I put 80% of my money in the S&P

Summary

My First Million – "I put 80% of my money in the S&P"

Hosts: Sam Parr & Shaan Puri
Date: May 11, 2026

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Episode Overview

Sam Parr and Shaan Puri dive deep into how much our financial behaviors are shaped by genetics, the intersection of self-knowledge and investing, and the evolving landscape for business opportunities in an AI-driven world. They unpack a landmark twin study on investing habits, muse on business and life through stories of famous investors, and brainstorm new startup ideas inspired by emerging trends—including company-wide AI 'brains' and the militarization of tech. Throughout, they reflect candidly on their own biases, philosophies, and strategies, making for an episode bursting with practical wisdom and provocative insights.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Are Our Money Habits Out of Our Control? (00:00–05:06)

• Sam introduces a Swedish twin study showing that 45% of savings and investing behaviors are genetic (00:29–03:22).

  • Sweden’s massive twin database combined with its historic wealth tax allowed researchers to control for upbringing and environment.
  • Six main investment biases were studied: under-diversification, excess turnover, performance chasing, home bias, love of “lottery” stocks, and refusal to sell losers.
  • "What he found was that 45% of savings and investing patterns of behaviors was genetic, which I find to be astounding." – Sam Parr (02:58)

• Investing is about understanding human nature.

  • Financial fads come and go, but human behavioral quirks are constant.
  • Money mistakes reflect deeper personal traits.

2. Know Thyself: Finding Your Game (05:06–14:05)

• The Mohnish Pabrai story:

  • Pabrai’s career pivoted after a detailed personality test identified his love for “solo, competitive, numbers-based games”—making him ill-suited for traditional entrepreneurship, but a natural investor (05:06–09:57).
  • “You have to know who you are and what you are like predisposed to love and obsess over and then find yourself in those types of games.” – Shaan Puri (07:08)
  • Pabrai’s philanthropy also mirrors this, focusing on maximizing economic return per dollar spent, e.g., by placing talented children into elite schools.

• Self-awareness in career and investment.

  • Many never discover which game they’re best at—“life passed them by. Isn't that sort of a, a tragedy?” – Shaan Puri (10:41)
  • Both hosts reflect that their superpower is “reverse engineering”—studying how others have achieved success, then customizing their own playbook (12:21–14:05).

3. Personalities, Business, and Investing (14:05–19:51)

• Companies mirror their founders.

  • Business issues often reflect the founder’s personal flaws, and changing the business usually means changing oneself.
  • “The business that you’re controlling...is just an extension of your personality.” – Sam Parr (14:32)

• Habits cross domains:

  • Investment biases can show up in personal and professional life (e.g., inability to sell losing positions mirrors difficulties letting go in relationships).
  • Real change comes from experience, not reading: “Change requires pain, not words.” – Sam Parr (16:25)
  • The most meaningful change (apart from genetics) occurred for those who worked in finance—i.e., who experienced the pain of losses or poor decisions.

• Tactics for overcoming personal bias:

  • Pre-commitment (set decisions in advance)
  • Shorten the feedback loop
  • Don’t play games where your own bias is likely to be fatal

4. The Paradox of Reading and Activity (19:51–22:44)

• Reading as an ‘activity blocker’:

  • Many great investors (e.g. Warren Buffett) read constantly—not for knowledge alone, but as a way to avoid trigger-happy investing.
  • “One of the biggest leaks in investing is too much activity.” – Shaan Puri (19:27)

• Sometimes, doing nothing is the smartest move.

  • “The best thing that I can do is to do nothing. Because oftentimes when I meddle, it gets screwed up.” – Sam Parr (19:51)

• Over-idea generation can drown companies.

  • Too many ideas from leadership become a distraction—citing Jeff Bezos’ learning curve at Amazon.
  • Shaan’s solution: Hold all ideas until a dedicated weekly meeting, rather than dropping them continuously on the team.

5. Averages, Placebos, and the S&P 500 Debate (23:19–31:47)

• Financial averages can be misleading.

  • “Many men drown in the river that was on average 5 ft in depth, because averages don't tell you so much.” – Shaan Puri (24:13)
  • Belief and mindset matter more than cold statistical facts: It’s about “productive placebos”—adopting beliefs that help you take the right actions (24:43–25:27).

• Sam’s approach: 80% in the S&P 500.

  • Despite warnings from Howard Marks about high valuations, Sam remains committed to the long-term average return strategy: “I am chasing 8% nominal return every single year...and that fits within my plan.” – Sam Parr (28:57)
  • Shaan notes that most of his personal wealth growth came from private companies, not public markets.

6. The Changing Face of Opportunity: Brain-Breaking Startup Ideas (33:37–56:00)

• AI ‘Company Brain’:

  • Moving from AI as an assistant to AI as the actual decision-maker at the center of the company, with humans supplying context and executing tasks. "[AI] is the thinker, not us." – Sam Parr (48:22)
  • Raises the specter of massive job displacement and the need for new roles (e.g., field analysts gathering unique, real-world data).
  • AI-facilitated company structure flips the traditional leadership pyramid.

• Aesthetic data centers:

  • As society resists ugly or disruptive tech infrastructure, there’s huge opportunity in making data centers and other necessary tech beautiful—likened to Rockefeller Center’s “reputation laundering” (36:53–39:22).
  • Notable quote: “There’s probably billions of people walking around who never discovered what game they're actually great at and never got into that game.” – Shaan Puri (10:02)

• Defense tech and the nerds’ rise—the militarization of Silicon Valley:

  • Swarms of cheap drones fundamentally shift the economics of war.
  • Software and robotics roles in national security are now crucial—what was once culturally unusual is now a burgeoning opportunity.
  • “War is really going to change...people who grew up more on video games and less on the battlefield.” – Shaan Puri (51:29)

• The opportunity landscape keeps shifting.

  • The next big winners rarely look like the last generation’s stars.
  • “If you want to be a part of the big waves, you have to be really attuned to the shifts.” – Shaan Puri (57:23)

7. AI-Driven Personalized Medicine (57:33–64:41)

• Real-world stories:

  • Nat Friedman’s experiment: giving his health data to AI, letting it manage his hydration and lifestyle—AI even rerouted his self-driving Tesla to pick up supplements (58:00–64:01).
  • Sid Sijbrandij (GitLab founder) allegedly beats cancer with highly personalized AI-driven protocols.

• The future is here, just unevenly distributed.

  • “The future is already here. It's just unevenly distributed.” – Sam Parr (63:07)
  • Cutting-edge AI health interventions exist, but society barely notices.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On personality and investing:

  "Personal finance is more personal than it is finance." – Sam Parr (18:55)

• On career and passion:

  "You have to know who you are and what you are predisposed to love and obsess over and then find yourself in those types of games." – Shaan Puri (07:08)

• On business problems reflecting psychology:

  "The business that you're controlling...is just an extension of your personality." – Sam Parr (14:32)

• On overactivity in investing:

  "One of the biggest leaks in investing is too much activity." – Shaan Puri (19:27)

• On AI decision-making:

  "The AI should be the company brain. We are the nodes, we are just giving it new information..." – Sam Parr (48:22)

• On the shifting opportunity landscape:

  "It's just clear to me that the ground has shifted again. The things that are going to be really interesting in the next 10 years, they're not going to look like the last generation." – Shaan Puri (56:26)

• On the technophile personality:

  "If you find a man on top of a mountain, don't assume that he's going to be reasonable or normal." – Sam Parr (65:00)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Opening & twin study: 00:00–05:06
• Pabrai and self-knowledge: 05:06–09:57
• Reverse engineering & defining games: 12:21–14:05
• Personality and business/investing: 14:05–19:51
• Reading & activity in investing: 19:51–22:44
• Averages, mindset, and S&P: 23:19–31:47
• AI as decision-maker / Company Brain: 42:20–49:52
• Startup ideas – data centers, defense tech: 33:37–56:00
• Personalized AI medicine & health: 57:33–64:41

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Takeaways

• Genetics plays a major role in how we save and invest, but self-awareness and environment still matter greatly.
• Career and investment success starts with "knowing thyself" and leaning into your natural game.
• Business problems mirror personal challenges; growth requires both insight and real-world experience.
• Do less: idle activity ruins results—often, letting things compound is best.
• The opportunity landscape for entrepreneurs and investors is constantly shifting, especially as AI fundamentally reorders business, work, even warfare.
• Personalized AI-driven medicine is already (quietly) revolutionizing health—expect it to be mainstream soon.

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This episode masterfully weaves research, story, and hands-on tactics, leaving listeners with a clear charge: know your biases, pick your game carefully, and watch for the next big shift—because the rules, and the winners, never stay the same for long.

Transcript

[Sam Parr]

All right, Sean, I have a study that's going to show why the amount of money that you make is almost entirely out of your control unless you do what I tell you to do. How is that for an opener?

[Shaun Puri]

I feel like it is like a late night infomercial that just like is about to brainwash me into something. I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it. Like no days off on a road less troll. I'm intrigued. Go on. What do you mean? You mean it's out of my control? Nothing's out of my control.

[Sam Parr]

It's about as out of control as it is your ability to control if you're 7 foot tall or not. So I got up to give a shout out to Jim o'. Shaughnessy. I saw a clip where he kind of like brought me to this topic. He talked about the study that I'm going to reference. So in 2014, there was a researcher in Sweden named Heinrich. Interesting things about the Swedes is that they are obsessed with two things. Twins and money. So Sweden has this massive twin database where they have many, many, like hundreds of thousands, hundreds of million of twins that they've documented. And for some reason you're. They track twins. I think originally they did it for health reasons, where they wanted to track like what type of twins got diseases.

[Shaun Puri]

Twins are great for studies, right, because nature is controlled. So it's all about nurture.

[Sam Parr]

Yes. And so they have this like massive database and they were able to break the database down into fraternal twins, which are twins that are born at the same time but don't look alike. And identical twins, they're also obsessed with money. They love money and in particular, the government loves money. Up until 2007, they had a wealth tax. And as part of the wealth tax, Sweden basically tracked every citizen's entire financial portfolio. So they looked at which stocks you owned, the mutual funds that you owned, every dollar of savings. They basically tracked all of this stuff. And so what was interesting is that this guy named Heinrich, he went, he had this premise, this idea where he was like, how much of investing in savings behavior is controlled by genetics. And so he looked at the differences between fraternal twins and identical twins, because presumably twins grew up in the same environment. In many cases, they have the same education levels, their parents spoke to them the same way, they were loved a similar amount, whatever. And then he looked at, well, how do the fraternal twins, who only share 50% of genetics, how do they Invest and save compared to the identical twins who have share 100% of DNA. And he broke it up into six biases. So people who held too few stocks, excess turnover, people who traded a lot performance chasing. So people who bought whatever bought that did well the year before over investing in your home country called home bias loving lottery type stocks and then the disposition effect which is refusing to sell losers. And he looked at all of this data and I think he looked at it over the course of 30,000 session twins. And additionally he looked at outliers so like for example twins that were separated at birth and a couple of stuff like that. And the results that he found was basically and concluded was that 45% of savings and investing patterns of behaviors was genetic, which I find to be astounding. And the reason I was thinking about this was you and I, I would not, I think we both and we both in different ways like investing, but we are not, I would say professional investors.

[Shaun Puri]

And yet my portfolio would also say I'm not a professional investor.

[Sam Parr]

And yet we love having professional investors on the podcast. We both love reading about Warren Buffett and people like that. And I was trying to figure out two things. The first is why do I like that so much? What, what am I drawn to these guys for so much? And the second thing was a couple podcasts ago we talked about passion and how to figure out what you're kind of supposed to be doing. And I was trying to look for a more scientific reason about why I should do what I do to address the first one of why do we like these investors so much? Well, I think I realized that in order to be a world class investor, finances are actually secondary to human nature. Financial trends change every decade. Every handful of decades, something will, some new thing will pop up. You know, spacs are this new thing. So like learning about that is important, but that changes every so often. But what doesn't change is thousands and thousands of years of human nature and understanding how humans behave and asking yourself why do they do what they do? Is significantly more important than the financial stuff on this show. We have spent hours talking to some of the best investors alive. Well, lucky for you, the team at HubSpot, they have pulled out the principles that matter most and turned it into a very simple, easy to read wealth guide. It's 35 principles from the top investors. We're talking guys who have been on the pod like Howard Marks, Manish Prabhrai, Morgan Housel, Cathie Wood and a ton others. So these are all their Frameworks, their mental models, their rules, basically how to play the long game and how to avoid ruin. You can get it in the link below.

[Shaun Puri]

There's this great story from Mohnish Pabrai. So people who've been listening to this podcast, you've probably seen that Mohnish came on the podcast twice. I think his two episodes are the most viewed episodes in the history of my first million. So he's been this kind of hall of fame guest for us. And in the interview, I don't know if you remember this, but he said this thing where he was running a company, he was an entrepreneur and he was running this company and it wasn't super, super successful, but it was like moderately successful. I think it was like a $6 million a year revenue business or something like that. Now he did this, but he wasn't loving it. He just assumed this is a normal entrepreneurial burnout. You know, I'm working really hard. I've been doing this for a long time. This shit's hard. I probably feel how most founders feel, but he was encouraged to do a, like a very fancy version of a personality test where they talk to you, they talk to your coworkers, they talk to your parents, they talk to everybody in your life, this sort of 360 and they try to understand like a little bit more about you. The result came back and they were like, you know, it's no surprise that you're miserable here. This is a game that is completely incompatible for your personality type. And he goes, what do you mean? And they go, you like? And I forgot the exact descriptor, but it was something like you like solo player, competitive number games. And he's like, what? And they're like, yeah, let's say that again. You like one person. So you by yourself, not team sports, you like solo player, competitive number based games. It's like things that had a lot of like a math or, or number thing to it. And here you were, you were running this company, so now you're playing this multiplayer competitive non numbers based game. And so he was like, okay, I don't know what to do with this. And he decided to start investing on the side. And basically it turns out that as he's, as he's done in his life, he did way better as an investor, as a solo investor playing a competitive money numbers based game, which was the stock market, than he ever did during this other thing. He really encouraged this sort of know thyself thing which is like, you have to know who you are and what you are like predisposed to love and obsess over and then find yourself in those types of games. And he. So I'll give you another example with that. When I was there, he was like, he was telling me about how he'd been kicked out of these casinos because he was winning too much money. I was like, you were card counting. He's like, no, I wasn't.

[Sam Parr]

Dude, you're running around without your shirt on. Like, I, I know the,

[Shaun Puri]

that's not a casino. That was Margaritaville. And so he was like, he, and he, off camera, he wouldn't tell me on camera, off camera, he told me, he showed me the exact system that he used. And then my, my, I've had like friends go and use this system in at these specific casinos, play this specific way. And it was, he had actually found an edge. He's like, he's like just the intellectual thrill of actually being able to beat the house. There's nothing like it. You know, financially this is not a good decision to spend thousands of hours figuring this out. But I just like those single player competitive number based games. And same thing with philanthropy. He's like, when I got into philanthropy, oh, you make money, they gotta figure out how to give it away. And it's like, should I be going to these galas and dressing up and donating to these causes and socializing and like there's a whole socialite scene with philanthropy. And what he figured out was the version that was fulfilling to him was again a single player competitive numbers based game where he realized the fun part of philanthropy for him was figuring out how to make $1 that he puts in have the highest economic return in terms of impact anywhere. So what he figured out was there were kids in India who were really smart that had no schooling. Like India's got a bit, you know, over a billion people. So a lot of people just live in rural India that are very intelligent but have no access to good education or a pathway to better their lives. They're just going to end up on a farm. And what he realized was that if he could identify the smart kids for like three, three grand a year, he could put them in like a competitive school. So they started these competitive math schools and they got them into IIT and IIT is this feeder system to like the best jobs in the world. They can go get visas and basically for three, three grand he can up the that family's earning power from 10,000 a year to 50,000 a year. So he could 5x and create like 50,000 per year for a one time, $3,000 one year acceleration in training. And his admittance rate, the normal IIT is harder to get into than Harvard, than Stanford's, harder to get into than any US college. So it's like whatever point, whatever percent admissions rate typically, and I think his is like 8% or something crazy like a 10x larger admittance rate. So even that was a single player game or whatever. And it really got me thinking about this idea of how do you know yourself enough to know what game you should and shouldn't be playing? Which is kind of a spin off of what you're talking about. Right?

[Sam Parr]

Well that's like step one.

[Shaun Puri]

Yeah. I had another kind of mentor, this guy James Currier. He told me the same thing last week. He goes, I wish somebody earlier in life had told me who I really was. I go, what? He's like, I didn't know what he meant. This could go a lot of ways right here. What are you about to say? And he was like, you know, I played soccer my whole life competitively. And what I realized is like, you know, I was actually not very attuned to playing soccer, but I was actually really good at racket sports. I had long wingspan, good hand eye coordination, and I should have been playing racquetball early on. He goes, the same thing happened in my career. You know, I was doing these types of businesses when I really should have been doing this type of thing. It got me wondering, wow, there's probably billions of people walking around who never discovered what game they're actually great at and never got into that game and therefore like kind of life passed them by. Isn't that sort of a, a tragedy?

[Sam Parr]

Yeah, well, like, I don't, selfishly, I don't think about other people. I just think about myself where I'm like, where I'm like, focus on the

[Shaun Puri]

more important bit me.

[Sam Parr]

But that's, but that's what everyone thinks, you know, they think like, okay, but how does this apply to me? And I think it was Andrew Wilkinson who told me about that self assessment thing, which I really dig.

[Shaun Puri]

Did you do it?

[Sam Parr]

Yeah, it was awesome.

[Shaun Puri]

What's like the. When you're like a teen and you're like discovering yourself and you get a little curious. I think we're both a little bicurus here.

[Sam Parr]

Yeah,

[Shaun Puri]

little my curious right now.

[Sam Parr]

There's two of us, therefore we are bi curious.

[Shaun Puri]

So. So what game do you think you would be disposed. I don't even know what the options are. Right. Like, I don't think I'm single player, competitive numbers based game. That's not me. But I don't even know what the menu looks like. So. So what do you think yours is researching?

[Sam Parr]

I think it'd be like a new topic and going super deep and obsessing over one topic and coming to it, trying to, trying to a conclusion.

[Shaun Puri]

Right. So naturally go run Hampton. Yeah, you're describing like sitting alone on a couch with a book and thinking and really like finding your joy and you're, you're being the best at that. And then you're like, so I'm going to go sit in an office with 50 other people.

[Sam Parr]

I thank God my, my co founder Joe is the CEO, so he runs Hampton. But it's when we like are gearing up to launch something new. Like I'm in my zone of genius when I'm like researching how others have done something similar to us and where they failed and when they won, and then going talking to experts and weaseling my way into conversations of people who have been there, done that and being like, tell me, tell me, like the mistakes that I'm going to make.

[Shaun Puri]

I think you and I are both similar in this weird way. I thought this was completely normal until somebody pointed out that hey, that's probably not super common. I was talking to this guy who's a book developer. One thing this, one of the things this guy has done is he's written some of the most popular books as a ghostwriter for smart, successful, famous people. Okay, great. So I'm talking to him and he's like, okay, so what's your book idea? And I'm telling him my book idea. And I talked to him a couple of times over a couple of years. And so he had seen me talking about a couple of different book ideas. And he goes, you know, maybe we save this for later. He goes, but I think the most interesting about you is. And I'm like. He pauses. This is very interesting to me. Cause this guy's job is to spend time with really smart people and he lets them talk for hours and hours and hours. And then he's like, oh, the real story here is X. And they're like, really? That? And he's like, yeah, that's the most interesting part about this. And that's his gift. So he goes, the most interesting part about you is you have some weird predilection for reverse engineering businesses or reverse engineering. He goes, everything you do, you seem to reverse engineer as a first, like as a first instinct. Whereas most people, I don't think do that. And he's like, whether it's like something in life, you know, it could be family oriented. You told me this, it could be creatively this, it could be investment. And Sam, you're the same way where it's like, I think our first instinct when we want to do something is like, all right, let me go study in history how other people have done this. Let me go talk to the other people who've already done this. And I'm going to reverse engineer based on the principles that they tell me. I know what to ignore of what they're going to say, I know what to focus in on and I'm going to create my own system and my own understanding and then I'll just do that. And I think we both do that as our default mode and it's what we enjoy doing. And I don't think that that's common.

[Sam Parr]

And here's an example. Whenever we have someone on the podcast and they explain, they'll ask for advice or something like that. Instead of saying like, well, you should probably raise such your capital or you should, you should probably do this, the first question is always like, well, how would you define success in five years? Like what? Like what, what?

[Shaun Puri]

Backwards?

[Sam Parr]

Yeah, like what's the definition of success to you? And then let's figure out what the rules will be to the game. Then we will can give feedback. But the reason why I've been always obsessed with this is I've noticed in my company the times that I have issues, which is all the time. The times that I have issues, every waking breath, yeah, every time I screw something up, every day I, I'm like, I have to change the business, I have to change the people, I have to change all of these external things. But the reality is, and this is why I think I like capitalism so much, is that the business that you're controlling, if you are controlling, it's just an extension of your personality. So if you have trust issues, then your coworkers are probably going to think that you're micromanaging them. If you have trouble committing, then they're going to think that you're absent minded. The issues that you have in the company, they are an extension of the issues that you have and vice versa. If you are a kind person, you're going to have a kind culture. I think, and I think that what investing habits are, are just human nature habits and that's why investing is really interesting. And so even though this study was related to finance and it's the exact Same thing. So if you tend to have excessive turnover with your stocks, which is one of the six biases, then perhaps you struggle having steady relationships. If you tend to overinvest in like stocks in your home country, which they call a home bias, the likelihood that you have moved from your hometown is actually quite low. And so what I have found is that the best ways to make change in these issues, for one, it's not just reading. And so I wrote down this line, which was that change requires pain, not words. Because according to this study, what they found is once they normalize for education, meaning they took two people who both had business degrees. If that's, if person number two went and read a bunch of business books, they wouldn't necessarily be a better investor. What they found was that the only thing that made a meaningful difference other than genetics was people who worked in finance. Meaning you have to like, you have to experience a loss like, oh, I did this, I got burnt, I can't put my hand there again. Versus just constantly reading about burning your hand. You'll still burn your hand. Even in the book thinking fast and slow, he even says, he's like, I'm writing a book on biases, but I suffer from all these same things and I have to work on this all the time. And so the best way I think, or the, I wrote down like four ways that you can like prevent this. But one of the biggest ways to harness this is what Warren, Warren Buffett said. He just said, actually again, we invest in our zone of genius. And what that means is Warren Buffett is a slow and steady type of guy. So he invests in slow and steady types of, types of things. Which would entirely explain why he's adverse to Bitcoin, which would entirely explain that if he were a type of, if he were 18 or 25 nowadays, he probably would not consider having an AI startup that raised lots and lots of VC. The people who do that tend to be the ones who want dopamine a lot faster, who maybe care about glory. And you have to optimize the thing that you're working on for the personality that you have. But the other ways that you get rid of this, I think is that you have to pre commit so the future doesn't decide. Basically, don't go to a grocery store hungry. So like when you make a decision, you write it down like, if I'm gonna, I'm going to fire this person in month three after hiring them if they don't hit these requirements, did they or did they not Hit the requirements, you stick to it. Not if you're, like, predisposed to, like, you know, not like, confrontation. Another one would be to shorten the feedback loop so you're able to, like, see points on the scoreboard very fast and get new information quick. And the last one, you can't play games where your bias will be fatal. And that sort of means, like, for me, I'm a control freak. I'm a little bit of a slow and steady type of guy, right? Raising lots of VC where I'm not in control and I'm expected to go really, really, really fast. That would potentially be a fatal game for me. So I'd be setting myself up to lose.

[Shaun Puri]

That's really interesting. So I, I, I like the, the two premises you have. One, the problems you see in your situation, whether that's your life or your work workplace, is a mirror to the problems you have in your psychology. And then the, the, then the four or five tactics you just described are like, okay, what's the remedy? And also the insight, which is, I think Morgan Hounsell's book is this, which is basically getting wealthy through the money game. And investing is far less about strategy and far more about behavior. And it's your own poor behavior that leads to poor financial results, not poor strategy.

[Sam Parr]

He says it in a much better way, which I stole from him. I wrote it down here. I said, personal finance is more personal than it is finance, right?

[Shaun Puri]

Yeah, exactly. So I think that's great. It's also interesting because you said the best investors weren't necessarily the ones reading more books at the same time. All the best investors talk constantly about the books they're reading. And I actually thought about it while you were saying might be a weird thing. So it might not be that the knowledge in the books is super important. It might be that one of the biggest leaks in investing is too much activity. And the remedy for too much activity is actually to just busy yourself with bridge and books and playing pickleball and doing other things so that you are not prone to just sitting there and pushing buttons. Because it's the pushing buttons that's the problem. And so it might be that reading, it might not even matter what you actually are reading, but just simply that it takes you away from constant activity is actually the best part of the reason why all these great investors read so much.

[Sam Parr]

Or put differently, if you found a company that's going well, which, that's the situation I'm in, I've noticed the best thing that I can do is to do nothing. Because oftentimes when I meddle, it gets screwed up. Or if you like, let's say that you're trying to get popular on social media and you notice that when you post three times a day, you get growth. It's like, just do that. Don't do other things. Like this idea of like, it's working, just continue and that you need something else to do in order to have your playground where you're allowed to mess something up, but don't mess up the main thing.

[Shaun Puri]

Yeah, there's a great example of this I just picked up. Buffett did an interview with the Berkshire thing and he talked about this, which was like. Because Berkshire has, I think, almost $400 billion in cash and it's just been piling up over the last five years and they just haven't deployed it anywhere.

[Sam Parr]

I wonder what that even means. Like, where is.

[Shaun Puri]

They just have $400 billion in like treasury bills?

[Sam Parr]

Basically, it's Treasury, Yeah.

[Shaun Puri]

Wow.

[Sam Parr]

I wonder what percentage of like the US treasury that that makes up.

[Shaun Puri]

I don't think it's that much. There's trillions in T bills. You know, it's not, not zero, but it's not, not more than like 5%. So he, he was talking about, like, well, well, you know, we, we don't do anything unless there's something to do. And he was talking about this. There's an Amazon. Jeff Bezos just gave this interview and he said the same thing. He goes, early in Amazon's history, Jeff Wilkie came to me one day and said, jeff, you have enough ideas to destroy Amazon. And he goes, what? He said, you have enough ideas per minute, per day, per week to destroy Amazon. I said, what do you mean? He goes, you have to figure out how to release the work at the right rate that the organization can accept it. Because every time I released an idea, I created a backlog, a queue, a work in process, a distraction. And it was just stacking up, it was adding no value the way I was doing it. In fact, I was creating distraction. So I had to learn how to prioritize the ideas better. Keeping lists of them, keeping those on myself until the organization was ready for the ideas. And I saw this and I was like, oh, you, Honor, I plead guilty. Because the same thing, if you're very generative with ideas feels good, and the ideas themselves might be great ideas, it might be a very sound idea. And so it seems like you're doing nothing wrong, but you can literally drown your company in ideas. And I've done This many times, especially like the growth teams or the marketing teams. It's like, here's 14 marketing ideas, and then every day two more are coming. And then I'm gonna send you a tweet about something somebody else is doing that you guys should check out. And then I'm tell you this, and then I'm gonna have an event you should go to. And then there's this guy you should meet. And then there's this thing we should try. And then. Did that ever work? We should try again. And I can literally suffocate an organization by releasing too many ideas into the org at once. Right. It's just again, like you described, like a personality defect that becomes a culture defect, a operational defect.

[Sam Parr]

I read that same quote, I think six months ago. And so my co founder, Joe, who's the CEO, we set up this meeting every Thursday, and it's the only meeting that him and I have together. And it's just when we go through a running list of ideas and it's a. He's like, just say anything you want. We could say anything. We can talk about anything you want. And it just end this room. We can pillow. Yeah, we'll talk about anything you want. I don't think we're going to do any of it, but maybe we will. But like, let's just, we can get it out. And don't slack me any ideas, though. But he's like, just have a running notion list. Yeah. And we'll, we'll go through any idea that you want. And then maybe we'll. Maybe we'll do something.

[Shaun Puri]

All right, let's take a quick break and I got a question for you. When a buyer asks AI for a solution like yours, does your business come up? Most companies have no idea. And by the time they found out, they've already lost the deal to another company that did. HubSpot has AEO, which helps you show up in the moments when the right buyers are looking for a company like yours before the first click, before they fill in the form. That is the moment HubSpot AEO is built for. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. I have a different tactic with these research papers, which is I basically read it and then I say, does this serve me? And like, if the conclusion of that was that your genetic disposition determines half of your financial success, you know, I tend to just throw things like that out the window, partially because there are some great lies and statistics. Right. Like Howard Marks, who was on the Podcast described. He's like, oh, what's the S&P's average annual return? And we're like, 10%. He's like, yeah, but do you know how often 10% happens? And it was like, pretty much never. The actual. The actual annual returns vary widely. So it might be the mean, but it's definitely not the median or the mode. And. And so, like, you have these numbers, and do you expect it's going to be 9, 10%? And it's almost never 9, 10. It overperforms and underperforms, and it averages out to that. And same thing. Like, you know, many men drown in the. In the pool that was crossing the river that was on average 5ft. 5ft in depth, because averages don't tell you so much. And so there's all kinds of these statistical things that can mislead you that just because something is a norm or an average or was studied once, that that's. That is. I guess I should draw a conclusion from that. And I'm a big fan of basically, like, productive placebos. So the question is not what is the situation, is what. What do I need to believe in order to do the things that will lead to a good result? Right? And so, you know, I don't need to know everything. I don't need to know even what's right, what's true. True. Who cares what's true? It's what's useful is what matters. And so I try to find what are the beliefs that I need to stuff in my brain that is going to lead to me doing the things I want to do to have the life I want to have.

[Sam Parr]

Dude, that's so weird that that's your takeaway. My takeaway is the opposite, which is if these are the facts, then how do I use the facts to continue to get what I want?

[Shaun Puri]

First of all, there's like, this huge replication crisis where who knows if these are even the facts? And then secondly, even if they were the facts, if the facts are telling me that it's out of my control and that, you know, whatever my DNA was is imprinting, you know, half, it's kind of like, you know, Lloyd and dumb and dumber. It's like, so you're saying there's a chance. It's like, oh, so there's still 55 in my control. Fantastic. So it's like, why did I need to know any of that? All I needed to know was that here's the. Here's the behaviors that lead people to make money. Here's the behaviors that lead people to lose money. Do the ones that make money avoid the ones that lose? I think what you're saying is that your genetic disposition is going to, like, bias you towards maybe failing in a couple of these more than others and be more on guard to those. Is that the takeaway?

[Sam Parr]

Yes.

[Shaun Puri]

Which of those five or six are you most guilty of? Because I was guilty of all of those. Every one of those I do wrong. What do you mean?

[Sam Parr]

I haven't spent enough time to think

[Shaun Puri]

about this, but I'm pretty home country bias. I'm not like buying, like, industrials in Indonesia.

[Sam Parr]

But that's not. I mean, I don't think the bias. That's not how biases work. Where it's like, you only do these and not all these. Obviously you do all of them. It's just what you towards. I would say probably refusing to sell losers.

[Shaun Puri]

You're like, I don't know. I'm pretty good, actually.

[Sam Parr]

No, I mean, I do. No, what I'm saying is I do all of them, but I do some more than others. I'm trying to think, which ones do I do most?

[Shaun Puri]

Mine's definitely the activity one over activity.

[Sam Parr]

I don't have that issue, but. And I don't have performance chasing. I do, like, stick to what I know. And I. I've. I've always done that. And I do refuse to sell losers. I get emotional about, like, the things that I like.

[Shaun Puri]

Right. Let me ask you this. You. You sold the hustle six years ago. Five years ago. What was it?

[Sam Parr]

February of 21.

[Shaun Puri]

All right, so let's call it five years. Has that performed well? Because obviously you got a huge slug of capital. Have you doubled in the five years? Are you like.

[Sam Parr]

Well, assume that 80% went into the S&P 500. Yeah, it's double. Is it up 75%? Yeah, I think the S and P, I mean, just whatever the S and p is up. 80% of my portfolio is up that amount.

[Shaun Puri]

Right. And I'm curious how you feel. You know, Howard Marks came on and he said, hey, the s and P500 right now is a bad bet. And so here's you got a guy who's whatever, 900 years old, who's got all of the experience and all of the knowledge. And he says, he comes on our podcast and says to our face, the S and P is a bad bet right now. And he says it's because it's valued at 23 times PE ratio, whatever it is, on average.

[Sam Parr]

That was in August that he came

[Shaun Puri]

on and he said the 10 year history tells us, the data tells us that the next 10 years will fluctuate between -2 and 2%. When the S and P, when you buy in at this valuation, is it like yeah, sure, but like, but here's my counter argument or is it just like la la la la la in my ears, is it just, I don't know enough, I'm just not going to worry about it like for peace of mind, like what was your reaction to that?

[Sam Parr]

So just, I went into the math. Just so you know, the market's up 12.5% since he said that.

[Shaun Puri]

Yeah, he's saying 10 years. Right. So it's not like a five month

[Sam Parr]

thing when he says that. I think I don't, I don't care, I think I know that like I study America, I study history. History will probably continue to re repeat itself for the while I'm alive. And if I'm, I think America will continue to exist. But the s and P500 at this point is not an American index, it's a global index. And so I just think that it's just going to keep on going and I am chasing 8% nominal return every single year. And if I get that, which I feel quite high, that I will, that I will, then I'm very happy. And that fits within my plan that I set out when I was, when I, before I sold the country saying I study history.

[Shaun Puri]

He's saying the history shows that it's not just 8%. It depends what your entry point valuation is. Which makes sense. Right? Obviously.

[Sam Parr]

But what, but, but, but he, but he didn't say that it's not going to be that way for the next 50 years. What I'm looking at is you're just saying like longer time horizon, longer than just a decade. Yes. What I, what I look at is to when I'm 100, basically when I was 21 years old, I set a target where I want this amount of money while I'm 30 and if I get that amount of money at the age of 30, that will grow 8% a year, which means I can spend this amount on my life and I could still have X, Y and Z, which I can leave or give away. And I just don't think that what Howard Mark says, which if he is right, it won't break that plan. And as that as long as 8% per year over 40 years on average, as long as that happens, which I believe it will, then I am happy.

[Shaun Puri]

I love that. If you wrote like a book on Investing. And you, like, open it up. It would just be like, America would be like the. The first page, right?

[Sam Parr]

The S&P 500. Is Apple an American company? Of course not. Do you know what I mean?

[Shaun Puri]

It is. It's an American company.

[Sam Parr]

Is Toyota a Japanese company? Of course not. They make Toyota here in America. You know, I lived in Tennessee, nearby the Nissan plant. Like, it's all.

[Shaun Puri]

If a company is headquartered here, vast majority of employees are here. Vast majority of revenue is here. Vast majority of profits is here. It's. For all intents and purposes, it's an American company. Whether that number's not 100%, but is it 60%, 70%, it's still a majority.

[Sam Parr]

I just don't know what that means to me. Like, you just said a lot of words that to me were vague. If the profits are here, if the ma.

[Shaun Puri]

Who's buying the iPhones, right? Like, where are the. I don't know if the. I don't know if the answer is majority. Let's ask. Let's ask Claude here. So 43% of total revenue comes from American sales. 54% of the, like, operating income.

[Sam Parr]

Okay, so let's just say half on both accounts. Ish. Give or take 10%. I don't know. Is that an American company?

[Shaun Puri]

We're both right.

[Sam Parr]

When you sold, what percent is it up based off of whatever you did with it, which I don't know what you did with it.

[Shaun Puri]

My net worth is up 40 times or something since we sold.

[Sam Parr]

Right?

[Shaun Puri]

It says up a lot. But the problem is a huge percentage. That probably 70% of that came from companies we started or we own. And not like, oh, I'm a good investor in the public stock market. So, you know, I don't know.

[Sam Parr]

Do you consider private companies to be part of your net worth?

[Shaun Puri]

Yeah, of course, dude. I don't calculate, but I don't say liquid net worth. Right? I have liquid net worth. That's one. Whenever I do my. Like, every two months when I just feel like I need more money, and then I go, okay, let's go see how much money we actually have. Let's go see what's going on. And I go and I calculate liquid net worth, and I calculate the illiquid net worth. I look at them separately. Because the illiquid one, that one thing can go wrong in two of these businesses, and that could get wiped out. Right? It can go way down. Our E. Commerce business was a much bigger percentage of net worth, but it's gone down. Because if that business hasn't performed as well as the other businesses because when tariffs hit and you know, consumer sentiment has changed and our margins shrunk a little bit like, you know, hit a little bit of a plateau. Like there has been changes in that. So, okay, we have to mark that down internally of like how much we think that's worth. We thought it was worth X. Now it's worth a little less than X. Today's podcast is brought to you by my friends at Mercury. They make the world's best banking product. I think you know this already. I use Mercury for all my businesses. I think I have like maybe seven or eight businesses. We use Mercury as our business, banking across all of them. And now they actually just launched a personal banking account. So I have my personal account there. I moved off of Wells Fargo and Chase. I'm just all in on Mercury. Why? I like products that are easy to use. I like products that get me and the problems that I have. So like very easy to make a joint account with my wife. Very easy to spin up virtual cards. One click and I get savings yield. It just has all the stuff that I need in one place. So if you're looking for the best banking product on the market, it's definitely Mercury. I will fist fight anybody who disagrees with me on that. Go to mercury.compersonal and learn more. Mercury is a FinTech, not an FDIC insured bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group and column NA members fdic.

[Sam Parr]

What was your topic?

[Shaun Puri]

What I want to talk to you about is a couple of business ideas that broke my brain. And these come from the YC request for start list. If you don't know yc the most successful accelerator invest early stage investor in the world in the history of the world. They helped see Airbnb and Dropbox and they were the first investor at like a $2 million valuation in these like you know, $100 billion companies now. Great. So they every year release these request to shops and for. And I've been looking at these lists for like 10 years. Right. And most years it's kind of like you just nod along, you're like, oh, okay, cool.

[Sam Parr]

No, they do it every semester or every quarter. They have fall, summer, spring, winter.

[Shaun Puri]

Right. And they used to do it a little bit less often and it would be things that were like, hey, better software for lawyers. Hey, somebody should make a, a tool that helps this person do this. It is normal sounding businesses.

[Sam Parr]

Well, some of them are not. Some one of our three years ago was a way to end cancer.

[Shaun Puri]

Like okay, so, so over time they've been getting progressively more, I don't know if you want to say, like ambitious or just impressive or like, you know, just sort of breaking my brain. So the one I want to talk to you about the most, which I think you have a bunch of ideas around, but I have, I have three that I want to talk to you about. I'll start with a fun one and then we'll go to the most brain breaking one at the end. Fun one is this. This isn't on their list, but it came from one of the X, Y, Z guys, Daniel Gross, who's great. He's talking about esthetic data centers. And so there's this problem right now in the world where we need way more data centers and we need way more power in order to like quote, unquote, win the AI race. And the problem is that most Americans actually hate AI. It's crazy. Like they use AI, but they hate AI. They don't like AI, they don't like what's where it's going. They don't like the big tech companies. It's like all the big, big, big tech backlash is just like ratcheted up for some reason. If you go read like the TikTok comments about anything about AI, it's unbelievable. People really do not like AI. They don't like AI art, they don't like AI music. They don't like AI, you know, productivity. They don't like data centers. They think it's taking their, it's going to increase their power bills, it's going to like use all their water. There's all kinds of different things, even though the data would say the opposite, right? Like, you know, golf courses use 100 times more water than data centers, but nobody's out here like protesting a golf course. And so there's this problem which is that these big companies need to build data centers. But the towns all have this sort of like, not in my backyard mentality when it comes to data centers. So somebody brought up, Daniel Gross brought up this idea. He's like, I think that we need to, if we look at these data centers, the spend is so high to build them, right? We're talking like billions of dollars to build one. The incremental extra to make it like architecturally beautiful or interesting or something that helps the feels good in the neighborhood type of deal is very small and we should really be considering this. And I just thought this was a really interesting idea. I had never thought about, I thought you as a man of style, history and Culture would appreciate this, that there's probably some historical comps to this that I don't know about that you might be able to think about where companies sort of figure out how to almost create a public good or create public art in a way to almost corporate wash their agenda.

[Sam Parr]

I can give you a great one.

[Shaun Puri]

Yeah.

[Sam Parr]

So John Rockefeller, he was sort of like the Jeff bezos of the 1920s. He started Standard Oil, which by the time he was 50 years old, it was the largest company in the world. So large that Teddy Roosevelt became a monopoly buster. And the non monopoly act in America was created because of him. So he had this really bad energy about him where people thought he was just like, you know, Scrooge McDuck type of guy. Well, he also was part owner of a mine, I think it was in Colorado. And they were basically. Standard Oil was so big they needed to do. Create their own mine in order to get the chemicals they needed to make the ovens for the. To make the. You know, to make all their. Anyway, John D. Jr. Was the predecessor. He was the son of John Senior and he takes over the company. And he's a. He's a good guy. And he's John D. Senior. He actually was a good guy as well. But he goes to his son, he's like, I need you to figure out how to do good in this world and like bring our name back and do what's right. Well, Junior goes to this mine and he sees that like tens of thousands of workers are living in squalor. It's horrible. And the reason he goes there is because I believe that there was a flood and like 200 people died in this little crappy mining town which is basically a company town. And John Jr goes there and he's like, this is horrible. I can't believe we let this happen. I see why you guys died. This is, this is garbage the way you guys are living. I feel so bad. We have to do something about this. And he does do something about it, but his reputation is truly harmed. Well, the Great depression happens in New York City. A lot of jobs get screwed up and a lot of blue collar workers go on are forload and just laid off. And he's like, we gotta do something. And he comes up with this idea with this for an architectural project and he builds this massive tower in midtown New York City. And he's like, we're gonna make this amazing. It's gonna be one of the greatest things ever. And we're gonna employ like 10,000 people. We're gonna revitalize the city. And that is Rockefeller Center. And Rockefeller center is a huge tower surrounded by smaller towers. And in the, in the beginning, or, sorry, the courtyard, there's a man lifting up the world. It's like, supposed to be like Atlas, you know, and he was sort of like, this signifies what we're trying to do. We are trying to take, like, the bad in, in this area, in this era of time. We're going to try to make this amazing. So John D. Rockefeller is an example of someone who has done what I call reputation laundering. He, like, he. He took something that was bad. And so John D. Jr actually has a great reputation. And a lot of people believe it's in part because of Rockefeller Center.

[Shaun Puri]

That's a great example. I asked AI also for some other examples of this, and it talks about. One funny example that I didn't know about was when cell phone towers were needed, like everywhere, right? Like phone towers. People didn't like these ugly steel towers that would put up. So they created. Have you ever seen a monopine or a monopalm? It's basically a cell tower that is like a Halloween costume where it looks like a palm tree or a pine tree at the top. They just like fake put like, bark. They put fake bark and fake branches and fake, fake plastic, you know, pine needles so that it looks like a tree and not like a ugly steel thing. And that's how they got through and building out the infrastructure needed. Another example was Carnegie. So Carnegie obviously had Carnegie Steel, and Then he built 2,500 libraries across America while, while running Carnegie Steel. And it served as like, you know, a good to each of the communities. And this is while like, there was like, huge strikes happening because, like, they had pretty brutal labor practices.

[Sam Parr]

He was such a hypocrite. He was like, I'm gonna do all this good stuff for the world. But he had this famous quote where he would say, if you watch the cost, the profits will follow. And for him, the biggest cost was workers costs. And he was known for being a, a kind of a jackass when it came to workers.

[Shaun Puri]

And so, and so I think there's. I think this is something very interesting I, I would predict is gonna happen. I don't know what they're gonna do. I don't know if it's like park spaces or if the. If they're going to design the actual data centers to look like the bird's nest or whatever. I don't know what they're gonna do. But it does seem like they're Gonna have to do something.

[Sam Parr]

It totally can be done. Have you been to the, like. Do you know the Paramount in Oakland? The theater where I used to host my event? Do you remember how beautiful that is? That's from the 1930s, but, like, up until, like, the 1950s, I would say before, like, right before the end of World War II, a lot of these buildings were gorgeous. I live in the upper side of West New York City, and the architecture from any. They call it a pre war building. They're absolutely gorgeous. So I just. I don't know why, like, this minimalism took place where, like, it's things a lot more plain. But this is a great idea.

[Shaun Puri]

Shout out to David Perel and Cultural Tutor, who are. Who are on a crusade right now to bring beauty back to the world. And so if you haven't seen. Go watch their. Go look up Cultural Tutor, I think, on YouTube and watch the sort of. The stuff they're putting out. It's got millions of views. People really resonated with this, like, why does everything look the same? And why does everything look so bland now? I would have never guessed that that would touch such a nerve, but it definitely does. They have found, like, something that the. That people resonate with a lot. And they're building like a whole, like, I think they're doing like a movie on it or something like that. They're doing something cool with that. All right, can I give you two of these other ideas that kind of broke my brain a little bit. So one is the company brain. I think you've been thinking about this.

[Sam Parr]

I do it now. We have it now.

[Shaun Puri]

There's. And there's a bunch of different ways to take this. What does this mean? So there's two ways to take this. I'll. I'll just describe the first one. The one that's more interesting to me today. AI is seen as a very smart assistant. So it's someone you go to when you have a question and it'll go fetch you the answer. It's somebody you go to when you have a task and you delegate the task and it'll try to do the task for you. So it's kind of like this, junior. Everybody gets a chief of staff. Everybody gets an assistant who's smart, always on, and doesn't talk back. Fantastic. And that's what I think the mental model most people have of how AI is going to. Going to, going to work. And some people sort of see it as like, oh, it'll be like you'll have digital employees, like, oh, well, we'll probably hire fewer people because they'll just be like kind of these workers, these AI workers, these guys in the coal mine, just digging for us. Ah, this is so great. We're gonna have so many. We're gonna have so much productivity. And I think actually it's going the other way, which is it's not that the AI works for us, but that we work for the AI. And people are gonna hate that sentence. But let me just describe what that means. AI is very good at understanding a broad set of information, having eyes and ears everywhere, reading everything, knowing everything, and making decisions. Today we use it as the sort of junior employee. But it does seem like the way this is going is that AI becomes the boss. Jack Dorsey is probably the most vocal about this right now. So he laid off tens of thousands of people at Block. And I think he's trying to, like, change the way the, you know, like, the org structure looks inside of a company. And I believe maybe I have this wrong. Sam, you can correct me if I'm wrong. I believe what he's saying is basically that the AI is the brain, and the rest of us are giving context to the brain. So we're out there, we're trying to feed it the right information so that it can make the right decisions. And then we go do tasks. And those tasks also produce information that comes back to the brain. The brain sort of knows everything that's going on in the company, can weigh all the different factors and can make awesome decisions at high speed, with less bias, with less fatigue, with less stress than the rest of us. And it does seem like this is the way that things are going. I could say this only just for my own use, which is I started out very much in a hey, go do this, or hey, tell me this type of mode. And more and more I basically say, hey, can you ask me questions? I'll give you some answers. Then can you help me make this decision? Hey, can you tell me what the right move is here? And it's very good at doing it right. And so the question is, like, are companies going to work this way? And I'll give you one last story that's on top of this. So I don't know if you remember, but a few months ago, there's this research arm called Citrini that put out this research, that put out this blog post. And the blog post basically described this sort of almost like a bit of a doomsday scenario. Basically, what they described was that you're going to get all this Productivity from AI, which means you're going to have fewer people working at these companies. So you're going to have less people earning wages, which is what you need, because the wages of one person become the spending in the economy, which becomes the wages of the next person. And so when you have fewer employees, then you have fewer wages. When you have fewer wages, you're going to have less spending. When you have less spending, you have less revenue and we have less revenue. Then you're going to tighten the belt even more and cut more staff. And it creates this downward spike spiral. And maybe they said it's smarter than that, but ultimately this was the, the sort of conclusion that they had of how you might get this productivity gain and it still might result in the economy going down. This, I don't know if it triggered or created or maybe just coincidentally there was a huge sell off in the stock market. Like the stock market went down like a huge percentage on the back of this because people got pretty worried about what's going to happen in the US economy because again, the S&P 500 is an American index. All right, let's go back. So, so, so you, you hear this and you're like, wow, that's pretty bad. And basically they, they wrote this thing that's kind of depressing for everybody.

[Sam Parr]

I asked AI to summarize it in three sentences. Imagine that the bulls are right and that AI works exactly as everyone predicts. That's precisely what breaks the economy. The white collar jobs get gutted, displaced workers earn far less, consumer spending collapse, and the productivity gains flow entirely to the owners of compute rather than circulating throughout households.

[Shaun Puri]

Right. And so there's a big market sell off. Everybody gets mad at Citrini people, whether if you agreed with them, you got mad at their conclusion. If you disagreed with them, you got mad at them for spreading, you know, doom and gloom.

[Sam Parr]

And they, I imagine were short. Right.

[Shaun Puri]

I'm not sure they sell the research. So I don't think they, they sell the research. I think they might have like a capital arm, but it's like pretty small if I remember correctly. It's like, it's not a huge thing. So then a few months later, they go viral again. And this time it was for the analyst number three where they basically they sent a researcher out to the Strait of Hormuz. This guy went on this like, you know, Jason Bourne mission and he sneaks across the border of Oman and he bribes this guy to take him out in a boat into the Strait and he tries to collect first first party data. And he says, oh wow, look, it's not open or closed, but it's functioning as a bit of a toll route where if you, if you are from the right country and you pay the right bribe, you get through the strait. It's not fully closed and it's not fully open. And they found this and they fed that information back and people again got mad at them and they go, look, first you got mad at us for telling you that the white collar jobs are going away, and then you get mad at us when we show you the only types of jobs that are going to be left. Which is basically feeding real world information and context back into the engine. And that's what the future of analysts look like. It's not guys sitting at spreadsheets because guess what the AI is much better at sitting at. They're looking at a spreadsheet, reading every earnings report, listening to every earnings call on earth simultaneously and coming up with the right decision. It's going to far outperform an analyst. So what does an analyst need to do now? You better be in the field getting better information, higher quality first party data to give back to the AI so it can make a better trading decision. That's what an analyst is going to be. And I just thought, oh, that's really interesting how that like the reframe of like what a job was and what a job is going to be and then, you know, what does that look like across other jobs? So I just find this whole idea of like the company brain, the AI brain is basically the AI management software.

[Sam Parr]

What Jack Dorsey, I think he originally said this on Brian Halligan's podcast. And I think he said, what you're describing is the way that you previously, and I previously used AI when a lot of people are doing it this way is you are the human and you are in a circle and there's nodes connecting to you and you are this decision maker. And the AI machines and agents are feeding you new information to help you make the right decision as the CEO. Right as the CEO or business owner or project manager. And what they're saying is that's all wrong. The AI should make the decision. And the humans should be around the AI. The AI should be the company brain. We are the line, we are the nodes, we are just giving it new information. And in some ways the AI is making a decision, but also going to execute or we will be in charge of the execution. But the AI is the thinker, not us. And the reality is, I believe that, except that Humans will have editing capabilities.

[Shaun Puri]

Sure, sure, yeah. It's not all. Not all. One or the other. That's a pretty brain breaking concept to me because it's just so. It just flips the world model upside down of how I thought the world works and would work.

[Sam Parr]

So do you use anything for this? I use Victor. I have no connection to these guys. It's getvikr.com V I K T O R and it like connects to all these tools. And in Slack, everyone at my company just asks the information.

[Shaun Puri]

I don't use any of those because I don't trust them. I'm kind of waiting to see kind of how this plays out. I try not to give startups like too much information because startups are just like super leaky buckets in general. And I, you know, I've been inside startups and you could just like, you know, some random employee can see everything and you know, they're not super concerned about security because they don't know when they're, you know, they're just trying to grow is generally how things, no matter what they say. Like, I remember once I used some like telehealth thing and our buddy Sieva was like, bro, whatever, whatever you got. Everybody that startup now knows what you got. He's like, you what? What do you got? You got a fungus, they know you got a fungus, you got a, you got a virus, they know you got a virus. Whatever you got, they know. And I was like, he's so right. You just have to assume that that's true if you're going to use a startup's product.

[Sam Parr]

Dude, every once in a while I'll, I'll, I'll buy something from a company. Like, and like the other day I bought shoes from someplace and they emailed me, the founder did, and was like, oh, I love your podcast, so I'm thankful that you shopped here. And I was like, you're trying to treat me nicely and that's wonderful, but what if I was buying a cream? You know what I mean? Like, I wouldn't, I don't want you to do this.

[Shaun Puri]

I meant medium, not extra large.

[Sam Parr]

All right, what's the other one that you like?

[Shaun Puri]

The other ones I would say are the scary ones. So one here is like drone swarm defense. They talked about the story I hadn't actually heard about, which was that the Iranians sent a small shitty drone swarm and took out a AWS data center that didn't have like drone defense protection. They just blew it up. And they're like, yeah, that's going to happen more and we need a defense for low cost drones. And what they talked about is like the US military is almost built wrong. Like I forgot what the name of the, whatever the missile is that. But like we basically send like 2 million dollar missiles to knock out 200 drones. And like that's just, they're going to make that trade every day. They're like great, exhaust yourself. That's expensive for you and it's cheap for us. And so just this idea of like, wow, war is really going to change. And then you got, you got like Anduril and others trying to build these like defense systems. And there's many companies like this, that many startups that are in this field. But just reminding me there's going to be a lot of these like Andover type companies because it seems like the nature of war has changed and like all of the, if you go look at like the decorated generals that are buying, you know, that lead, lead our stuff, like I wonder if that's the right person, you know, and I, I mean that in the most respectful way possible. But like if you fought a war and you, what you know about war is from a completely different tech thing. Like you're going to be obviously playing catch up. And I'm sure they are, I'm sure they're asking all the right questions and trying to get up to speed. But it's almost like Ender's game in a way where you kind of need people who have a bit of a blank slate and can think from first principles like where are the attacks going to come from and what are they going to look like? And like, you know, people who grew up more on video games and less on the battlefield. Right, because it's going to look more like cyber hacking, it's going to look more like drones than it is, you know, Braveheart.

[Sam Parr]

Karp, the Palantir guy put out this 21 rule or his manifesto and one of the rules was that. Or one of the points was that Silicon Valley should be more involved in like with the US military, the US government. It's kind of crazy now that like the nerds are going to be involved like that. It's, it's just this really like interesting cultural shift now where it's the nerds are into like the government and like defense tech. That's a very strange, I'm very curious how that impacts things.

[Shaun Puri]

Well, the reason I bring it up is just because sometimes like the, the ground moves under your feet and I remember feeling this when I moved to Silicon Valley. And I think I was pretty dumb. And I guess I had read about what just worked and I was like, that's the thing to do. And of course, like, Peter Thiel famously even said, he's like, the next Mark Zuckerberg won't build a social network. The next interesting things are going to look not like the last wave of interesting things, because the opportunity space keeps moving, these windows are opening and closing, and the. The opportunities move. And so I remember working on one batch of ideas that sounded really good based on what had happened in the last seven years. And then all the new things that popped off looked nothing like that. So if you, you know, like, just as a kind of like a before and after, you know, the befores was sort of like the Facebooks, Twitters, dropboxes of the world. Those were like the winners. And then the next wave of winners was Airbnb. It was like renting out your couch to strangers in the real world, like, marketplace. And Uber was a real world marketplace and Lyft. And there was. That's what worked was this, like, thing that looked nothing like it. And you had to go city by city. The winners had to play by a different playbook, right? The people who were good at it, they would go into cities and they would bootstrap. Like, how do we get. How do we put free donuts out here to get the drivers to come? And then we're going to incentivize the drivers and then that we're going to do that. We're going to throw parties in every city. In order to get this thing to work, you had to be good at that playbook, which was so different than the playbook that you needed right before that. And then that wave ended, and all of a sudden it was about crypto. And it was like, oh, the people who got rich were the people who really understood, like, what money even is and, like, what fiat currency is and what's going on with pro, you know, what is the double spending problem and cryptography. And then crypto had this wave, and it looked absolutely nothing like it because Bitcoin wasn't even a company. It was like, how do I invest in that? It's like, well, you'd buy the currency. It's like, well, I had no idea how to even become successful in this because the game had changed again. And then with AI, it seems like the game is changing again. And so I think with AI, the reason I bring up this kind of, this idea of like, using AI as the company brain or the management tool for the company. Because that sounds so unfamiliar that it sort of my spidey sense is, hey, maybe the game, maybe the floor is moving again and the opportunity's moved over here. Similarly with hard tech or like, you know, defense tech, this was something when we moved to Silicon Valley nobody would do. And if you did, you seemed like a sort of callous in a way. And then Palmer Lucky made defense cool.

[Sam Parr]

If you like would just show up at a meetup or like I remember people showing up at a startup wearing a suit and tie because they didn't, they were either like a potential customer, they didn't understand the nomenclature or they didn't understand the culture. And I remember we would joke about it and they would have to explain like, oh, I don't, I just did this on accident, I don't actually work for the government. Or you know, like I was like, are you a cop? Like it was like a joke.

[Shaun Puri]

It's like 21 Jump Street.

[Sam Parr]

Yeah.

[Shaun Puri]

As a narc.

[Sam Parr]

Yeah. But now it's different now.

[Shaun Puri]

So now I think it's the hardware, it's the robotics is obviously like massive. I think all the war stuff is massive. I think, you know, crazy AI stuff. So it's just, it's just clear to me that the ground has shifted again. The ground has moved and that the things that are going to be really interesting in the next 10 years, they're not going to. And by the way, this also just happened with the AI labs. It's like, oh, it turns out the best startups in the world, whether you're investing or joining or starting, was to create a, you know, the first one was a non profit research entity for artificial intelligence. OpenAI. Right. And anthropic. And like these were the big winners since they looked nothing like the winners of the, the last generation. It's like open source, nonprofit. What, like what does that even mean? And that was the thing to join, right? That was the thing to start, that was the thing to invest in. Like when we were in Silicon Valley, how many people do you know that were investing in working on starting a research lab? 0. 0. I never met anyone that did that. They didn't hear those two words together. That sounded like something that you're supposed to do in university for science. Like I didn't understand even what that was. So you have to be really attuned to the shifts if you want to be a part of the big waves.

[Sam Parr]

Do you want to wrap up with this AI personalized medicine moment? Intelligent agents are enabling a new level of personalization in medical care. We can now use an agent harness like Claude code to analyze personalized health data, whether that be a diagnostic test, a scan, EHR data, or wearables that are highly accurate and user specific.

[Shaun Puri]

So do you know who Nat Friedman is?

[Sam Parr]

Right, yes. Yeah, he was telling the story YC guy now or.

[Shaun Puri]

No, I don't know what his story was. He did a startup, got acquired by Microsoft. Then when Microsoft bought GitHub for like, whatever, billions and billions of dollars, he became the CEO of GitHub. And he famously kind of turned it around in a way. Really injected a lot of life into that company. And people really, like, praised his tenure there. So then him and Daniel Gross go and they start investing in AI stuff. They created a small fund for AI. They got into a bunch of interesting companies. Then they joined Ilia when he left OpenAI to start his new whatever lab is competitor to OpenAI. Then Facebook tried to buy that thing for like, whatever, $30 billion, pre product, pre anything. And Ilya said no, but Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman were like, we'll go. You still got two seats in that car because we'll go. And so now they run the meta. Like, they're like one of the brain trust of like, the Facebook meta's AI program. Okay. So him and Daniel Gross are there. They run like the super intelligence program. So. Okay, that's a long story. So he was. He's on. He's on stage and they were like, tell him how you're using, like, openclaw. And he tells this story. He's like, yeah, all right. This is going to sound weird, but here's something I did. He's like, so I gave Claude code, like all my genetic data and my blood test data. And I was like, analyze this. And it's like, okay, cool. Like, genetically, here's what blood test. It seems like you're. It basically, it was like you're dehydrated. We think you're, like, chronically dehydrated. And that's showing up in all these, like, symptoms or these, like, these, these signals are telling us that you're probably dehydrated. And so he was like. He tells Open Claw, he goes, okay, do whatever you need to do to make me not dehydrated. Which is like, hilarious. If you've ever heard of, like, the paperclip maximizer problem where you, like, basically, like, you end the world by giving it this, like, you give it a. Like, do this at all costs. And it like, you know, to make more paperclips at all costs. And it starts like crushing buildings and cars to generate more paperclips. Like, it goes a little too far. So similarly, he tells the open cloth thing, help me be not, not dehydrated. Do whatever you must do. He connected. And so OpenClaw is connected in his house. So it has access to all of his TV screens. It has access to all of his cameras, so it could see him and it could display things to him at all times. It could talk through his, like, you know, his, like, Alexa, whatever to him. It could text him on WhatsApp. It could do whatever. So it's just like, hey, you've been sitting there for four hours and you haven't had any water. I need you to get up and go to the kitchen and have a glass of water.

[Sam Parr]

Can he just put up like a post it note on the refrigerator door that says, like, drink a glass?

[Shaun Puri]

He goes, so I did. So I got up, I went ahead, water. And the camera watched me drink the water. And it came back and it goes, good job. I'm proud of you for drinking that water.

[Sam Parr]

That's messed up.

[Shaun Puri]

Hilarious. Hilarious thing that's super easy to make fun of, by the way. Like, you know, the jokes write themselves, but these tech nerds have taken it too far. Yes, sure. All true. Also, a little peek into what the future is going to be when an AI is in charge of running your health, which it will be.

[Sam Parr]

We talked about. What's the guy's name From Git? Not GitHub. GitLab. Is it GitLab?

[Shaun Puri]

Yeah. Cured his own cancer with AI.

[Sam Parr]

I don't know if it's cured yet. Is it cured?

[Shaun Puri]

I think it is cured. Yeah.

[Sam Parr]

Wow. Okay. So this guy had. He's a billionaire, Sid. He had cancer and he said, I'm going founder mode on my cancer, which is a pretty cool article. And he has been talking about the journey. I have a. A friend who has cancer and they got connected and they've been working together. Like, you know, they've been helping each other. My buddy, you, I told you that he was doing this and you asked me how it was going and I was like, well, I don't really ask him. I let him come to me. It's going great. The. It's cancer's going away. It's not gone. But it's like he got great news.

[Shaun Puri]

And so, like, what the AI stuff

[Sam Parr]

helped him with or through what him and Sid and a few other guys have. Have done. And like, that's wild. My buddy works in The AI field. I don't want to say too much about his information, but he is a. He's an AI professional. We could. We'll say. And he's been like, you know, being a nerd and using AI and he's been helping get rid of his cancer. It's not gone, but it's. It's. He's getting great news every couple months, which is pretty amazing. You know, when everything works out well, we can. We'll, like, talk about it and like, bigger deal.

[Shaun Puri]

Like, shouldn't we all be screaming about this? From the. We've talked about it three times on this podcast. But, like, seems like, like, you know, like, if you watch Sid's thing, it's like in a PowerPoint in a webinar somewhere. It doesn't seem like anyone's paying attention to, like, what sounds like some pretty incredible stuff. Like, the guy who cured his dog's cancer went kind of viral. That's cool.

[Sam Parr]

Yeah, he went viral where he was like, on the Today show, not, like, getting a Nobel Prize.

[Shaun Puri]

I was actually thinking about the Today show. That's what I meant. I was like, he was on the. I think he was like, mainstream people care about this.

[Sam Parr]

He was on Australia's version of the Today show, by the way. It wasn't even the American one. Yeah, I thought you were going to

[Shaun Puri]

go for an Australian accent there. I was excited to hear that.

[Sam Parr]

I'll leave the impressions up to you. I can't believe how little of a deal that was made, though.

[Shaun Puri]

There's that great phrase, which is the future is already here. It's just unevenly distributed. That feels more obvious today than I've ever felt it in the past, which is the future is here. People are doing crazy things with AI and it's just not evenly distributed. I'm not doing it. It's not made its way out to the world yet. There was another thing that Matt Friedman said that I thought, like, he just said casually that I was like, what he told the story about again. It was like, hey, you need to be taking this supplement, this magnesium sulfate whatever supplement. And he's like, okay, I don't have it. And then he was in his self driving Tesla and he had given it access to his Tesla and he just saw the directions change. There's a Whole Foods nearby. And it just rerouted his car. His open claw rerouted his car to the shop. And then he bought it and he was like, whoa, what just happened?

[Sam Parr]

Yeah, like, I am on board with this, but I am on board.

[Shaun Puri]

I Would.

[Sam Parr]

I would let AI control a lot of these things. But you can't do it when you have, like, a wife.

[Shaun Puri]

Maybe there is just a threshold of wealth where it's like, listen, you like all these. This is a good life we have, right? I'm gonna have the open claw, like, tell me when to drink water. I'm gonna have the cameras on. You know, like, I'm gonna do some weird shit from time to time.

[Sam Parr]

Because for the record, there is a. There's a personality threshold. There's no money threshold. It's like, are you willing to do that?

[Shaun Puri]

There's a number.

[Sam Parr]

There's.

[Shaun Puri]

That.

[Sam Parr]

Yeah, there's a. There's like a. An EQ number, but. But there's definitely not a dollar. There's no dollar sign.

[Shaun Puri]

You know, when Elon was on SNL and he goes, you know, I built rockets that can, you know, go to go into space, and electric cars that drive themselves. What you think? I was just going to be a normal, chill dude? And I thought, like, Socrates, Aristotle, like, that's up there in the quotes for me, the pantheon of, like, oh, yeah, that makes sense.

[Sam Parr]

If you find a man on top of a mountain, don't assume that he's gonna be reasonable or normal. I think that that's fair to say. Just like, if you. If there's. If there's a great artist, I don't expect him to show up on time all the time.

[Shaun Puri]

Correct. All right, I gotta go. I gotta get on a flight.

[Sam Parr]

All right, that's it. That's a pod piece.

[Shaun Puri]

I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it. Like, no days off on a road. Hey, let's take a quick break. I want to tell you about a podcast that you could check out. It is called the Science of Scaling by Mark Roberge. He was the founding CRO of HubSpot, and he's a guest lecturer at Harvard Business School. The guy's smart, and he sits down every week with different sales leaders from cool companies like Klaviyo and Vanta and OpenAI. And he's asking about their strategies, their tactics, and how they're growing their companies as, you know, head of sales or chief revenue officer. If you're looking to scale a company up, if you're a CRO or head of sales, that's looking to level up in your career, I think a podcast like this could be great. Great for you. Listen to the Science of Scaling. Wherever you get your podcasts.