25 Years Of Founder WISDOM In 55 Minutes (ft. Jason Fried)

**Jason Fried** (0:00)
My job as a founder, it's to inject risk into the business. You can get away with certain things that other people simply can't because you own the damn place.

**Sam Parr** (0:17)
All right, today's episode, we're gonna talk about things that interest us.
One thing that I tweeted out the other day, I wasn't surprised by this result, but it still made me sad. I tweeted out, I said, if you could guarantee a 7.5% real return for the rest of your life, every year, guaranteed, but you can't invest in any individual stocks forever. However, you can start your own business. And I think I even said, you can only invest $10,000 into that business.
Or you can invest actively. You can't really buy the index, but you can invest actively and do whatever you want. Some days, maybe, or some years, maybe you'll get plus 50%. Some years you're gonna get minus 50%. Which would you choose, option A or B? 40% of my 300,000 followers selected option B. And you replied and you said, option A, all day, easy. Why did you select that?

**Jason Fried** (1:19)
Well, to get 7.5%, like with no effort and you're guaranteed, it's a no brainer. It's an absolute no brainer for me. I mean, now I've got a business. I have a lot of risk in my own business. So that might be part of it as well. Like I have all the risk there.
So let me ask you this. Were you intending this to be like someone who's 21 years old, straight out of school, never invested before, has nothing else going on? Or is it just like at any point in your life?

**Sam Parr** (1:47)
I think at any point in your life, that's still the right decision.

**Jason Fried** (1:50)
I still turn that switch on in a second. Yeah. That's a ridiculous return.
In a good way and a consistent return. I mean, the way that would compound over time would be fantastic. And there's nothing boring about that. That's an incredible, I mean, it's boring actually, but also an incredible thing. So yeah. What'd you think that the survey was gonna produce? Did you, were you surprised by the ratio or?

**Sam Parr** (2:12)
I'm surprised that the average Joe, I mean, and my followers are probably above the average Joe in terms of income, maybe IQ, maybe not, I don't know, but for their, they're typically a higher-

**Jason Fried** (2:23)
Good looks for sure, they're up there.

**Sam Parr** (2:24)
They're very good-looking. It's a very high, like I would imagine it's a high-educated, coastal crowd. And so anyway, I would have thought that they would have seen the fallacy that they probably can't beat all the others, particularly the other people who have a much better advantage. And so the idea that although everyone else fails at getting this return, I, in my little office in part-time with just me, can somehow beat all the others. And I thought that that was shocking to me, that they thought that they were exceptional at that. That's what I was surprised at.

**Jason Fried** (2:59)
Yeah, well, that's pretty common. I think everyone thinks they're exceptional in some way. I mean, the thing people don't take into consideration is risk. So like they might go, well, if I just buy NVIDIA or Apple or whatever, Shopify, I mean, and the thing is in the short term, you almost certainly can.
Over the next two or three years, you get lucky, pick one, pick a winner. But the rest of your life, that's the question.

**Sam Parr** (3:24)
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So here's what I've done lately. I've been spending time in New York because I've got family here. And I cold emailed and did cold outreach and I randomly met a bunch of people who work at hedge funds.
And I'm like, hey, I'm not like a competitor. You don't ever have to worry about me. I'm just like a passionate, interested person.
Can I just like see your office and just like, can I just sit at your computer and you just show me your software? And like, I just want to see like what you do all day.
And you go to some of these offices and you know, I would have thought like they were like Waffle Wall Street where it's like buzzing and like the phones are ringing. It's really just a bunch, it's pretty quiet. And it's usually just like a bunch of nerds like looking at a computer screen, but they got like four screens and they've got like incredibly complicated software. And the average show is getting paid hundreds of thousands, sometimes tens of millions of dollars to be good at this one thing. And then I think about like, how is like Bobby Lee in whatever, Missouri, where I'm from on his Robin Hood app, possibly gonna have like an edge on all these resources. And these people with all these resources, they're still not that good. I talked to a guy who worked at Bridgewater recently and I was like, Bridgewater, I've run up Ray Dalio, aren't you guys like the best? He's like, sometimes we're the best, but the last 15 years, we've sucked. We've underperformed the market. And I'm like, that's insane that 1500 employees, tens of billions or hundreds of billions under assets, you all paid like the best there is, you still can't beat it. And so that kind of like, that's kind of where I'm coming from.