The guy who gets paid $80K/yr to do nothing

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
All right, Sam, I gotta tell you about this. There is a guy in Japan who I read about who is making $80,000 a year for doing nothing. They called him the do nothing man. Have you ever heard of this guy?

**Sam Parr** (0:22)
No. What you read about this?

**Shaan Puri** (0:24)
Well, I originally saw it, I don't even know where, I saw it somewhere.
I was fascinated because what happened is, this guy was at work and his boss called him a do nothing man. He was insulting him as like, dude, you just do nothing, you don't really add anything, you don't provide any value. He says that he thought to himself and he goes, is there value in society for a man who does nothing? He went online and he posted a tweet saying, I'm starting a new service. It's called Rental People Who Do Nothing. And he basically was like, I will be a companion, a friend who will do nothing. So what this guy does is you rent him out and he'll go hang out with you and he says nothing. It's pretty much a silent companion, completely non-physical, non-sexual, basically an introvert for hire. And so what people do is they will, either they have a task they need to go do, like an errand they need to run, or they just feel really lonely and they just want somebody to have some tea with them. And he'll come and he'll sit and he won't really say anything. And if you ask him a question, he'll give you a simple answer. But it's really just the presence of another human body. And this guy made $80,000 in a year, renting himself out. And he, then he wrote a book, a memoir, called Rental People Who Do Nothing, The Man Who Didn't Do Nothing, or Rental People Who Do Nothing. And he's continued to do this now for years. So he did it before COVID, then COVID hit, so he couldn't do it. And then he started it back up again. And now he doesn't even charge for the hangout. He used to charge $68 for a session. And now he just says, just cover the food and travel, and then I'll hang out with you for free. And so he travels around and he gets paid for his food and his event tickets and all the things that people want to do with them. And this is what this guy does. Isn't this fascinating?

**Sam Parr** (2:17)
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What I'm reading the comments on his Goodreads account for his book. What were the reasons why people wanted to hang out with him?

**Shaan Puri** (3:14)
Well, so this was pretty fascinating. So I was wondering this too. I was like, why is there a need for this? And I guess in Japan, there's a loneliness epidemic. It's kind of crazy. They have words for this that we don't even have words for. So have you ever heard this term like hikikomori?

**Sam Parr** (3:29)
You know, I haven't. I have not heard that term.

**Shaan Puri** (3:31)
Has it come up in Connecticut?

**Sam Parr** (3:33)
No, I have not heard that word before. That's a new word for me.

**Shaan Puri** (3:36)
So it's a word that they have for severe social withdrawal. It's total withdrawal from society. So typically, it's kind of like in cell in the States. So typically, it's mostly men who are living at home, still in their parents' home, but they are completely recluse. They don't work, they don't socialize, and there are like an estimated two million men in Japan that are in this category. For six months, they basically have not engaged with anybody in society. So that's one problem, is this growing trend of hikikomori. Then there's another word, I think, kodokushi, which is, it's basically death without being cared for. So it's like older people who are dying, and then they find their bodies like five months later, because they were so socially isolated that nobody knew that they passed away. This is like number that the last 10 years has doubled. I think 70,000 people died this way where they're found weeks or months later. These trends are all like very concerning. So like in Japan, single-person household, so no wife, no family members, no friends, just living alone by yourself is now 38% of the population, which is that's like triple where it was five or seven years ago. They appointed a minister of loneliness in Japan because this has become such a big problem. And so this guy doing this is almost like an art statement in a way about this to bring awareness to this huge problem that people are just really freaking lonely. In Japan, everywhere, but really, in Japan, it's even more heightened.