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My First Million

I spent 48 Hours With 10 Billionaires. Here’s What I Learned.

05 Feb 2026

Transcription

Chapter 1: What was the experience like at the billionaire camp?

0.031 - 6.68 Unknown

All right, you just got done hanging out with some big ballers. It wore off on you to where you think you have the audacity to wear a varsity jacket.

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8.343 - 9.344 Sam Parr

I have a stylist now.

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10.005 - 11.988 Unknown

Is it Marty McFly from Back to the Future?

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12.008 - 18.657 Sam Parr

Is that your stylist? It's A.C. Slater from St. Louis Bell.

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18.677 - 26.528 Shaan Puri

I feel like I can rule the world. I know I can be what I want to. I put my all in it like no day's off on the rolling.

26.508 - 40.449 Sam Parr

We just threw one of our annual events. It's our basketball camp for founders, what Forbes calls the billionaires basketball camp. They never covered it, but I did pitch that to them in an email that they didn't reply to. And yeah, so we did this thing.

Chapter 2: How does intensity play a role in successful strategies?

40.489 - 45.337 Sam Parr

It was amazing. And I guess what? You want to debrief? What do you want to know?

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45.757 - 63.889 Unknown

Yeah, I want to know everything. So I've gone two out of the four years. And it seems like each time the average net worth has gone up, like you've added a zero to it. Because I think I heard you did this event this year in Greenville, North Carolina, I think, which is a very small town. And there were 17 private jets in town that weekend.

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65.152 - 74.384 Sam Parr

Yeah, out of like 25 guests. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. So, okay, so I wrote down some learnings because I don't want to tell you too much about the event. Well, can you give some background to it?

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Chapter 3: What does it mean that culture is an action word?

74.665 - 94.872 Sam Parr

The 30-second description is, I hate conferences because networking, suits and ties, icebreakers, awkward, forced social interactions, don't like that part. But I also do love meeting new interesting people. So the idea was like, can you have the good without the bad? Can you have your cake and eat it too? And I've learned...

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94.852 - 104.389 Sam Parr

in the past that basically every time you complain, you've planted a seed of an opportunity. So like my complaint about conferences signaled to me that maybe there's an opportunity to reinvent this, right?

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Chapter 4: What does 'you can't top pigs with pigs' signify?

105.09 - 119.541 Sam Parr

Innovation comes from irritation. So my irritation at conferences led me to ask a different question. What would be the type of conference that I would love to go to? And so we kind of architected this thing that's basically just the three things we like the most put together.

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Chapter 5: What distinguishes millionaires from billionaires?

119.601 - 133.149 Sam Parr

So it was, well, what if we got together and instead of being in like a ballroom seat of the hotel and we're all just standing around awkwardly, What if we got together and we played sports? So what if you play basketball?

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133.309 - 154.092 Sam Parr

So the icebreaker is when you get to the event, you get put on teams and within an hour, we go pick up basketball together and you get to know each other that way before you do small talk and all this other stuff. The second part is, so you play basketball and sort of sweat all day. And then at night, we all hang out in a house and we do like impromptu versions of TED Talks.

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154.313 - 157.479 Sam Parr

So the idea is everybody in the room is world-class at something.

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Chapter 6: How can one innovate from irritation?

157.92 - 178.723 Sam Parr

It's like that guy knows more about... how to sell on TV infomercials than anyone else. And this guy could build the largest company in X category. This guy built the largest company in X category. And so you pop them up and you say, hey, tell us something, teach us about that. And they have little like rough slides that they take a 10 minute talk about.

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178.703 - 191.02 Sam Parr

That's the idea of the event is two days with 25 of the most interesting people in the world. You play sports and it feels, you have a summer camp vibe, but then you get the sort of lessons learned of a TED Talk event.

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191.28 - 205.3 Unknown

And you're hosting it, co-hosting it, I don't know how you describe it, with Jimmy, aka Mr. Beast at his campus. And last year, and I think every year, you get like a tour. One of the activities was like a tour of his movie studio, if that's what he calls it.

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205.32 - 208.764 Sam Parr

Yeah. This year is cool. We actually played a MrBeast game.

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Chapter 7: What are the lessons learned from billionaire interactions?

209.225 - 224.284 Sam Parr

They thought they were going for the tour, but we set it up so that he's like, well, I could show you this. You want to do it? And he had the cameras and the microphone set up, and so everybody got to play this game. And they made a video that's private. It won't go out on YouTube, but it's just for the group.

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224.505 - 230.192 Unknown

It's like the rich man version of going on a Six Flags ride, and they take a photo of you on the ride.

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231.421 - 238.933 Sam Parr

Yeah, exactly. I was like, have you ever done this before? He's like, yeah, we do this for the Make-A-Wish kids. I was like, oh, perfect. This is great.

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239.734 - 241.897 Unknown

And so can you say who was there?

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243.139 - 259.504 Sam Parr

I don't want to talk too much about who was there, but I'll give you a couple of stories. I just wrote down three little lessons learned. I'm going to try to keep this short because I can go all day about this type of stuff. I have like pages and pages of notes that I wrote afterwards. But I'll give you three things that I thought stood out. So this is my lessons from billionaires.

260.041 - 263.045 Sam Parr

Number one, intensity is the strategy.

Chapter 8: How do successful people maintain their drive and reinvent themselves?

263.185 - 279.028 Sam Parr

So here's one of the things that happened. At the event, we had, I think, five people who owned NBA teams at this event, which is crazy. That's like, I don't know, one sixth of the league. And we were like, what's the hardest part about owning a team you didn't really anticipate before you bought it, right? You've been a basketball fan your whole life.

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279.008 - 303.383 Sam Parr

And he was like, well, the hardest thing is that here's a guy on my team who's got a five-year $150 million deal guaranteed. So he plays good, $150 million. He plays bad, $150 million. His knee feels sore, he's got a boo-boo, he wants to sit out, $150 million. And he's like, it is very hard to lead an organization where your upside and your compensation is guaranteed regardless of performance.

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303.403 - 326.533 Sam Parr

And he goes, in my life, I'm on a day-to-day contract with myself. That's how I've always been. Let's fast forward about an hour. Now people have broken up into smaller groups, and two rich guys in the corner are talking, and I think they're about to get in a fight. They're talking so loud and so passionately. They're like nose-to-nose almost. I'm like, oh, shit, I got to get over there.

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326.633 - 347.185 Sam Parr

So I walk over. I'm like, I don't know what to do here. Turns out they're not fighting. They're just both so passionate about this one idea, which is about living in the details. So one of the guys was an NBA team owner named Matt Ishbia. He owns the Phoenix Suns. He also owns one of, if not the largest mortgage company in the country. So he owns United Wholesale Mortgage.

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347.205 - 369.384 Sam Parr

You know, he basically took over this business from his dad. It was like his dad's side hustle and had 12 employees when he joined it and probably did, I don't know, like single digit millions in revenue, maybe at that time. And, you know, that was, you know, whatever. 2004, they did like 45 mortgages, you know, not huge volume. 2005, still slow. 2006, still slow.

370.245 - 388.092 Sam Parr

Then 07, 08, 09, it starts to take off because other mortgage lenders during the financial crisis, the subprime mortgage crisis, they went under because they were writing bad mortgages. He was not. And so they picked up tons of business. So they grew literally 10X in those years and grew and grew and grew. And so now they do like, I don't know,

388.072 - 396.221 Sam Parr

over $200 billion in loans, $2 billion a year in profit at the company level. So he's one of the wealthiest, 50 wealthiest people in the country at this point.

396.441 - 400.585 Unknown

Was his dad's company big? Or was it a subsidiary within a successful company?

400.625 - 405.25 Sam Parr

No, it was just his own 12-person side hustle.

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