My First Million
00:20:54 · Sam Parr
[00:20:54] S1: This is awesome. I feel very optimistic because I've been like trying to figure out, I read a lot of history because I'm trying to one thing, figure out what makes America so special? Like how did this experiment come to be? It's pretty crazy how like these group of guys like had this opinion on what the world should be, and two fifty years later, it's mostly great. And I was reading books on it, and between like 1880 and like 1970 or so, there was this massive explosion of American growth. And part of it was like our values and ideas, like this idea of individual liberty, equality, private property, capitalism, like that all like combined, and we were the first country that was founded with that collective group of principles. We were the first one that really had that. But one of the reasons why America became so special was in like the 1890s, 1880s or so, Rockefeller discovered oil, and then soon after Carnegie started creating steel using iron ore. And we had so many resources in America that basically everyone talks about the gold rush. The bigger rush was out of Duluth, Minnesota, where we had this massive mine that created this stuff called iron ore, which was used to create steel. And we also had huge copper mines and you could put it on a ship based out of Duluth and it could go through the Great Lakes, which is basically the size of an ocean and Great Lakes are huge. And it could get up to New York and get up to all these amazing places really, really fast. So the point where in the 1950s, we were transporting so much iron ore that that was enough to create 50,000,000 cars a year. That's how much we were transporting on the Great Lakes. And then we were growing all this food in the farmlands because of America, because one of America's greatest abilities is to grow tons and tons of food. And so we had all these people and we had 50 states that were tariff free. And so, like, I was reading about, like, the massive resources in America and that we don't get enough credit. I mean, was luck, but we don't get enough credit. Like that's one of the reasons that made us great. And then the 1940s, World War II happened and every place in Europe and a lot of places in North Africa, in Asia were destroyed, but we were good. We were good because A, we were so far away and B, we didn't get destroyed.
00:23:10 · Sam Parr
And so I was thinking, I'm like, it feels like we're gonna go through another one of these things because if you look at the data center creation in America, it's like way beyond most every other country right now. And it feels like we're gonna go through this... Another one of these industrial revolutions simply because of our entrepreneurial spirit, but also the huge amount of resources, including people. We have so many people working on this stuff. And so whenever you talk about this, I'm like, America is gonna go through this massive, massive explosion. I don't know how it's gonna look. I don't know how long it's gonna take, but it seemed very comparable to the industrial revolution.
00:23:51 · Shaan Puri
[00:23:51] S0: Yeah. It's interesting. I mean, I I was in a group chat yesterday, and I think people have... There's one way to look at it is exactly what you said. That's, I would say, a very optimistic take. I think another group of people feel extremely pessimistic. And, you know, if I boil down, what are they pessimistic about? It's basically the most popular parts of America, like New York, California, are trending towards socialism. So, you know, a hatred of billionaires, a hatred of companies, a hatred of AI, a hatred... You know, like, there's a lot of, like, negativity towards those exact things, those drivers of progress that you just talked about. Right? Capitalism and and, obviously, output of capitalism is that you can build a successful company, and you can become very wealthy, and you can, you know, go compete and build new technologies and all those things. And then you can, you know, take those resources you have and reinvest them in the next... You know, in others. Right? And that self sustains all the progress. And so I think one negative view is have you... You know, are are we losing are we losing what made us great in that way? Another piece of the negativity is, you know, have we hollowed out our ability to actually build things? You know, for so long, we kind of outsourced manufacturing to China. And so now trying to get back and kind of reshor or reskill or re... Reindustrialize is like, sounds good, easy to pump your fist to, really hard to do. Do we actually have the stomach to do it? It's like a big company that hasn't innovated in a very long time. And even if you realize you need to innovate, can you can you actually move such a big ship? Can you culturally, like, get back to that or not? I think that's another one. And then the third one is general skepticism around AI. So either AI is so good that we're all gonna lose our jobs, and people are gonna be out of work, or AI is not as good as it's advertised, and it's a huge bubble, and this is all you know, it's gonna tank the market because everybody's overspending on it. Just sort of like a no win proposition. And so it's funny to hear you say that because several of our friends in a group chat literally had like such a negative view that was so foreign to me, but, you know, I understand where they're coming from.
00:26:04 · Sam Parr
[00:26:04] S1: So a lot of times, people at the podcast, they'll reach out to me, and they're wondering, hey, Sam and Shaan, how do you meet all these amazing entrepreneurs? How do you find all these stories? Well, I have a hack. You see, I actually have a community called Hampton. It's a community for entrepreneurs doing at least 3,000,000 in revenue, although we do on average something like $25,000,000 a year in revenue. We have the founders of DoorDash, of Figma, of BlueChew. All these amazing companies are part of Hampton. And what's interesting is because of the environment in Hampton, which frankly is very similar to My First Million, we have a very unique high trust environment. When people apply and go through this vetting process, they're put in groups of like eight or nine other entrepreneurs, and they get real about everything that's going on in their life and in their business. And sort of like when people listen to MFM, they get inspired to come up with new solutions for business. That's what happens in real life in Hampton. It's life changing. And so if you're a founder of a startup that does at least 3,000,000 in revenue and you just wanna go ahead and pull forward five or ten years worth of success, then check it out. The URL is joinhampton.com. Again, the URL, joinhampton.com. Well, I think that I don't... I would change the word pessimism towards and switch it to uncertainty and fear, which is very understandable. I think that what we're missing now is good common sense leaders who can say things like America's amazing, and we have problems that we should fix. Capitalism is amazing, and I understand why you guys are upset that housing is so expensive, let's try to fix that. Like, it just seems like there's this, you have like guys like Trump on one side and then like an AOC on the other side, and they say such polarizing things.
00:27:40 · Shaan Puri, Sam Parr
[00:27:40] S0: Do you think those people don't exist, or do you think that the incentive of the media machine is that the more... The farther to one end you go, the louder your voice gets. Right? Because it's more second polarizing, you get more [00:27:52] S1: one. I think that most people can't... Like, it's just... It's insane to me that capitalism is considered an insult or a negative word. Right. And I I just... There there needs to be like ways to reclaim some of these words that people use. For example, the Democrat Socialists of America, like, when they talk about socialism, I'm like, that's that's really... Historically, that's quite bad. That's not, like, a good thing to do. Now when you... I'm not... Like, I would consider myself very moderate, so I don't consider myself to be like total libertarian where anything goes. And also I like capitalism, I like immigrants, but there needs to be someone who like has this like fairly common sense approach where they can bridge both sides and talk about this in plain, language [00:28:32] S0: Right. [00:28:33] S1: In a charismatic way, because that's very important, where you... But you can't be fear based, and you can't say like this other side is gonna ruin everything, or capitalism is evil, etcetera.
00:28:43 · Shaan Puri
[00:28:43] S0: Yeah. I've actually always thought that somebody should make common sense political party, because I think common sense is such a... Such an amazing phrase that lets you take the moral high ground. Common sense... If you say you're the common sense party, a implies that everybody else is being a dumbass. Right? Like, everybody else is not using common sense if they're on... If they're not in the common sense party. And then also, who can argue with common sense? It's sort of like when, you know, Trump came out and was America first or make America great again. It's like, well, who can take the other side of that? Who can say, no. No. Not America first. Right? Like, you know, he took the moral high ground with a sort of inarguable thing that he could then put his agenda underneath. And I think if somebody really wanted to create, like, instead of being, like, moderate, which basically sounds like the tampered down version of everything, the passive, the middle, the not gonna do anything party, it's the... You know, I think that that... Or, you know, the third party, the alternates, it's like, you know, they always make themselves sound less than, like, third place. And I think you have to basically go in and go into one of the parties, but hijack it and and rename the platform around being the common sense candidate, and then just constantly beat the drum of common sense. And I think a a sufficiently charismatic person could use language like that and go pretty far. I would love to see it.