I put 80% of my money in the S&P after Howard Marks told me not to

- May 11, 2026 (2 days ago) • 01:04:14

Transcript

Start Time	Speaker	Text
00:00	Sam Parr	Alright, 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's that for an opener? I feel like it is...
00:13	Shaan Puri	"A late-night infomercial that is about to brainwash me into something... Okay, I'm intrigued. Go on. What do you mean? What do you mean it's out of my control? Nothing's out of my control."
00:29	Sam Parr	It's about as out of control as it is your ability to control if you're seven foot tall or not. So, okay—I got up to give a shout-out to Jim O'Shaughnessy. I saw a clip where he kind of 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 thing about the Swedes is that they are obsessed with two things: twins and money. Sweden has this massive twin database where they have many, many—like hundreds of thousands, hundreds of millions—twins that they've documented. For some reason they track twins. I think originally they did it for health reasons, where they wanted to track what type of twins got diseases...
01:09	Shaan Puri	For studies, right? Because nature is controlled, so it's all about nurture. </FormattedResponse>
01:13	Sam Parr	Yes. They have this massive database, and they were able to break the database down into fraternal twins — twins born at the same time but who 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, Sweden had a wealth tax. As part of the wealth tax, Sweden basically tracked every citizen's entire financial portfolio. They looked at which stocks you owned, the mutual funds you owned, every dollar of savings — they basically tracked all of this. What was interesting is that a guy named Heinrich had this premise: how much of investing and savings behavior is controlled by genetics? So he looked at the differences between fraternal twins and identical twins. 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 similar amounts, whatever. Then he looked at how the fraternal twins, who only share about 50% of genetics, invested and saved compared to the identical twins, who share 100% of DNA. He broke the behaviors up into six biases: - people who held too few stocks, - excess turnover (people who traded a lot), - performance chasing (people who bought what did well the year before), - overinvesting in your home country — home bias, - loving lottery-type stocks, - and the disposition effect (refusing to sell losers). He looked at all of this data — I think over the course of 30,000 sets of twins. Additionally, he looked at outliers, like twins separated at birth and a couple of other cases. The result he found and concluded was that about 45% of savings and investing patterns and behaviors were genetic, which I find astounding. The reason I was thinking about this was you and I... I would not — I think we both, in different ways, like investing, but we are not, I would say, professional investors, and yet...
03:23	Shaan Puri	My portfolio would also say, "I'm not a professional investor."
03:27	Sam Parr	And yet, we love having professional investors on the podcast. We both love reading about Warren Buffett and people like that. I was trying to figure out two things. The first is: why do I like that so much? What am I drawn to these guys for? 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 — 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 some new thing will pop up — SPACs are this new thing — so learning about that is important, but that changes every so often. What doesn't change is thousands and thousands of years of human nature. Understanding how humans behave and asking yourself why 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 has 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 people who have been on the pod like Howard Marks, Mohnish Pabrai, Morgan Housel, Cathie Wood, and a ton of 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.
05:06	Shaan Puri	There's this great story from Monish Pabrai. So, people who've been listening to this podcast — you've probably noticed that Monish 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. In the interview — I don't know if you remember this — 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
05:34	Sam Parr	It was moderately successful, I think.
05:35	Shaan Puri	It was like a $6 million–a-year revenue business or something like that. He wasn't loving it. He just assumed this was 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." He was encouraged to do a very fancy version of a personality test — a 360° assessment where they talk to your coworkers, your parents, everybody in your life — to try to understand a little bit more about you. The result came back and they said, "It's no surprise that you're miserable here. This is a game that is completely incompatible with your personality type." He asked, "What do you mean?" They said something like, "You like...," and the descriptor they used was along the lines of: "You like 'solo-player, competitive, number-based games.' " He was like, "What?" and they repeated, "Yeah — you like one-person, not team sports; you like solo competitive, number-based games," meaning things with a lot of math or numbers to them. Here he was, running this company — playing a multiplayer, competitive, non-numbers-based game. He didn't know what to do with that, so he decided to start investing on the side. It turned out that, as he's done in his life, he did way better as a solo investor — playing a competitive, money-and-numbers-based game (the stock market) — than he ever did doing the other thing. He really encouraged this sort of "know thyself" approach: you have to know who you are and what you're predisposed to love and obsess over, and then find yourself in those types of games. I'll give you another example he told me: he'd been kicked out of casinos because he was winning too much. People were like, "Was he card counting?" and he's like, "No, I..."
07:26	Sam Parr	Wasn't—dude, [unclear: "card"]. You were running around without your shirt on. Like, I... I know the [unfinished].
07:33	Shaan Puri	That's not a casino. That was Margaritaville.
07:38	Sam Parr	And so he was like, "he... he...," and...
07:40	Shaan Puri	Off camera he wouldn't tell me; on camera he wouldn't tell me. Off camera he told me and showed me the exact system that he used. I've had friends go and use this system at specific casinos, playing in a specific way, and he had actually found an edge. He described “the intellectual thrill of actually being able to beat the house.” There's nothing like it. Financially, this is not a good decision—spending thousands of hours figuring this out—but he just liked those single-player, competitive, number-based games. It's the same thing with philanthropy. He said, when he got into philanthropy—once you make money you have to figure out how to give it away—there's the whole gala-and-socialize scene. But what he found fulfilling was again a single-player, numbers-based game: figuring out how to make $1 that he puts in have the highest economic return in terms of impact. What he figured out was that there were kids in India who were really smart but had no schooling. India has over a billion people, so a lot live in rural areas; many are very intelligent but have no access to good education or a pathway to better their lives. They were just going to end up on a farm. He realized that if he could identify the smart kids for $33 a year he could put them in a competitive school. They started competitive math schools and got them into IIT. IIT is a feeder system to some of the best jobs in the world; graduates can get visas and better opportunities. For $33 he could increase a family's earning power from $10,000 a year to $50,000 a year—a fivefold increase. He could create, you know, $50,000 per year for a one-time $33,000 one-year acceleration in training [transcription unclear]. The normal IIT is harder to get into than Harvard or Stanford—harder than any U.S. college—so it's a significant achievement.
09:37	Shaan Puri	Whatever the admissions rate typically is — and I think his is like 8% or something crazy, like a 10x larger admittance rate — even that was a single-player game or whatever. It really got me thinking about this idea: 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? You're...
09:57	Sam Parr	Well, that's like step one.
09:59	Shaan 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 said, "What?" He replied, "I didn't know what he meant..." This could go a lot...
10:11	Sam Parr	Of ways, right here. What are...
10:12	Shaan Puri	You were about to say, and he was like: > "You know, I played soccer my whole life competitively, and what I realized is I'm just actually not very attuned to playing soccer. But I was actually really good at racket sports. I had a long wingspan, good hand–eye coordination, and I should have been playing racquetball early on." He said, "The same thing happened to my career. I was doing these types of businesses when I really should have been doing this type of thing." He 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 life kind of passed them by. Isn't that sort of a tragedy?"
10:44	Sam Parr	"Yeah, well... don't selfishly think about other people. I just think about myself, where I'm like... see, the more important bit is me. But that's— that's what everyone thinks, you know. They think, like, 'Okay, but how does this apply to me?' I think it was Andrew Wilkinson who told me about that self-assessment thing, which I really dig."
11:02	Shaan Puri	"Did you do it?" "Yeah."
11:04	Sam Parr	It was awesome.
11:06	Shaan Puri	What's it like when you're a teen and you're discovering yourself? You get a little curious... I think we're both a...
11:10	Sam Parr	Little here, yeah.
11:15	Shaan Puri	I'm a little curious right now.</FormattedResponse>
11:17	Sam Parr	There are two of us; therefore, we are bi-curious.
11:21	Shaan Puri	So, so—what game do you think you would be? I don't even know what the options are, right? I don't think I'm a single-player, competitive, numbers-based game. That's not me. But I don't even know what the menu looks like. So... what do you think yours is—researching?
11:36	Sam Parr	I think it'd be like a new topic: going super deep and obsessing over one topic, trying to come to a conclusion.
11:43	Shaan Puri	Right, so naturally, "go run Hampton"—yeah. You're describing sitting alone on a couch with a book, thinking, and really finding your joy. You're being the best at that, and then you're like, "So I'm gonna go sit in an office with 50 other people?"
11:59	Sam Parr	No — I thank God my cofounder Joe is the CEO, so he runs Hampton. But when we're gearing up to launch something new, I'm in my zone of genius: researching how others have done something similar to us, where they failed, and where they won. Then I talk to experts and weasel my way into conversations with people who have been there, done that, asking, "Tell me, tell me the mistakes I'm going to make." I think.
12:21	Shaan Puri	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 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, what's your book idea?" I told him my idea. I talked to him a couple of times over a couple of years, and he had seen me talking about a few different book ideas. He said, "You know, maybe we save this for later," and then he paused. This is very interesting to me because his job is to spend time with really smart people—he lets them talk for hours and hours. 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." That's his gift. He said, "The most interesting part about you is—you have some weird predilection for reverse engineering businesses or reverse engineering." He explained, "Everything you do, you seem to reverse engineer as a first instinct, whereas most people I don't think do that. Whether it's something in life—family-oriented, creative, investment—" Sam, you're the same way. I think our first instinct when we want to do something is like, "Alright, let me go study the history of how other people have done this; let me go talk..."
13:47	Sam Parr	To the other people who...
13:48	Shaan Puri	I'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, and I know what to focus in on. I'm going to create my own system and my own understanding, and then I'll just do that. I think we both do that as our default mode, and it's what we enjoy doing. I don't think that's common.
14:05	Sam Parr	And here's an example. Whenever we have someone on the podcast and they ask for advice or something like that, instead of saying, "Well, you should probably raise venture capital," or "You should probably do this," the first question is always: "How would you define success in five years?" Like, what's the definition of success to you? Then we work backwards and figure out what the rules of the game will be, and then we can give feedback. But the reason I've always been 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...
14:37	Shaan Puri	Issues every waking breath.
14:39	Sam Parr	Yeah. Every time I screw something up, 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 — and this is why I think I like capitalism so much — is that the business you're controlling, if you are controlling it, is just an extension of your personality. If you have trust issues, your coworkers are probably going to think you're micromanaging them. If you have trouble committing, they're going to think you're absent-minded. The issues you have in the company are an extension of the issues you have, and vice versa. If you are a kind person, you're going to have a kind culture. I think investing habits are just human-nature habits, and that's why investing is really interesting. Even though this study was related to finance, it's the exact same thing. If you tend to have excessive turnover with your stocks — which is one of the six biases — perhaps you struggle to have steady relationships. If you tend to overinvest in stocks in your home country (they call this home bias), the likelihood that you have moved from your hometown is actually quite low. What I have found is that the best ways to make change in these issues — for one, it's not just reading. I wrote down this line: "Change requires pain, not words." According to the study, once they normalized for education (they compared two people who both had business degrees), if person number two went and read a bunch of business books, they wouldn't necessarily be a better investor. The only thing that made a meaningful difference, other than genetics, was people who worked in finance — meaning you have to experience a loss: "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. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, the author even says, "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." So the best ways I worked on this — I outlined four approaches to prevent these biases: 1. Invest in your zone of genius. As Warren Buffett said, invest in your zone of genius. Buffett is a slow-and-steady type, so he invests in slow-and-steady things. That explains why he's averse to Bitcoin and why, if he were 18 or 25 today, he probably would not consider starting an AI startup that raised lots of venture capital (VC). People who chase fast dopamine and glory tend to do that. You have to optimize the thing you're working on for the personality you have. 2. Pre-commit. Let the future not decide for you. Don't go to the grocery store hungry. When you make a decision, write it down. For example: "If 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?" Stick to it, even if you're predisposed to avoid confrontation. 3. Shorten the feedback loop. Be able to see scoreboard points very fast and get new information quickly. 4. Don't play games where your bias will be fatal. For me, I'm a control freak and a slow-and-steady type. Raising lots of VC when I'm not in control and expected to move extremely fast would be a potentially fatal game for me — I'd be setting myself up to lose.
18:20	Shaan Puri	That's really interesting. I like the two premises you have. One: the problems you see in your situation — whether that's your life or your workplace — are a mirror. They're a mirror of the problems you have in your psychology. And then the four or five tactics you just described are like, okay, what's the remedy? Also, the insights — which I think Morgan Housel's book expresses — are that getting wealthy through the "money game" and investing is far less about strategy and far more about behavior. It's your own poor behavior that leads to poor financial results, not poor strategy.
18:55	Sam Parr	He says it in a much better way, which I stole from him. I wrote it down here: "Personal finance is more personal than it is finance." </FormattedResponse>
19:01	Shaan Puri	Right — exactly. 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. I actually thought about it while you were saying it. It might be a weird idea: it may not be that the knowledge in the books is super important. Rather, one of the biggest leaks in investing might be too much activity, and the remedy for that is to busy yourself with bridge, books, playing pickleball, and other activities so you aren't prone to just sitting there and "pushing buttons." So it might be that what you're reading doesn't even matter. Simply that reading takes you away from constant activity may be the main reason all these great investors read so much.
19:51	Sam Parr	Or, put differently: if you found a company that's going well — which is the situation I'm in — I've noticed the best thing I can do is to do nothing. Oftentimes, when I meddle, it gets screwed up. If you're trying to get popular on social media and you notice that when you post three times a day you get growth, just do that. Don't do other things. This idea — if it's working, just continue — is important. Have something else to be your playground, where you're allowed to mess something up, but don't mess up the main thing.
20:26	Shaan Puri	Yeah, there's a great example of this. I just picked up—Buffett did an interview about the Berkshire thing [Berkshire Hathaway], and he talked about this: Berkshire has, I think, almost $400 billion in cash, and it's just been piling up over the last five years. They just haven't deployed it anywhere.
20:40	Sam Parr	I wonder what that even means... Where is...
20:43	Shaan Puri	They just have $400 billion in treasury bills, basically.
20:46	Sam Parr	Is it—it's U.S. Treasury? Yeah. Wow. I wonder what percentage of the U.S. Treasury that makes up.
20:53	Shaan Puri	I don't think it's that much. There's trillions in T-bills, you know. It's not zero, but it's not more than like 5%. He was talking about this. Jeff Bezos just gave an interview and said the same thing. He told a story: > "Early in Amazon's history, Jeff Wilke came to me one day and said, 'Jeff, you have enough ideas to destroy Amazon.' > I said, 'What do you mean?' > He said, 'You have enough ideas per minute, per day, per week to destroy Amazon. 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, work in process — a distraction. 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.'" I heard that and I was like, "Your honor, I plead guilty," because I have the same problem. If you're very generative with ideas, it feels good, and the ideas themselves might be great — very sound ideas. It seems like you're doing nothing wrong, but you can literally drown your company in ideas. I've done this many times, especially with growth teams or marketing teams: "Here's 14 marketing ideas," and then every day two more are coming. Then I'm going to send you a tweet about something somebody else is doing that you guys should check out, and then I'm going to tell you this, then I'm going to have an event you should go to, 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 that again." I can literally suffocate an organization by releasing too many ideas into the organization at once. It's, again, like you described — a personality defect that becomes a culture defect, an operational defect.
22:44	Sam Parr	I read that same quote, I think, six months ago. My co-founder, Joe, who's the CEO, and I set up this meeting every Thursday. It's the only meeting that he and I have together. It's when we go through a running list of ideas. He's like, "Just say anything you want. We can say anything; we can talk about anything you want." It's just this room — [unintelligible phrase]. Yeah, we'll talk about anything you want. I don't think we're going to do any of it, but maybe we will. It's like, let's just get it out. Don't Slack me any ideas, though; it's like just have a running Notion. Yeah, we'll go through any idea that you want, and then maybe we'll do something.
23:18	Shaan Puri	I have a different tactic with these research papers, which is: I basically read them and then I ask, "Does this serve me?" If the conclusion is that your genetic disposition determines half of your financial success, I tend to just throw things like that out the window. Partly because there are some great lies in statistics. For example, Howard Marks — who was on the podcast — described it like this: "What's the S&P's average annual return?" We're like, "10%." He's like, "Yeah, but do you know how often 10% happens?" It was pretty much never. Actual annual returns vary widely. So it might be the mean, but it's definitely not the median or the mode. You have these numbers, and do you expect it's going to be 9–10% every year? It's almost never 9–10%. It overperforms and underperforms, and then averages out to that. The same thing: many people drown in a river that was, on average, five feet deep. Averages don't tell you so much. There are all kinds of statistical things that can mislead you. Just because something is a norm or an average or was studied once doesn't mean I should draw a conclusion from that. I'm a big fan of basically productive placebos. So the question is not "What is the situation?" but "What do I need to believe in order to do the things that will lead to a good result?" I don't need to know everything. I don't even need to know what's right or what's true — who cares what's true? What's useful is what matters. I try to find the beliefs I need to put in my brain that will lead me to do the things I want to do to have the life I want to have.
24:59	Sam Parr	Dude, that's so weird — that's your takeaway? My takeaway is the opposite. If these are the facts, then how do I use the facts just to continue to get what I want? </FormattedResponse>
25:09	Shaan Puri	First of all, there's, like, this huge replication crisis — who knows if these are even the facts. 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 imprinting... half it's kind of like, you know, Lloyd in 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 why did I need to know any of that? All I needed to know was: here are the behaviors that lead people to make money; here are 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 bias you towards maybe failing in a couple of these more than others, and to be more on guard to those. Is that the takeaway? Yes. 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? </FormattedResponse>
25:59	Sam Parr	I haven't spent enough time to think about this, but...
26:01	Shaan Puri	I'm pretty whole-country biased. I'm not really buying industrials in Indonesia. </FormattedResponse>
26:07	Sam Parr	But that's not— I mean, I don't think biases work like that. It's not that you only do these and not all these. Obviously you do all of them; it's just what you skew towards. I would say probably "refusing to sell losers." Like... I don't know. I'm pretty good, actually. No— I mean, what I'm saying is I do all of them, but I do some more than others. I'm trying to think which ones I do most.
26:29	Shaan Puri	Mine's definitely the activity one over activity.
26:31	Sam Parr	I don't have that issue, and I don't engage in performance chasing. I do like to stick to what I know — I've always done that. I refuse to sell losers. I get emotional about the things that I like.
26:42	Shaan Puri	Right — let me ask you this: you sold The Hustle six years ago? Five years ago?
26:48	Sam Parr	What was it—February 2021?
26:50	Shaan Puri	Alright, so let's call it five years. Has that performed well? Because obviously you got a huge slug of capital. The five years—are you... yeah, like...
26:58	Sam Parr	Well, assume that 80% went into the S&P 500. Yeah — it's doubled. Is it up 75%? Yeah. I think the S&P — I mean, whatever the S&P is up, 80% of my portfolio is up.
27:09	Shaan Puri	That amount, right? I'm curious how you feel. Howard Marks came on and he said, "Hey, the S&P 500 right now is a bad bet." So you've got a guy who's, whatever—900 years old—who's got all the experience and knowledge, and he comes on our podcast and says to our face, "The S&P is a bad bet right now." He says it's because it's valued at... 23 times P/E ratio or whatever.
27:36	Sam Parr	On average, that was in August that he came on.
27:39	Shaan Puri	And he said, "You know, the ten-year—history tells us, the data tells us—that the next ten years will fluctuate between -22% when the S&P is at this valuation." When you buy in at this valuation, is it like, "Yeah, sure, but here's my counterargument," or is it just "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? What was your reaction to that?
28:04	Sam Parr	So, I went and did the math. Just so you know, the market is up 12.5% since he said that.
28:09	Shaan Puri	Yeah, he said ten years, right? So it's not like a five-month thing.
28:13	Sam Parr	When he says that, I think I don't care. I think I know that. I study America; I study history. History will probably continue to repeat itself for a while while I'm alive, and I think America will continue to exist. But the S&P 500 at this is not an American index—it's a global index. So I just think it's going to keep on going. I am chasing an 8% nominal return every single year, and if I get that—which I feel is quite high—then I am very happy. That fits within the personal plan I set out before I sold.
28:53	Shaan Puri	But his company is saying, "I study history." He's saying the history shows that it's not just 8%; it depends what your entry valuation is, which makes sense, right? Obviously.
29:01	Sam Parr	"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..."
29:08	Shaan Puri	Time horizon
29:09	Sam Parr	Longer than just a decade. Yes. What I look at is to where I'm a hundred. Basically, when I was 21 years old I set a target: I wanted a certain amount of money by the time I'm 30. If I get that amount of money at age 30 and it grows 8% per year, that means I can spend a certain amount on my life and still have X, Y, and Z which I can leave or give away. I just don't think that what Howard Marks says—if he is right—will break that plan, as long as that 8% per year over forty years on average happens. If that happens, which I believe it will, then I am happy.
29:44	Shaan Puri	I love that. If you wrote a book on investing and opened it up, it would just be like America.
29:50	Sam Parr	It would be.
29:50	Shaan Puri	Like the first page, dude.
29:53	Sam Parr	S&P 500 is not. Is Apple an American company? Of course not. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? </FormattedResponse>
29:57	Shaan Puri	"Is it so American?"
29:58	Sam Parr	Is Toyota a Japanese company? Of course not. They make Toyotas here in America. You know, I lived in Tennessee, nearby the Nissan plant... like it's, if all...
30:06	Shaan Puri	A company is headquartered here. The vast majority of employees are here. The vast majority of revenues are here. The vast majority of profits are here. For all intents and purposes, it's an American company. Whether that number is not 100%—but if it's 60% or 70%—it's still...
30:20	Sam Parr	A majority... 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...
30:26	Shaan Puri	If the—who's buying the iPhones, right? Where are they? I don't know. I don't know if the answer is "majority." Let's ask Claude here. So, 43% of total revenue comes from American sales, and 54% of operating income...
30:44	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?
30:50	Shaan Puri	Both, right?
30:52	Sam Parr	I think it's half. When you sold it, what percent is it up based off of whatever you did with it? I don't know what you did with it.
30:59	Shaan Puri	My net worth is up 40 times or something since we sold, right? It says it's up a lot. But the problem is a huge percentage of it—probably 70%—came from companies we started or that we own, and not like, "Oh, I'm a good investor in the public stock market." So, you know... I don't know.
31:19	Sam Parr	"Do you consider private companies to be part of your net worth?"
31:22	Shaan Puri	Yeah, of course.
31:25	Sam Parr	Dude, don't calculate liquid.</FormattedResponse>
31:26	Shaan Puri	Net worth, right? I have liquid net worth — that's one. Whenever I do my check (every two months, or whenever I just feel like I need more money), I go, "Okay, let's see how much money we actually have. Let's see what's going on." I calculate liquid net worth and I calculate the illiquid net worth. I look at them separately because, with the illiquid one, one thing can go wrong in one of these businesses and that could get wiped out. It can go way down. For example, our e‑commerce business was a much bigger percentage of net worth, but it's gone down because that business hasn't performed as well as the other businesses. When tariffs hit, consumer sentiment changed, and our margins shrunk a little bit — it hit a plateau. There have been changes, so we have to mark that down internally: how much we think it's worth. We thought it was worth X; now it's worth a little less than X.
32:18	Sam Parr	Okay, what was your topic?
32:21	Shaan Puri	What I want to talk to you about is a couple of business ideas that broke my brain. These come from the YC "Request for Startups" list. If you don't know, YC (Y Combinator) is the most successful accelerator and early-stage investor in the world. In the history of the world, they've helped seed Airbnb and Dropbox. They were the first investor at about a $2,000,000 valuation in those now roughly $100 billion companies. Every year they release these "Request for Startups" lists, and I've been looking at them for about ten years. Most years it's kind of like you just nod along — you're like, "Oh, okay. Cool."
32:54	Sam Parr	They do it every semester or every quarter. They have fall, summer, spring, and winter.
32:59	Shaan Puri	Right. They used to do it a little bit less often, and it would be things like, "Hey, better software for lawyers," or "Hey, somebody should make a tool that helps this person do this." These are normal-sounding businesses.
33:12	Sam Parr	Well, some of them are not. One of ours three years ago was "a way to end cancer." Yeah... like that. Okay.
33:20	Shaan Puri	So, over time they've been getting progressively more — I don't know if you want to say ambitious or just impressive — or, like, just sort of breaking my brain. The one I want to talk to you about the most, which I think you have a bunch of ideas around, I have three that I want to talk about. I'll start with a fun one and then we'll go to the most brain-breaking one at the end. Fun one: this isn't on their list, but it came from one of the XYZ guys, Daniel Gross, who’s great. He's talking about “aesthetic data centers.” There's this problem right now in the world: we need way more data centers and we need way more power in order to, quote, "win the AI race." The problem is that most Americans actually hate AI — it's crazy. They use AI, but they hate AI. They don't like where it's going, they don't like the big tech companies; the big tech backlash has just ratcheted up for some reason. If you read the TikTok comments about anything AI-related, 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 productivity tools. They also don't like data centers: they think it's going to increase their power bills, it's going to use all their water — there are all kinds of concerns — even though the data would say the opposite. For example, golf courses use 100 times more water than data centers, but nobody's out here protesting a golf course. So there's this problem: these big companies need to build data centers, but towns have a "not in my backyard" mentality when it comes to them. Daniel Gross brought up this idea: the spend to build a data center is so high — we're talking billions of dollars to build one — that the incremental extra to make it architecturally beautiful or interesting, to make it feel good in the neighborhood, is very small. We should really be considering this.
35:10	Sam Parr	And I thought, "This is..."
35:10	Shaan Puri	"That's a really interesting idea — I had never thought of it. I thought you, as a man of style, history, and culture, would appreciate this: there's probably some historical comps [comparables] to this that I don't know about, which you might be able to think about. It's where companies figure out how to almost create a public good or create public art in a way that almost corporate-washes their agenda."
35:34	Sam Parr	I think it'd be a great one. Yeah. So, John D. Rockefeller was sort of like the Jeff Bezos of the 1920s. He started Standard Oil, which by the time he was 50 years old 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. He had this really bad energy about him; people thought he was just like a Scrooge McDuck–type of guy. He also was part owner of a mine — I think it was in Colorado. Standard Oil was so big they needed to create their own mine to get the chemicals they needed to make the ovens to produce all their stuff. John D. Rockefeller Jr. was the predecessor. He was the son of John D. Rockefeller Sr., and he takes over the company. He's a good guy. John Sr. actually was a good guy as well. Junior goes to this mine and sees tens of thousands of workers living in squalor. It's horrible. The reason he goes there, I believe, is because there was a flood and about 200 people died in this little, crappy mining town, which is basically a company town. John Jr. goes there and says, "This is horrible. I can't believe we let this happen. I see why you guys died. 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. Then the Great Depression happens. In New York City a lot of jobs get screwed up; many blue-collar workers are furloughed or laid off. He says, "We gotta do something," and comes up with an architectural project: he builds this massive tower in midtown New York City. He's like, "We're going to make this amazing. It's going to be one of the greatest things ever. We're going to employ 10,000 people. We're going to revitalize the city." That is Rockefeller Center. Rockefeller Center is a huge tower surrounded by smaller towers. In the courtyard there's a man lifting up the world — it's supposed to be Atlas — and it signifies what they're trying to do: take the bad in this era and make something amazing. John D. Rockefeller is an example of someone who did what I call "reputation laundering." He took something that was bad and tried to redeem it. John D. Jr. actually has a great reputation, and a lot of people believe it's in part because of Rockefeller Center.
38:04	Shaan Puri	That's a great example. I asked AI also for some other examples of this, and it mentions one funny example I didn't know about. It was when cell phone towers were needed everywhere — people didn't like these ugly steel towers that would be 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.
38:31	Sam Parr	Where?
38:31	Shaan Puri	It looks like a palm tree or a pine tree at the top. They put fake bark, fake branches, and fake plastic pine needles so that it looks like a tree and not like an ugly steel thing. That's how they got through in building out the infrastructure needed. Another example was Carnegie. Carnegie obviously had Carnegie Steel, and then he built 2,500 libraries across America while running Carnegie Steel. It served as a good to each of the communities, and this was while there were huge strikes happening because they had pretty brutal labor practices.
39:09	Sam Parr	He was such a hypocrite. He was like, "I'm gonna do all this good stuff for the world," but he had a famous quote: "If you watch the costs, the profits will follow." For him, the biggest costs were workers' costs, and he was known for being kind of a jackass when it came to workers.
39:25	Shaan Puri	And so, I think there's something very interesting that I would predict is going to happen. I don't know what they're going to do. I don't know if it's like park spaces, or 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 going to do, but it does seem like they're going to have to do something.
39:40	Sam Parr	It totally can be done. Have you been to the Paramount in Oakland—the theater where I used to host my event? Do you remember how beautiful it is? That's from the 1930s. Up until the 1950s, I would say—or maybe right before the end of World War II—a lot of these buildings were gorgeous. I live on the Upper West Side of New York City, and the architecture there—what they call pre-war buildings—is absolutely gorgeous. I don't know why this minimalism took place, where things became a lot more plain, but this is a great idea.
40:12	Shaan Puri	Shout out to David Perell and Cultural Tutor, who are on a crusade right now to bring beauty back to the world. If you haven't seen them, go look up Cultural Tutor on YouTube and watch the stuff they're putting out. It's got millions of views. People really resonated with it—questions like, "Why does everything look the same? Why does everything look so bland now?" I would have never guessed that would touch such a nerve, but it definitely does. They've found something that people resonate with a lot, and they're building a whole project around it. I think they're doing a movie or something like that. They're doing something cool with it. Alright—can I give you two of these other ideas that kind of broke my brain a little bit? One is the company brain. I think you've been thinking about this.
41:02	Sam Parr	I do. We have it now. </FormattedResponse>
41:04	Shaan Puri	There are a bunch of different ways to take this. What does this mean? There are two ways to take this; I'll just describe the first one—the one that's more interesting to me today. AI is seen as a very smart assistant. It's someone you go to when you have a question and it'll fetch you the answer. It's somebody you go to when you have a task and you delegate the task; 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. That's, I think, the mental model most people have of how AI is going to work. Some people sort of see it as, like, "oh, it'll..."
41:42	Sam Parr	Be like, "You'll have digital employees." "Oh — we'll probably hire fewer people because they'll just be like... kind."
41:47	Shaan Puri	Of these workers—these AI workers, these guys in the coal mine just digging for us—this is so great, we're going to have so much productivity. I actually think it's going the other way: it's not that the AI works for us, but that we work for the AI. People are going to hate that sentence, but let me 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. He laid off tens of thousands of people at Block, and I think he's trying to change what the org structure looks like inside a company. I believe—maybe I'm wrong, Sam can correct me—that what he's saying is basically that the AI is the brain and the rest of us are giving context to the brain. We're out there trying to feed it the right information so that it can make the right decisions. 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, less fatigue, and less stress than the rest of us. It does seem like this is the way things are going. For my own use: I started out very much in a "hey, go do this" or "hey, tell me this" type of mode. 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? Can you tell me what the right move is here?" And it's very good at doing it. So the question is: are our companies going to work this way? I'll give you one last story on top of this. A few months ago there's this research arm called Sutrini that put out a blog post. The blog post basically described an almost doomsday scenario. They argued 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 fewer people earning wages. Wages are what people spend in the economy, which becomes the wages of the next person. When you have fewer employees, you have fewer wages; with fewer wages you get less spending; with less spending you get less revenue; with less revenue you tighten the belt even more and cut more staff. It creates a downward spiral. They may have said it's more nuanced than that, but ultimately their conclusion was that productivity gains could still result in the economy going down. I don't know if that report triggered or created it, or if it was just coincidental, but there was a huge sell-off in the stock market. The market went down a large percentage on the back of this because people got pretty worried about what's going to happen in the U.S. economy. The S&P 500 is an American index. So you hear this and you're like, "Wow, that's pretty bad." They wrote something that's kind of depressing for everybody.
44:53	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 collapses, and the productivity gains flow entirely to the owners of compute rather than circulating throughout households."
45:13	Shaan Puri	Right. So there's a big market sell-off. Everybody gets mad at Citrini people. Whether 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.
45:24	Sam Parr	And they, I imagine, were short, right? </FormattedResponse>
45:28	Shaan Puri	I'm not sure they sell the research. I don't think they sell the research—I think they might have, like, a capital arm, but it's pretty small if I remember correctly. It's not a huge thing. Then, a few months later they go viral again. This time it was for their analyst number three, where they basically sent a researcher out to the Strait of Hormuz. This guy went on this, you know, Jason Bourne mission: he sneaks across the border of Oman, he bribes a guy to take him out in a boat into the strait, and he tries to collect first-party data. He says, “Oh wow—look, it's not open or closed, but it's functioning as a bit of a toll route: if you are from the country and you pay the right bribe, you get through the strait. It's not fully closed and it's not fully open.” They found this, fed that information back, and people again got mad at them. They responded, basically, “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.” That's what the future of analysts looks like: it's not guys sitting at spreadsheets, because guess what—the AI is much better at sitting there, 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. I just thought, oh, that's really interesting—the reframe of what a job was and what a job's going to be. And then, what does that look like across other jobs? I find this whole idea of the company brain, the AI brain, fascinating. It's basically the AI management software.
47:07	Sam Parr	Well, what Jack Dorsey— I think he originally said this on Brian Halligan's podcast— 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, you are the human and you are in a circle, with nodes connecting to you. You are the decision maker, and the AI machines and agents are feeding you new information to help you make the right decision.
47:34	Shaan Puri	As the CEO, right?</FormattedResponse>
47:35	Sam Parr	The CEO, business owner, or project manager — what they're saying is: > "That's all wrong. The AI should make the decision, and the human should be around the AI. The AI should be the company brain."
47:47	Shaan Puri	We... we are the line. </FormattedResponse>
47:49	Sam Parr	We are the nodes. We are just giving it new information, and in some ways the AI is making a decision, but it's also going to execute — or we will be in charge of the execution. But the AI is the thinker, not us, right? And the reality is, I believe that — except that humans will have editing capabilities. Sure, sure. Yeah.
48:08	Shaan Puri	It's not all one or the other. That's a pretty brain‑breaking concept to me, because it just flips the world model upside down — how I thought the world works and would work.
48:19	Sam Parr	So, do you use anything for this? I use Victor. I have no connection to these guys. It's "getvictor.com" [website]. Victor connects to all these tools, and in Slack everyone at my company just asks for the information.
48:33	Shaan Puri	I don't use any of those because I don't trust them. I'm just kind of waiting to see how this plays out. I try not to give startups too much information because startups are just super leaky buckets in general. I've been inside startups, and a random employee can see everything. They're not concerned about security because they don't know — they're just trying to grow. That's generally how things go, no matter what they say. Once I used a telehealth service, and our buddy Siave said, "Bro, whatever you got, everybody at that startup now knows what you got."
49:10	Sam Parr	He's like, "What? What do you got? You got..."</FormattedResponse>
49:12	Shaan Puri	A fungus. They know—you've got a fungus.
49:13	Sam Parr	"You got a—you got a virus. They know you got a virus."
49:16	Shaan Puri	Whatever you've got, they know. And I was like, "He's so right. You just have to assume that's true if you're going to use a startup's product." </FormattedResponse>
49:22	Sam Parr	Dude, every once in a while I’ll buy something from a company. Like the other day I bought shoes from some place, and they emailed me—the founder did—and he 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? I wouldn’t—I don’t want you to do this.”
49:47	Shaan Puri	I meant medium, not...
49:48	Sam Parr	Actually, large. Alright—what's the other one that you like?
49:54	Shaan Puri	The other ones I would say are the scary ones. One here is drone swarm defense. They talked about a story I hadn't actually heard about, which was that the Iranians sent a small, shitty drone swarm and took out an AWS data center that didn't have drone defense protection. They just blew it up. They're like, "Yeah, that's gonna happen more and we need a defense for low-cost drones." What they talked about was that the U.S. military is almost built wrong. We basically send $2,000,000 missiles to knock out $200 drones, and 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." Just this idea of, wow, war is really going to change. Then you've got companies like Anduril and others trying to build these defense systems. There are many startups in this field. It reminded me that there's going to be a lot of these Anduril-type companies because it seems like the nature of war has changed. If you go look at the decorated generals that are buying, you know, that lead our stuff, I wonder if that's the right person. I mean that in the most respectful way possible, but if what you know about war is from a completely different tech era, you're going to be obviously playing catch up. I'm sure they are asking all the right questions and trying to get up to speed, but it's almost like Ender's Game in a way. You kind of need people who have a bit of a blank slate and can think from first principles: where are the attacks going to come from and what are they going to look like? People who grew up more on video games and less on the battlefield, because it's going to look more like cyber hacking and drones than it is, you know, Braveheart.
51:37	Sam Parr	Karp, the Palantir guy, put out this "21-point manifesto," and one of the points was that Silicon Valley should be more involved with the U.S. military and the U.S. government. It's kind of crazy now that the nerds are going to be involved like that. It's a really interesting cultural shift — the nerds are into the government and defense tech. That's very strange. I'm very curious how that will impact things.
52:06	Shaan Puri	Well, the reason I bring it up is just because sometimes the ground moves under your feet. I remember feeling this when I moved to Silicon Valley. I think I was pretty dumb, and I had read about what Jess worked, and I was like, "That's the thing to do." Of course, Peter Thiel famously even said, "The next Mark Zuckerberg won't build a social network." The next interesting things are going to look different from the last wave of interesting things because the opportunity space keeps moving. These windows are opening and closing, and the opportunities move. I remember working on one batch of ideas that sounded really good based on what had happened in the last seven years. Then all the new things that popped off looked nothing like that. Just as a before-and-after: the befores were sort of like Facebook's, Twitter's, Dropbox's — those were the winners. Then the next wave of winners was Airbnb — renting out your couch to strangers in the real world — and Uber and Lyft. That was a real-world marketplace. It looked nothing like the previous playbook. You had to go city by city. The winners had to play by a different playbook. The people who were good at it would go into cities and bootstrap: "How do we get—how do we put free donuts out here to get the drivers to come?" Then we're going to incentivize the drivers, 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 you needed right before that. Then that wave ended, and all of a sudden it's about crypto. It was... </FormattedResponse>
53:41	Sam Parr	Like... oh, the people who got rich were the people...
53:42	Shaan Puri	Who really understood what money even is, what fiat currency is, and what's going on with — you know — what is the double-spending problem and cryptography? Then crypto had this wave, and it looked absolutely nothing like it because Bitcoin wasn't even a company. People asked, "How do I invest in that?" and the answer was, "Well, you'd buy the currency." I had no idea how to even become successful in this because the game had changed again. And now with AI, it seems like the game is changing again. I bring up this idea of using AI as the company brand or the management tool for the company because that sounds so unfamiliar that my spidey-sense is: maybe the game — maybe the floor — is moving again, and the opportunities moved over here. Similarly, with hard tech or defense tech: when we moved to Silicon Valley, nobody would do that. If you did, you seemed sort of callous. Then Palmer Luckey made defense cool.
54:41	Sam Parr	If you would just show up at a meetup—remember people showing up at a startup wearing a suit and tie? They were either a potential customer, didn't understand the nomenclature, or didn't understand the culture. I remember we would joke about it. They would have to explain, "Oh, I don't — I just did this on accident. I don't actually work for the government," or, you know... I was like, "Are you a cop?" It was, like, a joke.
55:01	Shaan Puri	"It's like 21 Jump Street."
55:03	Sam Parr	Yeah, as a narc—yeah—but now it's different now.</FormattedResponse>
55:07	Shaan Puri	So now, I think it's the hardware — robotics is obviously massive. I think all the war stuff is massive. I think, you know, crazy AI stuff. So it's clear to me that the ground has shifted again; the ground has moved, and the things that are going to be really interesting in the next ten years—they're not gonna... And by the way, this also just happened with the AI labs. It turns out the best startups in the world—whether you're investing in them, joining them, or starting them—were to create a, you know, the first one was a nonprofit research entity for artificial intelligence: "OpenAI," right, and "Anthropic." These were the big winners. They looked nothing like the winners of the last generation. It's like open source nonprofit — 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. When we were in Silicon Valley, how many people do you know that were investing in, working on, or starting a research lab? Zero. I never met anyone that did that. The two words "research lab" sounded like something you're supposed to do in university for science. I didn't even understand what that was. So you have to be really attuned to the shifts if you want to be a part of the big waves.
56:15	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, to analyze personalized health data—whether that be a diagnostic test, a scan, EHR data, or wearables—that are highly accurate and user-specific.
56:34	Shaan Puri	So, do you know who either Nat Freeman is, right? Yes? Yeah. He—he was telling the story. He did.
56:40	Sam Parr	Is he a great YC guy now, or not? I don't know what his story was.
56:44	Shaan Puri	He did a startup that got acquired by Microsoft. Then, when Microsoft bought GitHub for billions, he became the CEO of GitHub. He famously kind of turned it around—really injected a lot of life into the company—and people praised his tenure there. Then he and Daniel Gross started investing in AI. They created a small fund for AI, got into a bunch of interesting companies, and then joined Ilya when he left OpenAI to start his new lab—a competitor to OpenAI. Facebook tried to buy that thing for like $30,000,000,000 (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.” So now they run Meta’s AI program; they’re part of the brain trust there. He and Daniel Gross run the superintelligence program. Okay, that’s a long story. He was on stage and they asked him how he’s using Claude [AI assistant]. He tells a story: “I gave Claude all my genetic data and my blood-test data and said, ‘Analyze this.’ Claude responded: genetically and from your blood tests, it seems you’re chronically dehydrated. Those signals point to dehydration.” He told Claude, “Do whatever you need to do to make me not dehydrated.” That’s hilarious if you know the “paperclip maximizer” problem—where you give an AI an all-costs objective and it goes too far to achieve it. Claude was connected in his house, so it had access to all his TV screens and cameras—it could see him and display things to him at all times. It could talk through his Alexa or whatever, text him on WhatsApp, and so on. So Claude would do things like: “Hey, you’ve been sitting there for four hours and haven’t had any water. I need you to get up and go to the kitchen and have a glass of water.”
59:07	Sam Parr	Can't he just put up a Post-it note on the refrigerator door that says, "Drink a glass"?
59:11	Shaan Puri	He goes, "So I did. I got up, went and got water, and the camera watched me drink it." Then it came back and said, "Good job. I'm proud of you for drinking that water."
59:24	Sam Parr	"That's messed up."
59:25	Shaan Puri	It's hilarious — it's super easy to make fun of, by the way. 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.
59:45	Sam Parr	We talked about—what's the guy's name from Git? Not GitHub... GitLab? Is it GitLab?
59:52	Shaan Puri	Yeah — who cured his own cancer with AI?
59:54	Sam Parr	"I don't know if it's cured yet. Is it cured?" </FormattedResponse>
59:57	Shaan Puri	I think it is cured, yeah.</FormattedResponse>
59:58	Sam Parr	Wow. Okay. So this guy — he's a billionaire — said he had cancer, and he said, "I'm going founder mode on my cancer," which is a pretty cool article. He has been talking about the journey. I have a friend who has cancer, and they got connected. They've been working together and helping each other. My buddy — I told you 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. Cancer's going away; it's not gone, but he got great news.
01:00:32	Shaan Puri	"Through the use of the... what the AI stuff helped him with, yeah."
01:00:35	Sam Parr	Through what he, Sid, and a few other guys have done.
01:00:39	Shaan Puri	Like, that's wild.
01:00:40	Sam Parr	My buddy works in the AI field. I don't want to say too much about his information, but he is an AI professional. He's been, you know, being a nerd and using AI, and it's been helping him with his cancer. It's not gone, but he's getting great news every couple of months, which is pretty amazing. So, when everything works out well, we'll talk about it. </FormattedResponse>
01:01:02	Shaan Puri	Shouldn't we all be screaming about this from the rooftops? We've talked about it three times on this podcast, but it seems like—if you watch Sid's thing—it's tucked away in a PowerPoint or a webinar somewhere. It doesn't seem like anyone's paying attention to what sounds like some pretty incredible stuff. The guy who cured his dog's cancer went kind of viral. That's cool.
01:01:19	Sam Parr	Yeah, he went viral when he was on the Today Show — not for getting a Nobel Prize, you know.
01:01:26	Shaan Puri	I was actually thinking about the Today Show. That's what I meant—I was...
01:01:29	Sam Parr	"I think he was on the..."
01:01:31	Shaan Puri	Mainstream people care about this. </FormattedResponse>
01:01:32	Sam Parr	He was on Australia's version of the Today Show, by the way. It wasn't even the American one.
01:01:39	Shaan Puri	Yeah, I'm Australian. I do think there was an accent — I was excited to hear that.</FormattedResponse>
01:01:43	Sam Parr	"I'll leave the impressions up to you. I can't believe how little of a deal that was made, though."
01:01:48	Shaan Puri	There's that great phrase: "The future is already here — it's just unevenly distributed." That feels more obvious today than I've ever felt in the past. The future is here. People are doing crazy things with AI, and it's just not evenly distributed — it hasn't made its way out to the world yet. There was another thing that Matt Friedman said that I thought was casually said and I was like, "What?" He told the story about, well, again, someone saying, "You need to be taking this supplement — this magnesium sulfate, whatever supplement," and he's like, "Okay, I don't have it." Then he was in his self-driving Tesla. He had given it access to his Tesla, and he just saw the directions change to a Whole Foods nearby.
01:02:32	Sam Parr	It just... oh my gosh.
01:02:33	Shaan Puri	Rerouted his car. His open claw rerouted his car to the shop, and then he bought it. He was like, "Whoa — what just happened?"
01:02:42	Sam Parr	Yeah... I'm on board with this — I am on board. I would let AI control a lot of these things, you know, but you can't do it when you have, like, a wife.
01:02:50	Shaan Puri	"Maybe there's just a threshold of wealth where it's—listen—you appreciate all this. This is a good life we have, right? I'm going to have the open claw—tell me when to drink water. I'm going to have the cameras on. You know, I'm going to do some weird shit from time to time because..."
01:03:07	Sam Parr	For the record, there is big—not again. By the way, there's a... there's a personality threshold. There's no money threshold. It's like, are you willing to do... oh. </FormattedResponse>
01:03:13	Shaan Puri	"Bet there's a number."
01:03:15	Sam Parr	There's that. Yeah, there's—there's like an EQ number, but there's definitely not a dollar... there's no.
01:03:21	Shaan Puri	Dollar sign for that. You know, when Elon was on SNL, he goes, "I built rockets that can go into space and electric cars that drive themselves. What — did you think I was just gonna be a normal, chill dude?" I thought, like, Socrates, Aristotle... those are up there in the quotes for me — the pantheon. Like, "oh yeah, that makes sense."
01:03:41	Sam Parr	"If you find a man on top of a mountain, don't assume that he's going to be reasonable or normal. I think that's fair to say. Just like, if there's a great artist, I don't expect him to show up on time all the time."
01:03:51	Shaan Puri	Correct. Alright, I gotta go. I gotta go on a flight. </FormattedResponse>
01:03:54	Sam Parr	Alright. That's it. That's the pod. Peace.

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I put 80% of my money in the S&P after Howard Marks told me not to

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