My First Million - Building A 100+ Year Legacy + Peter Thiel’s Fellowship + Bomb Hiring Questions

Episode Date: August 28, 2024

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

All right, I want to tell you something. So I have a family now. And do you have a will? Weird flex. All right. Yes, I do have a will. Okay. So once I have a family, like you start getting into the will stuff, right?

And it's kind of been screwing with me. And I read a story last week that has maybe changed my life. And I think that if only a couple of listeners actually buy into what I'm buying into, this could be like the most life-changing thing that we've ever done on this podcast. I feel like I can rule. the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like my days off. On the road, let's travel.

Never let's travel. So in the 1800s in Sweden, there's this guy named Alfred. And Alfred was an inventor. And he had a little bit of success where he started inventing some, like, a bunch of small stuff. But then when he was like 30 or 40, he had something that changed his life. So we basically found out that nitroglycerin, if you mess with it in a certain way, you can make it explosive. And thus was the creation of dynamite. And so it made him incredibly rich. So we got super rich. He was worth something like the equivalent of two or three hundred million dollars in today's money. And towards the end of his life, his brother Ludwig died. And when his brother died, someone ran an obituary for Alfred on accident. They used

the wrong brother. And the obituary started with the merchant of death is no longer. And they go on to explain how Alfred created dynamite and how it was revolutionized the way people were murdered. Now, whether that story is true or false, that's actually offered to debate. No one has disproved it, but there's people like, I'm not sure if that's actually true. But that's the story. And afterwards, Alfred changed his life. He goes, that's ridiculous. I can't be known as the person who is the merchant of death.

I have to change this. And so two years before he died, he decided to rewrite his will. And he left 95% of his assets towards a foundation where he created the rules. And the rules were, I'm going to give, and this. I'm using today's money, but it's the equivalent money back then. I'm going to give one million dollars to the person who impacted humanity the most. The category that I want to start with is peace, but after peace, we're going to do a few other categories. We're going to do peace. We're going to do chemistry, economics, and literature. And thus became the Nobel Peace Prize. And to this day,

it's lasted for 130 years, where they now have like $600 million in assets. And the whole point of the foundation is we invest enough money, so we are always able to give something like the equivalent of a $5 million a year to some type of a person who has impacted the world the most. And winners have been like Marie Currie, Martin Luther King, Ernest Hemingway, like a lot of these like pretty like groundbreaking people. And in a way, this contest, it's encouraged like, I don't think there's too many people that are doing stuff just to win the Nobel Peace Prize. But in the back of their head, they're like, yeah, like.

Like, that would be amazing if, like, I can, like, discover something. And, like, you know, that's, like, the ultimate goal. Like, to get a Nobel Peace Prize. Like, that's, like, the greatest thing ever. And so it kind of changed my life. By the way, did you know that story, that dynamite story and the merchant of death? Not the specifics. I had heard Peter Thiel was talking about this with Joe Rogan, like the sort of whitewashing of a reputation.

And they were talking about Epstein. They were talking about Bill Gates. And Rogan brought up. He's like, that's how the Nobel Prize happened? And he's like, have you heard that? Peter was like, yeah, he is, you know, the dynamite guy. But I didn't know anything beyond that. So that's actually pretty cool.

I didn't know the merchant of death, obituary story. So the truth of it is that, like, dynamite actually wasn't used to kill that many people because of the way it worked. Like, TNT killed a lot of people, but like, so like- Open up caves for mining and shit. Right. It was like, so that's where like the story is like, you know, who knows, but we don't let the truth get in the way of a good story. Yeah. But what is true is that the Nobel Peace Prize has worked. Like, it's encouraged people and like through incentives to do stuff.

Sorry. So, explain the money side of this. So he left how much money to this? And then is it just been draining from that pot or does new money get injected into the Nobel? Because it's a million dollars per prize, right? Is that right? Yeah. And there's five per year. And like one year during the World War II, they were like, we don't have peace. So we're not going to give a peace prize. And so they like just didn't give a prize. And so, but in general, every year for the last 120 years, they've done this. And so the money right now,

it's six, this is all public. So you can see it. They have $612 million. It made a 10.7% return on capital in 2023. It's invested in equity funds, hedge funds, and the way that it's set up, according to his will, was make sure that the money never runs dry so we can always give, we can always give this away for potentially hundreds of years. And so there's like a organization, I think, and you can see what their expenses are. I think their expenses to run this thing are like three or eight million. I forget exactly a single digit millions per year to operate.

and then they give away roughly $5 million per year. And is this like Forbes 30 into 30 or like how legit are the winners of the Nibo Peace Prize now? I've never paid too much attention to it. Do you have a sense of like, is this high signal or is this like a hijacked thing that now is not high signal anymore? So in my opinion, it's very high signal. So Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King, Marie Curry, like these like legit people have done it. Now there have been a few times where they've made mistakes. So, for example, now they have a rule where they actually want to give the award a couple

years after the person made the discovery because in 1926, they gave the award to someone who created this enzyme that cured cancer. And obviously, that wasn't true. But like six months after they discovered it, they thought it was true. And then the other criticism is they have a liberal bias. And so they've given one to Barack Obama. They've given one to, I believe, an Israeli guy once, like a Peace Award. And then the people who side with Palestine are like, what the hell?

That's the racial piece. So there's criticism sometimes, but in general, it's very well regarded, although a lot of people will criticize it as being too academic or too liberal. But I think it's like as legit as it could be. And what's your take on this? So awesome story. So here's my take. My take is that this prize setup is awesome.

And let me give you a few examples of this. So inspired by the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919, there was this guy named Raymond or Ortege, I think his name is. Orteg, Raymond Orteg. And so he was like, hey, these planes that we've created are pretty amazing, but we're not doing like too many great things with them. He goes, I'm going to offer $25,000 to anyone out there who can fly from New York City to Paris.

This was in 1990. He offered 25 grand. That's like 500 grand today. And like eight people signed up. And seven of them fail. And in fact, five of them die. Now, who's the one person who made it? Charles Limburg.

and the year after Charles Lindberg did his flight, it says that airline passengers before he did it that year were 5,000. A few years after, 300,000. And it completely changed the airline industry because it made like a big hoopla and a big deal, whatever. Then, inspired by that prize,

this guy named Peter Diamandis, is that his name? Yep. He created this thing called the X Prize where he was like, I offer $10 million. I think the rules were anyone who can fly a rocket into space

bring it back down and two weeks later, it goes right back into space. So, like reusable rockets. And Elon Musk, at the time, I think Space X was two years old. He said, the X Prize basically helped create the commercial space industry.

It showed that you didn't have to be a giant aerospace company to make progress in space, and it definitely influenced the direction I took with Space X. So this was like a big deal for like space. And now... The genius of the X Prize was that

by putting up 10 million, and I think it became $20 million for the prize, people would, like a bunch of 20 teams would invest $2 million each in trying to develop the thing to win the $10 million prize. And so you would get $40 million invested for a $10 million prize. So it was a kind of genius way to spur innovation and investment. So not just people who want to win the prize, because that's obvious, put a prize up, people will try to go win it.

But actually in the act of winning it, more dollars got poured in because they saw a clear return. and the math worked out where, oh, wow, I get leverage. My 10 actually becomes 100 invested in this mission if I get enough interest around it. Along with the PR, along with the want to just win and to make this exciting. And so it works. And so now there's a SpaceX prize that Elon has funded where it's $100 million for someone who, if by 2030, they can remove a certain amount of carbon from the planet or something like that.

And so it's still ongoing. Here's another example. So you know what DARPA is? Have you heard of DARPA? It stands for a defense advanced research projects agency. Have you heard of that? Yeah. Weren't they like responsible for creating the internet? They've done a bunch of stuff. And so in 2003, they created this thing called the Grand Prize. And the idea was we have a 150 mile road trip or like a route. And the first person who can create an autonomous vehicle that can drive that route wins one million dollars. And 160 teams or something that applied. And for a little while, no one did it.

But then a team did it, and that's when the first time we ever used LIDAR, which is a type of self-driving technology that all the cars or many of the cars have. It was already existed, but it was applied to cars for the first time ever. And so it was very successful. And then there's actually a guy who I think maybe you might know this guy. His name is Nat Friedman. He's a really good guy to follow. A really interesting guy. He's doing a lot of stuff with AI investing right now.

And I know about this prize that he's got. It's really cool. I believe it's what's the right phrase? Is it Herkalanian text? basically, I think it was like one of the, there was an explosion in, I think, Italy, you know, Vesuvius project. Yeah, Mount Pesuvius exploded. And all these ancient Greek texts got basically ruined.

And he puts up a prize to where if you can create, you basically have to use machine learning. If you can create this algorithm that can help him diso cipher parts of the text, he'll give you a prize. Yeah. So it's like a scroll that is like been almost sealed. You can't unscroll it and just read it. So what they're using is computer vision to try to analyze it from the outside and just from like the little bits you can see and try to figure out what was written. I think this is going to be like the earliest written text or something like that. I forgot, I don't know the details.

Somebody can go look this up, but I remember hearing about this and thinking, wow, this was so cool. Like he, he sort of found this thing. Nobody was going to be, nobody was going to justify the investment they would take to see this because you also don't know what's inside. You don't know if there's anything interesting inside necessarily. And he decided to fund this competition. And I guess what happened recently was somebody figured out how to read a bit of it. Actually, they had like a breakthrough in the Vesuvius Prize where somebody figured out how to read a little bit of the thing from like some stupidly simple technique of computer vision.

Yeah. And so it's still a thing, by the way, and like people are still getting after it. And then the last thing is there's this thing called Cagle, Cagle competitions. Yeah. Where it was a startup that raised $12 million. It was eventually bought by Google. according to their website, they've had 19 million engineers compete in their competitions.

And if you're a company, you could put a bounty out there and people will compete to win it. So, for example, you remember Microsoft Connect, like the camera that you put on your Xbox and it could watch you play and somehow interact with that, I believe, was heavily developed by one of these competitions. But then they do other things for HIV research and things like that, where this gamifying system has actually contributed to like big, important problems.

And so all of this to say, when you're thinking about or when I'm thinking about when I die, what will happen to money? You know, you think about giving away to family. You think about just like traditional giving away. Do you just, do you just wire it to someone and hope they do well? I'm incredibly fascinated and interested in these competitions. And they don't all need to be huge. I think there's one guy who you particularly like Aubrey de Grey where he has a $25,000 a year. If you come with some interesting breakthrough on longevity, he will give you 25 grand. and then you get to go meet with him. And so sometimes they're huge, sometimes they're not huge.

But I think this is like so much more leverage and the publicity and the wanting to win. It seems so much more better for society to do a contest. And it's also more work, but than just giving. Do you know what I mean? 100%. So I love this topic. And there's a bunch of interesting angles. By the way, can I read you the just the Vesuvian thing?

Because I think it's pretty fascinating. They were able to take four passages with 140 characters each and get 85% of the characters readable, recoverable. And is it just someone's like grocery list? Yeah, exactly. And they use, you know, AI, blah, blah, blah. I don't know all the details of this. He did a good podcast with Ben Thompson on Stratory. That's where I heard him talking about this.

I wish, if I knew we were talking about this, I could have looked it up. But I heard this like six months ago, I was getting a haircut. I thought it was pretty fascinating. So what did the Shrolls say? So you get a haircut when you have earbuds in your ears. I won't go to a barbershop if they don't let me listen to something while I'm getting my hair cut. Oh my God. All right.

Like if they try talking, I'm just like, enough. And by the way, it falls out like four times during every haircut. And I'm like, oh, sorry, can you get that? And they're like, dude, this is annoying. That's why I started having a guy come to my house and just do it there so I could just listen on blast. But then I felt kind of weird because he was also listening to these like old Max Levchin talks. from like 2002 and he's like,

who is this? Why is this guy talking about like the future of the internet? I'm like, yeah, yeah, it's before the internet was like that huge of a deal. God,

that's so rude, but whatever. Well, well, let's close touch. Well, back to the squirrels. It's like going to a sports bar

and I don't want to talk to the bar. I don't want to watch the game. That's what I'm trying to do, right? I'm the customer. The customer is to have the experience that they want. So it says to, to date,

our efforts have managed unroll and read about 5% of the first scroll. So that's like, you know, the amount of headway that they've made so far. The general subject of the text is pleasure, which properly understood is the highest good in their philosophy. The two snippets are talking about, I guess talking about pleasure. So one author thinks, as to in the case of food, we do not right away believe things that are scarce to be absolutely more pleasant than those that are abundant.

I don't know what's going on, but it's basically a philosophy text. Okay, so that's pretty cool. So can I tell you about my take on this? So early on in the podcast, I think I had one. of the ideas, which was SpaceX, or sorry, the XPRIZ for companies. And I basically realized that a lot of companies, when I was inside of Twitch, after we got acquired, I was like, man, we had this whole situation where they were trying to build things internally, but they didn't have like the best team on it. They didn't have like the best focus on it. They didn't have their

highest sense of urgency. Then you have startups that are often like really high caliber teams, small groups of people, super high urgency, super high motivation. It's their baby. So they treat it like life or death, whereas in a company, you're not going to treat that. it. And I thought, well, in the end, we ended up getting acquired for like, you know, small, medium acquisition. And I was like, you know, if I had just known up front that they would be willing to pay for this, we could have just built it better and faster knowing that, hey, there's a eight figure payday on the other side of this. And they would have also happily been like, cool, whoever can make the best version of this, you get this money. And we don't have to fund

internally the product development and have one shot on goals. So I was like, why wouldn't a company I've just said, $10 million for the person who could build the team that can build the best X. And the conditions are, if you hit it, we have the first right to buy it. You can't sell it to anybody else. We get to hire you and the team and you guys will come on for, it basically earns out over two years. And here's the scope of what we want. So you're not guessing, oh, will Facebook want to buy us? It's like, no, no, Facebook's telling you what they want.

And then you get 25 teams to go try to be the winners of that prize because, hey, you actually don't. need maybe venture capital. You're like, hey, we're going to take nine months and try to build this thing and try to win the prize. Right. And I feel like that should exist. I'm surprised that that doesn't exist. That was the first idea.

Second is I actually tried this. So did I ever tell you about the prize we created for Milk Road? No. So when we were doing the Milk Road, we were like, all right, it's pretty clear that in crypto, there's like, you know, the money use case, which is, hey, just like save your money in Bitcoin or a currency that is not, that cannot inflate. It's not designed for inflation. And so I get that use case.

But then people were talking about Web 3. It's going to change everything. You're going to have all these apps, decentralized apps, social decentralized apps where you own your content, all this crazy stuff. But nobody actually had built any of them. It was just like a bunch of VCs talking about it in circles. Or lame white papers, whatever the hell that is. Yeah, white papers and like insane funding. But like they build a prototype, but nobody would use it.

Right. So we came up with an idea. We were like, hey, how do we at Milk Road? if we're this crypto newsletter, we believe in crypto, why don't we create our own little grant? And so we created a grant called the milk money grant. We're like,

this is not enough to get rich, but it's a little bit of milk money, right? It's enough where you can justify spending like two or three months on a project. And it was one ETH, which at the time was like maybe two or three grand. And so we had, I think, over like 2000 submissions.

And we said you could build whatever you want. It's some use case or application of crypto. And there was like, so we ended up picking, 10 or 12 people. So we gave away probably, what, what is that? Like, you know, 36 grand. And we just use our like ad revenue money to like pay that out.

We just treated as an expense of the business. And then we got to meet these people. And there were super interesting young, high caliber people that were building really interesting things. And even though they were probably already making more than two or three grand in their job, it just felt like a road scholarship. It felt like they got accepted that they were getting paid to do something. They had an excuse to go like scratch this it.

And that's the way we framed it. We're like, what's an answer you want to scratch? It doesn't need to be the biggest project, but something you want to see built that you want to use, what would it be? And then people built all kinds of things. And it was a fantastic experience. It was honestly really,

really awesome. And I forgot about it until now. Actually, it's something I want to do again. I have a couple ideas of what I might do with it. Do you want to talk about those or no? I have a specific idea that I want to fund. And I want to fund it and maybe it's not even going to be that big of a business. So it might be just like a philanthropic way.

But is my, version of the Young Hustlers Grant. So the other day I was sitting around us thinking about my time in college because I have a cousin who just got accepted into college, two cousins actually. And they were like, what advice did you have? And I was like, well, what do you want? Do you know what you want? Do you know what you want? If you don't know what you want, you should just spend that time dabbling. Go meet a bunch of people, try a bunch of things, do shadow a bunch of people? Go try to figure out what the menu even is and maybe what type of stuff. Do you like steak, chicken, salads? What do you want? And one of them was like, I know what I want. I want to be an entrepreneur.

And I was like, cool. He's like, so that's why I'm doing this like business program and whatever. I'm like, awesome. They're not going to teach you how to be an entrepreneur in college. That's not what's actually going to happen there, right? I know what you're thinking. Same thing I thought. If I go to school and I get a business degree, then I will.

You know how to run a business and start a business. I don't know how to start a business and run a business. It's like, no, that's not at all what you're going to get out of that. So I said, here's the best thing you can do. I said, actually, this is something that every college campus could have this. And I think it is the best college campus business that I can think of for somebody like, like me. So if you're listening to podcast, maybe you're wired like me or Sam. And that is to create the onion for your campus. So here's the, here's why. I know about you, but when I was in college,

like the campus paper was like a big deal. Maybe now with like smartphones being awesome and social, maybe this is dead and I'm a boo. No, it's still around because you love to read about yourself and your friends. Yeah, exactly. You want to know what's going on on your campus, what's the news, what happened with your teams, etc. Also, there was like, it's like the procrastination element of it where there's like the Sudoku and there's like the crossword and there's shit you could do while you're in class. So at my school at Duke, everybody read the Duke Chronicle. And I never thought about it. I didn't even know who wrote it. I didn't even consider what was going on there. But if I was smart, what I would have done is say, I'm actually going to create a little business here on

campus. I'm going to create a Duke newspaper. But of course, first rule of business, different is better than better. So I'm not going to create just another school newspaper that's reporting just the facts. I'm going to create the onion for my campus. So it's basically a satirical news. newspaper. This will teach me a bunch of skills. So I'll get the skills of creating a business. How do you start a business? I'll get the skills of content creation. So copywriting, humor, creating a content schedule, content pipeline, hiring and firing people, getting ad sales and ad revenue, distribution. How am I going to get people to read this? Product differentiation, marketing, naming the thing. And it's the perfect type of business for college because it's sandbox.

So I think one pressure a lot of people have when they're in college, they want to be an entrepreneur, is they trying to think of businesses that are, like the businesses they read about on TechCrunch or they see. Yeah, like big money-making things. Yeah, I'm going to create the next big thing. That's really hard. And also, you're a beginner. You're a white belt.

So you don't go look at the moves that Black Belt's do necessarily. Maybe like learn the best white belt moves. And you need a white belt business. For me, that was my sushi restaurant thing. My virtual sushi restaurant. It was like the hot dog thing and then you're like college, you know, like booze business or whatever, right? We had little like starter businesses that themselves are not meant to last,

but they teach you a whole. whole bunch of like the core building block skills that when you lump them together is this thing called business. So you're going to encourage them to create the onion for college. Exactly. So I want basically people who are, I don't know how many college kids listen to this, to be honest. But if you are or you have a kid in college, I want a hustler on every campus. So like one hustler to create their version of the campus paper. And I got to figure out the details, but I'm down to basically put in some amount of money like 10 grand or 15 grand to like kickstart people on this thing.

I don't think it'll take much money. I think 10 grand will be more than enough to start these on several campuses. And I think they should become self-sustaining cash flow businesses from there. And I think that the people who run these will be way far ahead.

And people don't even know, like, for example, Barstool. You know how Barstool started? A physical paper that he like gave to colleges, right? Not colleges exactly, but yeah, in Boston. He would, so it was basically a physical newspaper that Dave would write under, I think, pen names and it was, you can go find

the font is so funny. It's like comic sands on the internet. I think he even bought or he reused other people's newspaper, like the free newspaper that you pull the, you pull out that piece of glass and then you can grab one. You know what I'm saying? Like I think he bought it. I think he bought a few of his own and he like literally placed them on corners where it was like the bar, you know, like those free newspaper things.

And it was mostly a gambling newspaper. It was like a gambling rag. He called it. And what he would do is in the morning, he would write the thing or whatever, he'd get it printed. And then he would, the previous night, he would write the thing, get it printed. And then in the morning, he would rush into the subway. And you'd just be handing it out to people getting on the subway in Boston or getting on whatever the underground is there. And that's how Barstool got its initial distribution.

And then he would hand him out all day. Then he would go home. He would be calling advertisers to try to get like enough money to print the thing again. And then he would write the thing under all of his pen names and work on his copyrighting skills. Then he would go get them printed and figure out of a manufacturer product. And the next day, he would go distributed it again. And over time, he got like other people to hand them out and other people to write the thing and other people to do the ad sales.

And it became Barstool, which is this like, you know, many hundred million dollar company for Dave. But that's how it started. That's amazing. Yeah. You should go, the listener, you guys should go and Google and see the early ones. It's pretty hilarious. So I'm thinking about after this, I'm going to put up a Google Doc. That's my call to Axe.

I'm going to put up a Google Doc figuring out what are my actual rules and who am I looking for and how to apply. Where? I'm putting in the show notes of this thing. I'm just going to make an open dock. Anybody can read and submit to. And I'm going to think of a name because I think the name matters. And I'm going to treat it like a franchise. So every campus will have like the same naming convention.

And then we'll share the learning. So if you're the kid at Northwestern, you're going to be able to, and some kid at Duke comes up with a good distribution idea. We're just going to make one group chat where like all the people are like kind of sharing what's working and what's not. And I'm really curious to see what happens. And to me, this is my version of like the lemonade stand. It's like the slightly superior lemonade stand type of business that I think would

be great. I wish I had done this in college. So I'll take my bow because I have successfully, potentially rather, proven that this idea might be one of the bigger ones that we've ever talked about. It actually is quite exciting. Even like, you're talking $10,000 and a newspaper, which is like a silly thing, but it's awesome. Like, that's awesome. And that's kind of the point with this is like these things, When you repackage charity or whatever you want to call this into a game, it kind of makes it exciting. It makes it fun. It makes it cool. Yeah, what's the name for this sort of action philanthropy, right? It's like, it's not charity for

the completely impoverished, but you are giving people both inspiration, maybe capital, and an excuse to go and better their lives or improve their lives, live up to their potential, like take the next step. Is there a name for this where you're not, it's not starving kids in Africa, but it is, you know, kind of broke college kids who now have something to get excited about. What would you, is there a name for something like that? I got to think about it, but I would, in my head, I've been calling it incentivized philanthropy. That's, that's too, that's too much of a mouthful. Right. So we have to think about it. What this really comes down to is just a slight differing incentivization has like massive difference in the, in the outcome versus

just giving versus no, only one of you are got, are you going to get this and you all got to get after it. So there's a few versions of this, by the way, that I've thought about in the past. One, so when the Teal Fellowship came out, I thought it was genius. Peter Thiel basically had this point of view that universities are a bubble and that we, they have this halo, this umbrella where you can never criticize a university of college. What, education? It's the most important thing for our kids. How dare you? I thought it was crazy when I heard about it.

He's like, education might be the fifth thing that they do. And he called it, he said, education is a bundle. And I forgot what he bundled it as, but he was like, it's a insurance policy for the parents. You make sure your kid gets this degree because that is a, my kid's not going to fall through the cracks of society insurance. He's like, and then it's a filtering process. So he's like for companies, they don't care what you learned at Harvard. But if Harvard did a good job filtering, then I already know I'm picking from, you know, the smarter end of the crop when it comes to hiring. So it's a filtering bundle.

It's a social piece. That's part of the bundle. Then there's the education component. That's part of the bundle. And he had like five or six things that he's like, together those are all part of it. He's like, what's going to happen is people are going to unbundle the bundle. And so what he did was, he came out and said, I think universities are such a waste that if you're a high potential person, I will come out with the Teal Fellowship.

I will pay you 120 grand, I think it was, to drop out of college. And if you're in college, I will pay you to drop out. And Peter Thiel, for all of his like very unsmooth, uncharismatic ways of speaking, the guy's kind of a master of communication. If you just don't make him speak, give a talk and you're not looking at the poetry of it. If you read an article about his presentation

and see the quotes, it's the best. It's the best. And he, by the way, Peter Deal literally has speechwriter. So when he has a point, he'll go on tour and he'll give his speech. Universities are a bubble. And it's not that he just said that off the cuff. It's like he has a point of view that actually the universities,

there's something going on with them. And it's, there's sort of a, a weird thing going on. That's what he does. And then the speech writers are like, so are you saying that universities are a bubble? Yeah. Yep, nailed that.

Cool headline. All right. What's the subhead? Right? And so he gets it basically workshopped himself and his team. And then he literally goes on tour. He's done this a couple times. He did it with the zero to one thing, which is that.

And he does, he uses a provocative statement. So he says, universities are bubble. Something that he knows is going to, basically, it's a head turner. You're saying, tabby thing. MBA students have negative impacts on new companies. Yeah, or he'll say, by the time the MBAs are in, the alpha is gone, right? Once the MBAs are flooding into a space, the opportunity is gone. But the bigger one that he did was when he did his book zero to one, he went on tour.

Instead of saying, buy my book, I'm Peter Thiel. I've had a great business success. I've shared some of my lessons. Was it competition is bad? Competition is for losers. Yeah, okay. And he's like, oh, this idea in capitalism that competition, it brings out the best in us. No, competition is for losers.

He said the only goal of a business is shoot for Monopoly. Oh, Monopoly. I thought that's illegal. Literally, you get broken up if you're a monopoly. He's like, exactly. So he finds the head-turning thing. And when he has it, he builds like a pretty convincing case. So he did this with the Teal Fellowship.

And he paid kids to drop out of school. Like, wow, what a, what's the worst influence you could have on my child is convincing them to drop out of school, drop out of their education. How many kids a year do it, do you know? I remember I hosted them at my office. I think the first or second year of the Teal Fellowship and there was like 20 kids in it, ish. There was like 20 19 year olds or 18 year olds were like at my office.

And I was like, hey, who are you guys? What are you doing? They're like, oh, we don't know. It was super disorganized, by the way. And Peter Thiel was not there. All right. So I apply. I apply.

And one of Peter Thiel's team members selects however many people you said, six or eight people. They wire you the money. And they just said, do they say, come back to me with three months with a thing? No, no. At the time, I don't know what it is now. But at the time, you would get accepted, you would drop out, they'd give you the money, you would come to San Francisco and you would participate in the batch. And so you would like, I don't know if you live together, but they were all, I mean, they all showed up in my office. So there was definitely there for at least a period of time. I'm not sure if it was the whole program or what, but it's pretty open-ended and it was long. Does a hundred grand go towards starting your company or is it $100,000 plus three months of rent?

It's a two-year, $100,000 grant for young people who want to build new things instead of sitting in a classroom. Nice. 20 or 30 people per year. You've got to be 22 or younger. to do it. You'll need to drop out in order to have it. You don't have to move to San Francisco, and an idea is enough. That was the idea of it. It's been going for 10 years now. So here's some of the notable recipients. So the CEO and founder Dylan Field of Figma, which is a 50 billion dollar company, I think. Is it tens of billions of companies? Then there's Oyo Rooms, which was like a hotel style startup out of India that also was worth many, many billions. There's Austin Russell, the guy who, created Luminar Technologies, which I think he became the youngest billionaire ever.

It was like self-driving technology. And then, of course, the founder of Ethereum, which is a, who knows, hundreds of billions of dollars value creation thing. Then there's the founder of a loom. I didn't know that, which was a startup that was required for hundreds of millions of dollars. The Josh Browder from Do Not Pay, which I love. And then there's like other things that I don't even know about because maybe they're not for profit, but there's like a guy who created a software to detect Parkinson's disease.

And then there's a handful of like recipients like that where maybe they're behind the scenes but doing amazing stuff. So I guess that's been a very, he probably didn't do it for money. But if you wanted to, there was a return on it. But there's definitely a return on like I encouraged value creation. Right. Oh, yeah. I mean, if even one of those, if just Ethereum had come out of it, I mean, smashing success. If just Figma had come out of it, smashing success, right?

So those are like the two power law winners of the thing. By the way, go to muskfoundation.org. because I just saw that Elon Musk was the biggest donor. He donated, I think, $2 million to that Vesuvian challenge. So Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman put up $250K. And the Musk Foundation put up $2 million. Describe what you see. All right.

So muskfoundation.org, it's a website with no design. It's a blank piece of paper with five bullet points. And it says, Musk Foundation. Grants are made in support of renewable energy, human space exploration, pediatric research, science and engineering education, development of artificial intelligence to benefit humanity. That's it. It's like a hello world page, yeah.

Yeah, it's basically a hundred words, bullet pointed on a white piece of paper. And this is one of the like extreme like, you know, money talks, wealth whispers thing. Yeah, I call it sexy indifference. Like that's what we're going to call this, where you want people to know that you, don't care, but you also want them to know that you don't care because you're cool.

So I'm going to call it sexy indifference. It's the homeless billionaire paradox, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The difference between a homeless man and a billionaire at face value is so small in San Francisco. You will not be able to tell the difference, right? And the takeaway being, sometimes you could just be sexy and different in the very beginning and you become successful. Like, you could just like, but so we're going to call it sexy indifference.

I saw a LinkedIn the other day that was no profile. photo, one line bio, one job experience, 26 years owner. And I was like, here's a man who's going to leave a lot of money for his children. I can tell you that right now. I don't know anything about this company name, never heard of this guy. I can tell you right now, this guy's going to leave a lot of money to his children. You don't get 26 years owner, no profile photo LinkedIn. That's such a high signal thing to do. Or at worst, he owns a really nice lake house. Or again, He's broke. He's homeless.

We don't know. Actually, it could go either way, but it's one way or the other. By the way, I bought the Peter Thiel shirt from the Joe Rogan podcast. I'm going to wear it next week on the pod.

It was like $120 shirt, right? The all-white mesh net Peter Thiel shirt from, from Saxis, I'm just teasing it right now. Subscribe on YouTube and you'll get to see me wearing that. I don't think it's made for hairy people. Mesh usually is not a great,

choice for us, but I think my IQ will go up like six or seven points if I wear it. Yeah, you're going to look like human Velcro with all these like little threads sticking out. I saw people talking about his shirt. I thought it was pretty funny. He also had the Nazi haircut, which is like totally in, which is like you do like a high fade. A high fade and he looked good. Yeah, he looked good. I thought he looked great.

He looked great. But other than that, he seems to be on like kind of a, a bit of a rejuvenation kick. Well, I mean, he's like, how old is he's like 56. He's all right. He can look 56, but he looks great. He looks a little bit younger than 56. But if you've heard of cool contests like this or even a cool name for what this is

called, tweet at me. I'm at the Sam Park because this stuff is very fascinating to me. And I'm trying to understand like the economics of it because I think I might actually do it. So are you going 50-50 with me on the MFM scholarship? I'm not willing to commit to that yet. I'm trying to do it. Look, I'm a slower person than you. I'm thinking like the par family, like where it's going to go.

Oh, dude, the par four. You use a golf pun? Yeah, I got to figure out something. What did you call it, par four? Yeah, the par four. But I can't decide if you want to go cheeky or like extra serious. Like when you look at the Nobel Peace Prize, like they're wearing like those like the suits with the tails.

You know what I mean? Well, you know how it is. You know what you're going to do. You're going to go cheeky on the front end, deadly serious on the execution. I feel like that's you. I think that's what we might do. But I like I told we had the conversation with like a,

with my wife. I'm like, because like we actually have to sign documents. And I'm like, should we do something like this? And what are we going to do? What are we going to do? Right now I'm,

dude, I was, I'm obsessed with like single motherhood because like, have you ever, has your wife, like, whenever you got to like be a single parent for the day, like when your wife's gone or,

whatever. I'm like, this is impossible. Yeah, it's impossible. It's not, I'm like, how do you? It actually can't be done. So that's my. Yeah. So I'm like, if you're a single mother, how do you get ahead? Like, you know, if you want to like, it's so it's like a cycle. So anyway, I'm like, I'm like obsessed at that problem right now. I'm trying to figure out how to how we could contribute to making those people's lives better. All right, what do you want to do? I'll give you a simple, useful lesson learned from Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. Okay. Somebody asked Elon about hiring.

They go, Elon, do you interview people still? And when you interview them for hiring, what do you ask them? How does Elon Musk filter for great talent? Have you ever seen what he said? No. Well, I've heard one thing where he says, if I'm talking to someone and I, like, you know, every once in a while, like, 45 seconds in, you can be like, ooh, this is a bad match. He's like, I just act on that.

So, like, if 60 seconds in, I'll just be like, hey, I don't want to talk anymore. He just walks away. It's like his version of, like, getting a haircut with headphones in. Yeah, let me. He's like, no. So what he said was, tell me about the toughest problems you've dealt with and how you dealt with those at your last company or project. He goes, I like this question because it filters out candidates who haven't actually done

anything. And you can ask them very detailed questions about it. And they will know the answer. Whereas the person who was not actually responsible for doing the thing won't know the details. And so it's a very quick filtering mechanism. Other questions that came from other people. So Steve Jobs used to ask, why are you here?

And so he's like, I want to understand their motivation. Why are you even at, why are you here for this interview? Why this company? Why this job? Why you? Is the most important thing that Steve Jobs said. I know that Jeff Bezos asked a question about, do you consider yourself a lucky person? I was going to say, I interviewed with Joe Gebia, the founder of Airbnb.

be and he was like a the last person it's just 15 minutes and the only question he asked me was on a scale one to 10 how lucky are you and what did you say I said I'm a nine I go you know I'm lucky for a variety of reasons and I explain them and then I said I don't know if it's luck or what it is but like I seem to get my way a lot and he and I go why'd you ask that and he said well because if luck's real I want to be around lucky people and even if it's not real I want to be around people who tend to get their way Yeah, exactly. And I was like, all right, I guess that's good. So Dan Rose, who worked for Bezos in the early, like 1999 to 2006.

He's a fun person to read about. Yeah, he's a good follow on Twitter as well because he shares some good, like, personal stories from the basis area. It'll be like in 99, we were struggling with this and we were sitting at our office. He's just sitting in the stairwell because we didn't have time to make desks. It's like, oh, nice. So he goes, Jeff Bezos's favorite interview question was, are you a lucky person? It was a great way to filter for optimists and people who manifest success.

He goes, if you're a successful optimistic person, the humble leader, right answer for this starts with, I'm the luckiest person on earth. I've worked really hard to get where I am, but a lot of things had to go right for me, and I've taken full advantage of my luck. That's essentially like not the exact words, but that is the crux of what you want them to say, which is I've worked really hard, but it took a tremendous amount of luck, and I take advantage of lucky breaks when they present themselves to me. And he goes, sorting for optimistic people is a good proxy for leadership potential and

likelihood of success. Perceiving yourself as lucky is a proxy for optimism. Basically, people will always tell you they're optimistic about things, but they won't always say that they're lucky. So it's kind of like a stealth question to get at the optimism thing. It goes, the humility part is also important. It's easy to filter out false humility. Humble brags are very obvious when you ask follow-up questions. He goes, this isn't the only question, but it's a conversation starter and opens the door to someone's personality beyond their resume. There's two wrong answers. Number one, no, I'm on, I've never really gotten lucky, but I've been able to overcome and outwork all the bad things that happened to me. And no, I never needed luck because I'm better,

smarter, stronger, faster than everybody else. And there's a third answer, which is like, no, I've been pretty unlucky. In which case, it's like, I don't want to be around unlucky people. Yeah, like, I don't want to be around you. Yeah. Yeah. And that's what Joe, that's what Joe told me. He was like, if you're really lucky, you're either luck's real in which case, I want to be around you, or you just make it work. And if, you're, you're just make it work. And if, you're, say, a one or a two, you're either unlucky, if Lux Real. I don't want to be around that shit either, or you just think you're a victim, and I don't want to be around that. So, that's how he explained it to me. And I thought it was weird, by the way. I thought it was weird at

the time. Looking back, I think it was better. I actually interviewed also at Google years ago. They asked me, like, how many days would it take you to, like, clean the windows on, like, a skyscraper or something like that. And I didn't like that question. I hated that question. Yeah, me too. One thing that interview questions, another way to think about them is they're meant to filter out certain people and they're meant to pull in other people. So a great interview question will not just assess the person. They will either attract or repel the wrong cultural fit. And so I think one of the Google things is like part of the reason I would hate that question is part of the reason they don't want to hire me, right? Like they want basically puzzle solving nerds. And I heard this put really well.

So Max Lovchin, I think was the one that, you know, the creator PayPal, he was talking about. He goes, when I got acquired by Google, I was like, how do they retain smart people here? Because they're trying to hire the most brilliant people on Earth. And then they're telling them, go like tweak the knob on Google AdSense. Like, go get us like a little edge. It's like, not only is that soulless, but it is like literally like almost the definition of a cog in the machine. And he goes, the way they keep those people around is he's like literally in the bathrooms, they would have like really hard puzzles on the stalls.

And he's like, they would give people like a crazy. He's like, they had 20% time, which was like 20% of time, just go work on whatever the hell you want. He's like, they would have puzzles on the walls in the stall. He's like, because the actual work that we needed you to do would never like, it's not like mission driven enough. It's not hard enough to like intellectually stimulate you. So they had all these other ways of intellectually stimulate you and to coddle you. Like, we'll do your laundry. We'll feed you.

We'll nurse you. We'll need a bath. Go ahead. There's sponge bath over there on the right. They would do everything they could to keep talent there. And one of the things that he talked about was like, you know, um, The PayPal Mafia is probably the most successful early group of people to come together in Silicon Valley, right? They basically created, you know, they had Elon, they had Peter Thiel, they had Max Lefutche, they went on to create like, I don't know, 10 plus billion dollar companies out of the like first 15 people there.

Yeah, like the smallest things of the PayPal Mafia was like a Yelp. Yeah, exactly. Like the guy Yelp is like, you know, sitting at the kids table at their reunion. No offense, Jeremy. He's a good dude. So the thing with PayPal was they treated it. They go, we're trying to create a cult. The idea of diversity is not what you want at a startup.

Now, you couldn't really say this today, but they're on the record of saying this a long time ago, which is that you want a certain type of person because that breeds a certain type of culture. So you pick the culture and then you only want to attract people that are going to reinforce that culture. And you want to immediately repel otherwise smart people who would dilute that culture.

And so for him, I remember there was a famous one, which was they were interviewing an engineer and the guy said, you know, they're like, what do you like to do outside of work? And he's like, oh, I love playing basketball.

And they, Max was like, I don't want to hire this guy. They're like, what? Because he plays basketball. He's like, I've never met a great engineer who loves to play pickup hoops.

He's like, great engineers have other hobbies. And he's like, and he's like, even if we're wrong, it's the thing that Monish said on the podcast, Monich probride. He said when he met Warren Buffett,

he goes, Warren, you're a great judge of people. How do you do it, man? how did you get your people radar so good? He goes, I don't think I have a good people radar. He goes, what I have is a very tight filter. He goes, so if you take me to a cocktail party and you let me talk to 100 people for five minutes each,

in that five minutes, I could probably take the worst five or seven people, and I'll tell you, these people are lousy, don't hire them. And the best five or seven people, I could probably tell you them is like, and then the other, you know, 85, 90 people, I don't know, I couldn't make a judgment on in five minutes. It wasn't obvious to me. So I put them all in the no pile. He goes, well, isn't that like a little harsh? You know, there might be some great people in there.

He goes, yeah, but the cost of bringing a not great person into my circle of life is so high. The cost of discarding somebody who might be great is nothing. It's so low comparatively. He's like, so I am willing to be a very harsh grader of people, meaning you're either obviously in or I put you in the too hard to tell bucket. And I just lump you in with all the obvious nose. And that was a non-obvious insight from. Warren Buffett. That's a very, there are freaks like a Peter Thiel or Marcus Zuckerberg who kind of nailed that harshness early on. And then there's normal people like me. And I'm sure you

were like this where you find like a 22 year old. I'm like, I don't know. Maybe they're promising. Maybe they were nervous at that interview. Maybe they were this. Maybe they were this. And it feels good to give the underdog a shot. Oftentimes that narrative isn't, it doesn't end the way that you'd like it to end. Like the people who that underdog narrative has worked, have, worked for me. It's someone like Step Smith where, let's hypothetically say she didn't do well in the interview, but she was so awesome because I saw her blog and I'm like, this person's like quirky and interesting. Like you said hypothetical there as if anybody was going to believe that was a hypothetical. Well, no, what I mean is like I think she, I don't remember the interview. I think she did great.

But like I was into her because I just read her like, because I read her blog. I'm like, oh, you have some type of it factor. Now, maybe I wasn't sure how that it factor could be deployed or used to my benefit or whether it's like if it was going to be used, like, if she was actually going to like just become the best at like blogging or if she's going to become the best business woman, I'm not sure. But there was some type of like kernel of like fire. There was a fire where I'm like, I don't know how I'm going to harness, you harness, whatever, but there was something there. Whereas I've hired a lot of people who, who did they didn't exactly have that. They didn't have a fire there. But I was like, maybe it's there. And I make these stupid decisions. And it doesn't work.

because you want to be a good person or whatever, and it doesn't work. What's that phrase? No good deed goes unpunished. That's how it felt with a lot of my hiring decisions. Yeah, you don't want to face the confrontation of it. You don't want to admit that you were wrong. You don't want to go back to square one and try to find somebody again.

You don't want to admit to your team that you were wrong on this. There's a whole bunch of very understandable reasons why we make this mistake. I tell you how much of trouble you're going on at Twitch. A lot of the maybes ended up being maybes. A lot of the maybe people ended up being like, eh. Like, it was, they were eh. The eh, I don't know, was just eh. In the end.

Yeah, it always, an eh always stayed in eh. All right, sorry, what were we saying? I got a lot of trouble at Twitch because when I was there, I tweeted out something that was very true for me, and I think it's true, but the CLO and others didn't like it. I said something to the effect of, you always know in the first two weeks if someone's going to be great. Great people are great right off the bat.

They show you greatness in the first two or three weeks. I've never seen or rarely ever, will, you ever see somebody who turns out to be great, that just was eh in the first two, three weeks. And they yelled at you? Yeah, they were like, that's not. I mean, different people started at different paces and, you know, that's not. Basically, they were kind of, they took it as almost like, that's too harsh. And somehow it was like seen as like not diverse.

Like, oh, there's a group of people who are slower to acclimate. Who yelled at you, HR? Did Emma? Our COO responded to the tweet and was like, I do not like, you know, stand. by this. In fact, blah, blah, blah. Since then, I've seen a bunch of other people say the exact same thing, a bunch of other, like, successful people say the same thing. So it kind of, in some ways, validated this like opinion. How do you, this first-hand experience I had, which was that the great people show greatness very early on. First two weeks, I tend to know if this person is going to be a winner.

Now, that doesn't mean that somebody can't be a solid contributor that had a slow first couple weeks, but they're never the ones who are great. And great is all I'm really looking for, right? The Warren Buffett, be a heart's greater. That is some of the best advice you could get. How do you spell? Because that would be your reply to them. There's a fart noise. It's like when they reply to you, like you're not supposed to do that.

It's like, come on. I just said my point exactly. And then they were like, what? That's a ridiculous thing to think because the company was probably founded on that principle. I don't know Emmett,

but I've seen his interviews. He seems like a particular, like pretty hardcore. For sure, I imagine he was like that early on. And so that company was probably founded with that principle in mind. We have this all the time in my team. So Ben, who's my business partner, we will have some interaction with somebody.

And he'll be like, so what do you think of how that's going with that person? Like maybe it's a company we invested in. And then we like, I don't really know exactly kind of way. Like they've been really slow to take action or they were saying all kinds of weird stuff that didn't make any sense. Or we hire somebody junior. And then he's like, how's it going with what's so and so far? And it's like, dude, if you have to ask. you know, right?

Like, that's the first, first principles. You have to ask you know. And I'll say something pretty harsh. I'm like, well, I don't know. We talked about doing these three things. And then those three things haven't happened. And there's been no update on them in a week. So I don't know.

How do you think it's going, Ben? And he's like, yeah. And he'll usually say to him because Ben, one of the great things about Ben is Ben has a generous interpretation of almost everybody. Like his wife will yell at him and he'd be like, I mean, maybe I could have been a little more present. Right. That's his first reaction.

You know, she had a hard day. Yeah. Most people get to that, you know, but their first reaction is, you know, somewhat, well, you, that's unfair. That doesn't make any sense. You did this, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? People don't get defensive, whatever. He doesn't really do that.

He doesn't blame. He gives a generous interpretation of people, which is why I think everybody loves Ben. But at the same time, in a company, like, it's a really harsh, hard way to run a company because sometimes it would be like, Ben, like, so do you think we should be making excuses for, like, do you think, like, great people just, like, have all these excuses and reasons why they're not just, like, being great right now? or are they just great in spite of circumstances? It's like obviously great people are great in spite of circumstances versus

people are bogged down in the 10 maybe reasons why they're struggling right now. And so I'm definitely, but that attitude that has served me in the workplace doesn't serve me outside of the workplace because having a generous interpretation for people outside of work is a really awesome trade. as a leader in a company, it tends to actually not work so well. In the same way that democracy is great.

Democracy inside a company where everybody gets a vote on what we're doing is not a great way to build a company. Companies are benevolent dictatorships when they win. And you have to be comfortable being a benevolent dictator there, but the benevolent dictator might not work in other areas of your life. Yeah. And that's why a lot of the most successful people are fucking assholes. You have to be that.

Four times divorced or whatever. Yeah, it's because what makes you at one thing can make you shitty on another thing. All right. I enjoyed that conversation. Is that the pod? That's the pod. That's the pod.

Sam, how many diapers you change in per day right now? Personally. Which are DPD? Yeah. For the up until recently, it was... Here comes a lie, by the way. At least one a day.

Divide by two. Now it's one every three days. Wow. That is pretty incredible. Well, we have a nanny. How happy are you with a nanny? Very. You know, a nanny tends to be

a nanny for the whole family. So, like, she does our laundry. She'll cook a little bit. She'll clean. I usually work at the kitchen table with headphones in. And so I'm always present, like, every 30 minutes, I take my headphones out and I go and play. So the nanny, my goal was done, make sure my child does not have a Jamaican accent. You threw a curveball in at the end there. What? But your goal was for your kid to not have a Jamaican accent? Like, I didn't want someone else to do all of the raising of my child. You know what I mean? You did a copywriting move there.

That was nice. Yeah. So if my kids, if Naomi ever says, Jamon, I'm going to be like, shit. I need to be involved. Yeah, I've been,

I'm working too hard. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.