25 Years Of Founder WISDOM In 55 Minutes (ft. Jason Fried)
Risk, Luck, Business, and Finding Balance - June 5, 2024 (10 months ago) • 56:08
Transcript:
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Jason Fried | My job as a founder is to inject risk into the business. You can get away with certain things that other people simply can't because you own the damn place.
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Sam Parr | Alright, today's episode we're going to talk about things that interest us.
One thing that I tweeted out the other day—I wasn't surprised by this result, but it still made me sad. I tweeted out, "If you could guarantee a 7.5% real return for the rest of your life, every year guaranteed, but you can't invest in any individual stocks forever. However, you can start your own business."
I think I even said you can only invest $10,000 into that business, or you can invest actively. You can't really buy the index, but you can invest actively and do whatever you want. Some years, maybe you'll get +50%; some years, you're going to get -50%.
Which would you choose: option A or B?
40% of my 300,000 followers selected option B, and you replied, "Option A all day, easy."
Why did you select that?
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Jason Fried | Well, to get 7.5% with no effort, and you're guaranteed... it's a no-brainer. It's an absolute no-brainer for me. I mean, now I've got a business, and I have a lot of risk in my own business, so that might be part of it as well.
Let me ask you this: Were you intending this to be for someone who's 21 years old, straight out of school, never invested before, has nothing else going on? Or is it just for anyone in their life?
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Sam Parr | I think at any point in your life, that's still the right decision.
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Jason Fried | I still turn that switch on in a second. Yeah, that's a ridiculous return—in a good way—and a consistent return. I mean, the way that would compound over time would be fantastic.
There's nothing boring about that. That's incredible! I mean, it's boring actually, but also an incredible thing.
So, yeah, what would you think the survey was going to produce? Were you surprised by the ratio?
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Sam Parr |
I'm surprised that the average Joe... I mean, my followers are probably above the average Joe in terms of income, maybe IQ - maybe not, I don't know. But they're typically a higher [socioeconomic group].
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Jason Fried | Good looks, for sure. They're up there.
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Sam Parr | They're very good looking. It's a very high, like, I would imagine it's a highly educated coastal crowd.
So anyway, I would have thought that they would have seen the fallacy that they probably can't beat all the others, particularly the other people who have a much better advantage.
The idea that although everyone else fails at getting this return, I, in my little office, part-time, with just me, can somehow beat all the others... I thought that was shocking to me that they thought they were exceptional at that. That's what I was surprised at. | |
Jason Fried |
Yeah, well that's pretty common. I think everyone thinks they're exceptional in some way. I mean, the thing people don't take into consideration is risk. So like, they might go:
> "Well, if I just buy Nvidia or Apple or whatever, or Shopify..."
And the thing is, in the short term, you almost certainly can [make money]. Over the next 2 or 3 years, you get lucky, pick one, pick a winner. But the rest of your life? That's the question.
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Sam Parr |
So here's what I've done lately: I've been spending time in New York because I've got family here. I cold emailed and did cold outreach, and I randomly met a bunch of people who work at hedge funds. I'm like, "Hey, I'm not a competitor. You don't ever have to worry about me. I'm just a passionate, interested person."
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Jason Fried | Can I? | |
Sam Parr | Just like, can I just sit at your computer and you show me your software? I just want to see what you do all day. You go to some of these offices, and I would have thought they were like "Wolf of Wall Street," where it's buzzing and the phones are ringing.
It's really just pretty quiet. It's usually just a bunch of nerds looking at computer screens. But they have like four screens and incredibly complicated software. The average Joe is getting paid $100,000, sometimes tens of millions of dollars, to be good at this one thing.
Then I think about how Bobby Lee, in whatever Missouri where I'm from, is possibly going to have an edge on all these resources. And these people with all these resources are still not that good. You know, I talked to a guy who worked at Bridgewater recently. I was like, "Bridgewater? I've read about Ray Dalio. Aren't you guys like the best?"
He said, "Sometimes we're the best, but the last 15 years we've sucked. We've underperformed in the market." I'm like, that's insane! That 1,500 employees, tens of billions or hundreds of billions in assets, and you're all paid like the best there is, yet you still can't beat it. So that kind of sums up where I'm coming from.
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Jason Fried |
Yeah, it's also like Vegas. You go to Vegas and you're on a hot streak for 30 minutes, and you know the longer you play, the less you're gonna win. You're gonna lose... like, you're gonna lose. The house is going to win over the long term.
People, I think, have this idea of short-term performance in the market, feeling like "I can do this forever." Just like in Vegas, you can't do that forever, and you will begin to lose. The same thing is true in the market.
So yeah, lock it in.
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Sam Parr | What's this thing about loosening the grip on the stick?
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Jason Fried | Oh yeah, so I got a drum set recently. I used to kind of want to play drums; I kind of did for a little bit, but I stopped for many years. I just picked it up recently. My office is a bit of a mess, so I have to find a better place for it, but right now it's in the corner.
As I've been playing, I learned this very quick lesson. Actually, it's true when I tried to learn how to play guitar. I say "try" again because I'm not very good at these things, but I enjoy them.
When you're new at something, you tend to hold things too tightly. For example, I hold the drumstick too tightly, and I hold the neck of the guitar too tightly. Anyone who's played any instrument will understand kind of where I'm coming from here.
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Sam Parr | I used to play drums. I know what you're talking about.
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Jason Fried | Okay, so you hold the stick really, really hard, and then you fatigue faster. You don't have as much articulation on the stick. You can't get certain ghost notes and tones out of things because you're always hitting too hard and too firmly. There's no finesse.
It kind of dawned on me recently that this is very, very true for most things in life, especially in business. In some ways, I feel silly always bringing this back to business. Anyway, I realized that by simply loosening my grip a bit and lightening up, you end up having better control. You end up playing better, working better, and you can do it longer. You also allow other things to happen that weren't possible when you're gripping so tightly.
I think this is true for business. When you're starting a business, you typically have a really tight grip on things. It's best at some point to loosen up a little bit and let the rest of the organization expand into itself, rather than trying to control every last thing. I run into a lot of entrepreneurs who I think have not learned how to let go of the stick. | |
Sam Parr | I think that that's also a young man's thing to do, right? Like, you learn this with age.
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Jason Fried | What are you saying?
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Sam Parr | What are... | |
Jason Fried | What are you trying to say?
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Sam Parr |
Well, what I'm saying is you have a couple decades of experience, and so do I. I think that as I'm getting older - which I'm not old, but neither are you - I'm learning it's okay to loosen up.
That's what they say a lot about men. They say, "Oh, well he used to be intense, but he's mellowed out." He's mellowed out, and that's usually what they're referring to.
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Jason Fried |
Yes, that's good. Yeah, the mellowing out... it's nice though. In a different realm of something, to find a metaphor... In my head now, I am kind of thinking about this like, "Loosen up your grip a little bit."
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Sam Parr | In what parts of life?
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Jason Fried | Well, I'd say business... I would also say, with my kids a little bit, there's a way where I kind of wanted them to do certain things a certain way. It creates this conflict. They're their own people, I'm my own person, and you know, I want to encourage them to do certain things in a certain way. But I also have to loosen up a little bit around that and let them find their own way.
That's something I learned pretty early in parenting. There are a lot of things, but in general, I just feel better when I'm not gripping things so tightly.
When I look out there, you know, on Twitter or anywhere like LinkedIn or whatever it is, I'm reading a lot of business stories. I'm seeing a lot of grit and tension. People are trying to over-optimize and paying attention to every last little thing. I feel like they should just loosen up a little bit, pay attention to a few things that matter, and let things just be a little bit more... relaxed.
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Sam Parr | Alright, look. The question that Sean and I get asked constantly is: **What skill set did we develop early on in our careers that kind of changed our business career?**
And that's an easy answer: **It's copywriting.** We've talked about copywriting and how it's changed our lives constantly on this podcast. We give a ton of tips, a ton of techniques, and a ton of frameworks throughout all the episodes.
Well, we decided to aggregate all of that into one simple document. You can read all of it, see how we've learned copywriting, and check out the resources that we turn to on a daily basis. You can see the frameworks and techniques we use. It's in a simple document, and you can check it out in the link below.
Alright, now back to the show.
The best example that I've experienced in my real life is arguing with people. Before, it was like every word that I... when I learned to talk, it was like fighting. That was the first thing that came out. You know, my early words were about wanting to fight.
If I met someone with a different political perspective, it was, "You're wrong for these reasons," or "You're really stupid for that." When I lived in San Francisco, I was significantly more combative than I am nowadays. I've been lucky that I was raised in Missouri and that I lived in San Francisco, New York, and Texas. That has shaped me a bit politically, but it also bleeds into other points of life.
Instead of someone saying something I disagree with, I now think, "Well, why do you feel that way? That's a really interesting perspective. Tell me more about why you feel that way."
I think... I don't know if this is just a clickbait thing, but Keanu Reeves had this quote where he said, "I used to argue with people. Now I never argue. You could say 1 + 1 equals 5, and I'll say, 'Well, I hope you have a really good day.'"
Yeah, and that's a little bit about how it's been for me. I just want to argue a bit less. I'll still catch myself arguing, but Dale Carnegie, in his book *How to Win Friends and Influence People*, has many famous lines. One of the famous teachings is basically just: **Don't argue with people, because typically no party walks away happy or satisfied.**
So, loosening the grip for me means arguing less. I'm not even going to judge you. I can recognize that you think this way and I think this way, and it's cool.
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Jason Fried | It's a great example, actually. I hadn't thought about that, but that's another great example of just holding on.
It's not even about holding on too tightly to a perspective because you can have a perspective that you really believe in. But it's like, don't clench where you're not even able to listen.
I think the idea of being too grippy is that you're like a spring under tension. If someone says something to you that you disagree with, you're going to boom, expand, and explode, right? This is kind of what an argument can be.
Instead, you could take some of the tension out of that spring and just bounce with it, listening rather than exploding out of it. I think that's a big difference.
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Sam Parr | Have you ever read... I, there's this term—I'll have to figure out what the term is—but there's this term where astronauts go to space and they see the Earth from far away. Many of them have reported having a life-changing perspective.
They think to themselves, "The fact that we're fighting over religion is ridiculous. The fact that we're fighting over borders is ridiculous."
Now, let's zoom down to the smaller things. The fact that we're fighting over someone saying something rude to us is absolutely crazy because we're all just a bunch of monkeys on this floating thing and it's...
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Jason Fried | Like with cars, that's all we are.
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Sam Parr |
Yeah, and we see this abyss, and then we're just a silly blue thing in the middle of it. A lot of astronauts say it changes their perspective and mellows them out. I think that when I read about that years ago, it kind of helped me calm down a little bit more.
It makes you think... the stuff that I thought mattered doesn't matter. For example, I remember when COVID happened, and I was like, "We're never going to a concert ever again." And then 3 years later, I'm like, "Fuck that, I forgot all about that." Do you know what I mean?
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Jason Fried | Totally! Have you read that great passage from Carl Sagan, "The Pale Blue Dot"?
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Sam Parr | What's he say?
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Jason Fried | No, I mean, it's one of the most beautiful... I'm not going to say it because I want you to read it. I want you to have the experience in your head.
Sure, it's a paragraph. It is one of the most beautiful passages I've ever read, but it's exactly kind of what you were talking about with the astronauts looking back at the Earth. It's all about all the things that have ever happened.
I'm going to really generalize here because I want you to read the words, but all the things that have ever happened—every leader, every religion, every point of view, every argument, every whatever, right?—beautifully, in beautiful prose, happened on this speck of dust. Basically, I think he calls it like a "mote of dust."
It's such a beautiful passage, and it brings tears to my eyes. I try to read it a few times a year because it's so right. It's so spot on, right? And it's exactly what you're talking about in the most beautiful, poetic way, which is that all the stuff that we're worried about, all these things—very few of those things matter.
Although, of course, they matter in your day-to-day life, so they're real for you, but they really don't matter that much. It's just a good reminder that, you know, all the things we're just so fired up about... care.
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Sam Parr | Well, it's a paradox of like caring by not caring. Why do you not like comparing this stuff to business? I'll tell you my reason why I think it's good afterwards.
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Jason Fried | Yes, so this is an undeveloped thought of mine that's been sort of on my mind. I don't know if it's a good idea or not, so just run with me here.
I'm going to kind of explore this idea. It seems like every great lesson is then applied to business by someone. For example, a Navy SEAL learns all the stuff in the military, and then they come and consult for companies about how to run teams. Or some great coach coaches a great team, and then they bring that knowledge to the business world.
It's always about bringing it to the business world, and I'm like, why does the business world deserve the best lessons from things that are completely unrelated in many ways to business? But why does it always come to the business world?
The main reason, in my opinion, is because the business world pays for that advice. It's not that it deserves the advice; it's not even that it's advice that's applicable, but that it pays for the advice.
The way I've been thinking about it is not as this shining beacon on a hill that business deserves all the greatest things, but actually as the drain that all these ideas drain down through business. Business is sort of just willing to pay for it, listen to it, and have this... it's sort of insecure in a way.
So, it wants to listen to the Navy SEALs. It wants to listen to the great NCAA coach. It wants to listen because it's insecure in its own way. There's also this sense that these other places and people know better than us, so we're going to just bow down for their advice.
Again, this is a little bit unformed, but it's something that just bugs me a little bit. I don't know, does that make any sense? Or is this a weird idea?
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Sam Parr |
No, it makes sense, but my argument would be... Instead of the image that you've just painted, you've painted an upside-down triangle with all of this beautiful stuff draining down into this bad thing.
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Jason Fried | Thank you.
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Sam Parr | I would turn that upside down and say it all is going up to this amazing thing, and here's why: because I think that whether you like capitalism or don't like capitalism, you cannot deny that it's here to stay.
At worst, it's here to stay in the lifetime of everyone who's alive. Maybe America will change; maybe the rest of the majority of the world will change, but I wouldn't bet on that happening anytime soon. Therefore, I think that capitalism, and thus business building, is the most practical way to manifest a dream or a reality.
Oftentimes, you could say, "Well, what about art?" and I would agree with that. But at the end of the day, you're still making stuff that people want, and you're still selling tickets. You're still trying to make some type of money off of your art so you can continue doing it, or you're just going to have a rich person who funds you so you are able to do it.
In my opinion, business is the most practical way to actually kick a dent in the world or to manifest a vision. I think of business as a very passionate journey—a little bit of a spiritual journey of turning dreams into reality.
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Jason Fried |
That's an optimistic view, which I do understand. Here's my question: if this thing called business is absorbing all of these lessons from all of these other realms, right, and they're all either filtering down or filtering up, but they're filtering too... and maybe I'm wrong about this, but why aren't the Navy SEALs asking CEOs for advice?
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Sam Parr | Why sometimes they are... If you look at, like...
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Jason Fried | I don't know, maybe they are.
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Sam Parr |
Like Jack Welch's book "Six Sigma," a lot of different types of organizations outside of business view that book as "the rules of the game." I don't really like that book, but they see it that way.
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Jason Fried |
Yeah, okay. I might be uninformed in a sense of like what... who the military is listening to and who, you know, sports teams are. But there's something... it's like you would imagine this entity, this business thing that has absorbed everything, would then be the definitive source of this wisdom. But I wonder, is it a one-way street or is it a two-way street?
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Sam Parr |
And it seems very one-way. You're more right than you are wrong, that's for sure. It's definitely more one-way. Yeah, no, I just wanted to give one example, but... yeah, frankly, it's a nitpick example.
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Jason Fried | Totally. I don't know... again, I don't know if this is a good idea or not. It's just been sort of floating in my head for a bit. So, it's fun to air these things out.
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Sam Parr | What was more fun, the early days or the later days of the company?
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Jason Fried | Oh man, that's a really good question. They're very fun in very different ways.
So, I'm going to... it's a bit of a cop-out, but it's true. They're fun in different ways.
What's exciting about the early days is there's a certain energy that you can never capture again. There's so much more unknown. You're starting from zero and you're building something. You don't know where it's going to be, where it's going to go, what's possible, what isn't, and how long it's going to last.
Now, you don't know how long it's ever going to last in a sense, but there's this hope, this possibility, this birth. It's like, "Boom! We're out in the world, and here we are!" This is an incredible thing, and that's super fun. You get a lot of new attention, and you're kind of bursting on the scene, and that's really exciting.
I think what's hard, actually, is the middle. We've gotten to a place now, having done this for 25 years, where it's become really fun again in a different way. But I would say like 15 years in is a different story because that... at that point...
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Jason Fried | It's like we've been doing this for a while. I don't know how much longer it's going to last. You're kind of in this sort of maintenance thing.
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Sam Parr |
Were you big enough at 15 years where you're like... payroll's not an issue? Like, were you out of any type of outside pressure where it was like, "Things are fine"? I... so it's like I feel weird that I'm complaining, but this feels weird.
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Jason Fried | Yeah, and I'm not really complaining about it, but... it's more like, you know, Scott Belsky wrote a book called *The Messy Middle*. | |
Sam Parr | Yeah, it's great.
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Jason Fried | I have not read the book, actually, but I understand the idea of it. It's kind of what I'm trying to get at, which is like the middle of it. It's like, what do we want to be now, and where do we want to go now? Are we going to be a big company, or are we going to stay a small company?
There are all these opportunities surrounding us now, swirling around us. Versus when you're starting, you're just moving. Then you reach a place where you're kind of evaluating. Now we're in this place where we've sort of mellowed, in a sense. Although, we're actually getting very ambitious again because we have the sense that we've been doing this for so long now.
If we took some crazy bets or made some bold moves and it all fell apart, I don't want that to happen, but I'd be okay with it too. We're at a place where we've done plenty and had an incredible run. If it all ended with a bang because we tried some crazy stuff that didn't work, I'd be okay with that too.
So, I feel like I'm at that place now where I wouldn't have been 15 years ago, if that makes any sense. What's your sense? I mean, you started a bunch of stuff.
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Sam Parr | My sense is that none of my things have been as big as yours, but they've been big enough where we've had dozens, or you know, 50 to 60 employees. We got outside of the existential crisis moment where it's like, "Things are working."
Everyone talks about focus; focus is a very common thing, and it's something I firmly believe in. But as someone who likes to make things, for my skill set, a company outside of maybe let's say $3,000,000 in revenue, or maybe $5,000,000 in revenue, I've noticed consistently that at $5,000,000 in revenue and like 15 employees, I feel like I don't know what to do with my hands. I'm just sitting here like, "What do I do?" I feel useless, and I feel like sometimes I'm a general behind the scenes just pointing.
I've noticed something that I really dislike, but I think it's normal: a company ebbs and flows. I've noticed that this ebb and flow carries over to the rest of my life. For example, I just had a child, and I'm in this quiet time for a moment where I have to be present.
Whereas there are other times, like when you're dating or something like that, and you're in "war mode" a little bit, where it's action constantly. Or like I'm on top of my game, and I gotta be on top of my game. The same goes for business, where it's like, "We're launching this new thing. We're out fighting with the troops; we're in the trenches."
Then there are other times—sometimes this can last for years—where it's just like, "We're just doing the same thing over and over and over again."
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Sam Parr | Can be a little depressing, even though everything is going well. It's very saddening because you lack action. It's basically like what they say with a lot of great investors. I think Manish said this on our last podcast: "If you can watch paint dry, you're gonna be a good investor."
The problem with that for a lot of entrepreneurs or go-getters is that it's a really sad place to be in. Even though everything is going well, it's really uncomfortable to be in that feeling.
So, have you guys had a lot of moments where you're like, "Man, I just gotta... unfortunately have to do nothing for maybe years?"
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Jason Fried |
Yeah, I can totally identify with that. I think what you're getting at is with entrepreneurs... What you're describing is that in the early days, you are very important as a founder.
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Sam Parr | Yeah. | |
Jason Fried | Then there's a point where you build an organization, and that organization is able to, in some ways, run without you to some degree. At that point, you kind of feel a little bit less valuable to your own thing that you made.
It's a good thing, but for you, it feels a little bit like you've become detached from this thing that you created. You're now further away, typically from the creation phase, and now you're more in the maintenance phase of something. You're dealing with internal politics, personalities, and hiring. You've got some great people who just left, and now you have to find new people. The culture is changing, and that's a pretty tumultuous, turbulent time for a founder.
I've gone through that many times, and it comes and goes. What I found is that, what I kind of discovered recently, is that my job as the founder—I'm still a founder, I still started this company, and I'm still in it after 25 years—my job as a founder, what I've realized, is to inject risk into the business.
Most people, everyone pretty much at your company, their job is to manage risk to some degree, to keep their job, to not push too hard or too far. Ultimately, you can get away with certain things that other people simply can't because you own the place; you are the original person.
What I found a lot more joy and excitement in is revisiting this idea of injecting risk, and for us, that means...
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Sam Parr | I don't think you could change that. I think, like, for a long time I was wondering, "Why aren't these people taking risks? I gotta force them." And I'm like, "There..."
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Jason Fried | You go. | |
Sam Parr | It's impossible. That's impossible to change.
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Jason Fried | Even if you hire a great CEO to replace you, they just don't have that same essence. They might be an incredible executive, executing things, training her on time—just incredible. But there's that thing present in a founder simply because they were there from the beginning. They have an extra ounce of latitude that allows them to take risks that nobody's going to say no to. Maybe if you have a board, someone might say no, but they'll still give you more latitude than a hired hand, basically.
So, my sense is that the way I found to return to this sort of flow versus the ebb is to inject more risk. For us, that means we're going to build a lot more products this year. We're going to do four products. We're about to start working on two products simultaneously, which we've never done before. We've never built two things at the same time.
There's a lot of stuff going on. We've got different models; we've got SaaS, we've got all these things. We're going to do multiple versions of multiple things and different business models. We're really off balance in a healthy way at the moment because we're doing a bunch of new stuff, and that gets me excited.
Now, it makes some people internally nervous, understandably so. It's like, "Well, this is different. Now we're kind of off balance a little bit, and we're trying new things." But that's how I have to run the business; otherwise, I will become bored.
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Jason Fried | It won't serve me or the business well if I'm in charge and I'm bored. That's not a good thing.
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Sam Parr |
For my professional life, or for my main company, that's like the main 9-to-5 thing. For Hampton, I've not... I do inject risk, but I have a CEO, and so I try to... I have to respect that relationship. And so...
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Jason Fried | Yes.
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Sam Parr | On my nights and weekends, I created a new website for fun. I created this website called **Sam's List**. It's [samslist.co](http://samslist.co).
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Jason Fried | Nice. | |
Sam Parr | And the reason I did it was I tweeted out, "Who's got an accountant that they love?" because I just needed an accountant for something.
I got like 300 replies, and I was like, "Wait, something's interesting here." This tweet got so many bookmarks. A lot of people bookmarked it, and someone was like, "Oh, I'm saving this for later to find an accountant."
So I thought this was interesting. I spent a few months calling every accountant on the list, finding out how much they charged, what services they provide, what services they don't provide, who the ideal client is, who isn't the ideal client, whatever.
Then I created a website called **Sam's List**, where I reviewed or compiled all the information from my research on all these accountants. I think I got 8,000 people to visit in the first week.
Then I started figuring out how to monetize it. So this month, the first month it's been live—it's May 22nd when we're filming this—I think it's done $20,000 this month.
The $20,000 that I've made from that is more dopamine than, let's say, $1,000,000 a month or $2,000,000 a month that I've gotten from other things. It's a total rush, and I love it.
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Jason Fried | Why is it... why do you think that's so exciting for you?
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Sam Parr | It's a total rush because what started as something so fun, like silly jokes, has turned into real things. For example, the logo we have is a calculator that has three numbers and a "Q." It looks like Clippy from Microsoft, waving at you, and it also resembles Mickey Mouse.
I just used ChatGPT and said, "Make a logo that looks like Clippy, but it's a calculator." It's so fun to take these silly, jokey ideas and turn them into real things that actually solve problems. I find that to be almost part trolling, part "shit-eating grin," like scheming. I love that!
Isn't it hilarious if we made this a thing? Then actually seeing it become a reality is so exciting. I also think that when you have a silly idea, even if it's a serious one, and you start seeing customers truly like it, that's a very invigorating feeling. | |
Jason Fried | It's the best! We have this internal saying that we don't say that much, but I've said it before: "The cool wears off, but useful never does." What you've made is something that's useful, and that is one of the most beautiful things you can do for humanity.
It's to make something useful and to have fun with it. Screw around and not take it so seriously. This goes back to the idea that your grip is loose on this. You know, you're having fun with it. Yes, ChatGPT to make a logo, and you're goofing around. The name is just your name. It's like, just have some fun!
It's a reminder that this should always feel like, as much as possible, it is totally valuable to do hard things. Absolutely! But not everything should be hard. There should be plenty of easy things in your life too—things that flow, things that you have fun doing, things that don't feel hard. You don't need to pile up and collect only hard things.
While some of your business ideas might be harder to pull off for other reasons, this one is so lighthearted and easy. It's healthy, it's good for you, and you rediscover why you do this sort of stuff. It's also fun!
I think there's probably something in this that makes you feel like, "I did this by myself." That's the feeling of accomplishment. You know, I could still do something by myself—really by myself—and that's useful. It's very rewarding and hard to come by sometimes when we all think we need to have partners, co-founders, and teams to pull things off. | |
Sam Parr | Do you and your partner get along beautifully?
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Jason Fried |
We get along really well. We're friends, but we don't see each other very often. We live in the same town, and we don't see each other... I see them once every, I don't know, couple of months. We're very good partners and we're friendly, but we just don't... we don't hang out. Like, our families don't hang out. It's not that we wouldn't enjoy it, we just... we just don't.
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Sam Parr |
There was a study where they looked at the most common reasons why couples get divorced. The most common reason was **contempt**.
Conversely, the most common reason for staying together was that you **admired** the other person.
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Jason Fried | Oh, I hadn't heard that, but it resonates. Resentment is just bad. I think a lot of business partners resent each other. Actually, have you been in business with others? I'm assuming.
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Sam Parr | Yeah, I've had bad relationships. I'm currently in a very harmonious relationship with my co-founder, Joe, and I could see it lasting a lifetime. | |
Jason Fried | What feels different about it?
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Sam Parr | So, when we first started together, we invested in startups and had a great time. He previously helped me with my old company, The Hustle. I cold emailed him, and he was like, "Hey, if you're in New York tomorrow, just stop by the office and we can talk." I was like, "Yeah, I'll be there." I flew out there, hung out with them, and that's how we became friends.
Then, we invested in startups together. I took a really formal approach with him. I said, "Joe, I love working with you." It was something I did with my wife early in our relationship when we were thinking, "Hey, is this something we want to make real, get married, and have a family?" I sat down with my wife and said, "Let's walk through our life values. What type of life do we want to have? Let's see if they align."
That's okay if things change eventually, but let's see if the direction is similar. So, I sat down with Joe, and we outlined what sacrifices we were willing to make, what sacrifices we were not willing to make, what a perfect day looks like for each of us, and what drives us.
For example, I said, "You know, I'm driven by ego. It bothers me that people think I'm not good enough, so I always want to prove that I'm as good as I think I am." I also mentioned, "I'm driven by money, but I only want to work 40 hours a week. I don't want to work more than that. I'm not willing to sacrifice traveling. I'm not going to get out of my house often if I have a family."
He named all of his priorities, and we looked at everything together. We discussed how much money we wanted to have and whether the things we didn't agree on were deal breakers. They weren't. We did a great job of being honest upfront about our wishes.
Now, it's much easier to address any issues we have. For example, he'll say, "Hey, we gotta get this done," and I'll respond, "Yeah, but you told me you don't want to grind on a Saturday, so I'm not even going to ask you. It's all good."
We agreed on these things, and that makes the relationship really nice. We respect one another, and we had those conversations super early on. | |
Jason Fried |
Do you feel like the list or the conversations you had about that turned out to be true? Are those really the things that you guys share together, or was that sort of what you imagined you would share?
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Sam Parr | Yeah, for example, let's just do the money one. That's a really easy one. We actually shared each other's personal finances with each other.
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Jason Fried | Interesting. | |
Sam Parr |
Yeah, we were like super transparent. We're like, "Here's all of our finances." What matters is like, "I would like to go here one day. Where would you like to go?" It's like, alright, well to go there we're gonna be... Let's say that my goal is less than your goal. Let's hit your goal then, and if we need to hit your goal, here's maybe what the numbers would need to look like and here's what we'd have to make. So like, that's... you know, is that like something we both agree upon? Do you know what I mean? Like, we're very transparent with each other.
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Jason Fried |
That's wild. I mean, this is... I know we... you and I were talking on Twitter a little bit about how I'm super uncomfortable talking about money, and you're like sharing your personal finances with your founder. It's... it's interesting. Wait...
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Sam Parr | You don't do that with your partner. You don't do that with your partner. Like, well, you guys' finances are probably so tied together, but...
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Jason Fried |
You know, they are tied together. I mean, yeah, basically all of our... essentially the vast majority of our net worth is tied into our business. So we know what our distributions are and all that stuff, but yeah, we don't... I mean, we don't talk about that ever.
But it's interesting, like... I also... you're a Midwesterner, I'm a Midwesterner. I feel like my thing is like, "Don't talk about it." I don't know why. It's ingrained in me.
Were you like that at one point? Or... and did you change, or...?
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Sam Parr | I was always open about it because I saw my family like that. I thought, "That's so unhelpful for me." They weren't telling me anything; they weren't giving me a roadmap. I didn't have anything to strive for because I didn't even know what was possible.
My father owned a produce brokerage company, which is like a small business. Over the course of his 20 to 30-year career, he sold about $150,000,000 worth of onions. But I thought, "How much is a lot of money? Is it $50 a year or like $300,000 a year?" I had no clue about this.
I always regretted that they weren't open with me, so I decided, "I'm just going to be open about it."
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Jason Fried | It's switching. My folks never talked about money. I still, to this day, don't know if they're middle class or wealthy. I don't really know.
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Sam Parr | Do you really have no idea? That's weird. Do you support them?
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Jason Fried |
I have supported them. I gave them a big chunk of money at one point. But they... like, regretfully took it. They didn't really want it then. I don't think they need it, and I think I'm gonna get it back when they pass, kinda thing. Like, they're not gonna use it, you know?
They've always been very frugal. We don't talk about it. My dad was an entrepreneur, worked for himself.
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Sam Parr | Like a small business owner. | |
Jason Fried | He was a trader, so he traded stocks on his own. He wasn't a broker; I think he started out as a broker for a little bit, but then he became an individual investor. Basically, I think he did well for a while, and then he didn't do well for a while.
You know, that's a tough road in a lot of ways. He wasn't a day trader, but there wasn't anything we couldn't have. We also didn't strive for anything that we couldn't afford. I don't really know; my parents have always been careful with this, so I kind of absorbed that.
I just don't really talk about it, and it didn't limit me, though. It's not like I felt restricted. I just felt like everything was sort of fine, is how it felt to me.
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Sam Parr | What are you going to do with your kids?
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Jason Fried |
I struggle with this... My parents never really talked about it. We don't talk about it, but we certainly act differently than my parents did growing up. You know, we own a few homes, we have a couple of nice things.
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Sam Parr | So, just you. | |
Jason Fried | It's kind of obvious that we can afford things and do things, but we just don't. We haven't talked about it.
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Sam Parr | I think that's an incredibly Midwestern and a more traditional, older set of values. My family had very Midwestern values, and I think a lot of those values are great: hard work, don't complain, and don't make people work for you.
Like, I remember going to a restaurant, and we ordered a pizza, but they brought us a chicken salad. I think there are many other values that are, I don't like using this word because it's too loaded, but *toxic* or *bad*.
There are a lot of values that are bad. For example, I think the stoicism that Midwesterners tend to have...
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Jason Fried | You definitely have... I think that it's gotten you.
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Sam Parr |
To where you wanted to go in a... I think that it's gotten you to where you wanted to go in a traditional success perspective. But also, like not being transparent with certain people. I think I just don't want my family to be left wanting more when I'm gone in the sense of like, "I wish that they were more open with me." For example, I've not seen photos of my family really when they were younger, or like, I don't have any.
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Jason Fried | Your parents, you mean?
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Sam Parr | Yeah, my parents were young, and I don't even know my grandparents' names. I had to do 23andMe because when I asked them about my heritage, they would just say, "We're white." I'm like, "Yes, okay, but what flavor? Come on, I need some more!"
So, I had to do Ancestry.com in order to understand who my grandparents were. I was wondering, "What are you guys hiding?" It turns out I found out that an uncle is actually my grandmother's child from a previous marriage. I'm like, "Why didn't you guys tell me this?" They said, "Oh, we didn't want to bring it up."
You know, just little things like that. I'm like, "That's weird. Just discuss it!" It's...
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Jason Fried | Just... just tell me. Yeah, yeah, right.
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Sam Parr |
That's weird. So anyway, I think that is actually bad though, and I pray that I don't fall into that trap. That's why with my family, I've been overly transparent with a lot of things. I just think that... lightens things up a little bit.
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Jason Fried |
I admire that, actually. And this is something I also admire about David. I'm sure you wouldn't mind me telling you this: David used to, when we were in Chicago and we had an office, drive to work in incredibly fancy cars.
My Midwestern sensibility is like, "Dude, don't do that." He's like, "Why not?" My sense was that it just sends a weird message.
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Sam Parr | He's like... | |
Jason Fried | He's like, "What's the message?" I mean, everyone knows—like everyone here who works—like they know we're doing well. Like, why would I hide that from him?
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Sam Parr | With you on that one, by the way.
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Jason Fried | It's so funny because he's right, I think.
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Sam Parr | Have you seen *The Big Lebowski*? He goes, "You're not wrong, dude. You're just an asshole."
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Jason Fried | So, like, in my mind, I'm like, I still struggle with it just because of how I was raised and how I was brought up. The imagined messages... like, I'm imagining that everyone's looking at that and going, "What an asshole!" But most people probably don't care. They know the score; they're fine with it.
And if they're not, that's their problem. Like David said, if they have a problem with me driving a nice car, that's their problem. It's not my problem. I've earned this; I enjoy this car. I buy this car because I like the car. I'm not going to hide the car.
He's right, but I still have a hard time with it. Not anymore with him; this is like way back in the early years. But it still is something that's in there—a residual struggle with that degree of honesty around money. It's similar to how people are in America, like, "Who'd you vote for?" I don't talk about who I voted for.
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Sam Parr | Same. | |
Jason Fried | **I think Chris Rock has a great bit on that. It's so funny.**
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Sam Parr | Like when I see something with a political bumper sticker on their car, I'm like, "You're insane. You're a crazy person."
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Jason Fried |
Yeah, and they're probably like, "Why? I like this guy," or "I like that guy," or "I like hers." Like, "Why do I have to watch to hide my point of view?" And they're right too, you know.
So deep down, your point of view is healthier. I still have a hard time with it, and that's probably my problem. Or maybe it's not... I don't really know. I don't really know. It's very interesting.
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Sam Parr | Do you want to change, or do you not care?
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Jason Fried | Well, I think the truth is my kids have a different perspective. At least my son, who's older. My daughter is 5; she doesn't recognize any of this stuff yet, but my son does. He seems to be into expensive things; he has this craving for them.
I mean, he's got to know what's going on to some degree. He's not an idiot. Do I want to sit him down and say, "Hey son, we've got this and we've got that"? That's not how I would handle it. It would be more like, "I've worked hard. Here's what we have. We have some things, and we're going to enjoy these things. We share these things with friends; this is not just our stuff."
That's kind of how I treat, for example, the house situation. When I renovate a nice old house and make it better, I think of it as our house, but it's also all of our friends' house. People are free to stay there as much as they want and visit as much as they want.
I have this property in Wisconsin, this old farmhouse on 160 acres—a beautiful piece of land. I've been working on it for years. My friends use it more than I do; I don't even go there anymore. My friends can just go up there whenever they want and use it.
So, it's about recognizing that we're clearly fortunate and lucky. A big part of this is that you want to share these things. You're not fortunate if you hoard things; then there's something, I think, kind of wrong about it in my opinion. | |
Jason Fried |
Of view, so share as much as you can. Share this experience with other people, and... and we're fortunate, you know? That's kind of how I sort of left it at this. I don't know, we'll see. The thing that...
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Sam Parr | I tell my friends and family that I try to let them know... and this is something that I couldn't grasp earlier on in my career. I refused to admit this one thing: **luck is real**, and it has played such an important part in any type of financial success.
Just meeting the woman who you spend your life with—just the fact that we were in the same place at the same time—luck is such a bigger component than I ever would have been willing to admit years ago.
I think what I'll explain to my children is, "Look, I worked hard, but I frankly didn't work harder than many other people."
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Jason Fried | That's right.
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Sam Parr | I'm smart, but I'm not that much smarter, if at all, than the average person. The truth is that I worked hard; I had a skill. But I got like 50% of luck—was like part of that, or maybe even more than 50%. Luck is such a huge, huge component, and I hope that I can impress upon my family that luck is real.
It just happened to work out because some timing thing worked out. Like, let's say you started a business and you surged during COVID. You're like, "Dude, I just kicked ass!" because of something I had nothing to do with. Our business killed it during COVID. I'm like, I didn't know that was going to happen; that was just total luck.
You know what I mean? Things like that—it's absolutely real, and I hope my family will understand that. | |
Jason Fried | I am 100% with you, and I think it's way more than 50%. I mean, all the way back to the fact that you didn't choose your parents. You didn't choose anything, right? You didn't choose your mind.
How did you become the kind of person who is the way you are? There are a million inputs, a billion inputs that you don't know about.
What is it? I don't regret... too strong a word, but one of the things I regret most in my career is getting on stage at Startup School. This was like Y Combinator's Startup School years ago. I forget when I was invited to speak. I was only invited once because I was pretty anti-raising money.
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Sam Parr | Yeah, I was gonna say I thought you were like the opposite of their ethos.
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Jason Fried | I was, but Paul was kind enough to ask me to come up on stage and give a talk.
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Sam Parr | But you and Paul seem quite similar, to be honest.
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Jason Fried |
Well, I appreciate that. I mean, I have a lot of admiration for his ability to put ideas together and think things through. What he's built... but he invited me on stage and there was a question from the audience about luck.
Someone's like, "Do you believe in luck?"
I'm like, "**Hell no**, I don't believe in luck!" Wow... I was such a prick.
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Sam Parr | How old were you?
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Jason Fried | Early to mid-twenties... I think it was. I was just such a prick, a young punk prick, you know? It's so embarrassing, but you know, a lot of things are. You look back on things like poetry you wrote in college and you're like, "Oh my God, I wrote that!"
Whatever it is, you realize that part of growing up is totally misunderstanding the world and your position in it. Then, hopefully, you get to a place in your world where you develop a bit more. You have some self-reflection and you can call yourself out on the bullshit that you thought. But also, that's who you were at the time, and that's that.
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Sam Parr |
The last thing I wanted to ask you about was this "staying off" versus "staying up." You said:
> Imagine all the things you felt you were falling behind on. If you didn't learn about them last year, would it really have mattered if you started today instead?
Watch out for the trap of "must know now." What does that mean?
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Jason Fried | Right now, in the AI world we're in, every once in a while, like in my "For You" feed on Twitter, I see "ten things you gotta know or you're falling behind." It's like, everyone's falling behind, meanwhile this thing is brand new and moving fast.
So, any human can pay attention. I just keep seeing these stories about, "If you don't know this, and they're doing that, and if you're not on top of this..." It's like, no, it probably doesn't matter that much. Most things, if you would have read that feed a year ago, that you were supposed to know, it wouldn't have mattered that much if you didn't. Some things would be handy to know, but it probably wouldn't have mattered that much if you started now instead or waited a year in some cases.
One of the things I was doing for a while, I'm not doing anymore, but I should go back to doing it again. This was actually easier to do during the pandemic. So, today is May 22, 2024. I would go back and listen to all the podcasts I listened to and listen to the ones from May 22, 2023.
During the pandemic, it was great because you hear all these experts talking about this and that, and everyone's so certain of everything. You go back and listen, and you're like, "Man, we were so wrong about so many things." Many of the things we were worried about never happened anyway, in this political issue and that political issue. "If this guy gets in office, this is gonna happen. If they get in office, this is gonna happen." Turns out, very few things actually happened.
It's really a nice exercise to go back and listen to old podcasts and old interviews of substance and realize that there's some stuff that was right, some stuff that was wrong. But man, the sense of urgency in these podcasts is so misplaced because most things don't need to happen right now. You don't need to be up on this right now, and you shouldn't feel bad about not being on the cutting edge of X, Y, or Z, especially an edge that is recutting itself and resharpening itself every few months.
So, that's what I'm saying. I try to stay a bit out of things. I don't want to be on the edge of things. I'd like to let things settle in a little bit more before I really start to dig in.
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Sam Parr | Do you read any biographies?
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Jason Fried | I have read a few biographies. I really love the idea of them, but I have a hard time reading long books.
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Sam Parr | Yeah. | |
Jason Fried | Most biographies tend to be very long.
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Sam Parr | I've got a limit where it's like **500 pages or less**.
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Jason Fried | Yes.
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Sam Parr |
But I'll do a long one every once in a while. I read a fair bit, not because I'm in a competition. It's just an hour a night is typically a book a week, and great. I read a lot of biographies. I like business biographies, and I love history... so, like, a lot.
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Jason Fried | of the | |
Sam Parr | World War II leaders, a lot of the American titans of industry, and a lot of just random people. I love biographies, and I have this process of what I do.
I've got this spreadsheet where I only read on Kindle. Anytime I see something interesting, I highlight it. At the end of the book, I'll create a timeline. Here's where they were born, here's where they died, and then anything that I highlighted that happened in this year, that happened in this year.
What I do is I go to this website called Newspapers.com. Newspapers.com has archived pretty much every newspaper ever, back until the 1600s. What I like to do is, let's say I read this biography about Ted Turner. Ted Turner is the guy who started CNN. He was a fascinating guy to me.
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Jason Fried | Or let's actually talk about the biggest plane owner in the United States.
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Sam Parr | The biggest plane... yeah, and he's done a lot of fascinating things. The reason why I use Newspapers.com is that I like to go back to my Kindle and my spreadsheet. I see, "Alright, in this year he decided that he wanted to buy land." You know, I'm going to go read a newspaper article that was written about him during that time. I want to see what he said about his interests, why he's doing it, and like, did he say it? For example, maybe he'll say, "One day I hope to own like 5,000 acres." Turns out he owns millions and millions and millions of acres.
So, I like to read what the predictions were, as well as what people were saying about the person at the time. This way, you don't get revisionist history. What you notice when you do this is that oftentimes you'll read a biography and think, "This was obvious that this person was going to do this," or "Who wouldn't have predicted that this was going to happen?"
Here's another example: World War II. Churchill was basically saying, "The world's going to end; we are going to die. The world's over." We felt that way during COVID. But if you read a lot of history, there have been many times where we have felt this exact same feeling and had this exact same prediction.
I remember I recently read JFK's book, and with the Cuban Missile Crisis, it was like, "The world's over." I go to Newspapers.com and read what the predictions were. What you notice is that people are wrong more than they're right.
Regarding what you're saying about things moving too fast, I read Henry Ford's biography about cars. I got interested in cars and went to read what people were saying in 1912 when the Model T was coming out. The predictions were just ridiculous, and it's so funny that you don't... to reiterate on your point.
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Sam Parr | You don't actually have to be that fast to pounce on certain things. It's really quite fascinating.
To put this in perspective, Ford came out with the Model T, I think, in 1912 or 1916. So, the internet right now is something like 30 years old.
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Jason Fried | Ish. | |
Sam Parr | So, how old would you say the internet is, or like the modern-day internet?
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Jason Fried | The commercial internet, yeah, like '95 or '96 is when, you know, really Mozilla or Netscape kind of came out and really made it happen.
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Sam Parr | It's basically... basically.
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Jason Fried | It's older than that because it's a research thing. But yeah, commercially, let's say 35 years.
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Sam Parr | It's basically like a car company in 1940. Do you know what I mean?
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Jason Fried | Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
Sam Parr |
What's really fascinating is to read all these biographies and use Newspapers.com. It's one of my favorite resources to see interesting predictions and how they've come true. I already know the answer, but I want to know what they were saying at the time. That's my version of what you do with your 2023 podcast.
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Jason Fried | I love that! I didn't know that site existed too. That's fascinating. There's an X account I follow called "Pessimist's Archive" or something like that.
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Sam Parr | I love that one.
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Jason Fried | It's a great one to follow. The thing that's a little bit interesting about right now, the time we're in, is that there are so many people saying so many things, all wearing the expert uniform.
Some people are experts; there are experts in this world. However, many people act and play as one based on just their ability to communicate on platforms. There's just so much certainty layered into their suggestions, requirements, requests, and demands.
It's very healthy to go, every time you see that, "Every time there's like a 'you must,' I always back off and go, probably not." The more forward they are about being certain and right about something, the less interested I am in the short term. I'd rather just stand back and see how it all plays out.
At the end of the day, there are plenty of opportunities in a lot of different areas. You don't need to just pounce on everything as it's happening. In many cases, it's best to wait a little bit and see how things settle out.
I mean, I just think about AI. All the companies that began to implement AI stuff early on, and then OpenAI has just wiped them out in a lot of ways for a lot of different reasons. When you build on other people's platforms, you're very much at risk of things changing—tectonic plates shifting very quickly. You might have been better off waiting and seeing how things shake out.
So anyway, who knows?
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Sam Parr | I wanted you to come on here and just talk because I've read your work for years. I've been a fan of yours for years. I've seen you do a bunch of interviews, and I just wanted to connect.
Someone told me this guy named Dylan said you should just ask people what's interesting to them, and that's what I wanted to do with you. You're an interesting person, and I respect your opinion on so many things.
So, I appreciate you just coming on and riffing with me, telling me what's intriguing to you. It's been very valuable for me just to see how you think and what grabs your attention.
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Jason Fried |
Well, thanks for the invitation. It was really fun and, as I mentioned earlier, I just want to make useful things. Hopefully, this is a useful conversation for us and for anyone listening. So thanks for inviting me, and it was a real pleasure.
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Sam Parr | Alright, that's the pod.
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