Shaan Puri

“They have this rule called the 80-20 rule. So 80% of all profits will get reinvested back in the business. 20 goes out as dividends to the family.”

“One of the great things about reading about John Rockefeller, he was this madman businessman... His son, John, also John, he was a great dad... And they loved each other very much. And they showed a lot of mutual respect.”

“You saw like at this recent college graduation speeches, Solomon, the CEO of Goldman was like talking about AI and everyone was booing. People walked out, right.”

“The Walmart family owns — have you heard of Rafa? It's like a cool bike D2C company. They own that.”

“The Hearst organization, Hearst company, which owns like GQ is like a famous magazine they own, but they also own like a hundred businesses that you'd never even heard of. And they, including like they own half of ESPN or whatever.”

“He comes up with this little handheld device where you can kind of like put cotton in there and kind of cranks it and it gets the seeds out to the point where one slave could produce 50 pounds of cotton... America had to import like eight to 10 times more slaves than we currently had.”

“A lot of people are saying that AI is going to put people out of work. I think it is the exact opposite. I believe that code will get more cheap. Therefore, demand will increase a significant amount to the point that we can't even understand.”

“James Jevin was basically this guy in the 1800s. He wrote a book in 1865 called The Coal Question. And he basically says, I have a feeling that because of how amazing this new steam engine is, that Britain potentially is going to get rid of all of our cheap coal... He was exactly right.”

“They also own a thing called Garta Capital Partners, which is a $10 billion plus size hedge fund... Because they have to hedge commodities, you know, on behalf of the farmers and for themselves as well at this point.”

“My business partner, Ben, who's the guy who emailed 77 times to you and your team to get you to be on this podcast... he's an amazing connector. He's an amazing supporter. He wanted this moment to happen, even though he's not at the table.”

“I think trust is going to be the thing that is in lowest supply over the next 10 years... we're going into like peak fakeness around the world. And what happens when everything is easy to fake? Trust becomes incredibly important.”

“It's when you're here and we're just doing things, you know, we get to sort of bump into each other. Like, you know, our atoms get to bump into each other. Good things happen.”

“The point I want to make is that I think that that is super underrated and not enough people do it. And brands could benefit from doing it a lot more than they currently are.”

“The biggest risk is that he dies.”

“Carlisle has $500 billion AUM.”

“His whole career is taking messy data and organizing it... take data that exists that is just not transparently, easily structured and available and make it transparent, easily structured and available.”

“He is probably going to make every single mistake, the same mistake that an 18 year old degenerate Robinhood trader is going to make... There's a behavioral side to that.”

“You basically can go into any industry, any social circle, and simply by making the winners list, by making the awards, by making the list, you can insert yourself at the center of any network or any market.”

“He's so lovable. He's like super thoughtful, super well-meaning, really smart, obviously just like a killer... not only this killer business, but other killer businesses too in their portfolio.”

“The first slide on the Anduril pitch deck and our seed investment said, we are going to save the American taxpayer hundreds of billions of dollars a year. And we are going to make hundreds of billions of dollars.”

“He puts her at four. And so immediately she's like, what? Who are the three people that beat me?... He goes, I intentionally would place people at certain parts of the list to maximize the controversy.”

“He crushed it so hard for a very long period of time, made so much money for himself and his investors that just like... basically just shut down the fund. It was just like, we won.”

“Bezos has this quote which is that advertising is the price you pay for having an unremarkable product or service.”

“What he would ask is basically what is the cost of the raw ingredients on the London metals stock exchange for the valve? And then what is the markup relative to the actual raw materials costs? That's the idiot index... He found that the space industry had essentially the worst idiot index of all the industries that he had seen.”

“Oh wait, Chipotle has a 300 person real estate team. Why don't we just go next to wherever there's a Chipotle? Like they did all the work and it turns out that's actually what Burger King does. They just go, if McDonald's does the research, they just go piggyback off McDonald's.”

“My opinion is that this, to all the big companies out there, this appears to be a very niche, silly thing. My prediction is that in 10 years, this will not be.”

“She sold $800,000 worth of this product in five months. Now in 2026, she's tracking or she says the goal and it's early in the year, but tracking towards $5 million a year in revenue.”

“I read this article in the Wall Street Journal how there's this crossing... The headline is, The Crossing Guard Making $14,000 a Month Mailing Out Her Musings from Her Job.”

“Othership... Dana White, the president of the UFC, did one. He went to one. He didn't know anything about it. He went to one. He's like standing up. He's like, I don't know what like this is the most amazing place I've ever been to.”

“CNN recently did the best ad campaign ever for this company... They gave them this phone for two weeks. And then they had them redo the test. And his capacity to focus and his capacity to remember went up significantly.”

“Participants: Joe Liemandt, Sam Parr, Shaan Puri”

“We decided to clone... what if we created a newsletter for crypto, just like this guy's done for farming... In one year we built the largest crypto newsletter in the world.”

“In one year we built the largest crypto newsletter in the world and selling it for millions.”

“I've been writing this newsletter for 20 years for farmers. Half of the thing is just memes, just funny jokes because the farmers just want to laugh in the morning.”

“He invested in, I think Uber and Pinterest in the same couple of weeks, both at a three and a half million dollar valuation... he had like 75 grand in personal savings and I put 25 in each of those companies.”

“My First Million”

“Sarah Moore, who you did a podcast with, where we do these podcasts and I leave with more energy than I came in on.”

“I've listened to Arthur Brooks. You know who that is? Yeah. Like I would love to talk to people like that...they've done some cool research paper or some like data driven way to like raise better children or be happier or find your passion.”

“I noticed that I dislike those the most. And then I noticed there are so many times like when you will tell me a story or we will have a guest like Graham Weaver...where we do these podcasts and I leave with more energy than I came in on. And almost always that happens when it's not data driven and it's simply what am I curious about?”

“When we had Graham Weaver on, that was baller...to me, he's an inspirational guy who has all these cool ways to live a wonderful life. And it just so happens to be that he was really successful at business.”

“Dan would have to follow the treasure map for a trail of clues all over the house and sometimes all over the neighborhood until he finally found the present. This sparked a deep love of solving puzzles, cracking codes, and hunting treasures.”

“He would collect all the discarded betting slips... most of them are rubbish. But if even five, ten percent, he could make some money... that's not that different than what value investing is.”

“Bill Gates, when he was coding or Mark Zuckerberg, when he picked up programming or Mr. Beast, when he started doing YouTube videos at age 12...”

“My First Million — Podcast participants: Sam Parr, Shaan Puri”

“Goalie was giving creators... the top thing was a condo in Miami. The next thing was a Lambo... several hundreds of brands have aggressively used this strategy.”

“He created Anduril, the leading, the first kind of significant tech company that was doing defense stuff. It's worth like whatever, a hundred billion dollars.”

“He used to put deodorant on his armpits, run around the block, two different sticks, two different formulas, run around the block, have his brother smell each one and be like, which one's better. And that was his clinical trial.”

“There's a golden window between, I think he says the ages of eight to 18. So there's this 10 year window where a child's brain is developing in such a way that it can specialize and do some incredible things.”

“His theory is basically that a huge percentage of your personality is pretty hardwired and baked by the time you're five years old. And you don't want to spend your whole life fighting your nature.”

“With OpenAI, they already have a billion users. I don't understand how there's any growth related to this other than it's just a cool thing to own.”