. That's it — that's the pod.