Investor with 2.9 decisions a year beat the S&P 500 for a decade, hosts say

Shaan Puri says that a few weeks before the recording he met a man in Hampton who had sold his company and received roughly eight figures in cash. When Puri asked what he had been doing since, the man said he was a public-market investor.

Puri then asked to see the man's brokerage account on the spot. The man pulled it up. Puri says he exported the account and analyzed it with Claude, asking how many decisions the investor made each year, with a decision defined as a stock bought or sold.

According to the analysis Puri describes, the investor averaged 2.9 decisions a year, with a maximum of six in any year and zero in three of the last ten years. Puri reports an annual return of about 21.8% over the past decade against 13.5% for the S&P 500, and says the investor beat the market in 11 of 12 years. Puri has not named the investor, and the figures are as presented on the show.

Sam Parr says he was surprised that many investors he admires, including Howard Marks, Ray Dalio and Monish Pabrai, make very few decisions each year. He says the investors' decision frameworks are easier to read than those of startup founders, whose work is more iterative.

Parr cites Warren Buffett's description of his strategy as 'lethargy bordering on sloth,' and says Kevin Ryan, who runs a startup incubator, told him he gets about one good idea a year.

Parr says the second lesson is not to agonize over small decisions. He says the fix is to determine which decisions are reversible and which are not, and not to sweat the reversible ones.

Puri says his default is not to care: everything is ruled out unless it has a real reason to matter. He argues that if someone's natural wiring is anxious and treats everything as important, it is hard to find the one thing that matters among many.

Parr says his own nature is the opposite. He says he tells himself that the way you do one thing is the way you do everything, which makes him feel that everything matters. Puri jokes that this makes Parr 'a mess.'

Parr says Mark Zuckerberg has recently been doing a lot of press, which he calls 'a bit of a victory lap.' He says that feels premature because the leader in AI changes every six months or so, while Meta's Muse model is currently performing well, which is why Zuckerberg is excited and talking publicly.

The hosts also discuss Zuckerberg's more casual public style. They say he has recently sworn in interviews, which they find unnatural. In one clip, he is filmed barbecuing while on a FaceTime call and says he is 'smoking meat,' which the hosts compare to an earlier, unsuccessful attempt at a casual barbecue stream.

The hosts describe Scale AI as an early large data company for AI labs, doing operational work to collect and clean the training data those labs need. They say Meta bought a large stake in the company, reportedly for about $15 billion, and that a big part of the deal was acquiring Wang, who started Scale.

In an interview, Zuckerberg was asked why Wang, since a data company's founder seemed an odd fit for a social media company leading in AI. Zuckerberg said he tried to meet many of the great founders of Wang's generation and then realized Wang 'is the guy.' The hosts say the praise was not framed as an overly intellectual point.

The hosts also contrast this with Meta's earlier VR bet, which they describe as costly. Puri says Meta spent roughly $60 billion, about ten times what it spent developing the iPhone, without strong returns.

Parr asks whether the description of Wang sounds like an individual contributor. Scale was valued around $14 billion when it was bought, so Parr asks whether Wang led a company that large, noting that CEOs of such companies are not usually the smartest person in the room. He says the praise sounded as if Wang were a great leader, strong at everything, and also knowledgeable about AI beyond others.

The answer offered focuses on Wang's strategic thinking, communication clarity and strong views on execution. One example given is Zuckerberg's belief that Meta needed a very small, talent-dense team of perhaps 20 to 200 extremely capable people, rather than a large group, to win in AI.

The hosts say Zuckerberg does not wait for quarterly board meetings to get input. He sends the same question to about 20 people outside the official board of advisors and asks what they think Meta should do. The hosts say he is not necessarily bound to follow their advice, but he constantly seeks their views.

One person in the discussion says that when he asked Zuckerberg a question on WhatsApp, the reply was a very thorough, crisp message nearly the length of a blog post. The hosts say Zuckerberg also uses these exchanges to judge which people consistently give high-signal answers.

Parr says he has had three or four sessions with an executive coach, along with an assessment. The coach told him he is very self-critical. Parr says he had described himself as lazy and not ambitious, but the coach said he seemed very ambitious.

Parr says his job involves spending time with some of the best people in the world, including someone he describes as the 30th richest person on Earth. He says comparing himself to them is challenging because he sees how high the levels go, and that he sometimes criticizes himself for feeling that way. Puri agrees and says the way to cope is to get comfortable with the game one is actually playing.

Parr uses NBA examples to describe games. LeBron James, he says, is trying to defeat Father Time and catch Michael Jordan, which is why he keeps playing at 42 and joined Philadelphia to win a championship and cement his place among the greatest of all time.

Parr says a teammate may be playing a different game. He says Jaylen Brown, who left the Celtics in a trade after always being the number two player there, appears to be playing a game of proving himself. Parr adds that most NBA players, when asked, say they just want to have fun and make a good living.

Parr says he learned from a book called The Score that games are a powerful way to think about life. In charades, he says, the goal is for teammates to guess what you are doing, so you need to be expressive, collaborative and a good communicator. In Mafia, the goal is to win through deception, so you need to be a lying, cheating scoundrel.

He extends the idea to the body: in Twister, mobility matters, while a bodybuilder needs strength and does not care about flexibility. Parr says the game you play can change your whole personality and body, and that most people put no effort into deciding which game they are playing.

Parr recounts a story he says he heard about Elon Musk, which he notes is from a private dinner and is not verified. The story places the question around 2008 or 2009, when Tesla was on the brink of failure and SpaceX had three rocket failures. Asked what he would do if both companies failed, Musk reportedly answered for about eight minutes.

According to the story, Musk said he would move to the cheapest apartment he could find, buy a computer and start building the next thing within 24 hours. He said losing money would not bother him, losing the companies would devastate him, but he would let that devastation last only one night. Asked what the next thing would be, he said he did not know and that not knowing would not slow him, because 'the thing finds you' and you have to be building when it arrives.

Parr says his father gave him similar advice: it is about motion, not direction, and once one is moving it is easier to find and change direction than to act from a standstill.

Parr says his company had a 'last play' mentality: because yesterday had been bad, he and his partner expected today to be bad too, and their productivity fell. Switching this did not require any change to the business or a new strategy. Instead, they changed their routine.

One morning they went for a hike in the Flatirons near Boulder instead of working. Parr says the physical win left them in a better mood, and when they returned they had better ideas and believed in them more, which lifted sales somewhat. He says the fix was basic: small daily wins, then operating from that place.

Parr says he had taken Xanax on every flight for 15 years. He read half of a book about panic attacks and learned the DARE method: dismiss, allow, run towards, engage. Before a flight to Jackson Hole, he deliberately put himself in situations that made him anxious, and he flew sober for the first time in 15 years.

Parr says the trip was the first time he and his partner had left their two children for four nights. He describes the step of telling himself that he was about to get panicky and that he was excited to see how the exercise worked. He says the approach made the panic less powerful, and that once the plane took off he became anxious but managed it. He says the plane had to return after landing, and that he freaked out a little, but the method still worked.

Parr says the method worked, although he freaked out a little. Puri says the method seems to apply to many things beyond panic attacks, and Parr says he has been working on claustrophobia, which has been a major issue for him.

Parr says he used to avoid the New York subway, then began exposure therapy: he used Claude to find the shortest subway route and rode it on a given day. He says a cruise ship in the middle of the ocean is the thing he finds most frightening. The discussion also touches on MMA coaches who study fear, with Georges St-Pierre mentioned, since fighters must prepare for traumatic situations.

Puri says he often walks into hard conversations, such as negotiations, firings or tough talks, without preparing. He now plans to walk through exactly how he feels the day before any situation he fears, and says he should do the same for everything he feels.

To prepare for flights, Puri says he has occasionally packed his suitcase or gone through the same motions, which feels silly but helps because packing makes him nervous. The hosts also discuss how anticipation often exceeds the actual event, and say research suggests the peak of enjoyment can come in the lead-up rather than the event or aftermath.

In closing, the hosts repeat the four steps of the method: dismiss, allow, run towards, engage. Parr jokes about re-filming an egg commercial to show 'this is your brain, this is my brain on a plane.'