3 mindset shifts from billionaires (you won't find in books/videos)

Sam Parr

"Alright. You just got done hanging out with some *big ballers*. It wore off on you to the point where you think you have the **audacity** to wear a varsity jacket."

Shaan Puri

I have a stylist *now*.

Sam Parr

Is it **Marty McFly** from *Back to the Future*? Is that your stylist?

Shaan Puri

It's AC Slater — "say for the bell." We just threw one of our annual events. It's our **basketball camp for founders**, what Forbes calls the *"billionaire's basketball camp."* They never covered it, but I did pitch that to them in an email that they didn't reply to. And yeah… we did this thing; it was amazing. I guess—do you want to debrief? Should we? What do you want to... yeah.

Sam Parr

"Yeah, I want to know everything. I've gone two out of the four years, and it seems like each time the average net worth has gone up — like you've *added a zero* to it. I think I heard you did this event this year in **Greenville, North Carolina**, which is a very small town, and there were **17 private jets** in town that weekend."

Shaan Puri

Yeah — out of about 25 guests. It's pretty crazy. Okay, I wrote down some learnings because I don't want to tell you too much about the event, but I'll give some background. The 30-second description is: I hate conferences because of networking, suits and ties, icebreakers, awkward forced social interactions. I don't like that part. But I also love meeting new, interesting people. So the idea was: can you have the good without the bad? Can you "have your cake and eat it too"? I've learned in the past that basically every time you complain, you've planted a seed of an opportunity. So my complaint about conferences signaled to me that maybe there's an opportunity to reinvent this. Innovation comes from irritation. My irritation at conferences led me to ask a different question: what would be the type of conference that I would love to go to? We kind of architected this thing around the things we like the most. Instead of being in a ballroom of a hotel, all standing around awkwardly, what if we got together and we played sports? What if you played basketball? The icebreaker is: when you get to the event you get put on teams, and within an hour we go play pickup basketball together. You get to know each other that way before you do small talk and all the other stuff. The second part is: you play basketball and sort of sweat all day. Then at night we all hang out in a house and do impromptu versions of TED talks. The idea is that everybody in the room is world-class at something. Like, that guy knows more about how to sell on TV infomercials than anyone else; this guy can build the largest company in X category; that guy built the largest company in another category. You pop them up and say, "Hey, tell us something. Teach us about that." They have little rough slides and take a ten-minute talk. So the idea of the event is: two days with 25 of the most interesting people in the world. You play sports in the field, it has a summer-camp vibe, and then you get the lessons learned of a TED-talk-style event.

Sam Parr

And you're hosting it—co-hosting it, I don't know how you describe it—with **Jimmy, aka MrBeast**, at his campus. Last year, and I think every year, you get a tour. One of the activities was a tour of his movie studio, if that's what he calls it. It was pretty this year.

Shaan Puri

Cool — we actually played a *MrBeast* game. They thought they were going on the tour, but we set it up so that he was like, "Well, I could show you this. You wanna do it?" He had the cameras and the microphones set up, so everybody got to play the game. They made a video that's private — just for the group. It won't go out on YouTube.

Sam Parr

It's like the *rich man's version* of going on a Six Flags ride, where they take a photo of you on the ride.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, exactly. I was like, "Have you ever done this before?" He's like, "Yeah—do this for the Make-A-Wish kids." I was like, "Oh, perfect. This is great."</FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

And so, do you want to—can you say who was there? Or is that what you want to do?

Shaan Puri

I don't want to talk too much about who was there, but I'll give you a couple stories. I just wrote down three little lessons learned. I'm going to try to keep this short because I can go all day about this type of stuff. I have pages and pages of notes that I wrote afterwards, but I'll give you three things that I thought stood out. **My lessons from billionaires — number one: _Intensity is the strategy_.** Here’s one of the things that happened at the event. We had, I think, five people who owned NBA teams at this event, which is crazy — that's like one-sixth of the league. We asked, "What's the hardest part about owning a team that you didn't really anticipate before you bought it?" You think you've been a basketball fan your whole life, and then he said: > "Here's a guy on my team who's got a five-year, $150,000,000 deal guaranteed. So he plays good: $150,000,000. He plays bad: $150,000,000. His knee feels sore, he's got a boo-boo, he wants to sit out: $150,000,000." He said it's very hard to lead an organization where your upside and your compensation are guaranteed regardless of performance. Then he added, "In my life, I'm on a day-to-day contract with myself. That's how I've always been." Fast forward about an hour. People had broken up into smaller groups and two rich guys in the corner were talking. I thought they were about to get in a fight — they were talking so loud and so passionately, almost nose to nose. It turned out they weren't fighting; they were both just so passionate about one idea: living in the details. One of the guys was NBA team owner **Mat Ishbia**. He owns the Phoenix Suns and also owns one of, if not the largest, mortgage companies in the country: **United Wholesale Mortgage**. He basically took over the business from his dad. It was a dad's side hustle with 12 employees when he joined, and probably single-digit millions in revenue at that time. In 2004 it was small; 2005 still slow; 2006 still slow. Then in 2007–2009 it started to take off because other mortgage lenders went under during the subprime mortgage crisis for writing bad mortgages — he was not doing that. They picked up tons of business and literally grew tenfold in those years and kept growing. Now they do over $200,000,000,000 in loans and about $2,000,000,000 a year in profit at the company level, so he's one of the 50 wealthiest people in the country.

Sam Parr

Was his dad's company *big*, or was it a subsidiary within a successful company? Or no?

Shaan Puri

It was just his own 12-person... *side hustle*.

Sam Parr

"Dude, *that's crazy.*" I feel like there's also a bunch of different basketball or sports team owners who are in the mortgage business.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, Dan Gilbert also is in the mortgage business. I don't know if there are any others—there's definitely those two and they're rivals. So he's talking to this guy. I walk in and I think they're about to fight. They're not fighting at all; they're both just passionate and they're both talking about, "Dude, you've gotta be in the details." He told this story that I thought was really great. One of the things is, if you weren't on the private jet—we tried to get you on one of their private jets on the way out—my buddy Ramin got to ride with him on the way home. I was like, "What's the story?" He goes: > "I walk the floor of my company every day." I think his company has like thousands of employees—10,000 employees, something crazy like that. He says, "I walk the floor every day and I'm looking for three problems." What he means by that is he talks to everybody: entry-level people, the janitor, the senior executives—whoever he bumps into. He's just trying to find who has a problem that's blocking them from the company being more successful. Like, where are the bottlenecks? He's just searching for them. So he goes, "I'm trying to find three a day. If I find a problem, then right there I'll try to fix it on the spot." For example, he says, "I will talk to my sales guy; he's telling me about a problem with the IT system. We call the IT guy and we're like, 'Hey, this guy's got a problem with the IT system.' And the IT guy's like, 'Okay, I'll look into it, thanks.'" He's like, "No, no—get off your ass. This guy's got a problem; it needs to get fixed today." The IT guy comes and fixes the problem, and now all those sales guys don't have that IT problem anymore. He's like, "I do three problems a day for 365 days a year—I'm solving 1,000 problems that are stopping my company from growing." So if you ask, "How do you grow?" it's: you remove a thousand bottlenecks to growth every year. I was like, "That is awesome." I loved that.

Sam Parr

Hey everyone — really quick: if you're enjoying this episode on **CEO stuff**, I've got something for you. The team at **HubSpot** put together a bunch of best practices that **Sean** and I use in our own companies. They organized it into something that's really easy to read and understand. If you want to save yourself **10 years** of headache and heartache, you should check it out. I wish we had this a long time ago — it would've helped me a lot. There should be a **QR code** on your screen that you can scan, or a link in the description. So check it out. It's **totally free and totally awesome**. Did he talk like that, just talking to one other guy? </FormattedResponse>

Shaan Puri

Yeah. So the other guy was basically saying the same thing about how he lives. He's like, "Bro, I'm so in the detail." It turned into an "I'm so in the details" contest that they were getting into, and they were all loving it. I think the perception of a CEO or a manager is that you delegate — you're this visionary, 10,000-foot-level kind of person. What they were saying, though, and what works for them, is that they *live in the details*. They're on the ground floor solving problems. We also do this other thing: we do a *store walk*. At night, there are so many people there who have built big CPG brands that we wanted to — instead of just giving the talk, what if we went to Walmart or Target and you just taught us about it there? So now we shut down our Target at night. After Target closes, they hold it open for an extra hour and a half for us. We go there, we tour Target, and basically every aisle has someone who knows that category. Like, "Oh, that's the pet food guy — pet food guy, teach us about pet food." Jamie from Ring was there, and we're in the home security aisle. "Jamie, tell us the story of Ring," but standing in the Ring aisle holding the Ring product: "Tell us about this." One guy dominates the board games category — eight of the ten best-selling board games in the world are his. We asked, "Tell us how the hell that happens." He said, "Look, check this out." He showed how bad restocking is for games: he ripped the panel open underneath the shelf and explained, "For games, they don't restock in the back — they're just down here. So I will crawl under here and pick this up and put this back myself." You see the scrappiness of people who are literally *making* billions of dollars. I just thought that's at odds with how I think — which I think is how most people view the role of a CEO.

Sam Parr

So, *intensity as a strategy* is interesting. Let me ask you: have you noticed this to be true or not? I often wonder—do you think they were intense when they were in their twenties on the come-up, or does the intensity and sharpness dial up the more you progress and the bigger opportunity you see—one you maybe didn't actually think was big but you kind of fell into? For example, there's a famous pitch from **Jeff Bezos**. He said, "I think if we kill it, we're gonna be—this is gonna be a $100 million company; it's gonna be pretty big," right? As the opportunity opens up, did the intensity dial up, or was he already intense?

Shaan Puri

So I think, like with most things in life, if you go to the people at the top it's always the combination of nature and nurture. It's talent times the ability to exploit the talent. There's nobody at the top who's totally talentless—they didn't get there with zero intensity. For example, with Matt Ishbia: he was a small white guy who basically was a bench player at Michigan State basketball, which is one of the most hard-nosed, gritty college basketball programs under Tom Izzo. He even said it during his talk: "If you guys saw me on the court today, I'm not the most talented guy, but I've always had this mentality of, 'I'll outwork you.'" I want to clarify one thing: it's never one or the other. When I say *intensity is a strategy*, that doesn't mean they don't have any strategy or vision. All of one without the other wouldn't work. If you're all vision and no work—you are not down on the floor at Target getting the stuff out from under the shelf—that's not going to get you anywhere. If you're only restocking the shelves and you have no vision, no key insight, that's also going to get nowhere. It's the combination that makes you dangerous. For example, the guy who does this with board games, Ilan, who came on the podcast, had the right vision at the beginning: the idea wasn't to make a game that's fun by itself, but to make a game that helps the players be fun to each other. So he got the right big idea. </FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

Yeah.

Shaan Puri

Which was: how do we make games where the game itself is not fun but the game makes the players fun? So when they're acting it out in charades, it's not that the card of charades was fun — the card of charades let you be a fun or funny person. And that's the **secret**: we're gonna be the best in the world at that. And then, you know, we pair it with scrappiness. Same thing with the United Wholesale thing: he had a strategy that was different than everybody else. Most people, like Rocket Mortgage, sell mortgages to the end customer: "You're buying a home, come buy it with us." What he did was different. He said, "Look, there's all these mortgage brokers out there. What if we sell wholesale to them? Then they win, but they become our sales channel." All of a sudden, there are 33,000 of those guys in the country. We turn them into our salesmen — that's our sales fleet. He had very simple metrics. He said, "Cool: we think that brokered mortgages are going to become a third of the market, and we think we can get to 50% market share of that. If we do those two things, we're the biggest mortgage company in the world." So it's a simple, **two-sentence** level of clarity about "what the hell do we need to do," and then everything else is just intensity at that strategy.

Sam Parr

I have a bunch of questions about that. But do you think that **owning a basketball team** is sort of like owning a house — where you dreamt of it and you finally get it, and you're like, *"This is a pain in the ass; I wanna rent"*? [trails off]

Shaan Puri

Well, there was a guy there who's a *minority owner*, and I was like, "Yeah, that's the way to do it," because the minority owner—yes, you don't have the control—but he only goes to games when he wants to. </FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

And he could say that he owns it.

Shaan Puri

Time in and feel like an **owner**, but he doesn't have all the headaches. Whereas other guys — they're going to every single game: a regular-season Tuesday game against Charlotte — and you're in town for that. It takes over your life completely. For some of them, that's exactly what they wanted. For me, I probably wouldn't want that version of it. There's other ways to have it.

Sam Parr

Poor guys — that way you give.

Shaan Puri

You give yourself a job, right? You have total freedom at that stage, and then you give yourself a job. So it is, in a way, *poor guys*. Now they're not — they don't feel that way. They like that job; they chose that job, but it is no doubt a job.

Sam Parr

One time I got to go. It's so funny — I participated in this charity thing. My buddy has a program where he and I occasionally help inmates get jobs after prison. It's a universally loved foundation. One time I went to Indiana State Prison. I was sitting next to this guy just talking. There were about 20 of us outsiders getting ready to go into the prison and talk to these guys. I didn't know who this guy was; I was just talking to him for a little while longer. Eventually it came up, "So what do you do?" and he's like, "I own the Pacers." I got to go to the game with him afterward that night. Seeing him walk around the stadium of his team was the **best feeling ever**.

Shaan Puri

**Restaurant-owner energy — times a billion.**

Sam Parr

It was *restaurant-owner energy* times a billion. It was the coolest thing I've ever seen. I was like, "Have you seen Napoleon Dynamite?" — where the lady's looking at the little ship in a bottle and she goes...

Shaan Puri

"I want that."

Sam Parr

That's... that's hot. I like *whispers* too. I was like, "I want that." It was awesome. That was so... that's amazing. Alright, what's the second thing?

Shaan Puri

Alright. Second thing: **culture is an action word**. One of the things I was thinking: I'm looking up these guys and wondering, "What do they do better than me? Where can I steal from their game? Where can I notice some delta — some difference?" So obviously **intensity** is one. They have this sort of psychopathic, almost joyful enjoyment of being a maniac about the details. Great — that's one. What's the second difference I noticed? The second difference... not all </FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

Some of them are *psychopaths*, by the way. I hang out with Mario a bit—Mario is one of the founders of Oscar, which is like a $4 or $5 billion publicly traded company. **Not psycho at all.** Have you talked to him?

Shaan Puri

Not at all. He is technically brilliant and the CTO. And I think the CTOs and the technically brilliant people... what is...</FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

"The CEO, though."

Shaan Puri

They have a slightly different *superpower* that they're bringing to the table.

Sam Parr

But even guys like Jesse Itzler, who I think went this year and has gone previously—he's a pretty nice, calm guy. He's a *psycho* when it comes to being calm. Do you know what I mean? </FormattedResponse>

Shaan Puri

"He's like an *adventure psycho*."

Sam Parr

Yeah, so he still has a little bit of *psycho*, which is funny. Okay, sorry.</FormattedResponse>

Shaan Puri

Jesse Go did do for leisure — he's like, 100-mile races. Yeah, you're like, no, no — he's cool. He's chill. Alright, so **culture is an action word**. I think for most companies, culture is just a set of generic words written on a wall that nobody remembers and definitely nobody's using in their day-to-day actions. If you look at the companies that have the most unique outcomes — the most unique output of what they make — what is the unique input that leads to that? So Jesse Cole was there — Jesse Cole from the Savannah Bananas. We had him on the podcast. Unbelievable story. He made minor league baseball, essentially — something that, in the dictionary definition, nobody gave a shit about. Now it has like a 3 million-person waitlist for tickets, sells out 80,000-person stadiums, and has more followers on social media than every other baseball team, including the Yankees, combined. Obviously, he's done something magical with the product. So what's the magical input? He's telling the story, and it was very inspiring to me. He goes, okay — the CEO, the founder, has some vision of how we want to deliver this magical, wonderful A++ customer experience. But how do you get that? If your experience is in the hands of some new guy who joined nine months ago, is getting paid a modest salary, and has never worked in an environment like this, how do you get them to care the way you care? It's very, very hard. I think this is the biggest challenge. I once met the founder of Chipotle and he said, "Oh, you're going into food service? Anybody in food service can make a billion dollars if you can figure out how to get a minimum-wage employee to treat the customer as if it's their guest." So that's the mindset. Okay, so how do you do it? He goes, "You gotta show them, not tell them." He said they have a value called "you always + the experience" — meaning whatever the experience was, we plus it the next time. This year, their players were coming for the first day of minicamp — before the season even starts. They got all their players together and he was thinking about it with his team. He said, "We want them to put on a show for people. We want them to know how special it feels to go to something. We want them to make the fans feel special, but we never make them feel special." So here we go. He had, like, a week to plan this or something like that, and he said, "We're gonna turn their first-day orientation into a show." They get down from the bus — they're all at the hotel — it's like, "We're gonna report, we're gonna go through orientation," so they're kind of like anybody is from first-day employee orientation. A first-day player on the job, you just sort of zombie-walking through life at that point.

Shaan Puri

He goes, "They come downstairs; the cars have been replaced by this special bus. The bus is surrounded by a police escort." People are like, "What?" and he's like, "We're only going, like, 1,200 feet away, but you have a police escort to go from here to there because you are special. You are a star, and we're gonna treat you like a star." As they start going with the police escort, all of our headquarters staff and employees are outside cheering. We got signs. They get there, they come out of the bus — boom! Fireworks go off into the sky. We start singing the song to them; they're being serenaded by us. They walk through the aisle and enter the stadium. In the stadium we have a motivational video on the screen — they're seeing themselves as kids when they were baseball players and now they're grown up. The story being told is: "You made it to the big show. You are here." He tells this story about how he fired up his players and how they were like, "What just happened?" There were no fans, no customers even — this was how he trained his employees. Basically, this was how he welcomed his new players. He asks, "You think after that they're gonna walk a little differently on day one of doing their job?" He's like, "Of course. Of course they will. They now know what we mean when we say 'you put on a show' — the experience, all these values. You gotta live it if you want them to live it." I was like, I had goosebumps. Dude, it was awesome.

Sam Parr

Ari, can we cue the *sound bite* of Sean making fun of me for caring about culture and values? It was literally ten days ago—he was like, "You care about... yeah, because you..."

Shaan Puri

"We're like, *you know*... I've been working on culture for the last two months, and I thought I decided that **integrity** is going to be a culture for us. That's not how it went down. We're going to, we're going to really, we're going to really do a good job." </FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

"That is **not** how it went down. And two, you gotta start somewhere."

Shaan Puri

Did it feel like how I made you just feel when Jesse Cole was telling that story? That's what I want from you, Sam. That's the **level**. That's the **bar**.

Sam Parr

Dude, I don't have a bus or a place to go to get a bus.

Shaan Puri

A bus.

Sam Parr

We have no reason to leave...

Shaan Puri

Office—get a jitsu. Whatever you gotta do, you do it.</FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

*It is pretty dope.* I mean, I have been working really hard at this, and when I hear this I'm like, "ugh — that's like a **10 out of 10**." I'm doing like a **2 out of 10**. I wonder what it was like in year one versus the year whatever he's in now. But that is actually inspiring. I do totally buy into *treating people a certain way*, and if you do things that don't add up on paper, they definitely do add up on paper eventually. </FormattedResponse>

Shaan Puri

Right, right. *That's so true.* Because, I mean, obviously that's just a cost, right? Those fireworks aren't free. That bus isn't free. That police escort isn't free. Where's the **ROI**? </FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

I can't put into an Excel sheet the ROI (return on investment) of getting people to care — of getting people goosebumps. But it just... it just feels right. You know, *intuition* is a hard thing to justify within a company, which is very strange.

Shaan Puri

And it's the same thing, by the way, with all of MrBeast's crew. If you work with Jimmy, you're doing things a certain way. He makes you feel like you're part of something huge, something special, something unstoppable — something that's going to be a **once-in-a-lifetime** ride. So people give a once-in-a-lifetime level of effort toward it.

Sam Parr

I'd be curious to hear how some of the people who have more boring companies — like a mortgage lender — instill this. Because, you know, *excuses are assholes*, and we all got them; they all stink. This is an excuse, but when I hear Jesse I'm like, "Okay, that is a baseball team — that's something I can make cool." How does the insurance broker do it? I'd be curious to hear how they do it. And, like, yeah — it's easy to do that when you're **Mr. Beast**. I don't actually think this way, but this is an excuse a lot of people listening to this would say: "Yeah, it's easy when you're Mr. Beast and you're making videos online — that's pretty cool." But what about if you're selling notepads? I don't know… like, something boring.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I don't think it changes at all. If it's boring to you, then yeah — it's boring to them. Is it boring to you? Like, that's the guy selling the notepads: is he selling a notepad or is he selling something much bigger than that? Is it, like, **Jesse Itzler**? He's there — he sells a wall calendar, a piece of plastic you put on the wall. It's $30. Now, you could look at that and be like, "It's just a calendar, who cares?" Or you could be like — he told me the story about people in his life: why did you get so into this and how did you turn away from the *money monster*? That's what I think is really remarkable about him. He's unlike the rest of the people in the room. He seems so secure that he's not still chasing something; he's just living the life he wants. He was like, "You know, I had people in my life pass away. Alright? People very close to me, my family members pass away, and I realized how short life is and how I'm just pissing years away." He starts talking about years. When he talks about years, it's like you're holding bricks of gold and there's only 25 or 30 of them left in your life. If you only got 30 of these bricks of gold left and every year one melts right through your fingertips — are you going to let that happen? We have to be really intentional about how we treat our years. What do you think — is it just going to happen or do you think you gotta plan it? If you're going to plan it, guess what: you need a **big-ass calendar** on your wall. He takes you down that road. He didn't — that's not him speaking; that's me speaking for him. But I think with any product, if you don't have a big **"why"** behind it and you're not trying to play at a high level with it, then obviously you can't instill that in anybody else. </FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

So, for the listener: **Jesse Itzler** has been on our podcast a bunch of times. He's famous and popular on the internet. He was already a very successful entrepreneur — he started and sold some companies — and married a very successful woman who started and sold a company. What I want to ask you, **Sean**, is: whenever I'm around incredibly ambitious people — like the billionaires of the world — for example, I've been to Ramp (the credit card company, which is like a "takeover-the-world" startup). I've been to their office. Whenever I'm around these guys, you start getting these *memetic desires* where you say, "A) I want what they have," and "B) their energy becomes contagious." The most successful people's energy is contagious. You're like, "I should work harder; I should do this." If you're around **Elon Musk** or someone, you're going to want to work harder. But then, when you're around a Jesse Itzler, you think he's doing it right. You know what I mean? Like people who are really successful — regardless of whether they're in the grinder or on the calm path — they're contagious. Were you finding yourself getting, like, you know, caught in the...

Shaan Puri

Bro, I'm a leaf blowing in the wind at these events. I talked to one guy and I'm like, "I should start a **YouTube** channel." I started. I talked to another guy and I'm like, "Board games are sick." And then I talked to Jesse and I'm like, "I need to run a race. Why am I not running?" You know, I'm so *easily manipulated*, and it's...

Sam Parr

Go to these things... **the truth is** — just like this podcast — the truth is not. I mean, in your setting of hanging out with him for twenty-eight hours, that is not actually the truth either. You know, there's always bullshit on the back end of everyone's life that you don't truly see. So nothing is as good, or probably as bad, as it seems. But were you attracted to one lifestyle? </FormattedResponse>

Shaan Puri

I mean, the truth is: over time I've figured out how to do these events. How to do them is this: be curious about everybody. You should not write anybody off—*keep an open mind*. Second thing: you're looking for the **parts, not the whole**. You're looking for the little elements that I want to steal for my game, because nobody's perfect as a whole and nobody is the right match for you as a whole. *No advice is right for you; it's just what was right for them.* So you look for the parts that resonate—the parts that make you excited, the parts that make you interested. You note those. You become aware of them because there's something in you that remains after it sparks interest. You have to ask yourself: do I want the life, or the lifestyle? It's like, yeah—I would love to walk through Target and be like, "that's my product on the walls." Then I hear about what it took to get there, and I'm like, "this is an absolute death game to play. I don't want to play. I would not want to play that game."

Sam Parr

Yeah, I'm not willing to pay that price.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, yeah. Cool — I like that. You know, Jimmy... he gets to do all these incredible things because he's the most-followed guy in the world. That's... I mean, incredible. Wow, how inspiring. At the same time, he's got four assistants for every hour of his day. They're like, "You gotta be doing this. You need to be doing this. You need to do this." He just got off a flight from here; now he's gotta go on a flight to there. I mean, that is not a lifestyle I would want. So you gotta understand: you have to want the *lifestyle of doing it*, not the *life of having it*. It's too easy to want the life of having it — that doesn't count. That's like... checkmate. "Yeah, sure, so do I," but do you actually like to play chess? Know that — that's kind of an important distinction to make. So I'm always looking for the lifestyle, not the life. Because if you like the lifestyle, you'll actually do it. You'll stick with it long enough to get whatever your results are going to be, based on, you know, your talent and your luck as you go.

Sam Parr

What about the third one? </FormattedResponse>

Shaan Puri

Alright — third one: **"You can't top pigs with pigs."** Have you ever heard this phrase before? </FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

"No, what's that mean?"

Shaan Puri

So it's a Walt Disney story. One of Walt Disney's early movies was "Three Little Pigs." It was basically a short he made, and it was really successful. I think he won an Oscar for it — it did very well. Of course, the distributor comes to him and says, "Walt, what's next?" Walt's like, "Yeah, working on what's next." The distributor goes, "Hey, I got a tip: more pigs." They were serious — like, "You gotta do a sequel." Walt had this belief: "I don't think you can top pigs with pigs." He felt that if he wanted to do the next great thing, he couldn't just try to do that again. In fact, he ended up getting influenced over time to do a sequel. It did okay, but he was never proud of it. He thought it was "shit" — he felt he shouldn't have done it. He knew it: you can't top pigs with pigs. He had an emphasis on **originality** and **reinventing yourself**. I would say at this group there were kind of two groups of people. There were what I would call the *exploiters* — the guy who sells a company in one space for $300,000,000 and, guess what, he's back in that space again with a new company that's going to sell for $3,000,000,000 this time. He knows the space so well; he's exploiting his depth of knowledge and maybe his passion for the space. That was one group — there were ten of them at the event. Then there were ten at the event that were just reinventing themselves. I personally was very drawn to the *reinventers*. Maybe it's just, like you would say, romantic — I think it's just a more romantic idea for how to live life.

Sam Parr

Can you give an **example** of one of them?

Shaan Puri

Yeah, so Joe Gebbia, the founder of Airbnb, is there. Joe actually left Airbnb. He initially started a company — a *really cool* company — but it was also in the kind of housing design space.

Sam Parr

What they called in San Sansera?

Shaan Puri

I'm sorry, I think... it's basically like backyard **ADUs** [Accessory Dwelling Units]. If you're in California and you're allowed to have a backyard unit, here's a manufactured prefab backyard unit. Cool. It was doing well, but Joe reinvented himself. At this event he gave a talk that just brought the house down. It was unbelievable — literally, about 30 people were chanting "USA! USA!" at the end because he told the story of his meeting with Trump, where he ended up becoming the **Chief Design Officer for America**, a role that didn't even exist before Joe got there. He wanted to serve and to use his *superpower*, which is design and creating delightful user experiences. He aimed to bring that to an area that had shown zero care for user experience: government paperwork, government websites — things that literally look like the first versions made in 1986. He wanted to take the time and care to actually improve those experiences. A very simple example — and this has been talked about publicly, so I can mention it — is that when people retired from the government, the paperwork was kept in a mine, like an actual physical mine. It was all paperwork, and that made sense in the 1960s because that's all we had.

Sam Parr

It took about **six months** — just *literally, physically* walking around, fetching the paperwork, and getting all the right people to sign off on it.

Shaan Puri

Exactly. So, let's say you served, you know, thirty years. You're ready to retire, and now you go through this sort of brutal six- to twelve-month paperwork process to retire. Look — nobody's ever... that's never going to be a top priority for anyone to fix. So you just have these *tragedy-of-the-commons* type problems, where nobody wins political points for fixing these. Nobody makes any money; nobody enriches themselves by fixing these things, and therefore they just never get fixed. So it takes somebody like **Joe** who's just like, "I just don't like seeing bad design, bad feelings, bad user experiences. I just think we could do better — why can't we do better?" And so he's bringing that to all different parts of the government. He told this incredible story, and I think you've seen him talk. You just chat with him one-on-one: he's quiet when he talks, and he's an absolute man.

Sam Parr

Well, he's got a *"politician energy"* a little bit — not in a bad way, but in a good way. He, like, **turns it on**. He turns it on.

Shaan Puri

My man could use a *pause*. Let me just put it that way. My man knows how to use a *pause* — he is unbelievable at public speaking.

Sam Parr

I've seen him do a few public talks. I went to the Airbnb office and I've seen him talk, and I've seen YouTube videos of him talking. I met him in real life last year. I was like, "Do you hate me?" I was like, "Why are you talking? I thought you were this *extroverted* guy." He was just incredibly *quiet*—super low-key. Then I've seen him turn it on, and that was pretty remarkable.

Shaan Puri

There was a... reinventing himself. That was a reinvention. He literally created the perfect role for himself—one that didn't even exist in the world. I thought that was an example of, like, **"you can't top pigs with pigs."** He couldn't top Airbnb with another tech startup, but he could top it by doing this incredible thing that takes his genius and applies it in the act of service at the national scale.

Sam Parr

"What has he designed?"

Shaan Puri

So, have you seen—he showed us some stuff. But have you seen the retirement side of things, like the national parks website? National parks are one of the best things that America has. Most countries don't have this amazing, free, beautiful land that anybody can go and explore. He redid the national park stuff. He also redid the food pyramid. He's big into the Bobby Kennedy side of things about, like, "look, it's crazy—we're so unhealthy as a country and we're chronically ill." Then you go look at the original food pyramid, which is like the foundation of your day: cereal, carbohydrates, bread, grains. So they made a new food pyramid and a new website that educates people about that. So, you know, just every touch. I think there's some more big stuff coming. Another one: there was a guy on the phone there and we're like, "Hey man, you know we got a **no-phone policy** here. You can't just be taking calls; otherwise everybody would just start taking calls here. This event sucks." So we walk over and someone's like, "Hey, you gotta let him do this—he's selling his company right now today for $5,000,000,000." It was the founder of **Brex**, and he just sold his company the same day for $5,000,000,000. He's just there with us, but I assume part of him is just somewhere in the clouds, enjoying himself at a whole different level.

Sam Parr

I see people on Twitter... mocking Matt.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, how big of a **loser** do you have to be to try to mock somebody who just sold the company for $5 billion?

Sam Parr

Isn't he, like, 29 years old or something? *Insane.*

Shaan Puri

He—he's... yeah, I can't even fathom how people do that.</FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

Isn't that funny?

Shaan Puri

But a few hours later he's in the sauna, telling us about how he's been tinkering with **Claude** code — how he's building these things, relearning code basically through **AI**, and exploring what can be built now. He's asking these questions and entering a whole new space with his next company, doing something completely different. I just thought, "Wow." The same day he sells his company for **$5 billion**, he's already back to being a beginner — a **"white belt"** at something new, with a full beginner's mindset. I was pretty inspired by that. There were several people in that same boat.

Sam Parr

So you and I have founded companies, and I believe both of us—or all the things that we have founded—have ranged from millions to tens of millions in revenue. A huge percentage of our friends are in that category, which is, like, very successful. But then there are different levels of success. Did you notice—and this is a very selfish question for me because I want to get better—did you notice any distinct differences between the people who had relatively mild-success companies versus those breakout, home-run companies? For example, when I used to host HustleCon, I distinctly remember we had probably 100 people speak across my conference series years ago. It was all the hot startups from about 2014 to 2019. I remember talking to one of the founders of WeWork—not Adam, but the other guy, Miguel. I remember talking to the founders of Casper and all these great companies, and then a bunch of other companies that were in the billions of dollars. I remember thinking, "Oh, you're definitely not more special than a normal successful person—you just have been at it for a while, or there's been some luck that happened your way, or you just didn't give up." Not giving up is special, but occasionally I met other people and thought, "You're a genius." For example, I met the founder of Grammarly—Max—and I was like, "Oh, you're legitimately better than me." Same with Mario, the founder of Oscar: when you talk to him, you're like, "Yeah, you're 1% of the 1% in IQ," and also you're fairly bold. It's a no-brainer why you're successful, and we will never be the same. So, did you notice any trends like that?

Shaan Puri

Yeah — definitely. I would say if you ever want to get a really big number in math, you probably can't just change one variable. These are multipliers. You multiply several variables together and suddenly you get a gargantuan number at the end. If you just try to add numbers together, it doesn't really work. It's a multiplier. For example: what are some of those variables? I would say one variable is **endurance**. A lot of the people there had sold their company. If you look at the people who had sold their company for, let's call it, $50,000,000, $150,000,000, $500,000,000 — a lot of times that same company is now worth $5,000,000,000. They just sold early and were ready to move on. What's the difference between them and the person whose company is worth $5,000,000,000 now? They stayed at it longer. They stayed in the company for a longer period of time. So I would say an uncommon level of endurance is one key variable. I would also say there's a **"multiply-by-zero"** moment. Almost every company there had a story about when they almost failed. People will say things like: "I remember when it was Christmas and we were growing fast. We actually ran out of cash — we didn't realize it because we were so dumb about inventory planning. We were going to do $380,000,000 in revenue and we were about to go broke. I had two weeks left. I had to go get a loan, I had to get funding, and then the funding got pulled within 24 hours of the deadline. I personally mortgaged my house, then I got this, then this, then this. Or we lost the deal to get into retail to this other company, but then I came over the top and I guaranteed we would spend $3,000,000 on TV ads. By the way, I had $300,000 in the bank, but that sealed the deal. Then I had to hustle to get the $3,000,000 and that got us into retail. Now we do $500,000,000 in retail every year." There's always a story like that — everybody's got their own flavor. They avoided the multiply-by-zero events. When you hear Joe from Airbnb talk about Airbnb, the number one takeaway I had is: "This company shouldn't exist — it's a miracle child." It should have died at any of those five points he mentioned, because those are "we're f'd, it's over" moments. But they didn't die. There were like five miracles to get there. So I feel like that's another important variable: not dying at a moment when you could have died, or flipping a deal at the last minute that turned out to be a huge fork in the road. I think **project selection** is another variable. For example, James Clear is there and he wrote the bestselling book of the last five years across all categories. Part of the reason is he talks about deliberate practice as a core insight. He really wanted to make the book about deliberate practice. It could have been a deliberate-practice book that talked about habits, but nobody would buy a book that says *deliberate practice* on the cover. A lot of people wanted to buy a book about *habits* — breaking bad habits and building good ones — and deliberate practice ended up as chapter three or whatever. So just picking things that have the right tag — either because you knew it in advance or you stumbled into something that actually had a huge market even though it sounded small and silly at first — matters. To recap: - **Intensity** is the strategy — being at the ground-floor level. That idea of solving three problems a day for 365 days to solve a thousand problems in your company — I thought that was great. - **Culture** is the action word — the Jesse Cole story of treating the players to a show to instill in them what it means to give the fans a show. - And then you can't top pigs with pigs — **being willing to reinvent yourself after success**: go back to the beginning, have the beginner's mind, go back to the bottom of the mountain and do it again. I was inspired by that. Those are three of my big ones.

Sam Parr

Alright. Well, that's pretty cool. I'm happy you had a good time. I'm happy that it even happened. You chose *literally* the worst weekend of the year.

Shaan Puri

I know there was the biggest storm in the country happening the same day, so we had to, **24 hours** before, change the entire event we'd been planning for months. There were all these planners and whatnot, but we pulled it off — it worked out.

Sam Parr

That's why I *hate* the events business. It's very stressful—it's like running a marathon. It sucks while you're doing it; it sucks in preparation. When you get done with it, you're like, "That was awesome. I wanna do it again."

Shaan Puri

Dude, ours is worse. It's not even a business — we don't charge anyone anything; we just pay for this out of pocket. So you have all of the headache without the reward. The reward is just getting to attend something that's *dope* and, you know, hang out with cool people.

Sam Parr

Well, I'm happy you did that. I'm happy we had a good podcast. *That's it — that's the pod.*