AI transcript
0:00:04 All right, I’m going to tell you something. So I have a family now and do you have a will?
0:00:06 Weird flex. All right. Yes, I do have a will.
0:00:11 Okay. So once I have a family, like you start getting into the will stuff, right?
0:00:14 And it’s kind of been screwing with me.
0:00:19 And I read a story last week that has maybe changed my life.
0:00:25 And I think that if only a couple of listeners actually buy into what I’m buying into,
0:00:28 this could be like the most like life changing thing that we’ve ever done on this podcast.
0:00:30 I feel like I can rule the world.
0:00:36 I know I could be what I want to put my all in it like the days off on the road.
0:00:37 Let’s travel.
0:00:43 So in the 1800s in Sweden, there was this guy named Alfred and Alfred was an inventor.
0:00:47 And he had a little bit of success where he started inventing some like a bunch of small stuff.
0:00:51 But then when he was like 30 or 40, he had something that changed his life.
0:00:55 So we basically found out that nitroglycerin, if you mess with it in a certain way,
0:00:56 you can make it explosive.
0:00:58 And thus was the creation of dynamite.
0:01:00 And so it made him incredibly rich.
0:01:01 So we got super rich.
0:01:05 He was worth something like the equivalent of two or three hundred million dollars in today’s money.
0:01:09 And towards the end of his life, his brother Ludwig died.
0:01:15 And when his brother died, someone ran an obituary for Alfred on accident.
0:01:16 They used the wrong brother.
0:01:21 And the obituary started with the merchant of death is no longer.
0:01:25 And they go on to explain how Alfred created dynamite and how it was
0:01:28 revolutionized the way people were murdered.
0:01:31 Now, whether that story is true or false, that’s actually offered to debate.
0:01:34 No one has disproved it, but there’s like people like, I’m not sure if that’s actually true.
0:01:37 But that’s the story.
0:01:40 And afterwards, Alfred changed his life.
0:01:42 He goes, that’s that’s ridiculous.
0:01:44 I can’t be known as the person who is the merchant of death.
0:01:45 I have to change this.
0:01:50 And so two years before he died, he decided to rewrite his will.
0:01:56 And he left 95 percent of his assets towards a foundation where he created the rules
0:01:59 and the rules were I’m going to give and this is I’m using today’s money,
0:02:01 but it’s it’s the equivalent money back then.
0:02:06 I’m going to give one million dollars to the person who impacted humanity the most.
0:02:09 The category that I want to start with is peace.
0:02:11 But after peace, we’re going to do a few other categories.
0:02:14 We’re going to do peace, we’re going to do chemistry, economics and literature.
0:02:17 And thus became the Nobel Peace Prize.
0:02:23 And to this day, it’s lasted for, you know, 130 years where they now have like
0:02:26 six hundred million dollars in assets.
0:02:29 And the whole point of the foundation is we invest enough money.
0:02:34 So we are always able to give something like the equivalent of a five million dollars
0:02:38 a year to some type of person who has impacted the world the most.
0:02:43 And winners have been like Marie Currie, Martin Luther King, Ernest Hemingway,
0:02:45 like a lot of these like pretty like groundbreaking people.
0:02:51 And in a way, this contest, it’s encouraged like, I don’t think there’s too many people
0:02:54 that are doing stuff, stuff just to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
0:02:58 But in the back of their head, they’re like, yeah, like that would be amazing.
0:03:01 If like, I can like discover something and like, you know, that’s like the ultimate goal.
0:03:03 Like to get a Nobel Peace Prize, like that’s like the greatest thing ever.
0:03:09 All right, let’s take a quick break to talk about our sponsor today, HubSpot.
0:03:13 With smaller budgets and sky high expectations, growth is feeling pretty painful right now.
0:03:16 But HubSpot just announced more than 200 product updates to make
0:03:18 impossible growth feel impossibly easy.
0:03:20 Like Breeze, it’s a new suite of AI tools that will help you say,
0:03:23 goodbye to your busy work and hello to better work.
0:03:26 Breeze Intelligence, which will give you the richest, most comprehensive picture
0:03:30 of your prospects and customers and re-imagined marketing and content hubs
0:03:33 to attract and convert more leads and send your revenue soaring.
0:03:36 Visit HubSpot.com/Spotlight to learn more.
0:03:40 And so it kind of changed my life.
0:03:44 By the way, did you know that story, that dynamite story in the Merchant of Death?
0:03:45 Not the specifics.
0:03:47 I had heard Peter Thiel was talking about this with Joe Rogan,
0:03:49 like the sort of whitewashing of a reputation.
0:03:51 And they were talking about Epstein.
0:03:53 They were talking about Bill Gates and Rogan brought up.
0:03:55 He’s like, that’s how the Nobel Prize happened.
0:03:56 And then he’s like, have you heard that?
0:03:58 Peter is like, yeah, he is, you know, the dynamite guy.
0:04:00 But I didn’t know anything beyond that.
0:04:00 So that’s actually pretty cool.
0:04:03 I didn’t know the Merchant of Death obituary story.
0:04:07 So the truth of it is that like dynamite actually wasn’t used to kill that many people
0:04:08 because of the way it worked.
0:04:09 Like TNT killed a lot of people.
0:04:12 But like, so like open up caves for mining and shit.
0:04:16 Right. It was like, so that’s where like the story is like, you know, who knows?
0:04:18 But we don’t let the truth get in the way of good story.
0:04:22 Yeah. But what is true is that the Nobel Peace Prize has worked.
0:04:25 Like it’s encouraged people and like through incentives to do stuff.
0:04:27 Sorry. So explain the money side of this.
0:04:29 So he left how much money to this.
0:04:31 And then is it just been draining from that pot?
0:04:34 Or does new money get injected into the Nobel Prize?
0:04:36 Because it’s a million dollars per prize, right? Is that right?
0:04:38 Yeah. And there’s five per year.
0:04:42 And like one year during the World War two, they were like, we don’t have peace.
0:04:43 So we’re not going to give a peace prize.
0:04:45 And so they like this didn’t give a prize.
0:04:48 And so but in general, every year for the last 120 years, they’ve done this.
0:04:52 And so the money right now, it’s six, this is all public.
0:04:53 So you can see it.
0:04:55 They have six hundred and twelve million dollars.
0:04:59 It made a 10.7 percent return on capital in two thousand twenty three.
0:05:02 It’s invested in equity funds, hedge funds.
0:05:06 And the way that it’s set up, according to his will, was make sure that the money
0:05:09 never runs dry so we can always give.
0:05:12 We can always give this away for potentially hundreds of years. Right.
0:05:15 And so there’s like an organization, I think.
0:05:16 And you can see what their expenses are.
0:05:20 I think their expenses to run this thing are like three or eight million.
0:05:24 I forget exactly a single digit millions per year to operate.
0:05:27 And then they give away roughly five million dollars per year.
0:05:29 And is this like Forbes 30 to 30?
0:05:32 Or like how legit are the winners of the Nobel Peace Prize now?
0:05:34 I’ve never paid too much attention to it.
0:05:40 Do you have a sense of like, is this high signal or is this like a hijacked thing
0:05:42 that now is is not high signal anymore?
0:05:45 So my opinion is very high signal.
0:05:48 So Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King, Marie Currie,
0:05:50 like these like legit people have done it.
0:05:52 Now, there have been a few times where they’ve made mistakes.
0:05:57 So, for example, now they have a rule where they actually want to give the award
0:06:01 a couple years after the person made the discovery, because in 1926,
0:06:05 they gave the award to someone who created this enzyme that cured cancer.
0:06:07 And obviously that wasn’t true.
0:06:10 But like six months after they discovered it, they thought it was true.
0:06:13 And then the other criticism is they have a liberal bias.
0:06:16 And so they’ve given one to Barack Obama, they’ve given one to,
0:06:19 I believe, an Israeli guy once like a peace award.
0:06:22 And then the people who side with Palestine are like, what the hell?
0:06:24 That’s right, there’s no peace.
0:06:25 So there’s criticism sometimes.
0:06:27 But in general, it’s very well regarded,
0:06:32 although a lot of people criticize it as being too academic or too liberal.
0:06:35 But I think it’s like as legit as it could be.
0:06:37 And what’s your take on this?
0:06:38 So awesome story.
0:06:40 So here’s my take.
0:06:44 My take is that this prize set up is awesome.
0:06:46 And let me give you a few examples of this.
0:06:51 So inspired by the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919, there was this guy named Raymond
0:06:55 Ortiz, I think his name is, or let’s call him Orteg, Raymond Orteg.
0:07:01 And so he was like, hey, these planes that we’ve created are pretty amazing.
0:07:03 But we’re not doing like too many great things with them.
0:07:07 He goes, I’m going to offer $25,000 to anyone out there who can fly
0:07:09 from New York City to Paris.
0:07:12 This was in 1919, you know, for $25,000, that’s like $500,000 today.
0:07:16 And like eight people signed up and seven of them failed.
0:07:18 And in fact, five of them died.
0:07:20 Now, who’s the one person who made it?
0:07:21 Charles Lindbergh.
0:07:24 And the year after Charles Lindbergh did his flight,
0:07:28 it says that airline passengers before he did it that year were 5,000.
0:07:31 A few years after, 300,000.
0:07:33 And it completely changed the airline industry
0:07:36 because it made like a big hoopla and a big deal, whatever.
0:07:40 Then inspired by that prize, this guy named Peter Diamandis.
0:07:42 Is that his name? Yep.
0:07:46 He created this thing called the X Prize, where he was like, I offer $10 million.
0:07:50 I think the rules were anyone who can fly a rocket into space,
0:07:52 bring it back down.
0:07:54 And two weeks later, it goes right back into space.
0:07:57 So like reusable rockets and Elon Musk at the time.
0:07:59 I think SpaceX was two years old.
0:08:04 He said the X Prize basically helped create the commercial space industry.
0:08:06 It showed that you didn’t have to be a giant aerospace company
0:08:07 to make progress in space.
0:08:11 And it definitely influenced the direction I took with SpaceX.
0:08:14 So this was like a big deal for like space.
0:08:20 And now the genius of the X Prize was that you by putting up 10 million.
0:08:22 And I think it became 20 million for the prize.
0:08:28 People would like a bunch, 20 teams would invest two million each
0:08:31 in trying to develop the thing to win the 10 million dollar prize.
0:08:34 And so you would get 40 million invested for a 10 million prize.
0:08:40 So it was a kind of a genius way to spur innovation and investment.
0:08:42 So not just people who want to win the prize, because that’s obvious,
0:08:44 put a prize up, people will try to go win it.
0:08:47 But actually in the act of winning it, more dollars got poured in
0:08:50 because they saw a clear return and the math worked out where,
0:08:52 oh, wow, I get leverage.
0:08:55 My 10 actually becomes 100 invested in this mission
0:08:57 if I get enough interest around it.
0:09:00 Along with the PR, along with the the want to just win
0:09:02 and to make this exciting.
0:09:03 And so it works.
0:09:06 And so now there’s a SpaceX prize that Elon has funded,
0:09:10 where it’s 100 million dollars for someone who, if by 2030,
0:09:14 they can remove a certain amount of carbon from the planet or something like that.
0:09:15 And so it’s still ongoing.
0:09:17 Here’s another example.
0:09:18 So you know what DARPA is?
0:09:19 Have you heard of DARPA?
0:09:21 It stands for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
0:09:22 Have you heard of that?
0:09:24 Yeah, weren’t they like responsible for creating the internet?
0:09:25 They’ve done a bunch of stuff.
0:09:30 And so in 2003, they created this thing called The Grand Prize.
0:09:35 And the idea was we have a 150 mile road trip or like a route.
0:09:40 And the first person who can create an autonomous vehicle
0:09:45 that can drive that route wins one million dollars and a hundred and six teams
0:09:46 or something that applied.
0:09:48 And for a little while, no one did it.
0:09:49 But then a team did it.
0:09:52 And that’s when the first time we ever used the lidar,
0:09:56 which is a type of self driving technology that all the cars or many of the cars have.
0:09:58 It was already existed, but it was applied to cars for the first time ever.
0:10:01 And so it was very successful.
0:10:04 And then there’s actually a guy who I think maybe you might know this guy.
0:10:06 His name is Nat Friedman.
0:10:08 He’s a really good guy to follow.
0:10:08 A really interesting guy.
0:10:10 He’s doing a lot of stuff with AI investing right now.
0:10:12 And I know about this prize that he’s got.
0:10:13 It’s really cool.
0:10:15 I believe it’s.
0:10:16 What’s the right phrase?
0:10:18 Is it Herculanean text?
0:10:22 So basically, I think it was like one of the there’s an explosion in, I think, Italy.
0:10:25 You know, the Suvious prize, Suvious.
0:10:31 Yeah, the Mapasuvius exploded and all of these ancient Greek texts got basically ruined.
0:10:34 And he puts up a prize to where if you can create,
0:10:36 you basically have to use machine learning.
0:10:41 If you can create this algorithm that can help him decipher parts of the text,
0:10:42 he’ll give you a prize.
0:10:46 Yeah, so it’s like a scroll that is like been almost sealed.
0:10:48 You can’t unscrew it and just read it.
0:10:53 So what they’re using is computer vision to try to analyze it from the outside.
0:10:57 And just from like the little bits you can see and try to figure out what was written.
0:11:00 I think this is going to be like the earliest written text or something like that.
0:11:01 I forgot. I don’t know the details.
0:11:02 I think somebody could go look this up.
0:11:06 But I remember hearing about this and thinking, wow, this was so cool.
0:11:08 Like he he sort of found this thing.
0:11:11 Nobody was going to be nobody was going to justify the investment
0:11:13 they would take to see this because you also don’t know what’s inside.
0:11:16 You don’t know if there’s anything interesting inside, necessarily.
0:11:19 And he decided to fund this competition.
0:11:22 And I guess what happened recently was somebody figured out how to read a bit of it.
0:11:25 Actually, they had like a breakthrough in the Seavius Prize
0:11:28 where somebody figured out how to read a little bit of the thing from like
0:11:31 some stupidly simple technique of computer vision.
0:11:35 Yeah. And so it’s still a thing, by the way, and like people are still getting after it.
0:11:39 And then the last thing is there’s this thing called Kaggle Kaggle competitions
0:11:43 where it was a startup that raised 12 million dollars.
0:11:45 It was eventually bought by Google.
0:11:50 According to their website, they’ve had 19 million engineers compete in their competitions.
0:11:52 And if you’re a company, you could put a bounty out there.
0:11:54 And people will compete to win it.
0:11:57 So, for example, you remember Microsoft Connect,
0:12:01 like the camera that you put on your Xbox and it could like watch you play
0:12:05 and somehow interact with that, I believe, was heavily developed by one of these competitions.
0:12:08 But then they do other things for HIV research and things like that,
0:12:14 where this gamifying system has actually contributed to like big important problems.
0:12:17 And so all of this to say.
0:12:19 When you’re thinking about or when I’m thinking about when I die,
0:12:22 what will happen to money, you know, you think about giving away to family,
0:12:24 you think about just like traditional giving away.
0:12:27 And you just you just wire it to someone and hope they do well.
0:12:33 I’m incredibly fascinated and interested in these competitions.
0:12:34 And they don’t all need to be huge.
0:12:36 I think there’s one guy who you particularly like Aubrey de Grey,
0:12:38 where he has a twenty five thousand dollar a year.
0:12:41 If you come with some interesting breakthrough on longevity,
0:12:44 he will give you twenty five grand and then you get you get to go meet with him.
0:12:47 Right. And so sometimes they’re huge. Sometimes they’re not huge.
0:12:54 But I think this is like so much more leverage and the publicity and the wanting to win.
0:13:00 It seems so much more better for society to do a contest.
0:13:04 And it’s also more work, but then just giving, you know what I mean?
0:13:06 Hundred percent.
0:13:09 So I love this topic and there’s a bunch of interesting angles.
0:13:11 By the way, can I read you the just the Visuvian thing?
0:13:12 Because I think it’s pretty fascinating.
0:13:13 Yeah, yeah.
0:13:16 They were able to take four passages with 140 characters
0:13:19 each and get eighty five percent of the characters readable, recoverable.
0:13:22 And is it just someone’s like grocery list?
0:13:24 Exactly.
0:13:27 And they use, you know, AI, blah, blah, blah.
0:13:30 I don’t know all the the details of this.
0:13:33 He did a good podcast with Ben Thompson.
0:13:34 I’m sure technically that’s where I heard him talking about this.
0:13:36 I wish if I knew we were talking about this, I could have looked it up.
0:13:39 But I heard this like six months ago, I was getting a haircut.
0:13:40 I thought it was pretty fascinating.
0:13:42 So what did the shroll say?
0:13:44 So you get a haircut when you have earbuds in your ears.
0:13:48 I won’t go to a barbershop if they don’t let me listen
0:13:51 to something while I’m getting my haircut. Oh my God, all right.
0:13:52 Like, if they try talking, I’m just like,
0:13:54 and nothing.
0:13:57 So you can’t hear it.
0:14:00 And by the way, it falls out like four times during every haircut.
0:14:01 And I’m like, oh, sorry, can you get that?
0:14:03 And they’re like, dude, this is annoying.
0:14:06 That’s why I started having a guy come to my house and just do it there
0:14:08 so I could just listen on blast.
0:14:10 But then I felt kind of weird because he was also listening to these
0:14:13 like old Max Levchin talks from like 2002.
0:14:15 And he’s like, who is this?
0:14:17 Why is he talking about like the future of the Internet?
0:14:21 I’m like, yeah, yeah, it’s before the Internet was like that huge of a deal.
0:14:24 God, that’s so rude.
0:14:24 But whatever.
0:14:29 Well, we’ll go back to the scrolls.
0:14:32 It’s like going to a sports bar and I don’t want to talk to the bartender.
0:14:32 I want to watch the game.
0:14:34 That’s what I’m trying to do.
0:14:36 Right. I’m the customer.
0:14:38 The customer experience that they want.
0:14:42 So it says to date, our efforts have managed to unroll
0:14:44 and read about five percent of the first scroll.
0:14:46 So that’s like, you know, the amount of headway that they’ve made so far.
0:14:49 The the general subject of the text is pleasure,
0:14:53 which properly understood is the highest good in their philosophy.
0:14:55 The two snippets are talking about, I guess, talking about pleasure.
0:14:58 So one author thinks as to in the case of food,
0:15:00 we do not right away believe things that are scarce
0:15:03 to be absolutely more pleasant than those that are abundant.
0:15:05 I don’t know what’s going on, but it’s basically a philosophy text.
0:15:06 OK, so that’s pretty cool.
0:15:09 So can I tell you about my take on this?
0:15:11 So early on in the podcast,
0:15:13 I think I had one of the ideas, which was SpaceX,
0:15:16 or sorry, the XPRIZE for companies.
0:15:19 And I basically realized that a lot of companies,
0:15:22 when I when I was inside of Twitch, after we got acquired, I was like, man,
0:15:25 we had this whole situation where they were trying to build things internally,
0:15:28 but they didn’t have like the best team on it.
0:15:29 They didn’t have like the best focus on it.
0:15:31 They didn’t have their highest sense of urgency.
0:15:34 Then you have startups that are often like really high caliber teams,
0:15:38 small groups of people, super high urgency, super high motivation.
0:15:39 It’s their baby.
0:15:41 So they they treat it like life or death, whereas in a company,
0:15:42 you’re not going to treat that way.
0:15:44 And I thought, well, in the end,
0:15:48 we ended up getting acquired for like, you know, small, medium acquisition.
0:15:51 And I was like, you know, if I had just known upfront
0:15:53 that they would be willing to pay for this,
0:15:56 we could have just built it better and faster, knowing that, hey,
0:15:58 there’s a eight finger payday on the other side of this.
0:16:00 And they would have also happily been like, cool,
0:16:04 whoever can make the best version of this, you get this money.
0:16:06 And we don’t have to fund internally the product development
0:16:08 and have one shot on goals.
0:16:11 I was like, why wouldn’t a company just said ten million bucks
0:16:14 for the person who could build the bet, the team that could build the best X.
0:16:18 And then when and the conditions are when if you hit it,
0:16:19 we have the first right to buy it.
0:16:21 You can’t sell it to anybody else.
0:16:23 We get to hire you and the team and you guys get it.
0:16:26 We’ll come on for for it basically earns out over two years.
0:16:28 And, you know, here’s the scope of what we want.
0:16:32 So you’re not guessing, oh, will will Facebook want to buy us?
0:16:34 It’s like, no, no, Facebook’s telling you what they want.
0:16:38 And then you get 25 teams to go try to be the winners of that prize.
0:16:41 Because, hey, you actually don’t need maybe venture capital.
0:16:42 You’re like, hey, we’re going to take nine months
0:16:44 and try to build this thing and try to win the prize.
0:16:46 Right. And I feel like that should exist.
0:16:48 I’m surprised that that doesn’t exist.
0:16:49 That was the first idea.
0:16:52 Second is I actually tried this.
0:16:55 So did I ever tell you about the the prize we created for Milk Road?
0:16:59 No. So when we were doing the Milk Road, we were like, all right,
0:17:03 it’s pretty clear that in crypto, there’s like, you know, the the money use case,
0:17:07 which is, hey, just like save your money in Bitcoin or a currency
0:17:09 that is not that cannot inflate.
0:17:11 It’s not designed for inflation.
0:17:13 And so I get that use case.
0:17:14 But then people were talking about Web 3.
0:17:15 It’s going to change everything.
0:17:18 You’re going to have all these apps, decentralized apps, social,
0:17:21 social decentralized apps where you own your content, all this crazy stuff.
0:17:24 Right. But nobody actually had built any of them.
0:17:27 It was just like a bunch of VCs talking about it in circles.
0:17:29 Our lame white papers, whatever the hell that is.
0:17:32 All the papers and like insane funding, but like they didn’t build a prototype.
0:17:34 But nobody would use it, right?
0:17:35 So we we came up with the idea.
0:17:38 We were like, hey, how do we have Milk Road?
0:17:41 If we’re this crypto newsletter, we believe in crypto.
0:17:43 Why don’t we create our own little grant?
0:17:45 And so we created a grant called the milk money grant.
0:17:48 We’re like, this is not enough to get rich.
0:17:49 But it’s a little bit of milk money, right?
0:17:53 It’s enough where you can justify spending like two or three months on a project.
0:17:56 And it was one ETH, which at the time was like maybe two or three grand.
0:18:00 And so we had, I think, over like 2000 submissions.
0:18:02 And we said, you could build whatever you want.
0:18:04 It’s some use case or application of crypto.
0:18:08 And there was like so we ended up picking 10 or 12 people.
0:18:13 So we gave away probably what what is that like, you know, 36 grand.
0:18:16 And we just use our like ad revenue money to like pay that out.
0:18:19 We just treat it as an expense of the business.
0:18:20 And then we got to meet these people.
0:18:22 And they were super interesting, young, high caliber people
0:18:25 that were building really interesting things.
0:18:27 And even though they were probably already making more than two or three
0:18:31 grand in their job, it just felt like a road scholarship.
0:18:34 It felt like they got accepted, that they were getting paid to do something.
0:18:36 They had an excuse to go like scratch this itch.
0:18:37 And that’s the way we framed it.
0:18:38 We’re like, what’s an itch you want to scratch?
0:18:39 It doesn’t need to be the biggest project.
0:18:42 But something you want to see built that you want to use.
0:18:43 What would it be?
0:18:45 And then people built all kinds of things.
0:18:46 And it was a fantastic experience.
0:18:49 It was honestly really, really awesome.
0:18:51 And I forgot about it until now.
0:18:52 Actually, it’s something I want to do again.
0:18:55 I have a couple ideas of what I might do with it.
0:18:56 Do you want to talk about those or no?
0:19:01 I have a specific idea that I want to fund and I want to fund it.
0:19:04 And maybe it’s not even going to be that big of a business.
0:19:06 So it might be just like a philanthropic way.
0:19:08 But is my my version of the Young Hustlers grant.
0:19:12 So the other day, I was sitting around us thinking about my time in college
0:19:15 because I have a cousin who’s who just got accepted into college, two cousins,
0:19:17 actually, and they were like, what advice did you have?
0:19:19 And I was like, well, what do you want?
0:19:20 Do you know what you want or do you not know what you want?
0:19:23 If you don’t know what you want, you should just spend that time dabbling.
0:19:27 Go meet a bunch of people, try a bunch of things, do a shadow, a bunch of people.
0:19:30 Go try to figure out what what the menu even is and maybe what type of stuff.
0:19:32 Do you like seafood? Do you like steak, chicken, salads?
0:19:33 What do you what do you want?
0:19:35 And one of them was like, I know what I want.
0:19:37 I want to be an entrepreneur.
0:19:38 And I was like, cool.
0:19:41 He’s like, so that’s why I’m doing this like business program and whatever.
0:19:42 I’m like, awesome.
0:19:44 They’re not going to teach you how to be an entrepreneur in college.
0:19:46 That’s not what’s actually going to happen there, right?
0:19:47 I know what you’re thinking.
0:19:48 Same thing I thought.
0:19:52 If I go to school and I get a business degree, then I will you know how to run a
0:19:55 business and start a business and run a business is like, no,
0:19:57 that’s not at all what you’re going to get out of that.
0:19:58 So I said, here’s the best thing you can do.
0:20:02 I said, actually, this is something that every college campus could have this.
0:20:06 And I think it is the best college campus business that I can think of
0:20:07 for somebody like like me.
0:20:10 So if you listen to podcasts, maybe you’re wired like me or Sam.
0:20:13 And that is to create the onion for your campus.
0:20:18 So here’s the here’s why I know about you.
0:20:22 But when I was in college, like the campus paper was like a big deal.
0:20:25 Maybe now with, yeah, like smartphones being awesome in social media.
0:20:26 Maybe this is dead and I’m a boomer.
0:20:30 No, it’s still around because you love to read about yourself and your friends.
0:20:31 Yeah, exactly.
0:20:33 You want to know what’s going on on your campus, what’s the news,
0:20:35 what happened with your teams, etc.
0:20:38 Also, there was like, it’s like the procrastination element of it,
0:20:40 where there’s like the Sudoku and there’s like the crossword
0:20:42 and there’s shit you could do while you’re in class.
0:20:46 So the camp at my school at Duke, everybody read the Duke Chronicle.
0:20:48 And I never thought about it.
0:20:49 I didn’t even know who wrote it.
0:20:50 I didn’t even consider what was going on there.
0:20:52 But if I was smart, what I would have done to say,
0:20:55 I’m actually going to create a little business here on campus.
0:20:57 I’m going to create a newspaper.
0:21:00 But of course, first rule of business, different is better than better.
0:21:01 So I’m not going to create just another school
0:21:04 newspaper that’s reporting just the facts.
0:21:06 I’m going to create the onion for my campus.
0:21:08 So it’s basically a satirical newspaper.
0:21:09 This will teach me a bunch of skills.
0:21:11 So I’ll get the skills of creating a business.
0:21:12 How do you start a business?
0:21:14 I’ll get the skills of content creation.
0:21:18 So copywriting, humor, creating a content schedule, content pipeline,
0:21:23 hiring and firing people, getting ad sales and ad revenue, distribution.
0:21:25 How am I going to get people to read this?
0:21:28 Product differentiation, marketing, naming the thing.
0:21:31 And it’s the perfect type of business for college because it’s sandbox.
0:21:34 So I think one pressure a lot of people have when they’re in college,
0:21:34 they want to be an entrepreneur.
0:21:38 Is they try to think of businesses that are like the businesses
0:21:41 they read about on TechCrunch or like big money making things.
0:21:42 Yeah, I’m going to create the next big thing.
0:21:43 And that’s really hard.
0:21:45 And also, you’re a beginner, you’re a white belt.
0:21:47 So you don’t go look at the moves that black belts do necessarily.
0:21:50 Maybe like learn the best white belt moves and you need a white belt business.
0:21:53 For me, that was my sushi restaurant thing, my virtual sushi restaurant.
0:21:55 It was like the hot dog thing.
0:21:58 And then you’re like college, you know, like moves business or whatever.
0:22:03 Right. We had little like starter businesses that themselves are not meant to last.
0:22:06 But they teach you a whole bunch of like the core building block skills
0:22:10 that when you lump them together is this thing called business.
0:22:14 So you’re going to encourage them to create the onion for college.
0:22:17 Exactly. So I want basically people who are I don’t know
0:22:18 how many college kids listen to this, to be honest.
0:22:20 But if you if you are or you have a kid in college,
0:22:22 I want to hustle on every campus.
0:22:26 So like one hustler to create their version of the campus paper.
0:22:28 And I got to figure out the details,
0:22:31 but I’m down to basically put in some amount of money,
0:22:35 like 10 grand or 15 grand to like kickstart people on this thing.
0:22:36 I don’t think it’ll take much money.
0:22:40 I think 10 grand will be more than enough to start these on several campuses.
0:22:44 And I think they should become self-sustaining cash flow businesses from there.
0:22:47 And I think that the people who run these will be way far ahead.
0:22:51 And people don’t even know, like, for example, Barstool, you know, Barstool started.
0:22:55 A physical paper that he like gave to colleges, right?
0:22:58 Not colleges exactly, but yeah, in Boston, he would.
0:23:01 So it was basically a physical newspaper
0:23:04 that Dave would write under, I think, pen names.
0:23:06 And it was you can go find out the font is so funny.
0:23:08 It’s like comic sans on the internet.
0:23:12 I think he even bought or he reused other people’s newspaper,
0:23:16 like the free newspaper that you pull the the you pull out that piece of glass
0:23:19 and then you can grab one. You know what I’m saying?
0:23:20 Like, I mean, he bought it.
0:23:22 Let he I think he bought a few of his own.
0:23:26 And he like literally placed them on corners where it was like, you know,
0:23:27 like those free newspaper things.
0:23:30 And it was mostly a gambling newspaper.
0:23:32 It was like a gambling rag. He called it.
0:23:33 And what he would do is in the morning,
0:23:36 he would write the thing or whatever he’d get it printed, and then he would
0:23:39 or sorry, the previous night, he would write the thing, get it printed.
0:23:41 And then in the morning, he would rush into the subway.
0:23:44 And he’d just be handing it out to people getting on the subway in Boston
0:23:46 or getting on the whatever the underground is there.
0:23:48 And that’s how Barstool got its initial distribution.
0:23:50 And then he would hand them out all day.
0:23:51 Then he would go home.
0:23:55 He would be calling advertisers to try to get like enough money to print the thing
0:23:58 again, and then he would write the thing under all of his pen names
0:23:59 and work on his copywriting skills.
0:24:02 Then he would go get them printed and figure out a manufacturer product.
0:24:04 And the next day, he would go distribute it again.
0:24:06 And over time, he got like other people to hand them out
0:24:08 and other people to write the thing and other people to do the ad sales.
0:24:11 And it became Barstool, which is this like, you know,
0:24:14 many hundreds million dollar company for Dave.
0:24:15 But that’s how it started.
0:24:18 That’s amazing. Yeah, you should go.
0:24:21 The listener, you guys should go and Google and see the early ones.
0:24:22 It’s pretty hilarious.
0:24:24 So I’m thinking about after this, I’m going to put up a Google Doc.
0:24:25 That’s that’s my call to ask.
0:24:28 I’m going to put up a Google Doc, figuring out what are my actual rules
0:24:30 and who am I looking for and how to apply.
0:24:32 We’re in the show notes of this thing.
0:24:35 I’m just going to make an open doc anybody can can read and submit to.
0:24:38 And I’m going to think of a name because I think the name matters.
0:24:39 And I’m also going to I’m going to treat it like a franchise.
0:24:42 So every campus will have like the same naming convention.
0:24:44 And then we’ll share the learning.
0:24:47 So if you’re the kid at Northwestern, you’re going to be able to
0:24:50 in some kid at Duke comes up with a good distribution idea.
0:24:52 We’re just going to make one group chat where like all the people
0:24:55 are like kind of sharing what’s working and what’s not.
0:24:56 And I’m really curious to see what happens.
0:24:58 And to me, this is my version of like the lemonade stand.
0:25:02 It’s like the slightly superior lemonade stand type of business
0:25:03 that I think would be great.
0:25:05 I wish I had done this in college.
0:25:10 So I’ll take my bow because I have successfully, potentially rather
0:25:14 proven that this idea might be one of the bigger ones that we’ve ever talked about.
0:25:17 It’s it actually is quite exciting.
0:25:21 Even like when you’re talking ten ten thousand dollars
0:25:24 and a newspaper, which is like a silly thing, but it’s awesome.
0:25:26 Like that’s awesome.
0:25:29 And that’s kind of the point with this is like these things,
0:25:32 when you repackage charity or whatever you want to call this
0:25:35 into a game, it kind of makes it exciting.
0:25:37 It makes it fun. It makes it cool.
0:25:40 Yeah, what’s the name for this sort of action philanthropy, right?
0:25:43 It’s like it’s not charity for the completely impoverished,
0:25:47 but you are giving people both inspiration, maybe capital and an excuse
0:25:51 to go and better their lives or improve their lives, live up to their potential,
0:25:52 like take the next step.
0:25:54 Is there a name for this where you’re not?
0:25:57 It’s not starving kids in Africa, but it is,
0:26:00 you know, kind of broke college kids who now have something to get excited about.
0:26:02 What what would you is there a name for something like that?
0:26:03 I got to think about it.
0:26:06 But I would in my head, I’ve been calling it incentivized philanthropy.
0:26:09 That’s that’s too that’s too much of a mouthful.
0:26:10 So we have to think about it.
0:26:13 What this really comes down to is
0:26:18 just a slight differing incentivization has like massive
0:26:21 difference in the in the outcome versus just giving versus
0:26:24 not only one of you are going to get this and you all got to get after it.
0:26:27 So there’s a few versions of this, by the way, that I’ve thought about in the past one.
0:26:31 So when the Teal Fellowship came out, I thought it was genius.
0:26:34 Peter Teal basically had this point of view that universities are a bubble
0:26:39 and that we they have this halo, this umbrella
0:26:41 where you can never criticize a university college.
0:26:44 What education? It’s the most important thing for our kids.
0:26:46 How dare you? I thought it was crazy when I heard about it.
0:26:48 He’s like, education might be the fifth thing that they do.
0:26:50 And he called it. He said, education is a bundle.
0:26:51 And I forgot what he bundled it as.
0:26:54 But he was like, it’s an insurance policy for the parent.
0:26:57 You give them you make sure your kid gets this degree because that is a
0:27:00 my kid’s not going to fall through the cracks of society insurance.
0:27:02 He’s like, and then it’s a filtering process.
0:27:06 So he’s like, for companies, they don’t care what you learned at Harvard.
0:27:09 But if Harvard did a good job filtering, then I already know I’m picking from,
0:27:12 you know, the the smarter end of the crop when it comes to hiring.
0:27:14 So it’s a filtering bundle.
0:27:16 It’s a social social piece.
0:27:17 That’s part of the bundle.
0:27:18 Then there’s the education component.
0:27:19 That’s part of the bundle.
0:27:22 And he had like five or six things that he’s like, together, those are all part of it.
0:27:25 He’s like, what’s going to happen is people are going to unbundle the bundle.
0:27:29 And so what he did was he came out and said, I think universities are such a waste
0:27:33 that if you’re a high potential person, I will come out with the Teal Fellowship.
0:27:37 I will pay you 120 grand, I think it was to drop out of college.
0:27:40 And if you’re in college, I’ll pay you to drop out.
0:27:43 And Peter Teal, for all of his like
0:27:47 very unsmooth, uncharismatic ways of speaking,
0:27:50 the guy’s kind of a master of communication.
0:27:52 If you just don’t make him speak,
0:27:57 you know, give a talk and you’re not looking at the the poetry of it.
0:28:03 The if you if you read an article about his presentation and see the quotes,
0:28:04 it’s the best. It’s the best.
0:28:06 And he, by the way, Peter, he literally has speed traders.
0:28:10 So when he has a point, he’ll go on tour and he’ll give his speech.
0:28:12 Universities are a bubble.
0:28:14 And it’s not that he just said that off the cuff.
0:28:16 It’s like he has a point of view that actually the universities,
0:28:17 there’s something going on with them.
0:28:23 And it’s they’re sort of a a a a a a weird thing going on.
0:28:23 And that’s what he does.
0:28:27 And then the speech writers are like, so are you saying that universities are a bubble?
0:28:30 Yeah. Nailed it.
0:28:32 Cool headline. All right, what’s the what’s the subhead, right?
0:28:34 And so he gets it basically workshopped himself and his team.
0:28:36 And then he literally goes on tour.
0:28:37 He’s done this a couple of times.
0:28:40 He did it with the zero to one thing, which is that and he does.
0:28:42 He uses a provocative statement.
0:28:43 So he says universities are bubble.
0:28:46 Something that he knows is going to basically it’s a head turner.
0:28:53 You’re saying or you think MBA students are have negative impacts on new companies.
0:28:57 Yeah, or he’ll say by the time the MBAs are in, the alpha is gone, right?
0:29:00 Like once the MBAs are flooding into a space, the opportunity is gone.
0:29:03 But the bigger one that he did was when he did his book zero to one,
0:29:06 he went on tour instead of saying by my book, I’m Peter Teal.
0:29:07 I’ve had a great business success.
0:29:09 You know, I’ve shared some of my lessons.
0:29:10 Was it competition is bad?
0:29:12 Competition is for losers.
0:29:15 Yeah. And he’s like, oh, this idea in capitalism that, you know, competition,
0:29:16 it brings out the best in us.
0:29:18 No, competition is for losers.
0:29:21 He said the only goal of a business is shoot for monopoly monopoly.
0:29:22 I thought that’s illegal.
0:29:24 You literally get broken up if you’re a monopoly.
0:29:25 And he’s like, exactly.
0:29:27 So he finds the head turning thing.
0:29:29 And when he has it, he builds like a pretty convincing case.
0:29:35 So he did this with the Teal Fellowship and he paid kids to drop out of school.
0:29:38 Like, wow, what a what’s the worst influence you could have on my child
0:29:41 is convincing them to drop out of school, drop out of their education.
0:29:42 How many kids a year do it?
0:29:43 Do you know?
0:29:47 I remember I hosted them at my office.
0:29:49 I think the first or second year of the Teal Fellowship.
0:29:51 And there was like 20 kids in it ish.
0:29:56 There was like one of the like 19 year olds or 18 year olds were like at my office.
0:29:57 And I was like, hey, who are you guys?
0:29:59 What are you doing? They’re like, oh, we don’t know.
0:30:00 It was super disorganized, by the way.
0:30:01 And Peter Teal was not there.
0:30:03 All right. So I apply.
0:30:07 I apply and one of Peter Teal’s team members selects however many people you
0:30:10 said, six or eight people, they wire you the money.
0:30:14 And they just said, do they say, come back to me with three months with a thing?
0:30:15 No, no, you at the time, I don’t know what it is now.
0:30:17 But at the time you would get accepted.
0:30:19 You would drop out, they’d give you the money.
0:30:22 You would come to San Francisco and you would participate in the batch.
0:30:24 And so you live there.
0:30:26 I don’t know if you live together, but they were all.
0:30:27 I mean, they all shut up in my office.
0:30:29 So there was definitely there for at least a period of time.
0:30:31 I’m not sure if it was the whole program or what, but it was pretty open ended.
0:30:32 And it was long.
0:30:35 Does 100 grand go towards starting your company or is it
0:30:37 $100,000 plus three months of rent?
0:30:40 It’s a two year, $100,000 grant for young people who want to build
0:30:42 new things instead of sitting in a classroom.
0:30:44 Nice. 20 or 30 people per year.
0:30:46 You’ve got to be 22 or younger to do it.
0:30:48 You’ll need to drop out in order to have it.
0:30:50 You don’t have to move to San Francisco.
0:30:52 And an idea is enough.
0:30:54 That’s that was the idea of it.
0:30:56 It’s been going for, I don’t know, 10 years now.
0:30:58 So here’s some of the notable recipients.
0:31:03 So the CEO and founder of Dillon Field of Figma, which is a 50
0:31:06 billion dollar company, I think is it tens of billions of companies.
0:31:10 Then there’s Oyo Rooms, which was like a hotel style startup out of India
0:31:13 that also was worth many, many billions.
0:31:17 There’s Austin, Austin Russell, the guy who created Luminar Technologies,
0:31:20 which I think he became the youngest billionaire ever.
0:31:21 It was like self driving technology.
0:31:26 And then, of course, the founder of Ethereum, which is a, who knows,
0:31:30 hundreds of billions of dollars value creation thing.
0:31:31 Then there’s the founder of Loom.
0:31:33 I didn’t know that, which was a startup that was
0:31:34 required for hundreds of millions of dollars.
0:31:37 The Josh Browder from Do Not Pay, which I love.
0:31:40 And then there’s like other things that I don’t even know about
0:31:43 because maybe they’re not for profit, but there’s like a guy who created
0:31:45 a software to detect Parkinson’s disease.
0:31:48 And then there’s a handful of like recipients like that, where maybe
0:31:50 they’re behind the scenes doing amazing stuff.
0:31:54 So I guess that’s been a very, he probably didn’t do it for money.
0:31:56 But if you wanted to, there was a return on it.
0:32:01 But there’s definitely a return on like, I encouraged value creation.
0:32:02 Right. Oh yeah.
0:32:05 I mean, if even one of those, if just Ethereum had come out of it,
0:32:08 I mean, smashing success, if just Figma had come out of it,
0:32:09 smashing success, right?
0:32:12 So those are like the two power law winners of the thing.
0:32:15 By the way, go to muskfoundation.org.
0:32:17 Because I just saw that Elon Musk was the biggest donor.
0:32:20 He donated, I think, two million dollars to that Vesuvian challenge.
0:32:23 So Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman put up two million to pay.
0:32:27 And the Musk Foundation put up two million to describe what you see.
0:32:32 All right. So muskfoundation.org, it’s a website with no design.
0:32:36 It’s a blank piece of paper with five bullet points.
0:32:41 And it says muskfoundation grants are made in support of renewable energy,
0:32:46 human space exploration, pediatric research, science and engineering education,
0:32:50 development of artificial intelligence to benefit humanity.
0:32:51 That’s it.
0:32:53 It’s like a Hello World page. Yeah.
0:32:59 Yeah. It’s basically a hundred words bullet pointed on a white piece of paper.
0:33:05 And this is one of the like extreme like, you know, money talks, wealth whispers thing.
0:33:08 Yeah, I call them sexy indifference.
0:33:14 Like that’s what we’re going to call this where you want people to know that you don’t care.
0:33:18 But you also want them to know that you don’t care because you’re cool.
0:33:20 So I’m going to call it sexy indifference.
0:33:22 It’s the homeless billionaire paradox, right?
0:33:23 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:33:28 The difference between a homeless man and a billionaire at face value is so small.
0:33:30 In San Francisco, you will not be able to tell the difference, right?
0:33:36 It’s in the takeaway being sometimes you could just be sexy and different in the very beginning
0:33:37 and you become successful.
0:33:38 Like you could just like it.
0:33:40 But so we’re going to call it sexy indifference.
0:33:47 I saw a LinkedIn the other day that was no profile photo, one line bio, one job experience,
0:33:49 twenty six years owner.
0:33:53 And I was like, here’s a man who’s going to leave a lot of money for his children.
0:33:55 You can tell you that right now.
0:33:57 I don’t know anything about this company name.
0:33:59 Never heard of this guy.
0:33:59 I can tell you right now.
0:34:01 This guy’s going to leave a lot of money to his children.
0:34:05 You don’t get twenty six years owner, no profile photo linked in.
0:34:08 That’s that’s like such a high signal thing to do or at worst.
0:34:12 He owns a really nice lake house or again, he’s broke.
0:34:13 It’s homeless. We don’t know.
0:34:18 Actually, it could go either way, but it’s one way or the other.
0:34:21 By the way, I bought the Peter Thiel shirt from the Joe Rogan podcast.
0:34:23 I’m going to wear it next week on the pod.
0:34:25 It was like a hundred and twenty dollar shirt, right?
0:34:32 The all white mesh net Peter Thiel shirt from from Saks was that?
0:34:36 And just I’m just teasing it right now subscribe on YouTube
0:34:38 and you’ll get to see me wearing that.
0:34:40 I don’t think it’s made for hairy people.
0:34:42 Mesh usually is not a great choice for us.
0:34:46 But yeah, I think my ID will go up like six or seven points if I wear it.
0:34:49 You’re going to look like human Velcro with all these like little threads sticking out.
0:34:58 I saw people talking about his shirt.
0:34:59 I thought it was pretty funny.
0:35:04 He he also had the the Nazi haircut, which is like totally in,
0:35:08 which is like you you do like a high fade, a high fade.
0:35:10 And he looked good.
0:35:12 Yeah, it looked good. I thought he looked great.
0:35:14 He looked great weathered.
0:35:19 But other than that, he seems to be on like kind of a bit of a rejuvenation kick.
0:35:22 Well, I mean, he’s like he’s like fifty six.
0:35:25 He’s all right. He can he can look fifty six, but he looks great.
0:35:27 He looks a little bit younger than fifty six.
0:35:33 But if you’ve heard of cool contests like this or even a cool name for what this is called,
0:35:37 tweet at me. I’m at the Sam Park because this stuff is very fascinating to me.
0:35:40 And I’m trying to understand like the economics of it because I think I might actually do it.
0:35:44 All right. If you’re listening to this pod, I already know something about you.
0:35:47 You, my friend, are nosy.
0:35:50 You want to know the numbers behind all of these things that we’re talking about,
0:35:55 how much money people make, how much money people spend, how much money businesses make.
0:35:57 You want to know all of this people’s net worth, all of it.
0:35:59 Well, I’ve got good news for you.
0:36:02 So my company, Hampton, we’re a private community for CEOs.
0:36:06 We do this thing where we survey our members and we ask them all types of information,
0:36:10 like how much money they’re paying themselves, how much money they’re paying a lot of their employees,
0:36:14 what their team, my bonuses are, what their net worth is, what their portfolio looks like.
0:36:17 We ask all these questions, but we do it anonymously.
0:36:20 And so people are willing to reveal all types of amazing information.
0:36:22 So if you really cannot Google, you can’t find anywhere else.
0:36:27 And you could check it out at joinhampton.com, click the reports section on the menu,
0:36:29 click the salary and compensation report.
0:36:31 It’s going to blow your mind.
0:36:32 You’re going to love this stuff.
0:36:34 Check it out. Now back to the pod.
0:36:38 So are you going 50/50 with me on the MFM scholarship?
0:36:41 I’m not willing to commit to that yet.
0:36:42 But I’m trying to do it.
0:36:45 Look, I’m a slower person than you.
0:36:48 I’m thinking like the PAR family, like where where it’s going to go.
0:36:52 But oh, dude, the PAR floor, you use a golf pun.
0:36:54 It’s pretty. Yeah, I got to figure out something.
0:36:56 What did you call it? Par for the par for.
0:37:00 But I can’t decide if you want to go cheeky or like extra serious.
0:37:03 Like when you look at the Nobel Peace Prize, like they’re wearing like those
0:37:05 like the suits with the tails, you know what I mean?
0:37:08 Well, you know how it is. You know what you’re going to do.
0:37:12 You’re going to go cheeky on the front end, deadly serious on the execution.
0:37:14 I feel like that’s you.
0:37:15 I think that’s what we might do.
0:37:19 But I like I told we had the conversation with like a with my wife.
0:37:22 I’m like, I because like we actually have to sign documents.
0:37:24 And I’m like, should we do something like this?
0:37:26 And what do what are we going to do?
0:37:27 What are we going to do right now?
0:37:30 I’m I’m dude, I was I’m obsessed with like single motherhood because like
0:37:33 have you ever has your wife like whenever you got to like be a single parent
0:37:37 for the day, like when your wife’s gone or whatever, I’m like, this is impossible.
0:37:38 Yeah, it’s impossible.
0:37:40 It’s not like how do you it actually can’t be done.
0:37:43 So that’s my yeah.
0:37:46 So I’m like, if you’re a single mother, how do you get ahead?
0:37:48 Like, you know, if you want to like it, so it’s like a cycle.
0:37:51 So anyway, I’m think I’m like obsess it at that problem right now.
0:37:55 I’m trying to figure out how to how we could contribute to making
0:37:56 their those people’s lives better.
0:37:58 All right. What do you want to do?
0:38:03 I’ll give you a simple, useful lesson learned from Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.
0:38:05 OK.
0:38:08 Somebody asked Elon about hiring.
0:38:11 They go, Elon, when you do interview people still and when you interview them
0:38:13 for hiring, what do you ask them?
0:38:15 How does Elon Musk filter for great talent?
0:38:17 Have you ever seen what he said?
0:38:21 No, I well, I’ve heard one thing where he says, if I’m talking to someone
0:38:24 and I am like, you know, every once in a while, like 45 seconds in,
0:38:26 you can be like, oh, this is a bad match.
0:38:28 He’s like, I just act on that.
0:38:30 So like a 60 seconds in, I’ll just be like, hey, I don’t want to talk anymore.
0:38:33 And he just walks away.
0:38:35 It’s like his version of like getting a haircut with headphones in.
0:38:38 Yeah, let me.
0:38:40 He’s like, no.
0:38:43 So what he said was, tell me about the toughest problems you’ve dealt with
0:38:45 and how you dealt with those at your last company or project.
0:38:47 He goes, I like this question because it filters out.
0:38:50 It filters out candidates who haven’t actually done anything.
0:38:53 And you can ask them very detailed questions about it, and they will know the answer.
0:38:56 Whereas the person who was not actually responsible for doing the thing
0:38:57 won’t know the details.
0:38:59 And so it’s a very quick filtering mechanism.
0:39:01 Other questions that came from other people.
0:39:05 So Steve Jobs used to ask, why are you here?
0:39:08 And so he’s like, I want to understand their motivation.
0:39:09 Why are you even?
0:39:11 Why do you why are you here for this interview?
0:39:11 Why this company?
0:39:12 Why this job?
0:39:16 Why you is the most important thing that Steve Jobs said?
0:39:21 I know that Jeff Bezos asked a question about, do you consider yourself a lucky person?
0:39:25 I was going to say I interviewed with Joe Gebbia, the founder of Airbnb.
0:39:29 And he was like the last person in just 15 minutes.
0:39:33 And the only question he asked me was on a scale of one to 10, how lucky are you?
0:39:34 And what did you say?
0:39:35 I said, I’m a nine.
0:39:38 I go, you know, I’m lucky for a variety of reasons and explain them.
0:39:41 And then I said, I don’t know if it’s luck or what it is, but like,
0:39:42 I seem to get my way a lot.
0:39:44 And he and I go, why’d you ask that?
0:39:49 And he said, well, because if luck’s real, I want to be around lucky people.
0:39:52 And even if it’s not real, I want to be around people who tend to get their way.
0:39:54 Yeah, exactly.
0:39:56 And I was like, all right, that’s I guess that’s good.
0:40:02 So Dan Rose, who worked for Bezos in the early days, I think like 1999 to 2006.
0:40:05 So he’s a fun person to read about.
0:40:08 Yeah, he’s a good follow on on Twitter as well, because he shares some good
0:40:10 like personal stories from the Bezos era.
0:40:12 So it’ll be like in 99.
0:40:16 We were struggling with this and we were sitting at our office in the stairwell
0:40:17 because we didn’t have time to make desks.
0:40:18 It’s like, oh, nice.
0:40:22 So he goes, Jeff Bezos, favorite interview question was, are you a lucky person?
0:40:26 It was a great way to filter for optimists and people who manifest success.
0:40:29 He goes, if you’re a successful, optimistic person, the humble leader,
0:40:32 right answer for this starts with, I’m the luckiest person on earth.
0:40:34 I’ve worked really hard to get where I am.
0:40:37 But a lot of things had to go right for me and I’ve taken full advantage of my luck.
0:40:40 That’s essentially like not the exact words, but that is the crux of what you
0:40:44 want them to say, which is I’ve worked really hard, but it took a tremendous amount
0:40:47 of luck and I take advantage of lucky breaks when they present themselves to me.
0:40:51 And he goes, sorting for optimistic people is a good proxy for leadership
0:40:52 potential and likelihood of success.
0:40:55 Perceiving yourself as lucky is a proxy for optimism.
0:40:58 Basically, people will always tell you they’re optimistic about things,
0:41:00 but they won’t always say that they’re lucky.
0:41:03 So it’s kind of like a stealth question to get at the optimism thing.
0:41:05 He goes, the humility part is also important.
0:41:07 It’s easy to filter out false humility.
0:41:10 Humble brags are very obvious when you ask follow up questions.
0:41:13 He goes, this isn’t the only question, but it’s a conversation starter.
0:41:16 It opens the door to someone’s personality beyond their resume.
0:41:17 There’s two wrong answers.
0:41:21 Number one, no, I’ve never really gotten lucky, but I’ve been able to overcome
0:41:23 and outwork all the bad things that happened to me.
0:41:26 And no, I never needed luck because I’m better, smarter, stronger,
0:41:28 faster than everybody else.
0:41:33 And there’s a third answer, which is like, no, I’ve been pretty unlucky.
0:41:36 Yeah, in which case it’s like, I don’t want to be around unlucky people.
0:41:38 Yeah, like, I don’t want to be around you.
0:41:40 Yeah. And that’s what Joe, that’s what Joe told me.
0:41:44 He was like, if you’re really lucky, you’re either luck’s real
0:41:46 in which case I want to be around you or you just make it work.
0:41:50 And if you’re, say, a one or two, you’re either unlucky if looks real.
0:41:51 I don’t want to be around that shit either.
0:41:54 Or you just think you’re a victim and I don’t want to be around that.
0:41:56 So that’s how he explained it to me.
0:41:58 Have you? And I thought it was weird, by the way.
0:42:00 I thought it was weird at the time.
0:42:01 Looking back, I think it was better.
0:42:03 I actually interviewed also at Google years ago.
0:42:07 They asked me like, how many days would it take you to, like,
0:42:12 clean the windows on like a skyscraper or something like that?
0:42:14 And I didn’t like that question.
0:42:16 I hated that question too.
0:42:19 One thing that interview questions, another way to think about them is
0:42:23 they’re meant to filter out certain people and they’re meant to pull in other people.
0:42:26 Right. So a great interview question will not just assess the person.
0:42:30 They will either attract or repel the wrong cultural fit.
0:42:32 And so I think one of the Google things is like part of the reason
0:42:35 I would hate that question is part of the reason they don’t want to hire me.
0:42:39 Right. Like they they want basically puzzle puzzle solving nerds.
0:42:41 And I heard this put really well.
0:42:44 So Max Levchin, I think was was the one that, you know, the creator of PayPal.
0:42:47 He was talking about he goes when I got acquired by Google.
0:42:51 I was like, how do they retain smart people here?
0:42:53 Because they’re trying to hire the most brilliant people on earth.
0:42:57 And then they’re telling them, go like tweak the knob on Google AdSense.
0:42:58 Go get us like a little edge.
0:43:02 It’s like not only is that soulless, but it is like literally
0:43:04 like almost the definition of a cog in the machine.
0:43:07 And he goes, the way they keep those people around is he’s like literally
0:43:11 in the bathrooms, they would have like really hard puzzles on the stalls.
0:43:13 And he’s like, they would give people like a crazy.
0:43:15 They had 20 percent time, which was like 20 percent time.
0:43:17 Just go work on whatever the hell you want.
0:43:19 It’s like they would have puzzles on the walls in the stall.
0:43:22 He’s like, because the actual work that we needed you to do would never like.
0:43:25 It’s not like mission driven enough.
0:43:29 It’s not hard enough to like intellectually stimulate you.
0:43:31 So they had all these other ways of intellectually
0:43:34 stimulate you and to coddle you like, we’ll do your laundry, we’ll feed you,
0:43:35 we’ll nurse you, we’ll need a bath.
0:43:37 Go ahead, there’s a bunch of bath over there on the right.
0:43:39 They would do everything they could to keep talent there.
0:43:43 And one of the things that he talked about was like, you know,
0:43:46 the PayPal mafia is probably the most successful
0:43:51 early group of people to come together in Silicon Valley, right?
0:43:54 They basically created, you know, they had Elon, they had Peter Teal,
0:43:56 they had Macs, they went on to create like, I don’t know,
0:44:00 10 plus billion dollar companies out of the like first 15 people there.
0:44:04 Yeah, like the the smallest things of the PayPal mafia was like a Yelp.
0:44:05 Yeah, exactly.
0:44:08 Like the guy Yelp is like, you know, sitting at the kids table with their.
0:44:10 Yeah. No offense, Jeremy, he’s a good dude.
0:44:14 So the thing with PayPal was they treated it.
0:44:16 They go, we’re trying to create a cult.
0:44:19 They go, the idea of diversity is not what you wanted to start up.
0:44:22 Now, you couldn’t really say this today, but they’re on the record
0:44:25 of saying this a long time ago, which is that you want a certain type
0:44:28 of person because that breeds a certain type of culture.
0:44:31 So you, you know, pick the culture and then you only want to attract
0:44:33 people that are going to like reinforce that culture.
0:44:37 And you want to like immediately like repel otherwise smart people
0:44:39 who would dilute that culture.
0:44:41 And so for him, I remember there was a famous one, which was they were
0:44:44 interviewing an engineer and the guy said, you know, they’re like,
0:44:46 what do you like to do outside of work?
0:44:48 And he’s like, I love playing basketball.
0:44:50 And they match like, I don’t want to hire this guy.
0:44:51 They’re like, what?
0:44:52 Cause he plays basketball.
0:44:55 He’s like, I’ve never met a great engineer who loves, who says he loves
0:44:56 to play pickup hoops.
0:44:58 He’s like, great engineers have other hobbies.
0:45:01 And he’s like, and he’s like, even if we’re wrong, it’s the thing that
0:45:05 Monish said on the podcast, Monish Pabrai said, when he met Warren Buffett,
0:45:07 he goes, Warren, you’re a great judge of people.
0:45:09 How do you do it, man?
0:45:10 How did you get your people radar so good?
0:45:12 He goes, I don’t think I have a good people radar.
0:45:15 He goes, what I have is a very tight filter.
0:45:19 He goes, so if you take me to a cocktail party and you let me talk to
0:45:20 a hundred people for five minutes each.
0:45:25 In that five minutes, I could probably take the worst five or seven people.
0:45:27 And I’ll tell you, these people are lousy.
0:45:27 Don’t hire them.
0:45:30 And the best five or seven people, I could probably tell you them.
0:45:35 He’s like, and then the other, you know, 85, 90 people, I don’t know.
0:45:36 I couldn’t make a judgment on them in five minutes.
0:45:37 It wasn’t obvious to me.
0:45:39 So I put them all in the no pile.
0:45:41 He goes, well, isn’t that like a little harsh?
0:45:43 You know, there was, there might be some great people in there.
0:45:47 He goes, yeah, but the cost of bringing a not great person into my circle
0:45:48 of life is so high.
0:45:52 The cost of discarding somebody who might be great is nothing.
0:45:54 It is so low comparatively.
0:45:58 He’s like, so I am willing to be a very harsh grader of people.
0:46:02 Meaning you’re either obviously in or I put you in the too hard to tell bucket.
0:46:05 And I just lump you in with all the obvious nose.
0:46:08 And that was a non-obvious insight from Warren Buffett.
0:46:12 That’s a very, there are freaks like a Peter Thiel or Marcus
0:46:15 Zuckerberg who kind of nailed that harshness early on.
0:46:16 And then there’s normal people like me.
0:46:17 And I’m sure you were like this.
0:46:21 Where you find like a 22 year old and like, I don’t know.
0:46:22 Maybe they’re promising.
0:46:24 Maybe they were nervous at that interview.
0:46:26 Maybe they were this, maybe they were this.
0:46:28 And it feels good to give the underdog a shot.
0:46:33 Oftentimes that narrative isn’t, it doesn’t end the way that you’d like it to end.
0:46:38 Like the, like the people who that underdog narrative has worked have worked for me.
0:46:42 It’s someone like Steph Smith, where let’s hypothetically say she didn’t do well
0:46:45 in the interview, but she was so awesome because I saw her blog.
0:46:49 And I’m like, this person’s like quirky and interesting like that hypothetical
0:46:51 there as if anyone’s going to believe that was a hypothetical.
0:46:55 Well, no, what I mean is like, I think she, I don’t remember the interview.
0:46:56 I think she did great.
0:46:59 But like, I was into her because I just read her like, because I read her blog.
0:47:02 I’m like, oh, you have some type of it factor.
0:47:07 Now, maybe I wasn’t sure how that it factor could be deployed or used to my benefit.
0:47:11 Or whether it’s like, like if it was going to be used, like if she was actually
0:47:13 going to like just become the best at like blogging or if she’s going to become
0:47:15 the best, the best business woman, I’m not sure.
0:47:19 But there was some type of like kernel of like fire.
0:47:21 There was a fire where I’m like, I don’t know how I’m going to harness it.
0:47:22 Can you harness whatever?
0:47:23 But there was something there.
0:47:27 Whereas I’ve hired a lot of people who, who didn’t exactly have that.
0:47:28 They didn’t have a fire there.
0:47:32 But I was like, maybe it’s there and I make these stupid decisions.
0:47:37 And it doesn’t work because you want to be a good person or whatever.
0:47:39 And it doesn’t work.
0:47:40 What’s that phrase?
0:47:42 No good deed goes unpunished.
0:47:44 That’s how it felt with a lot of, with a lot of my hiring decisions.
0:47:47 Yeah, you don’t want to face the confrontation of it.
0:47:49 You don’t want to admit that you were wrong.
0:47:51 You don’t want to go back to square one and try to find somebody again.
0:47:54 You don’t want to admit to your team that you were wrong on this.
0:47:59 There’s a whole bunch of very understandable reasons why we make this mistake.
0:48:00 Did I tell you how much of trouble?
0:48:03 A lot of the, which a lot of the maybes ended up being maybes.
0:48:07 Like a lot of the maybe people ended up being like, like it was there.
0:48:08 I don’t know.
0:48:10 It was just in the end.
0:48:12 Yeah, it always an always stayed in.
0:48:14 All right, sorry, what are we saying?
0:48:16 I got a lot of trouble at Twitch because when I was there,
0:48:19 I tweeted out something that was very true for me and I think it’s true.
0:48:22 But the COO and others didn’t like it.
0:48:26 I said something to the effect of you always know in the first two weeks,
0:48:29 if someone’s going to be great, great people are great right off the bat.
0:48:31 They show you greatness in the first two or three weeks.
0:48:34 I’ve never seen or, you know, rarely ever will you ever see
0:48:38 somebody who turns out to be great that just was in the first two or three weeks.
0:48:39 And they yelled at you?
0:48:42 Yeah, they were like, that’s not I mean, different people started
0:48:47 at different pace, places and that, you know, that’s not basically they were kind
0:48:50 of they took it as almost like that’s too harsh.
0:48:54 And somehow it was like seen as like not diverse.
0:48:57 Like, oh, there’s a group of people who are slower to acclimate.
0:49:02 Who yell that you HR did and our COO responded to the tweet.
0:49:04 It was like, I do not like, you know, stand by this.
0:49:08 In fact, I’ve since then I’ve seen a bunch of other people say the exact same thing.
0:49:10 A bunch of other like, you know, successful people say the same thing.
0:49:13 So kind of in some ways validated this like opinion, how do you first
0:49:18 hand experience I had, which was that the great people show greatness very early on
0:49:21 first two weeks, I tend to know if this person could be a winner.
0:49:24 Now, that doesn’t mean that somebody can’t be a solid contributor
0:49:27 that had a slow first couple of weeks, but they’re never the ones who are great.
0:49:30 And great is all I’m really looking for.
0:49:31 Right. The Warren Buffett be a hard grader.
0:49:34 That is some of the best advice you can get.
0:49:38 How do you spell? Because that would be your reply to that.
0:49:41 Just a fart noise is like when they reply to you, like, you’re not supposed to do that.
0:49:44 It’s like, no, I just said my point exactly.
0:49:48 And then they’re like, what?
0:49:52 That’s a ridiculous thing to think, because the company was probably founded
0:49:55 on that principle, particularly, I don’t know, Emmett, but I’ve seen his interviews.
0:49:58 He seems like a particular, like pretty hardcore.
0:50:01 For sure, I imagine he was like that early on.
0:50:03 And so that company was probably founded with that principle in mind.
0:50:06 We have this all the time in my team.
0:50:11 So Ben, who’s my business partner, we will have some interaction with somebody
0:50:15 and he’ll be like, so what do you think of how that’s going with that person?
0:50:18 Like maybe it’s a company we invested in and then we like talk to the CEO
0:50:21 and then we’re like, I don’t really know exactly kind of why.
0:50:23 Like they’ve been really slow to take action
0:50:25 or they were saying all kinds of weird stuff that didn’t make any sense.
0:50:31 Or we hire somebody junior and then he’s like, how’s it going with what’s so and so so far?
0:50:34 And it’s like, dude, if you have to ask, you know, right?
0:50:36 Like that’s the first, first principle.
0:50:38 So you have to ask, you know, and I’ll say something pretty harsh.
0:50:39 I’m like, well, I don’t know.
0:50:43 We talked about doing these three things and then those three things haven’t happened.
0:50:45 And there’s been no update on them in a week.
0:50:48 So I don’t know how do you think it’s going, Ben?
0:50:50 And he’s like, yeah.
0:50:53 And he’ll usually say something because Ben, one of the great things about Ben
0:50:58 is Ben’s generous interpretation of almost everybody, like his wife will yell at him
0:51:00 and he’d be like, I mean, maybe I could have been a little more present.
0:51:01 Right. That’s his first reaction.
0:51:07 I think most people get to that, you know, but their first reaction is, you know,
0:51:08 somewhat, well, that’s unfair.
0:51:09 That doesn’t make any sense.
0:51:10 You did this, blah, blah, blah, right?
0:51:11 People get defensive, whatever.
0:51:12 He doesn’t really do that.
0:51:13 It doesn’t blame.
0:51:17 He gives a generous interpretation of people, which is why I think everybody loves Ben.
0:51:21 But at the same time in a company, like it’s a really harsh, hard way to run a company
0:51:26 because sometimes we’re like, Ben, like, so do you think we should be making excuses for
0:51:30 like, do you think like great people just like have all these excuses and reasons why
0:51:32 they’re not just like being great right now?
0:51:35 Or are they just great in spite of circumstances?
0:51:38 It’s like, obviously, great people are great in spite of circumstances versus
0:51:44 good people are bogged down in the 10 maybe reasons why they’re struggling right now.
0:51:50 And so I’m definitely, but that attitude that has served me in the workplace
0:51:56 doesn’t serve me outside of the workplace because, you know, having a generous
0:51:59 interpretation for people outside of work is a really awesome trade.
0:52:05 As a leader in a company, it tends to actually not work so well in the same way
0:52:07 that democracy is great.
0:52:09 Democracy inside a company where everybody gets a vote on what we’re doing
0:52:11 is not a great way to build a company.
0:52:14 Like companies are benevolent dictatorships when they win.
0:52:16 And you have to be comfortable being a benevolent dictator there.
0:52:19 But they might not work in other areas of your life.
0:52:20 Yeah.
0:52:24 And and that’s why a lot of the most successful people are fucking assholes.
0:52:27 You have to be the four times divorced or whatever.
0:52:31 Yeah, it’s because what makes you great at one thing can make you shitty on another thing.
0:52:34 All right, I enjoyed that conversation.
0:52:35 Is that the pod?
0:52:36 That’s the pod.
0:52:37 That’s the pod.
0:52:44 Sam, how many diapers you change in per day right now?
0:52:46 Personally, what’s your DPD?
0:52:49 Yeah, for the up until recently, it was here comes a line, by the way.
0:52:52 At least one a day divide by two.
0:52:54 Now it’s one every three days.
0:52:57 Wow, that’s pretty incredible.
0:52:59 Well, we have a nanny.
0:53:01 How how happy are you with the nanny?
0:53:05 Very, you know, a nanny tends to be a nanny for the whole family.
0:53:09 So like she does our laundry, she’ll cook a little bit, she’ll clean.
0:53:11 I usually work at the kitchen table with headphones in.
0:53:16 And so I’m always present, like every 30 minutes, I take my headphones out and I go and play.
0:53:18 So the nanny, my my goal was done.
0:53:21 Make sure my child does not have a Jamaican accent.
0:53:26 She threw a curveball in the end.
0:53:30 There was but your goal was for your kid to not have a Jamaican accent.
0:53:32 Like, I didn’t want someone else to do all of the raising of my child.
0:53:34 You know what I mean?
0:53:36 Oh, you did a copywriting move there.
0:53:37 That was nice. Yeah.
0:53:41 So if my kids, if Naomi ever says jam on, I’m going to be like, shit, I need to be involved.
0:53:44 Yeah, I’ve been working too hard.
0:53:47 I feel like I can rule the world.
0:53:53 I know I could be what I want to put my all in it like no days on the road.
0:53:55 Let’s travel never looking back.
0:53:55 Bye.
0:54:05 [BLANK_AUDIO]
0:00:06 Weird flex. All right. Yes, I do have a will.
0:00:11 Okay. So once I have a family, like you start getting into the will stuff, right?
0:00:14 And it’s kind of been screwing with me.
0:00:19 And I read a story last week that has maybe changed my life.
0:00:25 And I think that if only a couple of listeners actually buy into what I’m buying into,
0:00:28 this could be like the most like life changing thing that we’ve ever done on this podcast.
0:00:30 I feel like I can rule the world.
0:00:36 I know I could be what I want to put my all in it like the days off on the road.
0:00:37 Let’s travel.
0:00:43 So in the 1800s in Sweden, there was this guy named Alfred and Alfred was an inventor.
0:00:47 And he had a little bit of success where he started inventing some like a bunch of small stuff.
0:00:51 But then when he was like 30 or 40, he had something that changed his life.
0:00:55 So we basically found out that nitroglycerin, if you mess with it in a certain way,
0:00:56 you can make it explosive.
0:00:58 And thus was the creation of dynamite.
0:01:00 And so it made him incredibly rich.
0:01:01 So we got super rich.
0:01:05 He was worth something like the equivalent of two or three hundred million dollars in today’s money.
0:01:09 And towards the end of his life, his brother Ludwig died.
0:01:15 And when his brother died, someone ran an obituary for Alfred on accident.
0:01:16 They used the wrong brother.
0:01:21 And the obituary started with the merchant of death is no longer.
0:01:25 And they go on to explain how Alfred created dynamite and how it was
0:01:28 revolutionized the way people were murdered.
0:01:31 Now, whether that story is true or false, that’s actually offered to debate.
0:01:34 No one has disproved it, but there’s like people like, I’m not sure if that’s actually true.
0:01:37 But that’s the story.
0:01:40 And afterwards, Alfred changed his life.
0:01:42 He goes, that’s that’s ridiculous.
0:01:44 I can’t be known as the person who is the merchant of death.
0:01:45 I have to change this.
0:01:50 And so two years before he died, he decided to rewrite his will.
0:01:56 And he left 95 percent of his assets towards a foundation where he created the rules
0:01:59 and the rules were I’m going to give and this is I’m using today’s money,
0:02:01 but it’s it’s the equivalent money back then.
0:02:06 I’m going to give one million dollars to the person who impacted humanity the most.
0:02:09 The category that I want to start with is peace.
0:02:11 But after peace, we’re going to do a few other categories.
0:02:14 We’re going to do peace, we’re going to do chemistry, economics and literature.
0:02:17 And thus became the Nobel Peace Prize.
0:02:23 And to this day, it’s lasted for, you know, 130 years where they now have like
0:02:26 six hundred million dollars in assets.
0:02:29 And the whole point of the foundation is we invest enough money.
0:02:34 So we are always able to give something like the equivalent of a five million dollars
0:02:38 a year to some type of person who has impacted the world the most.
0:02:43 And winners have been like Marie Currie, Martin Luther King, Ernest Hemingway,
0:02:45 like a lot of these like pretty like groundbreaking people.
0:02:51 And in a way, this contest, it’s encouraged like, I don’t think there’s too many people
0:02:54 that are doing stuff, stuff just to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
0:02:58 But in the back of their head, they’re like, yeah, like that would be amazing.
0:03:01 If like, I can like discover something and like, you know, that’s like the ultimate goal.
0:03:03 Like to get a Nobel Peace Prize, like that’s like the greatest thing ever.
0:03:09 All right, let’s take a quick break to talk about our sponsor today, HubSpot.
0:03:13 With smaller budgets and sky high expectations, growth is feeling pretty painful right now.
0:03:16 But HubSpot just announced more than 200 product updates to make
0:03:18 impossible growth feel impossibly easy.
0:03:20 Like Breeze, it’s a new suite of AI tools that will help you say,
0:03:23 goodbye to your busy work and hello to better work.
0:03:26 Breeze Intelligence, which will give you the richest, most comprehensive picture
0:03:30 of your prospects and customers and re-imagined marketing and content hubs
0:03:33 to attract and convert more leads and send your revenue soaring.
0:03:36 Visit HubSpot.com/Spotlight to learn more.
0:03:40 And so it kind of changed my life.
0:03:44 By the way, did you know that story, that dynamite story in the Merchant of Death?
0:03:45 Not the specifics.
0:03:47 I had heard Peter Thiel was talking about this with Joe Rogan,
0:03:49 like the sort of whitewashing of a reputation.
0:03:51 And they were talking about Epstein.
0:03:53 They were talking about Bill Gates and Rogan brought up.
0:03:55 He’s like, that’s how the Nobel Prize happened.
0:03:56 And then he’s like, have you heard that?
0:03:58 Peter is like, yeah, he is, you know, the dynamite guy.
0:04:00 But I didn’t know anything beyond that.
0:04:00 So that’s actually pretty cool.
0:04:03 I didn’t know the Merchant of Death obituary story.
0:04:07 So the truth of it is that like dynamite actually wasn’t used to kill that many people
0:04:08 because of the way it worked.
0:04:09 Like TNT killed a lot of people.
0:04:12 But like, so like open up caves for mining and shit.
0:04:16 Right. It was like, so that’s where like the story is like, you know, who knows?
0:04:18 But we don’t let the truth get in the way of good story.
0:04:22 Yeah. But what is true is that the Nobel Peace Prize has worked.
0:04:25 Like it’s encouraged people and like through incentives to do stuff.
0:04:27 Sorry. So explain the money side of this.
0:04:29 So he left how much money to this.
0:04:31 And then is it just been draining from that pot?
0:04:34 Or does new money get injected into the Nobel Prize?
0:04:36 Because it’s a million dollars per prize, right? Is that right?
0:04:38 Yeah. And there’s five per year.
0:04:42 And like one year during the World War two, they were like, we don’t have peace.
0:04:43 So we’re not going to give a peace prize.
0:04:45 And so they like this didn’t give a prize.
0:04:48 And so but in general, every year for the last 120 years, they’ve done this.
0:04:52 And so the money right now, it’s six, this is all public.
0:04:53 So you can see it.
0:04:55 They have six hundred and twelve million dollars.
0:04:59 It made a 10.7 percent return on capital in two thousand twenty three.
0:05:02 It’s invested in equity funds, hedge funds.
0:05:06 And the way that it’s set up, according to his will, was make sure that the money
0:05:09 never runs dry so we can always give.
0:05:12 We can always give this away for potentially hundreds of years. Right.
0:05:15 And so there’s like an organization, I think.
0:05:16 And you can see what their expenses are.
0:05:20 I think their expenses to run this thing are like three or eight million.
0:05:24 I forget exactly a single digit millions per year to operate.
0:05:27 And then they give away roughly five million dollars per year.
0:05:29 And is this like Forbes 30 to 30?
0:05:32 Or like how legit are the winners of the Nobel Peace Prize now?
0:05:34 I’ve never paid too much attention to it.
0:05:40 Do you have a sense of like, is this high signal or is this like a hijacked thing
0:05:42 that now is is not high signal anymore?
0:05:45 So my opinion is very high signal.
0:05:48 So Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King, Marie Currie,
0:05:50 like these like legit people have done it.
0:05:52 Now, there have been a few times where they’ve made mistakes.
0:05:57 So, for example, now they have a rule where they actually want to give the award
0:06:01 a couple years after the person made the discovery, because in 1926,
0:06:05 they gave the award to someone who created this enzyme that cured cancer.
0:06:07 And obviously that wasn’t true.
0:06:10 But like six months after they discovered it, they thought it was true.
0:06:13 And then the other criticism is they have a liberal bias.
0:06:16 And so they’ve given one to Barack Obama, they’ve given one to,
0:06:19 I believe, an Israeli guy once like a peace award.
0:06:22 And then the people who side with Palestine are like, what the hell?
0:06:24 That’s right, there’s no peace.
0:06:25 So there’s criticism sometimes.
0:06:27 But in general, it’s very well regarded,
0:06:32 although a lot of people criticize it as being too academic or too liberal.
0:06:35 But I think it’s like as legit as it could be.
0:06:37 And what’s your take on this?
0:06:38 So awesome story.
0:06:40 So here’s my take.
0:06:44 My take is that this prize set up is awesome.
0:06:46 And let me give you a few examples of this.
0:06:51 So inspired by the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919, there was this guy named Raymond
0:06:55 Ortiz, I think his name is, or let’s call him Orteg, Raymond Orteg.
0:07:01 And so he was like, hey, these planes that we’ve created are pretty amazing.
0:07:03 But we’re not doing like too many great things with them.
0:07:07 He goes, I’m going to offer $25,000 to anyone out there who can fly
0:07:09 from New York City to Paris.
0:07:12 This was in 1919, you know, for $25,000, that’s like $500,000 today.
0:07:16 And like eight people signed up and seven of them failed.
0:07:18 And in fact, five of them died.
0:07:20 Now, who’s the one person who made it?
0:07:21 Charles Lindbergh.
0:07:24 And the year after Charles Lindbergh did his flight,
0:07:28 it says that airline passengers before he did it that year were 5,000.
0:07:31 A few years after, 300,000.
0:07:33 And it completely changed the airline industry
0:07:36 because it made like a big hoopla and a big deal, whatever.
0:07:40 Then inspired by that prize, this guy named Peter Diamandis.
0:07:42 Is that his name? Yep.
0:07:46 He created this thing called the X Prize, where he was like, I offer $10 million.
0:07:50 I think the rules were anyone who can fly a rocket into space,
0:07:52 bring it back down.
0:07:54 And two weeks later, it goes right back into space.
0:07:57 So like reusable rockets and Elon Musk at the time.
0:07:59 I think SpaceX was two years old.
0:08:04 He said the X Prize basically helped create the commercial space industry.
0:08:06 It showed that you didn’t have to be a giant aerospace company
0:08:07 to make progress in space.
0:08:11 And it definitely influenced the direction I took with SpaceX.
0:08:14 So this was like a big deal for like space.
0:08:20 And now the genius of the X Prize was that you by putting up 10 million.
0:08:22 And I think it became 20 million for the prize.
0:08:28 People would like a bunch, 20 teams would invest two million each
0:08:31 in trying to develop the thing to win the 10 million dollar prize.
0:08:34 And so you would get 40 million invested for a 10 million prize.
0:08:40 So it was a kind of a genius way to spur innovation and investment.
0:08:42 So not just people who want to win the prize, because that’s obvious,
0:08:44 put a prize up, people will try to go win it.
0:08:47 But actually in the act of winning it, more dollars got poured in
0:08:50 because they saw a clear return and the math worked out where,
0:08:52 oh, wow, I get leverage.
0:08:55 My 10 actually becomes 100 invested in this mission
0:08:57 if I get enough interest around it.
0:09:00 Along with the PR, along with the the want to just win
0:09:02 and to make this exciting.
0:09:03 And so it works.
0:09:06 And so now there’s a SpaceX prize that Elon has funded,
0:09:10 where it’s 100 million dollars for someone who, if by 2030,
0:09:14 they can remove a certain amount of carbon from the planet or something like that.
0:09:15 And so it’s still ongoing.
0:09:17 Here’s another example.
0:09:18 So you know what DARPA is?
0:09:19 Have you heard of DARPA?
0:09:21 It stands for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
0:09:22 Have you heard of that?
0:09:24 Yeah, weren’t they like responsible for creating the internet?
0:09:25 They’ve done a bunch of stuff.
0:09:30 And so in 2003, they created this thing called The Grand Prize.
0:09:35 And the idea was we have a 150 mile road trip or like a route.
0:09:40 And the first person who can create an autonomous vehicle
0:09:45 that can drive that route wins one million dollars and a hundred and six teams
0:09:46 or something that applied.
0:09:48 And for a little while, no one did it.
0:09:49 But then a team did it.
0:09:52 And that’s when the first time we ever used the lidar,
0:09:56 which is a type of self driving technology that all the cars or many of the cars have.
0:09:58 It was already existed, but it was applied to cars for the first time ever.
0:10:01 And so it was very successful.
0:10:04 And then there’s actually a guy who I think maybe you might know this guy.
0:10:06 His name is Nat Friedman.
0:10:08 He’s a really good guy to follow.
0:10:08 A really interesting guy.
0:10:10 He’s doing a lot of stuff with AI investing right now.
0:10:12 And I know about this prize that he’s got.
0:10:13 It’s really cool.
0:10:15 I believe it’s.
0:10:16 What’s the right phrase?
0:10:18 Is it Herculanean text?
0:10:22 So basically, I think it was like one of the there’s an explosion in, I think, Italy.
0:10:25 You know, the Suvious prize, Suvious.
0:10:31 Yeah, the Mapasuvius exploded and all of these ancient Greek texts got basically ruined.
0:10:34 And he puts up a prize to where if you can create,
0:10:36 you basically have to use machine learning.
0:10:41 If you can create this algorithm that can help him decipher parts of the text,
0:10:42 he’ll give you a prize.
0:10:46 Yeah, so it’s like a scroll that is like been almost sealed.
0:10:48 You can’t unscrew it and just read it.
0:10:53 So what they’re using is computer vision to try to analyze it from the outside.
0:10:57 And just from like the little bits you can see and try to figure out what was written.
0:11:00 I think this is going to be like the earliest written text or something like that.
0:11:01 I forgot. I don’t know the details.
0:11:02 I think somebody could go look this up.
0:11:06 But I remember hearing about this and thinking, wow, this was so cool.
0:11:08 Like he he sort of found this thing.
0:11:11 Nobody was going to be nobody was going to justify the investment
0:11:13 they would take to see this because you also don’t know what’s inside.
0:11:16 You don’t know if there’s anything interesting inside, necessarily.
0:11:19 And he decided to fund this competition.
0:11:22 And I guess what happened recently was somebody figured out how to read a bit of it.
0:11:25 Actually, they had like a breakthrough in the Seavius Prize
0:11:28 where somebody figured out how to read a little bit of the thing from like
0:11:31 some stupidly simple technique of computer vision.
0:11:35 Yeah. And so it’s still a thing, by the way, and like people are still getting after it.
0:11:39 And then the last thing is there’s this thing called Kaggle Kaggle competitions
0:11:43 where it was a startup that raised 12 million dollars.
0:11:45 It was eventually bought by Google.
0:11:50 According to their website, they’ve had 19 million engineers compete in their competitions.
0:11:52 And if you’re a company, you could put a bounty out there.
0:11:54 And people will compete to win it.
0:11:57 So, for example, you remember Microsoft Connect,
0:12:01 like the camera that you put on your Xbox and it could like watch you play
0:12:05 and somehow interact with that, I believe, was heavily developed by one of these competitions.
0:12:08 But then they do other things for HIV research and things like that,
0:12:14 where this gamifying system has actually contributed to like big important problems.
0:12:17 And so all of this to say.
0:12:19 When you’re thinking about or when I’m thinking about when I die,
0:12:22 what will happen to money, you know, you think about giving away to family,
0:12:24 you think about just like traditional giving away.
0:12:27 And you just you just wire it to someone and hope they do well.
0:12:33 I’m incredibly fascinated and interested in these competitions.
0:12:34 And they don’t all need to be huge.
0:12:36 I think there’s one guy who you particularly like Aubrey de Grey,
0:12:38 where he has a twenty five thousand dollar a year.
0:12:41 If you come with some interesting breakthrough on longevity,
0:12:44 he will give you twenty five grand and then you get you get to go meet with him.
0:12:47 Right. And so sometimes they’re huge. Sometimes they’re not huge.
0:12:54 But I think this is like so much more leverage and the publicity and the wanting to win.
0:13:00 It seems so much more better for society to do a contest.
0:13:04 And it’s also more work, but then just giving, you know what I mean?
0:13:06 Hundred percent.
0:13:09 So I love this topic and there’s a bunch of interesting angles.
0:13:11 By the way, can I read you the just the Visuvian thing?
0:13:12 Because I think it’s pretty fascinating.
0:13:13 Yeah, yeah.
0:13:16 They were able to take four passages with 140 characters
0:13:19 each and get eighty five percent of the characters readable, recoverable.
0:13:22 And is it just someone’s like grocery list?
0:13:24 Exactly.
0:13:27 And they use, you know, AI, blah, blah, blah.
0:13:30 I don’t know all the the details of this.
0:13:33 He did a good podcast with Ben Thompson.
0:13:34 I’m sure technically that’s where I heard him talking about this.
0:13:36 I wish if I knew we were talking about this, I could have looked it up.
0:13:39 But I heard this like six months ago, I was getting a haircut.
0:13:40 I thought it was pretty fascinating.
0:13:42 So what did the shroll say?
0:13:44 So you get a haircut when you have earbuds in your ears.
0:13:48 I won’t go to a barbershop if they don’t let me listen
0:13:51 to something while I’m getting my haircut. Oh my God, all right.
0:13:52 Like, if they try talking, I’m just like,
0:13:54 and nothing.
0:13:57 So you can’t hear it.
0:14:00 And by the way, it falls out like four times during every haircut.
0:14:01 And I’m like, oh, sorry, can you get that?
0:14:03 And they’re like, dude, this is annoying.
0:14:06 That’s why I started having a guy come to my house and just do it there
0:14:08 so I could just listen on blast.
0:14:10 But then I felt kind of weird because he was also listening to these
0:14:13 like old Max Levchin talks from like 2002.
0:14:15 And he’s like, who is this?
0:14:17 Why is he talking about like the future of the Internet?
0:14:21 I’m like, yeah, yeah, it’s before the Internet was like that huge of a deal.
0:14:24 God, that’s so rude.
0:14:24 But whatever.
0:14:29 Well, we’ll go back to the scrolls.
0:14:32 It’s like going to a sports bar and I don’t want to talk to the bartender.
0:14:32 I want to watch the game.
0:14:34 That’s what I’m trying to do.
0:14:36 Right. I’m the customer.
0:14:38 The customer experience that they want.
0:14:42 So it says to date, our efforts have managed to unroll
0:14:44 and read about five percent of the first scroll.
0:14:46 So that’s like, you know, the amount of headway that they’ve made so far.
0:14:49 The the general subject of the text is pleasure,
0:14:53 which properly understood is the highest good in their philosophy.
0:14:55 The two snippets are talking about, I guess, talking about pleasure.
0:14:58 So one author thinks as to in the case of food,
0:15:00 we do not right away believe things that are scarce
0:15:03 to be absolutely more pleasant than those that are abundant.
0:15:05 I don’t know what’s going on, but it’s basically a philosophy text.
0:15:06 OK, so that’s pretty cool.
0:15:09 So can I tell you about my take on this?
0:15:11 So early on in the podcast,
0:15:13 I think I had one of the ideas, which was SpaceX,
0:15:16 or sorry, the XPRIZE for companies.
0:15:19 And I basically realized that a lot of companies,
0:15:22 when I when I was inside of Twitch, after we got acquired, I was like, man,
0:15:25 we had this whole situation where they were trying to build things internally,
0:15:28 but they didn’t have like the best team on it.
0:15:29 They didn’t have like the best focus on it.
0:15:31 They didn’t have their highest sense of urgency.
0:15:34 Then you have startups that are often like really high caliber teams,
0:15:38 small groups of people, super high urgency, super high motivation.
0:15:39 It’s their baby.
0:15:41 So they they treat it like life or death, whereas in a company,
0:15:42 you’re not going to treat that way.
0:15:44 And I thought, well, in the end,
0:15:48 we ended up getting acquired for like, you know, small, medium acquisition.
0:15:51 And I was like, you know, if I had just known upfront
0:15:53 that they would be willing to pay for this,
0:15:56 we could have just built it better and faster, knowing that, hey,
0:15:58 there’s a eight finger payday on the other side of this.
0:16:00 And they would have also happily been like, cool,
0:16:04 whoever can make the best version of this, you get this money.
0:16:06 And we don’t have to fund internally the product development
0:16:08 and have one shot on goals.
0:16:11 I was like, why wouldn’t a company just said ten million bucks
0:16:14 for the person who could build the bet, the team that could build the best X.
0:16:18 And then when and the conditions are when if you hit it,
0:16:19 we have the first right to buy it.
0:16:21 You can’t sell it to anybody else.
0:16:23 We get to hire you and the team and you guys get it.
0:16:26 We’ll come on for for it basically earns out over two years.
0:16:28 And, you know, here’s the scope of what we want.
0:16:32 So you’re not guessing, oh, will will Facebook want to buy us?
0:16:34 It’s like, no, no, Facebook’s telling you what they want.
0:16:38 And then you get 25 teams to go try to be the winners of that prize.
0:16:41 Because, hey, you actually don’t need maybe venture capital.
0:16:42 You’re like, hey, we’re going to take nine months
0:16:44 and try to build this thing and try to win the prize.
0:16:46 Right. And I feel like that should exist.
0:16:48 I’m surprised that that doesn’t exist.
0:16:49 That was the first idea.
0:16:52 Second is I actually tried this.
0:16:55 So did I ever tell you about the the prize we created for Milk Road?
0:16:59 No. So when we were doing the Milk Road, we were like, all right,
0:17:03 it’s pretty clear that in crypto, there’s like, you know, the the money use case,
0:17:07 which is, hey, just like save your money in Bitcoin or a currency
0:17:09 that is not that cannot inflate.
0:17:11 It’s not designed for inflation.
0:17:13 And so I get that use case.
0:17:14 But then people were talking about Web 3.
0:17:15 It’s going to change everything.
0:17:18 You’re going to have all these apps, decentralized apps, social,
0:17:21 social decentralized apps where you own your content, all this crazy stuff.
0:17:24 Right. But nobody actually had built any of them.
0:17:27 It was just like a bunch of VCs talking about it in circles.
0:17:29 Our lame white papers, whatever the hell that is.
0:17:32 All the papers and like insane funding, but like they didn’t build a prototype.
0:17:34 But nobody would use it, right?
0:17:35 So we we came up with the idea.
0:17:38 We were like, hey, how do we have Milk Road?
0:17:41 If we’re this crypto newsletter, we believe in crypto.
0:17:43 Why don’t we create our own little grant?
0:17:45 And so we created a grant called the milk money grant.
0:17:48 We’re like, this is not enough to get rich.
0:17:49 But it’s a little bit of milk money, right?
0:17:53 It’s enough where you can justify spending like two or three months on a project.
0:17:56 And it was one ETH, which at the time was like maybe two or three grand.
0:18:00 And so we had, I think, over like 2000 submissions.
0:18:02 And we said, you could build whatever you want.
0:18:04 It’s some use case or application of crypto.
0:18:08 And there was like so we ended up picking 10 or 12 people.
0:18:13 So we gave away probably what what is that like, you know, 36 grand.
0:18:16 And we just use our like ad revenue money to like pay that out.
0:18:19 We just treat it as an expense of the business.
0:18:20 And then we got to meet these people.
0:18:22 And they were super interesting, young, high caliber people
0:18:25 that were building really interesting things.
0:18:27 And even though they were probably already making more than two or three
0:18:31 grand in their job, it just felt like a road scholarship.
0:18:34 It felt like they got accepted, that they were getting paid to do something.
0:18:36 They had an excuse to go like scratch this itch.
0:18:37 And that’s the way we framed it.
0:18:38 We’re like, what’s an itch you want to scratch?
0:18:39 It doesn’t need to be the biggest project.
0:18:42 But something you want to see built that you want to use.
0:18:43 What would it be?
0:18:45 And then people built all kinds of things.
0:18:46 And it was a fantastic experience.
0:18:49 It was honestly really, really awesome.
0:18:51 And I forgot about it until now.
0:18:52 Actually, it’s something I want to do again.
0:18:55 I have a couple ideas of what I might do with it.
0:18:56 Do you want to talk about those or no?
0:19:01 I have a specific idea that I want to fund and I want to fund it.
0:19:04 And maybe it’s not even going to be that big of a business.
0:19:06 So it might be just like a philanthropic way.
0:19:08 But is my my version of the Young Hustlers grant.
0:19:12 So the other day, I was sitting around us thinking about my time in college
0:19:15 because I have a cousin who’s who just got accepted into college, two cousins,
0:19:17 actually, and they were like, what advice did you have?
0:19:19 And I was like, well, what do you want?
0:19:20 Do you know what you want or do you not know what you want?
0:19:23 If you don’t know what you want, you should just spend that time dabbling.
0:19:27 Go meet a bunch of people, try a bunch of things, do a shadow, a bunch of people.
0:19:30 Go try to figure out what what the menu even is and maybe what type of stuff.
0:19:32 Do you like seafood? Do you like steak, chicken, salads?
0:19:33 What do you what do you want?
0:19:35 And one of them was like, I know what I want.
0:19:37 I want to be an entrepreneur.
0:19:38 And I was like, cool.
0:19:41 He’s like, so that’s why I’m doing this like business program and whatever.
0:19:42 I’m like, awesome.
0:19:44 They’re not going to teach you how to be an entrepreneur in college.
0:19:46 That’s not what’s actually going to happen there, right?
0:19:47 I know what you’re thinking.
0:19:48 Same thing I thought.
0:19:52 If I go to school and I get a business degree, then I will you know how to run a
0:19:55 business and start a business and run a business is like, no,
0:19:57 that’s not at all what you’re going to get out of that.
0:19:58 So I said, here’s the best thing you can do.
0:20:02 I said, actually, this is something that every college campus could have this.
0:20:06 And I think it is the best college campus business that I can think of
0:20:07 for somebody like like me.
0:20:10 So if you listen to podcasts, maybe you’re wired like me or Sam.
0:20:13 And that is to create the onion for your campus.
0:20:18 So here’s the here’s why I know about you.
0:20:22 But when I was in college, like the campus paper was like a big deal.
0:20:25 Maybe now with, yeah, like smartphones being awesome in social media.
0:20:26 Maybe this is dead and I’m a boomer.
0:20:30 No, it’s still around because you love to read about yourself and your friends.
0:20:31 Yeah, exactly.
0:20:33 You want to know what’s going on on your campus, what’s the news,
0:20:35 what happened with your teams, etc.
0:20:38 Also, there was like, it’s like the procrastination element of it,
0:20:40 where there’s like the Sudoku and there’s like the crossword
0:20:42 and there’s shit you could do while you’re in class.
0:20:46 So the camp at my school at Duke, everybody read the Duke Chronicle.
0:20:48 And I never thought about it.
0:20:49 I didn’t even know who wrote it.
0:20:50 I didn’t even consider what was going on there.
0:20:52 But if I was smart, what I would have done to say,
0:20:55 I’m actually going to create a little business here on campus.
0:20:57 I’m going to create a newspaper.
0:21:00 But of course, first rule of business, different is better than better.
0:21:01 So I’m not going to create just another school
0:21:04 newspaper that’s reporting just the facts.
0:21:06 I’m going to create the onion for my campus.
0:21:08 So it’s basically a satirical newspaper.
0:21:09 This will teach me a bunch of skills.
0:21:11 So I’ll get the skills of creating a business.
0:21:12 How do you start a business?
0:21:14 I’ll get the skills of content creation.
0:21:18 So copywriting, humor, creating a content schedule, content pipeline,
0:21:23 hiring and firing people, getting ad sales and ad revenue, distribution.
0:21:25 How am I going to get people to read this?
0:21:28 Product differentiation, marketing, naming the thing.
0:21:31 And it’s the perfect type of business for college because it’s sandbox.
0:21:34 So I think one pressure a lot of people have when they’re in college,
0:21:34 they want to be an entrepreneur.
0:21:38 Is they try to think of businesses that are like the businesses
0:21:41 they read about on TechCrunch or like big money making things.
0:21:42 Yeah, I’m going to create the next big thing.
0:21:43 And that’s really hard.
0:21:45 And also, you’re a beginner, you’re a white belt.
0:21:47 So you don’t go look at the moves that black belts do necessarily.
0:21:50 Maybe like learn the best white belt moves and you need a white belt business.
0:21:53 For me, that was my sushi restaurant thing, my virtual sushi restaurant.
0:21:55 It was like the hot dog thing.
0:21:58 And then you’re like college, you know, like moves business or whatever.
0:22:03 Right. We had little like starter businesses that themselves are not meant to last.
0:22:06 But they teach you a whole bunch of like the core building block skills
0:22:10 that when you lump them together is this thing called business.
0:22:14 So you’re going to encourage them to create the onion for college.
0:22:17 Exactly. So I want basically people who are I don’t know
0:22:18 how many college kids listen to this, to be honest.
0:22:20 But if you if you are or you have a kid in college,
0:22:22 I want to hustle on every campus.
0:22:26 So like one hustler to create their version of the campus paper.
0:22:28 And I got to figure out the details,
0:22:31 but I’m down to basically put in some amount of money,
0:22:35 like 10 grand or 15 grand to like kickstart people on this thing.
0:22:36 I don’t think it’ll take much money.
0:22:40 I think 10 grand will be more than enough to start these on several campuses.
0:22:44 And I think they should become self-sustaining cash flow businesses from there.
0:22:47 And I think that the people who run these will be way far ahead.
0:22:51 And people don’t even know, like, for example, Barstool, you know, Barstool started.
0:22:55 A physical paper that he like gave to colleges, right?
0:22:58 Not colleges exactly, but yeah, in Boston, he would.
0:23:01 So it was basically a physical newspaper
0:23:04 that Dave would write under, I think, pen names.
0:23:06 And it was you can go find out the font is so funny.
0:23:08 It’s like comic sans on the internet.
0:23:12 I think he even bought or he reused other people’s newspaper,
0:23:16 like the free newspaper that you pull the the you pull out that piece of glass
0:23:19 and then you can grab one. You know what I’m saying?
0:23:20 Like, I mean, he bought it.
0:23:22 Let he I think he bought a few of his own.
0:23:26 And he like literally placed them on corners where it was like, you know,
0:23:27 like those free newspaper things.
0:23:30 And it was mostly a gambling newspaper.
0:23:32 It was like a gambling rag. He called it.
0:23:33 And what he would do is in the morning,
0:23:36 he would write the thing or whatever he’d get it printed, and then he would
0:23:39 or sorry, the previous night, he would write the thing, get it printed.
0:23:41 And then in the morning, he would rush into the subway.
0:23:44 And he’d just be handing it out to people getting on the subway in Boston
0:23:46 or getting on the whatever the underground is there.
0:23:48 And that’s how Barstool got its initial distribution.
0:23:50 And then he would hand them out all day.
0:23:51 Then he would go home.
0:23:55 He would be calling advertisers to try to get like enough money to print the thing
0:23:58 again, and then he would write the thing under all of his pen names
0:23:59 and work on his copywriting skills.
0:24:02 Then he would go get them printed and figure out a manufacturer product.
0:24:04 And the next day, he would go distribute it again.
0:24:06 And over time, he got like other people to hand them out
0:24:08 and other people to write the thing and other people to do the ad sales.
0:24:11 And it became Barstool, which is this like, you know,
0:24:14 many hundreds million dollar company for Dave.
0:24:15 But that’s how it started.
0:24:18 That’s amazing. Yeah, you should go.
0:24:21 The listener, you guys should go and Google and see the early ones.
0:24:22 It’s pretty hilarious.
0:24:24 So I’m thinking about after this, I’m going to put up a Google Doc.
0:24:25 That’s that’s my call to ask.
0:24:28 I’m going to put up a Google Doc, figuring out what are my actual rules
0:24:30 and who am I looking for and how to apply.
0:24:32 We’re in the show notes of this thing.
0:24:35 I’m just going to make an open doc anybody can can read and submit to.
0:24:38 And I’m going to think of a name because I think the name matters.
0:24:39 And I’m also going to I’m going to treat it like a franchise.
0:24:42 So every campus will have like the same naming convention.
0:24:44 And then we’ll share the learning.
0:24:47 So if you’re the kid at Northwestern, you’re going to be able to
0:24:50 in some kid at Duke comes up with a good distribution idea.
0:24:52 We’re just going to make one group chat where like all the people
0:24:55 are like kind of sharing what’s working and what’s not.
0:24:56 And I’m really curious to see what happens.
0:24:58 And to me, this is my version of like the lemonade stand.
0:25:02 It’s like the slightly superior lemonade stand type of business
0:25:03 that I think would be great.
0:25:05 I wish I had done this in college.
0:25:10 So I’ll take my bow because I have successfully, potentially rather
0:25:14 proven that this idea might be one of the bigger ones that we’ve ever talked about.
0:25:17 It’s it actually is quite exciting.
0:25:21 Even like when you’re talking ten ten thousand dollars
0:25:24 and a newspaper, which is like a silly thing, but it’s awesome.
0:25:26 Like that’s awesome.
0:25:29 And that’s kind of the point with this is like these things,
0:25:32 when you repackage charity or whatever you want to call this
0:25:35 into a game, it kind of makes it exciting.
0:25:37 It makes it fun. It makes it cool.
0:25:40 Yeah, what’s the name for this sort of action philanthropy, right?
0:25:43 It’s like it’s not charity for the completely impoverished,
0:25:47 but you are giving people both inspiration, maybe capital and an excuse
0:25:51 to go and better their lives or improve their lives, live up to their potential,
0:25:52 like take the next step.
0:25:54 Is there a name for this where you’re not?
0:25:57 It’s not starving kids in Africa, but it is,
0:26:00 you know, kind of broke college kids who now have something to get excited about.
0:26:02 What what would you is there a name for something like that?
0:26:03 I got to think about it.
0:26:06 But I would in my head, I’ve been calling it incentivized philanthropy.
0:26:09 That’s that’s too that’s too much of a mouthful.
0:26:10 So we have to think about it.
0:26:13 What this really comes down to is
0:26:18 just a slight differing incentivization has like massive
0:26:21 difference in the in the outcome versus just giving versus
0:26:24 not only one of you are going to get this and you all got to get after it.
0:26:27 So there’s a few versions of this, by the way, that I’ve thought about in the past one.
0:26:31 So when the Teal Fellowship came out, I thought it was genius.
0:26:34 Peter Teal basically had this point of view that universities are a bubble
0:26:39 and that we they have this halo, this umbrella
0:26:41 where you can never criticize a university college.
0:26:44 What education? It’s the most important thing for our kids.
0:26:46 How dare you? I thought it was crazy when I heard about it.
0:26:48 He’s like, education might be the fifth thing that they do.
0:26:50 And he called it. He said, education is a bundle.
0:26:51 And I forgot what he bundled it as.
0:26:54 But he was like, it’s an insurance policy for the parent.
0:26:57 You give them you make sure your kid gets this degree because that is a
0:27:00 my kid’s not going to fall through the cracks of society insurance.
0:27:02 He’s like, and then it’s a filtering process.
0:27:06 So he’s like, for companies, they don’t care what you learned at Harvard.
0:27:09 But if Harvard did a good job filtering, then I already know I’m picking from,
0:27:12 you know, the the smarter end of the crop when it comes to hiring.
0:27:14 So it’s a filtering bundle.
0:27:16 It’s a social social piece.
0:27:17 That’s part of the bundle.
0:27:18 Then there’s the education component.
0:27:19 That’s part of the bundle.
0:27:22 And he had like five or six things that he’s like, together, those are all part of it.
0:27:25 He’s like, what’s going to happen is people are going to unbundle the bundle.
0:27:29 And so what he did was he came out and said, I think universities are such a waste
0:27:33 that if you’re a high potential person, I will come out with the Teal Fellowship.
0:27:37 I will pay you 120 grand, I think it was to drop out of college.
0:27:40 And if you’re in college, I’ll pay you to drop out.
0:27:43 And Peter Teal, for all of his like
0:27:47 very unsmooth, uncharismatic ways of speaking,
0:27:50 the guy’s kind of a master of communication.
0:27:52 If you just don’t make him speak,
0:27:57 you know, give a talk and you’re not looking at the the poetry of it.
0:28:03 The if you if you read an article about his presentation and see the quotes,
0:28:04 it’s the best. It’s the best.
0:28:06 And he, by the way, Peter, he literally has speed traders.
0:28:10 So when he has a point, he’ll go on tour and he’ll give his speech.
0:28:12 Universities are a bubble.
0:28:14 And it’s not that he just said that off the cuff.
0:28:16 It’s like he has a point of view that actually the universities,
0:28:17 there’s something going on with them.
0:28:23 And it’s they’re sort of a a a a a a weird thing going on.
0:28:23 And that’s what he does.
0:28:27 And then the speech writers are like, so are you saying that universities are a bubble?
0:28:30 Yeah. Nailed it.
0:28:32 Cool headline. All right, what’s the what’s the subhead, right?
0:28:34 And so he gets it basically workshopped himself and his team.
0:28:36 And then he literally goes on tour.
0:28:37 He’s done this a couple of times.
0:28:40 He did it with the zero to one thing, which is that and he does.
0:28:42 He uses a provocative statement.
0:28:43 So he says universities are bubble.
0:28:46 Something that he knows is going to basically it’s a head turner.
0:28:53 You’re saying or you think MBA students are have negative impacts on new companies.
0:28:57 Yeah, or he’ll say by the time the MBAs are in, the alpha is gone, right?
0:29:00 Like once the MBAs are flooding into a space, the opportunity is gone.
0:29:03 But the bigger one that he did was when he did his book zero to one,
0:29:06 he went on tour instead of saying by my book, I’m Peter Teal.
0:29:07 I’ve had a great business success.
0:29:09 You know, I’ve shared some of my lessons.
0:29:10 Was it competition is bad?
0:29:12 Competition is for losers.
0:29:15 Yeah. And he’s like, oh, this idea in capitalism that, you know, competition,
0:29:16 it brings out the best in us.
0:29:18 No, competition is for losers.
0:29:21 He said the only goal of a business is shoot for monopoly monopoly.
0:29:22 I thought that’s illegal.
0:29:24 You literally get broken up if you’re a monopoly.
0:29:25 And he’s like, exactly.
0:29:27 So he finds the head turning thing.
0:29:29 And when he has it, he builds like a pretty convincing case.
0:29:35 So he did this with the Teal Fellowship and he paid kids to drop out of school.
0:29:38 Like, wow, what a what’s the worst influence you could have on my child
0:29:41 is convincing them to drop out of school, drop out of their education.
0:29:42 How many kids a year do it?
0:29:43 Do you know?
0:29:47 I remember I hosted them at my office.
0:29:49 I think the first or second year of the Teal Fellowship.
0:29:51 And there was like 20 kids in it ish.
0:29:56 There was like one of the like 19 year olds or 18 year olds were like at my office.
0:29:57 And I was like, hey, who are you guys?
0:29:59 What are you doing? They’re like, oh, we don’t know.
0:30:00 It was super disorganized, by the way.
0:30:01 And Peter Teal was not there.
0:30:03 All right. So I apply.
0:30:07 I apply and one of Peter Teal’s team members selects however many people you
0:30:10 said, six or eight people, they wire you the money.
0:30:14 And they just said, do they say, come back to me with three months with a thing?
0:30:15 No, no, you at the time, I don’t know what it is now.
0:30:17 But at the time you would get accepted.
0:30:19 You would drop out, they’d give you the money.
0:30:22 You would come to San Francisco and you would participate in the batch.
0:30:24 And so you live there.
0:30:26 I don’t know if you live together, but they were all.
0:30:27 I mean, they all shut up in my office.
0:30:29 So there was definitely there for at least a period of time.
0:30:31 I’m not sure if it was the whole program or what, but it was pretty open ended.
0:30:32 And it was long.
0:30:35 Does 100 grand go towards starting your company or is it
0:30:37 $100,000 plus three months of rent?
0:30:40 It’s a two year, $100,000 grant for young people who want to build
0:30:42 new things instead of sitting in a classroom.
0:30:44 Nice. 20 or 30 people per year.
0:30:46 You’ve got to be 22 or younger to do it.
0:30:48 You’ll need to drop out in order to have it.
0:30:50 You don’t have to move to San Francisco.
0:30:52 And an idea is enough.
0:30:54 That’s that was the idea of it.
0:30:56 It’s been going for, I don’t know, 10 years now.
0:30:58 So here’s some of the notable recipients.
0:31:03 So the CEO and founder of Dillon Field of Figma, which is a 50
0:31:06 billion dollar company, I think is it tens of billions of companies.
0:31:10 Then there’s Oyo Rooms, which was like a hotel style startup out of India
0:31:13 that also was worth many, many billions.
0:31:17 There’s Austin, Austin Russell, the guy who created Luminar Technologies,
0:31:20 which I think he became the youngest billionaire ever.
0:31:21 It was like self driving technology.
0:31:26 And then, of course, the founder of Ethereum, which is a, who knows,
0:31:30 hundreds of billions of dollars value creation thing.
0:31:31 Then there’s the founder of Loom.
0:31:33 I didn’t know that, which was a startup that was
0:31:34 required for hundreds of millions of dollars.
0:31:37 The Josh Browder from Do Not Pay, which I love.
0:31:40 And then there’s like other things that I don’t even know about
0:31:43 because maybe they’re not for profit, but there’s like a guy who created
0:31:45 a software to detect Parkinson’s disease.
0:31:48 And then there’s a handful of like recipients like that, where maybe
0:31:50 they’re behind the scenes doing amazing stuff.
0:31:54 So I guess that’s been a very, he probably didn’t do it for money.
0:31:56 But if you wanted to, there was a return on it.
0:32:01 But there’s definitely a return on like, I encouraged value creation.
0:32:02 Right. Oh yeah.
0:32:05 I mean, if even one of those, if just Ethereum had come out of it,
0:32:08 I mean, smashing success, if just Figma had come out of it,
0:32:09 smashing success, right?
0:32:12 So those are like the two power law winners of the thing.
0:32:15 By the way, go to muskfoundation.org.
0:32:17 Because I just saw that Elon Musk was the biggest donor.
0:32:20 He donated, I think, two million dollars to that Vesuvian challenge.
0:32:23 So Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman put up two million to pay.
0:32:27 And the Musk Foundation put up two million to describe what you see.
0:32:32 All right. So muskfoundation.org, it’s a website with no design.
0:32:36 It’s a blank piece of paper with five bullet points.
0:32:41 And it says muskfoundation grants are made in support of renewable energy,
0:32:46 human space exploration, pediatric research, science and engineering education,
0:32:50 development of artificial intelligence to benefit humanity.
0:32:51 That’s it.
0:32:53 It’s like a Hello World page. Yeah.
0:32:59 Yeah. It’s basically a hundred words bullet pointed on a white piece of paper.
0:33:05 And this is one of the like extreme like, you know, money talks, wealth whispers thing.
0:33:08 Yeah, I call them sexy indifference.
0:33:14 Like that’s what we’re going to call this where you want people to know that you don’t care.
0:33:18 But you also want them to know that you don’t care because you’re cool.
0:33:20 So I’m going to call it sexy indifference.
0:33:22 It’s the homeless billionaire paradox, right?
0:33:23 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:33:28 The difference between a homeless man and a billionaire at face value is so small.
0:33:30 In San Francisco, you will not be able to tell the difference, right?
0:33:36 It’s in the takeaway being sometimes you could just be sexy and different in the very beginning
0:33:37 and you become successful.
0:33:38 Like you could just like it.
0:33:40 But so we’re going to call it sexy indifference.
0:33:47 I saw a LinkedIn the other day that was no profile photo, one line bio, one job experience,
0:33:49 twenty six years owner.
0:33:53 And I was like, here’s a man who’s going to leave a lot of money for his children.
0:33:55 You can tell you that right now.
0:33:57 I don’t know anything about this company name.
0:33:59 Never heard of this guy.
0:33:59 I can tell you right now.
0:34:01 This guy’s going to leave a lot of money to his children.
0:34:05 You don’t get twenty six years owner, no profile photo linked in.
0:34:08 That’s that’s like such a high signal thing to do or at worst.
0:34:12 He owns a really nice lake house or again, he’s broke.
0:34:13 It’s homeless. We don’t know.
0:34:18 Actually, it could go either way, but it’s one way or the other.
0:34:21 By the way, I bought the Peter Thiel shirt from the Joe Rogan podcast.
0:34:23 I’m going to wear it next week on the pod.
0:34:25 It was like a hundred and twenty dollar shirt, right?
0:34:32 The all white mesh net Peter Thiel shirt from from Saks was that?
0:34:36 And just I’m just teasing it right now subscribe on YouTube
0:34:38 and you’ll get to see me wearing that.
0:34:40 I don’t think it’s made for hairy people.
0:34:42 Mesh usually is not a great choice for us.
0:34:46 But yeah, I think my ID will go up like six or seven points if I wear it.
0:34:49 You’re going to look like human Velcro with all these like little threads sticking out.
0:34:58 I saw people talking about his shirt.
0:34:59 I thought it was pretty funny.
0:35:04 He he also had the the Nazi haircut, which is like totally in,
0:35:08 which is like you you do like a high fade, a high fade.
0:35:10 And he looked good.
0:35:12 Yeah, it looked good. I thought he looked great.
0:35:14 He looked great weathered.
0:35:19 But other than that, he seems to be on like kind of a bit of a rejuvenation kick.
0:35:22 Well, I mean, he’s like he’s like fifty six.
0:35:25 He’s all right. He can he can look fifty six, but he looks great.
0:35:27 He looks a little bit younger than fifty six.
0:35:33 But if you’ve heard of cool contests like this or even a cool name for what this is called,
0:35:37 tweet at me. I’m at the Sam Park because this stuff is very fascinating to me.
0:35:40 And I’m trying to understand like the economics of it because I think I might actually do it.
0:35:44 All right. If you’re listening to this pod, I already know something about you.
0:35:47 You, my friend, are nosy.
0:35:50 You want to know the numbers behind all of these things that we’re talking about,
0:35:55 how much money people make, how much money people spend, how much money businesses make.
0:35:57 You want to know all of this people’s net worth, all of it.
0:35:59 Well, I’ve got good news for you.
0:36:02 So my company, Hampton, we’re a private community for CEOs.
0:36:06 We do this thing where we survey our members and we ask them all types of information,
0:36:10 like how much money they’re paying themselves, how much money they’re paying a lot of their employees,
0:36:14 what their team, my bonuses are, what their net worth is, what their portfolio looks like.
0:36:17 We ask all these questions, but we do it anonymously.
0:36:20 And so people are willing to reveal all types of amazing information.
0:36:22 So if you really cannot Google, you can’t find anywhere else.
0:36:27 And you could check it out at joinhampton.com, click the reports section on the menu,
0:36:29 click the salary and compensation report.
0:36:31 It’s going to blow your mind.
0:36:32 You’re going to love this stuff.
0:36:34 Check it out. Now back to the pod.
0:36:38 So are you going 50/50 with me on the MFM scholarship?
0:36:41 I’m not willing to commit to that yet.
0:36:42 But I’m trying to do it.
0:36:45 Look, I’m a slower person than you.
0:36:48 I’m thinking like the PAR family, like where where it’s going to go.
0:36:52 But oh, dude, the PAR floor, you use a golf pun.
0:36:54 It’s pretty. Yeah, I got to figure out something.
0:36:56 What did you call it? Par for the par for.
0:37:00 But I can’t decide if you want to go cheeky or like extra serious.
0:37:03 Like when you look at the Nobel Peace Prize, like they’re wearing like those
0:37:05 like the suits with the tails, you know what I mean?
0:37:08 Well, you know how it is. You know what you’re going to do.
0:37:12 You’re going to go cheeky on the front end, deadly serious on the execution.
0:37:14 I feel like that’s you.
0:37:15 I think that’s what we might do.
0:37:19 But I like I told we had the conversation with like a with my wife.
0:37:22 I’m like, I because like we actually have to sign documents.
0:37:24 And I’m like, should we do something like this?
0:37:26 And what do what are we going to do?
0:37:27 What are we going to do right now?
0:37:30 I’m I’m dude, I was I’m obsessed with like single motherhood because like
0:37:33 have you ever has your wife like whenever you got to like be a single parent
0:37:37 for the day, like when your wife’s gone or whatever, I’m like, this is impossible.
0:37:38 Yeah, it’s impossible.
0:37:40 It’s not like how do you it actually can’t be done.
0:37:43 So that’s my yeah.
0:37:46 So I’m like, if you’re a single mother, how do you get ahead?
0:37:48 Like, you know, if you want to like it, so it’s like a cycle.
0:37:51 So anyway, I’m think I’m like obsess it at that problem right now.
0:37:55 I’m trying to figure out how to how we could contribute to making
0:37:56 their those people’s lives better.
0:37:58 All right. What do you want to do?
0:38:03 I’ll give you a simple, useful lesson learned from Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.
0:38:05 OK.
0:38:08 Somebody asked Elon about hiring.
0:38:11 They go, Elon, when you do interview people still and when you interview them
0:38:13 for hiring, what do you ask them?
0:38:15 How does Elon Musk filter for great talent?
0:38:17 Have you ever seen what he said?
0:38:21 No, I well, I’ve heard one thing where he says, if I’m talking to someone
0:38:24 and I am like, you know, every once in a while, like 45 seconds in,
0:38:26 you can be like, oh, this is a bad match.
0:38:28 He’s like, I just act on that.
0:38:30 So like a 60 seconds in, I’ll just be like, hey, I don’t want to talk anymore.
0:38:33 And he just walks away.
0:38:35 It’s like his version of like getting a haircut with headphones in.
0:38:38 Yeah, let me.
0:38:40 He’s like, no.
0:38:43 So what he said was, tell me about the toughest problems you’ve dealt with
0:38:45 and how you dealt with those at your last company or project.
0:38:47 He goes, I like this question because it filters out.
0:38:50 It filters out candidates who haven’t actually done anything.
0:38:53 And you can ask them very detailed questions about it, and they will know the answer.
0:38:56 Whereas the person who was not actually responsible for doing the thing
0:38:57 won’t know the details.
0:38:59 And so it’s a very quick filtering mechanism.
0:39:01 Other questions that came from other people.
0:39:05 So Steve Jobs used to ask, why are you here?
0:39:08 And so he’s like, I want to understand their motivation.
0:39:09 Why are you even?
0:39:11 Why do you why are you here for this interview?
0:39:11 Why this company?
0:39:12 Why this job?
0:39:16 Why you is the most important thing that Steve Jobs said?
0:39:21 I know that Jeff Bezos asked a question about, do you consider yourself a lucky person?
0:39:25 I was going to say I interviewed with Joe Gebbia, the founder of Airbnb.
0:39:29 And he was like the last person in just 15 minutes.
0:39:33 And the only question he asked me was on a scale of one to 10, how lucky are you?
0:39:34 And what did you say?
0:39:35 I said, I’m a nine.
0:39:38 I go, you know, I’m lucky for a variety of reasons and explain them.
0:39:41 And then I said, I don’t know if it’s luck or what it is, but like,
0:39:42 I seem to get my way a lot.
0:39:44 And he and I go, why’d you ask that?
0:39:49 And he said, well, because if luck’s real, I want to be around lucky people.
0:39:52 And even if it’s not real, I want to be around people who tend to get their way.
0:39:54 Yeah, exactly.
0:39:56 And I was like, all right, that’s I guess that’s good.
0:40:02 So Dan Rose, who worked for Bezos in the early days, I think like 1999 to 2006.
0:40:05 So he’s a fun person to read about.
0:40:08 Yeah, he’s a good follow on on Twitter as well, because he shares some good
0:40:10 like personal stories from the Bezos era.
0:40:12 So it’ll be like in 99.
0:40:16 We were struggling with this and we were sitting at our office in the stairwell
0:40:17 because we didn’t have time to make desks.
0:40:18 It’s like, oh, nice.
0:40:22 So he goes, Jeff Bezos, favorite interview question was, are you a lucky person?
0:40:26 It was a great way to filter for optimists and people who manifest success.
0:40:29 He goes, if you’re a successful, optimistic person, the humble leader,
0:40:32 right answer for this starts with, I’m the luckiest person on earth.
0:40:34 I’ve worked really hard to get where I am.
0:40:37 But a lot of things had to go right for me and I’ve taken full advantage of my luck.
0:40:40 That’s essentially like not the exact words, but that is the crux of what you
0:40:44 want them to say, which is I’ve worked really hard, but it took a tremendous amount
0:40:47 of luck and I take advantage of lucky breaks when they present themselves to me.
0:40:51 And he goes, sorting for optimistic people is a good proxy for leadership
0:40:52 potential and likelihood of success.
0:40:55 Perceiving yourself as lucky is a proxy for optimism.
0:40:58 Basically, people will always tell you they’re optimistic about things,
0:41:00 but they won’t always say that they’re lucky.
0:41:03 So it’s kind of like a stealth question to get at the optimism thing.
0:41:05 He goes, the humility part is also important.
0:41:07 It’s easy to filter out false humility.
0:41:10 Humble brags are very obvious when you ask follow up questions.
0:41:13 He goes, this isn’t the only question, but it’s a conversation starter.
0:41:16 It opens the door to someone’s personality beyond their resume.
0:41:17 There’s two wrong answers.
0:41:21 Number one, no, I’ve never really gotten lucky, but I’ve been able to overcome
0:41:23 and outwork all the bad things that happened to me.
0:41:26 And no, I never needed luck because I’m better, smarter, stronger,
0:41:28 faster than everybody else.
0:41:33 And there’s a third answer, which is like, no, I’ve been pretty unlucky.
0:41:36 Yeah, in which case it’s like, I don’t want to be around unlucky people.
0:41:38 Yeah, like, I don’t want to be around you.
0:41:40 Yeah. And that’s what Joe, that’s what Joe told me.
0:41:44 He was like, if you’re really lucky, you’re either luck’s real
0:41:46 in which case I want to be around you or you just make it work.
0:41:50 And if you’re, say, a one or two, you’re either unlucky if looks real.
0:41:51 I don’t want to be around that shit either.
0:41:54 Or you just think you’re a victim and I don’t want to be around that.
0:41:56 So that’s how he explained it to me.
0:41:58 Have you? And I thought it was weird, by the way.
0:42:00 I thought it was weird at the time.
0:42:01 Looking back, I think it was better.
0:42:03 I actually interviewed also at Google years ago.
0:42:07 They asked me like, how many days would it take you to, like,
0:42:12 clean the windows on like a skyscraper or something like that?
0:42:14 And I didn’t like that question.
0:42:16 I hated that question too.
0:42:19 One thing that interview questions, another way to think about them is
0:42:23 they’re meant to filter out certain people and they’re meant to pull in other people.
0:42:26 Right. So a great interview question will not just assess the person.
0:42:30 They will either attract or repel the wrong cultural fit.
0:42:32 And so I think one of the Google things is like part of the reason
0:42:35 I would hate that question is part of the reason they don’t want to hire me.
0:42:39 Right. Like they they want basically puzzle puzzle solving nerds.
0:42:41 And I heard this put really well.
0:42:44 So Max Levchin, I think was was the one that, you know, the creator of PayPal.
0:42:47 He was talking about he goes when I got acquired by Google.
0:42:51 I was like, how do they retain smart people here?
0:42:53 Because they’re trying to hire the most brilliant people on earth.
0:42:57 And then they’re telling them, go like tweak the knob on Google AdSense.
0:42:58 Go get us like a little edge.
0:43:02 It’s like not only is that soulless, but it is like literally
0:43:04 like almost the definition of a cog in the machine.
0:43:07 And he goes, the way they keep those people around is he’s like literally
0:43:11 in the bathrooms, they would have like really hard puzzles on the stalls.
0:43:13 And he’s like, they would give people like a crazy.
0:43:15 They had 20 percent time, which was like 20 percent time.
0:43:17 Just go work on whatever the hell you want.
0:43:19 It’s like they would have puzzles on the walls in the stall.
0:43:22 He’s like, because the actual work that we needed you to do would never like.
0:43:25 It’s not like mission driven enough.
0:43:29 It’s not hard enough to like intellectually stimulate you.
0:43:31 So they had all these other ways of intellectually
0:43:34 stimulate you and to coddle you like, we’ll do your laundry, we’ll feed you,
0:43:35 we’ll nurse you, we’ll need a bath.
0:43:37 Go ahead, there’s a bunch of bath over there on the right.
0:43:39 They would do everything they could to keep talent there.
0:43:43 And one of the things that he talked about was like, you know,
0:43:46 the PayPal mafia is probably the most successful
0:43:51 early group of people to come together in Silicon Valley, right?
0:43:54 They basically created, you know, they had Elon, they had Peter Teal,
0:43:56 they had Macs, they went on to create like, I don’t know,
0:44:00 10 plus billion dollar companies out of the like first 15 people there.
0:44:04 Yeah, like the the smallest things of the PayPal mafia was like a Yelp.
0:44:05 Yeah, exactly.
0:44:08 Like the guy Yelp is like, you know, sitting at the kids table with their.
0:44:10 Yeah. No offense, Jeremy, he’s a good dude.
0:44:14 So the thing with PayPal was they treated it.
0:44:16 They go, we’re trying to create a cult.
0:44:19 They go, the idea of diversity is not what you wanted to start up.
0:44:22 Now, you couldn’t really say this today, but they’re on the record
0:44:25 of saying this a long time ago, which is that you want a certain type
0:44:28 of person because that breeds a certain type of culture.
0:44:31 So you, you know, pick the culture and then you only want to attract
0:44:33 people that are going to like reinforce that culture.
0:44:37 And you want to like immediately like repel otherwise smart people
0:44:39 who would dilute that culture.
0:44:41 And so for him, I remember there was a famous one, which was they were
0:44:44 interviewing an engineer and the guy said, you know, they’re like,
0:44:46 what do you like to do outside of work?
0:44:48 And he’s like, I love playing basketball.
0:44:50 And they match like, I don’t want to hire this guy.
0:44:51 They’re like, what?
0:44:52 Cause he plays basketball.
0:44:55 He’s like, I’ve never met a great engineer who loves, who says he loves
0:44:56 to play pickup hoops.
0:44:58 He’s like, great engineers have other hobbies.
0:45:01 And he’s like, and he’s like, even if we’re wrong, it’s the thing that
0:45:05 Monish said on the podcast, Monish Pabrai said, when he met Warren Buffett,
0:45:07 he goes, Warren, you’re a great judge of people.
0:45:09 How do you do it, man?
0:45:10 How did you get your people radar so good?
0:45:12 He goes, I don’t think I have a good people radar.
0:45:15 He goes, what I have is a very tight filter.
0:45:19 He goes, so if you take me to a cocktail party and you let me talk to
0:45:20 a hundred people for five minutes each.
0:45:25 In that five minutes, I could probably take the worst five or seven people.
0:45:27 And I’ll tell you, these people are lousy.
0:45:27 Don’t hire them.
0:45:30 And the best five or seven people, I could probably tell you them.
0:45:35 He’s like, and then the other, you know, 85, 90 people, I don’t know.
0:45:36 I couldn’t make a judgment on them in five minutes.
0:45:37 It wasn’t obvious to me.
0:45:39 So I put them all in the no pile.
0:45:41 He goes, well, isn’t that like a little harsh?
0:45:43 You know, there was, there might be some great people in there.
0:45:47 He goes, yeah, but the cost of bringing a not great person into my circle
0:45:48 of life is so high.
0:45:52 The cost of discarding somebody who might be great is nothing.
0:45:54 It is so low comparatively.
0:45:58 He’s like, so I am willing to be a very harsh grader of people.
0:46:02 Meaning you’re either obviously in or I put you in the too hard to tell bucket.
0:46:05 And I just lump you in with all the obvious nose.
0:46:08 And that was a non-obvious insight from Warren Buffett.
0:46:12 That’s a very, there are freaks like a Peter Thiel or Marcus
0:46:15 Zuckerberg who kind of nailed that harshness early on.
0:46:16 And then there’s normal people like me.
0:46:17 And I’m sure you were like this.
0:46:21 Where you find like a 22 year old and like, I don’t know.
0:46:22 Maybe they’re promising.
0:46:24 Maybe they were nervous at that interview.
0:46:26 Maybe they were this, maybe they were this.
0:46:28 And it feels good to give the underdog a shot.
0:46:33 Oftentimes that narrative isn’t, it doesn’t end the way that you’d like it to end.
0:46:38 Like the, like the people who that underdog narrative has worked have worked for me.
0:46:42 It’s someone like Steph Smith, where let’s hypothetically say she didn’t do well
0:46:45 in the interview, but she was so awesome because I saw her blog.
0:46:49 And I’m like, this person’s like quirky and interesting like that hypothetical
0:46:51 there as if anyone’s going to believe that was a hypothetical.
0:46:55 Well, no, what I mean is like, I think she, I don’t remember the interview.
0:46:56 I think she did great.
0:46:59 But like, I was into her because I just read her like, because I read her blog.
0:47:02 I’m like, oh, you have some type of it factor.
0:47:07 Now, maybe I wasn’t sure how that it factor could be deployed or used to my benefit.
0:47:11 Or whether it’s like, like if it was going to be used, like if she was actually
0:47:13 going to like just become the best at like blogging or if she’s going to become
0:47:15 the best, the best business woman, I’m not sure.
0:47:19 But there was some type of like kernel of like fire.
0:47:21 There was a fire where I’m like, I don’t know how I’m going to harness it.
0:47:22 Can you harness whatever?
0:47:23 But there was something there.
0:47:27 Whereas I’ve hired a lot of people who, who didn’t exactly have that.
0:47:28 They didn’t have a fire there.
0:47:32 But I was like, maybe it’s there and I make these stupid decisions.
0:47:37 And it doesn’t work because you want to be a good person or whatever.
0:47:39 And it doesn’t work.
0:47:40 What’s that phrase?
0:47:42 No good deed goes unpunished.
0:47:44 That’s how it felt with a lot of, with a lot of my hiring decisions.
0:47:47 Yeah, you don’t want to face the confrontation of it.
0:47:49 You don’t want to admit that you were wrong.
0:47:51 You don’t want to go back to square one and try to find somebody again.
0:47:54 You don’t want to admit to your team that you were wrong on this.
0:47:59 There’s a whole bunch of very understandable reasons why we make this mistake.
0:48:00 Did I tell you how much of trouble?
0:48:03 A lot of the, which a lot of the maybes ended up being maybes.
0:48:07 Like a lot of the maybe people ended up being like, like it was there.
0:48:08 I don’t know.
0:48:10 It was just in the end.
0:48:12 Yeah, it always an always stayed in.
0:48:14 All right, sorry, what are we saying?
0:48:16 I got a lot of trouble at Twitch because when I was there,
0:48:19 I tweeted out something that was very true for me and I think it’s true.
0:48:22 But the COO and others didn’t like it.
0:48:26 I said something to the effect of you always know in the first two weeks,
0:48:29 if someone’s going to be great, great people are great right off the bat.
0:48:31 They show you greatness in the first two or three weeks.
0:48:34 I’ve never seen or, you know, rarely ever will you ever see
0:48:38 somebody who turns out to be great that just was in the first two or three weeks.
0:48:39 And they yelled at you?
0:48:42 Yeah, they were like, that’s not I mean, different people started
0:48:47 at different pace, places and that, you know, that’s not basically they were kind
0:48:50 of they took it as almost like that’s too harsh.
0:48:54 And somehow it was like seen as like not diverse.
0:48:57 Like, oh, there’s a group of people who are slower to acclimate.
0:49:02 Who yell that you HR did and our COO responded to the tweet.
0:49:04 It was like, I do not like, you know, stand by this.
0:49:08 In fact, I’ve since then I’ve seen a bunch of other people say the exact same thing.
0:49:10 A bunch of other like, you know, successful people say the same thing.
0:49:13 So kind of in some ways validated this like opinion, how do you first
0:49:18 hand experience I had, which was that the great people show greatness very early on
0:49:21 first two weeks, I tend to know if this person could be a winner.
0:49:24 Now, that doesn’t mean that somebody can’t be a solid contributor
0:49:27 that had a slow first couple of weeks, but they’re never the ones who are great.
0:49:30 And great is all I’m really looking for.
0:49:31 Right. The Warren Buffett be a hard grader.
0:49:34 That is some of the best advice you can get.
0:49:38 How do you spell? Because that would be your reply to that.
0:49:41 Just a fart noise is like when they reply to you, like, you’re not supposed to do that.
0:49:44 It’s like, no, I just said my point exactly.
0:49:48 And then they’re like, what?
0:49:52 That’s a ridiculous thing to think, because the company was probably founded
0:49:55 on that principle, particularly, I don’t know, Emmett, but I’ve seen his interviews.
0:49:58 He seems like a particular, like pretty hardcore.
0:50:01 For sure, I imagine he was like that early on.
0:50:03 And so that company was probably founded with that principle in mind.
0:50:06 We have this all the time in my team.
0:50:11 So Ben, who’s my business partner, we will have some interaction with somebody
0:50:15 and he’ll be like, so what do you think of how that’s going with that person?
0:50:18 Like maybe it’s a company we invested in and then we like talk to the CEO
0:50:21 and then we’re like, I don’t really know exactly kind of why.
0:50:23 Like they’ve been really slow to take action
0:50:25 or they were saying all kinds of weird stuff that didn’t make any sense.
0:50:31 Or we hire somebody junior and then he’s like, how’s it going with what’s so and so so far?
0:50:34 And it’s like, dude, if you have to ask, you know, right?
0:50:36 Like that’s the first, first principle.
0:50:38 So you have to ask, you know, and I’ll say something pretty harsh.
0:50:39 I’m like, well, I don’t know.
0:50:43 We talked about doing these three things and then those three things haven’t happened.
0:50:45 And there’s been no update on them in a week.
0:50:48 So I don’t know how do you think it’s going, Ben?
0:50:50 And he’s like, yeah.
0:50:53 And he’ll usually say something because Ben, one of the great things about Ben
0:50:58 is Ben’s generous interpretation of almost everybody, like his wife will yell at him
0:51:00 and he’d be like, I mean, maybe I could have been a little more present.
0:51:01 Right. That’s his first reaction.
0:51:07 I think most people get to that, you know, but their first reaction is, you know,
0:51:08 somewhat, well, that’s unfair.
0:51:09 That doesn’t make any sense.
0:51:10 You did this, blah, blah, blah, right?
0:51:11 People get defensive, whatever.
0:51:12 He doesn’t really do that.
0:51:13 It doesn’t blame.
0:51:17 He gives a generous interpretation of people, which is why I think everybody loves Ben.
0:51:21 But at the same time in a company, like it’s a really harsh, hard way to run a company
0:51:26 because sometimes we’re like, Ben, like, so do you think we should be making excuses for
0:51:30 like, do you think like great people just like have all these excuses and reasons why
0:51:32 they’re not just like being great right now?
0:51:35 Or are they just great in spite of circumstances?
0:51:38 It’s like, obviously, great people are great in spite of circumstances versus
0:51:44 good people are bogged down in the 10 maybe reasons why they’re struggling right now.
0:51:50 And so I’m definitely, but that attitude that has served me in the workplace
0:51:56 doesn’t serve me outside of the workplace because, you know, having a generous
0:51:59 interpretation for people outside of work is a really awesome trade.
0:52:05 As a leader in a company, it tends to actually not work so well in the same way
0:52:07 that democracy is great.
0:52:09 Democracy inside a company where everybody gets a vote on what we’re doing
0:52:11 is not a great way to build a company.
0:52:14 Like companies are benevolent dictatorships when they win.
0:52:16 And you have to be comfortable being a benevolent dictator there.
0:52:19 But they might not work in other areas of your life.
0:52:20 Yeah.
0:52:24 And and that’s why a lot of the most successful people are fucking assholes.
0:52:27 You have to be the four times divorced or whatever.
0:52:31 Yeah, it’s because what makes you great at one thing can make you shitty on another thing.
0:52:34 All right, I enjoyed that conversation.
0:52:35 Is that the pod?
0:52:36 That’s the pod.
0:52:37 That’s the pod.
0:52:44 Sam, how many diapers you change in per day right now?
0:52:46 Personally, what’s your DPD?
0:52:49 Yeah, for the up until recently, it was here comes a line, by the way.
0:52:52 At least one a day divide by two.
0:52:54 Now it’s one every three days.
0:52:57 Wow, that’s pretty incredible.
0:52:59 Well, we have a nanny.
0:53:01 How how happy are you with the nanny?
0:53:05 Very, you know, a nanny tends to be a nanny for the whole family.
0:53:09 So like she does our laundry, she’ll cook a little bit, she’ll clean.
0:53:11 I usually work at the kitchen table with headphones in.
0:53:16 And so I’m always present, like every 30 minutes, I take my headphones out and I go and play.
0:53:18 So the nanny, my my goal was done.
0:53:21 Make sure my child does not have a Jamaican accent.
0:53:26 She threw a curveball in the end.
0:53:30 There was but your goal was for your kid to not have a Jamaican accent.
0:53:32 Like, I didn’t want someone else to do all of the raising of my child.
0:53:34 You know what I mean?
0:53:36 Oh, you did a copywriting move there.
0:53:37 That was nice. Yeah.
0:53:41 So if my kids, if Naomi ever says jam on, I’m going to be like, shit, I need to be involved.
0:53:44 Yeah, I’ve been working too hard.
0:53:47 I feel like I can rule the world.
0:53:53 I know I could be what I want to put my all in it like no days on the road.
0:53:55 Let’s travel never looking back.
0:53:55 Bye.
0:54:05 [BLANK_AUDIO]
Episode 623: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talk about the underrated philanthropy style of Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Alfred Nobel.
MFM Scholarship: Apply for $10K to start The Onion For College – https://www.shaanpuri.com/collegepaper
—
Show Notes:
(0:00) Alfred Nobel’s $266M Legacy
(6:06) Competitions vs. Trusts
(15:28) Idea: XPRIZE but for companies
(19:15) Shaan’s Prize: Win $10K to start a college paper
(23:07) How Barstool Sports started
(26:47) Peter Thiel’s contrarian philanthropy
(32:30) Elon Musks sexy indifference
(37:22) Interview questions designed to repel and attract
(44:25) Be a harsh grader of people
(47:49) Great people are great in the first 2 weeks
—
Links:
• Get our business idea database here https://clickhubspot.com/mfm
• Nobel Peace Prize – https://www.nobelpeaceprize.org/
• XPRIZE – https://www.xprize.org/
• Darpa – https://www.darpa.mil/
• Vesuvius Challenge – https://scrollprize.org/
• Kaggle – https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/
• Thiel Foundation – https://www.thielfoundation.org/
• Musk Foundation – https://www.muskfoundation.org/
—
Check Out Shaan’s Stuff:
Need to hire? You should use the same service Shaan uses to hire developers, designers, & Virtual Assistants → it’s called Shepherd (tell ‘em Shaan sent you): https://bit.ly/SupportShepherd
—
Check Out Sam’s Stuff:
• Hampton – https://www.joinhampton.com/
• Ideation Bootcamp – https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/
• Copy That – https://copythat.com
• Hampton Wealth Survey – https://joinhampton.com/wealth
• Sam’s List – http://samslist.co/
My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by The HubSpot Podcast Network // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano