Listen To These 40 Minutes To Unf*ck Your Life

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
So the quote is this, it says, most of us have two lives, the life we live and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands the resistance, more powerful than a locomotive and harder to kick than a crack cocaine habit. And here's the biggest bitch, we don't even know what hit us.
All right, Sam, I gotta ask you about this. So I was watching the Lehman Brothers play. I don't know if you remember, I was telling you, I went and saw the Lehman Brothers play, and there's a line in there, there's a part that stuck with me.
The point of the play is it's talking about the generations of the Lehman Brothers from the great grandfather to the grandfather. And I don't know if you know this story, but basically they started out, they're German immigrants, they come to America, they land somehow in Alabama, and they open up a small little store selling fabrics. Okay, so somehow they went from German immigrants who had nothing selling fabrics in Alabama to the fourth or fifth biggest investment bank in New York in like a couple hundred years. So how did that happen? The story is how did that happen?
And the transition goes, they're selling fabrics for clothing in their store in Alabama. And then they realize they could just buy the raw cotton. So then they start going to plantations and buying the raw cotton and selling it to the guy who makes fabrics out of it. So then they become the largest buyer and seller of, they become a middleman and they kind of like, in the play they said they invent the idea of middleman. I don't think so, but like they really popularized the idea of being a middleman, where they weren't making the cotton nor were they making the fabrics. They were just in between, brokering the deals. And so then somehow that ladders up and eventually they become a bank. And so it's like generation two or three. So what they show is it's realistic. Like one of the kids that took over was really smart, had new ideas. He's the one who turned it into a bank. But there's other kids who was like, maybe a little bit more of a gambler and a bit reckless. And that put them in positions that, maybe they shouldn't have been in. They got a little too greedy, a little too aggressive, which ultimately in 2008 Lehman Brothers falls and it's the biggest bank collapse in the history of the country. It's because of some decisions that were made along the way, the seeds that were planted by the heirs, heirs to the throne. So in one of the scenes, it's the kind of the older generation and then the younger generation, they're both in the boardroom. And at this point, the older generation is kind of the figurehead. He sits there in the boardroom, but he's not the guy. He's not the guy making the decisions. His son is the guy making decisions. And so I forgot who it is. Somebody asked them, some bank or someone else comes and asks them, they say, what is your secret recipe?
What are the ingredients that let you do what you do?
And they think long and hard, and I forgot what answer they give, but it's something like it's the people or it's the trust that we have. That's the special ingredient. And then the son comes up and he goes, in our, when we're baking, our flour is money.
Some people use money to buy things. We use money to make money.
Our flour is money. And like, that was like one of the big transitions where they became a bank versus becoming, before they were merchants who were like buying and selling products, buying and selling commodities. And it shows that like, once they have that realization, like they never go back, they just get more financialized, more financialized, more financialized, where they're trading on computer screens and they're trading these subprime mortgages and they're never issuing the mortgage, they're not living in the house. They're not, they're just, it's numbers in a spreadsheet from there on out basically. And we've talked about this idea of like, what is it that you sell? And it kind of comes down to like, the way I think about this is, there's many moments of my life where I'm choosing between two paths. The path that's opportunistic, meaning I see green on the other side, I see money on the other side. And then maybe the path that's more interesting or fulfilling.

**Shaan Puri** (3:53)
Yeah, art versus money.

**Sam Parr** (3:54)
That's a good way to put it. But for others, it might be, others might be impact. It might be like making a difference in the world. Like that might be the fulfilling path for them. So, and as much as I could hear the advice, like you know the answer, the answer is go do the fulfilling thing.