Building A 100+ Year Legacy + Peter Thiel’s Fellowship + Bomb Hiring Questions

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
All right, I'm gonna tell you something. I have a family now, and do you have a will?

**Shaan Puri** (0:04)
Weird flex, all right. Yes, I do have a will.

**Sam Parr** (0:07)
Okay, so once I have a family, 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 in to what I'm buying into, this could be the most life-changing thing that we've ever done on this podcast. 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 a bunch of small stuff. But then when he was like 30 or 40, he had something that changed his life. So he 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 he got super rich. He was worth something like the equivalent of two or $300 million 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 up for debate. No one has disproved it, but there's like 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, 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 percent of his assets towards a foundation where he created the rules. And the rules were, I'm going to give, and this is, 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 person who has impacted the world the most. And winners have been like Marie Curie, Martin Luther King, Ernest Hemingway, a lot of these pretty ground breaking people. And in a way, this contest, it's encouraged. 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, that would be amazing if I can discover something. And that's the ultimate goal, to get a Nobel Peace Prize.

**Shaan Puri** (3:02)
That's the greatest thing ever. Hey, real quick, one of the cool parts about what we're doing is that people have reached out and told me that they've built actual million-dollar businesses, made their first million, off an idea they heard on the show. That is crazy. That's wild. That's why we want to do the show. And we want to see more of that. One of the questions we get asked over and over again is, is there some kind of idea, database or spreadsheet where we list out all the different business ideas that we've talked about? Well, the answer is finally yes. The fine folks at HubSpot have dug through the archive and pulled out 50 plus business ideas and put them into a business idea database. It's totally free. Go to clickhubspot.com/mff and get the database for you. All right, now back to the show.

**Sam Parr** (3:42)
And so it kind of changed my life. By the way, did you know that story, that dynamite story and the Merchant of Death?

**Shaan Puri** (3:48)
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 then he's like, have you heard that? Peter is like, yeah, he is 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.