EXTRA: Russian Oligarchs, Putin, and Sam and Shaan's Thoughts on Ukraine

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
All right, there's this amazing book called Getting Everything You Can Out Of All You've Got. I read it a few years ago and it changed my life.
And the reason I loved it was because it basically talks about how to get and make more money using things that you already have.
Coincidentally, today's podcast is brought to you by Business Made Simple. It's a podcast by Donald Miller, who I'm gonna tell you about in a second, but he has this amazing episode that's all related to this book and the things that I learned in this book. It's called How To Make Money With What You Already Have. It's an incredible episode. It talks about all the stuff that I learned in this book. The host is Donald Miller. I didn't know who Donald Miller was up until recently, but over the last 12 months, this is totally by coincidence. It was all separate people. They said, you have to check out Donald Miller. He's amazing. So I'm happy that he's part of HubSpot's podcast network. You can check it out, Business Made Simple Podcast. It's where he coaches you on how to build your business like an airplane, where the cockpit is your leadership, the body is your overhead, the right engine is your marketing, the left engine is your sales.
You have to check it out. This guy's amazing. It's called Business Made Simple with Donald Miller.
This guy, this Ukrainian guy, their leader, this guy's badass. Have you seen like him just wearing like green T-shirts, giving press conferences?

**Shaan Puri** (1:10)
Yeah.

**Sam Parr** (1:11)
He's amazing. This guy's amazing.

**Shaan Puri** (1:13)
This guy's, I don't know much about him. I don't know what's going on. I don't know what's like kind of media portrayal versus whatever else, but the guy does come across like a goddamn hero.

**Sam Parr** (1:30)
All right, let me tell you a quick story. I don't know if you're gonna like this topic, so I want to get it out of the way. If you like it, we could spend the whole time on it, but I'm not sure if you're gonna be into this.
Yeah, yeah, so it's about the most popular thing going on right now, the Ukraine-Russian conflict. It's not exactly about Ukraine, but it's about Russia. So something that I've always been interested in is the Russian oligarchs. So have you ever studied those folks?

**Shaan Puri** (1:55)
Not studied, but you know, okay, tell me about it.

**Sam Parr** (1:58)
Okay, so this starts, I'm reading a thing, so you're gonna see me look off. This starts on November 3rd, 1995, in a remote Siberian town called Sergot. Basically what happened in this small cabin, an auction took place for the right to lend the cash-strapped Russian government tens of millions of dollars, so basically in 95, the Russian government wasn't doing so hot and they needed money. And so they got these banks to come to this meeting and they said, we need some money. We need to borrow some money. And also as collateral, we're gonna put up shares of some of the large state-owned companies because at this point, Russia was basically going from being a communist nation to being a private country. And so they still had some like state-owned oil companies, mineral companies, basically like if you think of ExxonMobil, the government like owned that. And at this point, they were trying to figure out how do we make this so private individuals can do this. And so at this meeting, basically only two bidders showed up and if more bidders wanted to come, it was kind of a pain in the ass because conveniently there were no more flights. The airport shut down and you couldn't even book a flight to come into this small town.
By the way, your camera's, okay, you're there.
And so basically what happened at this like small cabin is one company made a bid to buy a, or to loan money to the government. They loaned something like $500 million and that was like $100,000 above the opening bid. So people were bidding to loan money. And so this bank loaned money to the government and then the government had to pay back the loan at a certain point, like something like a year later. And if they didn't, the bank then was given the collateral, so the shares in this company to auction off and they could keep 30% of the profits. So obviously the government didn't pay back the money. And there's like a lot of like wondering why they didn't pay it back. Basically the idea is that the current president was like, obviously this is all like, we're all planning this so don't pay this back and give us a little bit, whatever.