Think and Grow Rich. Amazing book. One of the bestselling books of all time, but the whole backstory completely fake. And he's a total con man.
What? What do you mean none of it's true?
All right, I have to tell you this story. So, I'm rereading a bunch of old books because I like rereading old books. And I started reading Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People. Have you read that one? I love that book, Sam.
Rule number one, rule number one, a person's name is the most beautiful sound in the English language.
The golden rule. I love that book. The reason I like these old books is because some of them, the rules have stood the test of time and the writing is always like older writing for some reason. It's like cute. There's something about...
Can I tell you something stupid I did? I took the book and you know how people wear like you're a denim guy, you know this distressed jeans?
I distressed the book. I roughed it up a little bit. I made it look like this is an heirloom that's been passed down from Napoleon himself.
Did you like dog ear certain pages even though you didn't even read the thing?
Tattered, tattered, folded it like a baseball, first 30 pages, but like I made this book look like it has already won friends and influenced people.
You just put it in the back of your pocket and just walk around with it.
For people who don't know, people have heard of the book, but if it's been one of those things like, you know, like The Wire, it's like I heard it's a great show but it's kind of old now and I just I guess I'm out on that. Like if you know of the book but you haven't actually cracked into it, I could tell the quick story of it.
Dale Carnegie, he originally was a public speaker and he taught public speaking classes. Then he created a book called How to Win Friends and Influence People. And I think it's like 15 or 20 rules on how to basically make friends and make people like you. So it could be saying their name, it could be asking them questions so they do most of the talking. It's never arguing with someone because no one wins an argument when you guys fight. And there's like how many, 15 or 20 rules and it's just like an old timer book. It was released in the 1930s so it's almost 100 years old and it probably has sold 50 to 100 million copies and to this day there's the Dale Carnegie Institute which is public speaking classes and a lot of amazing people including Warren Buffett have said that that book influenced them and helped them and in fact Warren Buffett, he was an instructor at the Dale Carnegie Institute I believe.
Love it. Okay, great. And you were going to say so you've been rereading this book?
I'm rereading that one. I just got The Power of Positive Thinking. That's another one from the 1930s. I just love these old books and like I told you, I'm in the motivational phase of my life right now. I'm back at it. I just want to be influenced to be, you know, motivated and happy and all that stuff. It's a girl dad thing. You know what I'm saying? Like once you have a girl, you know, you're just emotional. And so I'm into this stuff. But there's one book that I started reading last night and I was curious about it, the author, because it just got me interested. But it's called Think and Grow Rich. Have you read Think and Grow Rich?
A classic. I've again read the first 30 pages. Loved it.
So, you've read 30 pages. You get it. So, let me tell you the story about Think and Grow Rich. Think and Grow Rich, one of the earliest self-help books. I think it predates How to Win Friends and Influence People. It sold around 100 million copies, making it one of the bestselling non-fiction books of all time. And to this day, it still regularly lands on the New York Times bestsellers list. I mean, it's a huge thing. And so basically, the story is that there's this guy named Napoleon Hill.
Can I say it wrong and you correct me? Isn't it something like he got commissioned by Carnegie?
And he went and interviewed all these people or he hung out with what was it? What is the story?
So, it's even more epic than that. So, basically, Napoleon Hill is this guy from Appalachia, came from nothing. He's this really poor kid and makes his way to New York City and he's writing an article for a magazine and he meets Andrew Carnegie who at the time, this is like Elon Musk, he's the best of the best. Andrew Carnegie runs Carnegie Steel. This is Tesla. This is the biggest company in the world by far. And he's talking to Andrew Carnegie and Napoleon was like, look, I'm just trying to figure out what makes people successful. And Andrew Carnegie goes, look son, you seem promising. I want to tell you to do something, but can you promise me you'll actually do it because I have a feeling you're not going to follow through, but if you do follow through on me, I think you're going to be really successful. And Napoleon goes, "Look, I'm desperate for success. I'll do anything you say." And Andrew, imagine Elon Musk saying, "Shaan, I need you to go out and talk to 500 people, the most successful people on earth, and I need you to tell me what made them successful because I want the world to know about this gospel. They have to know what makes people successful. And I need you to study them for the next 20 years, and I will help fund it. I will help make this a reality." Will you do that? And Napoleon goes, "Hell yeah, brother. I am in. This sounds like the world's greatest mission. Let's do it." And so Andrew Carnegie introduces him to Henry Ford. They introduce him to John Rockefeller, also one of the richest men in the world. It even introduces him to Woodrow Wilson. And then FDR, the president of the United States. And Napoleon Hill spends a decade or two writing this book. And it becomes Think and Grow Rich. And it basically distills down all of the amazing stuff that makes someone successful. And it goes even further after this book because Napoleon Hill got to meet all these presidents. He basically was there when Woodrow Wilson negotiated the end of World War I and he helped like give Woodrow Wilson like the speech that he needed to convince Germany to like, you know, back down. And then it goes even further. Do you remember the famous line from FDR? He says, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. You know who wrote that line?
Napoleon Hill, baby. He wrote that for him. He...
Yeah. Pretty amazing, right?
Fingerprints are all over this country. He shaped America.
What? What do you mean none of it's true?
Everything I just told you is a lie. Except for Think and Grow Rich. Amazing book. One of the bestselling books of all time. Everything else totally false.
All right. I read a ton. I would say almost a book a week. And the reason I read so much is because my philosophy towards reading is I want to see what worked for the winners that I love and what strategies they use. And then I want to see what mistakes did they all make, what were the common flaws that they all had and I just want to avoid that. And so HubSpot asked me to put together a list of the books that have changed my life. And I did that. And so I listed out seven books that made a meaningful difference in my life. And I explained what the differences that they had on me or what actions I took because of the book. And then also I listed out my very particular ways of reading because I'm pretty strategic about how I read and how I read so much and how I remember what I read and things like that. And so I put this together in a very simple guide. It's seven books that had a huge impact on my life. And you can scan the QR code below if you want to read it or there's a link. You guys know what to do. There's a link in the description. Just go ahead and click it and you'll see the guide that I made. So, it's the seven books that had a massive change in my life and then also how I'm able to read so much. So, check it out below.
So, what do you mean? Where did this come from?
Listen to this. So, Napoleon Hill originally was called Oliver Napoleon Hill. That was his name. Married someone at the age of...
Yes. Married someone at the age of 16 or 17. Eventually gets divorced because he goes broke and spends all of his money on prostitutes. Starts a lumber company and he gets arrested for fraud. Gets arrested again for stealing a bunch of cars. And if you go to the MBD master document, I actually list his rap sheet. So he got in trouble in 1908 for lumber fraud. In 1908 again, he gets arrested for cashing fake checks. In 1909, he creates this thing called the Automobile College, which teaches kids how to work on cars. Turns out he actually kind of teaches them how to go and sell the course. So, it's a multi-level marketing scheme and he gets run out of town because he runs off with a lot of money. Gets arrested again in 1910 for car theft and just like a history of just like literally been in jail. We're talking like 15 or 20 times. And he comes out with this. I mean, he just tries business after business after business. He literally tries like 15 businesses. They all fail. He marries a woman. He convinces the woman's parents to loan him money for this like farm or something he wants to start that goes broke, bankrupt, and he divorces the woman. I mean...
Yeah. Like really bad. And so in the 1930s...
So did the Carnegie part happen at all? Did he even interview any of these people?
So Carnegie died in 1919. And in the 1930s he comes out with this book. He had written a bunch of books already that none of them were hits. This particular one was a hit. And he tells the story of meeting Andrew Carnegie and how Andrew Carnegie asked him to do this. There's zero proof that he met Andrew Carnegie. And Andrew Carnegie, I've read actually three biographies on him. I got married at Carnegie Hall because I loved him so much. The book comes out I think in 1929. Carnegie has been dead for 10 years and David Nasaw, who wrote the best biography on Carnegie, they're like, "Dude, Carnegie documented everything. There's no proof that he..."
Said no, or Carnegie didn't say anything about this. What about the people in Wilson and FDR and...
None of it happened. He'd never met any of these guys.
Well, so here's the thing. People did debunk it later on, but it's sort of like R. Kelly and his music. You could separate the art from the artist. Do you know what I mean? Like I can still listen to the music and acknowledge that it's good music. But a lot of his, the book was so good and I could talk about some of the stuff in the book. It was so good that it's known that he was a fraudster and that all of this story is completely fake. But the book is actually so good that he didn't get a pass, but people acknowledge the book's great and also he's full of [__]. So in the book there's actually a bunch of amazing stuff. For example, have you heard of the term mastermind?
He created that. So he came up with this idea.
Probably not. Probably lies. Probably all lies. You think I believe that?
Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, don't fool me again. That's a Napoleon Hill term.
So he created this idea of, I mean...
He popularized it at least.
Popularized it, but I think it's the first time that someone has ever said the word mastermind or at least published it. He did a bunch of amazing stuff. So in the book he says that you need to have a specific goal. You need to write it down and you need to repeat it to yourself every single day twice a day. That's been proven to be true. Like there's a lot of research that shows like if you write down goals, you repeat it to yourself, you are something like two times more likely to achieve your goal. Another thing that he said was like this idea of persistence and grit and he like goes through tons and tons of chapters of like the importance of persistence and grit. Angela Duckworth, I think we talked about it, has this book called Grit and it's also been proven that grit is more likely to make you succeed than IQ. And then there's other parts where he talks about like daily affirmations and like this is all woo-woo stuff, but this is like proven to be true that if you like affirm that you're going to be successful and all these things, you are actually more likely to be successful. And so he actually does have a lot of amazing stuff. There is some other weird stuff. He talks about how like sexual energy is the most powerful energy on earth and you need to harness it. There's a bunch of weird stuff in there, but there's a lot of really amazing stuff. And so when I read about his background, I just thought it was like one of the craziest things that I've ever read about because it's so in-depth about how he just lied about the entire backstory. His whole life basically is a lie. Oh, and by the way, I have to add, if you read the book, have you noticed how he mentions the secret?
I don't remember that, but yeah. Okay.
Okay. So, in the book, he talks about there's the secret to success. There is in fact a secret. Andrew Carnegie, the most successful man on earth, he conveniently dropped the secret into my pocket. And that's what I want to talk about. Well, in the book Think and Grow Rich, he never actually outlines the secret or sorry, he never like explicitly says what it is. But what he does say is he goes, "I've written another book about this, the secret, and I've outlined it like perfectly. I made it incredibly clear." Now, the thing is, is like I'm not even going to tell you the name of the book. It's going to come to you when you need it. And it was called, this book was called The Law of Success. And it was a 14-volume course that you had to buy. It was very expensive. And so the book Think and Grow Rich, it's just the front door offer. It's like the cheap version. So like the $10 book that upsells you on the $2,000 course. And so this is like one of the early versions of like an unclosed loop, like an open loop to like get people to go and buy stuff and then you could go and buy his seminars. And so his marketing prowess was like pretty amazing. And it totally worked. Napoleon Hill became like a seminar company and it actually was somewhat successful before he stole a bunch of money and got in trouble for fraud, but his marketing was amazing and the book actually has a lot of amazing stuff. But the whole backstory completely fake and he's a total con man.
That's pretty wild. Similar to like what's going on with the Jay Shetty thing, right? You seen this?
No. You know Jay Shetty? He's like me with green eyes.
Yeah, he's a very attractive guy, very popular. His backstory is that he's a monk. I was a monk, you know, I was in trouble. I blah blah blah and I went and I became a monk in India or Nepal or something. And then one day, and this is where I knew the story was [__] immediately. One day, guess what happened? A monk at the monastery comes to him and says, "You're not meant to be here. You're meant to do bigger things in this world. You're meant to go back to America and start a podcast" essentially is what he told him. You know, you're meant to go popularize this monk wisdom. Which I mean, come on. Do we really think that a monk broke his silence and just randomly went up to him and was like, "No, no, no. You are supposed to go do this other thing." Like, how convenient. How convenient.
We need you to start a seminar company, Jay.
Yeah, it's [__]. But basically, I think it's questionable. I think even if he was a monk, if he ever did like a stint as a monk, like being a monk, I think, is also like quite a long-term commitment versus like I did a 7-day retreat at a thing or whatever. So, I think that part's questionable. Definitely the part about the monk telling him like your purpose in life is to go do this other thing. That's [__].
He's only 38 years old and he's been famous for like 10 years.
So, I'm just waiting for it to be revealed he wears colored contacts. That's going to be the final straw for me.
It is. But basically, you know, and then they're like, "Oh, he has this degree." And it's like, "Oh, wait. He didn't actually have that college degree. In fact, he has his own school that gives their own certificates for 10 grand." And that's where he got his certification from. It's like the whole thing, you know, starts to fall over. But you know what? Like the things he says, right, he took old ideas, he repopularized them in his book. You know, his podcast, he gets people to open up and he's a good podcaster, you know? So, it's hard, right? And the art from the artist as you said and so I think it's very very similar.
He was the officiant of JLo and Ben Affleck's wedding.
They're like you are meant to officiate celebrity weddings. I met a guy who was like his brand coach like early on and I was like, tell me is this real? He was like, I have... he knew better than to ask. I was like, "Okay, sounds good."
I can't tell if the self-help industry actually has a higher percentage of this sort of like fraud and fakery. And there's something about the nature of wanting to be a guru that is attractive. It's kind of like politics, right? The people who seek power tend to be people who are flawed in certain ways. The people who deserve power don't seek it. And so I wonder if it's the same thing with like the kind of self-help guru space or if it's a bias where you just really remember the cases where they turn out to be frauds because it's so damning, right, given the front that they present. And so maybe it's just that it actually strikes a bigger chord or is it actually more frequent? I don't know.
I know a bunch of self-help people and I know that the majority of them...
What does that mean? Who do you know? What are you talking about? How many self-help people are there?
I mean, first of all, some people look to us as self-help people to be honest. So, like we run in circles with people that like at least have a book that are in the self-help category, right? Like, and I know that like when I see them, I'm like, "You son of a [__]. You built this into existence." And I don't think, I don't know anyone who I would say they're fraudulent, but it just like you're just painting the best picture of the reality. Which I don't think is necessarily wrong, but who do you know, if anyone that's in the self-help industry, that you think is totally legitimate?
Well, let me give you the nuance here. What does legit mean? So, what I don't mean by legit is you live a perfect life because no one does. So, that's not the criteria. If that's the criteria, then nobody should ever, there is no such thing as this. The second is that well you had these problems and that's why you're, you know, you had these problems. Look at your broken past. So it's like your present doesn't need to be perfect. Neither does your past. Because of course the people who get really into self-help are the people who needed it, right? They're the people who they had the pain, they had the wound and therefore they went and studied. Therefore when they overcame, they have the deepest mastery and understanding of it because they actually like self-actualized, self did it. So I don't hold it against anybody also if they had, you know, sort of a broken past. The only thing I think is bogus is if the things you preach don't actually help people or they're like a lower form of success or you're sort of helping, this is sort of like the Andrew Tate problem, right? Like he might, or even to an extent, you know, there's people who are like fitness people who it's all about the grind and suffering or there's business success people who again it's all about the grind and suffering and so you're actually giving people a dirty form of fuel, right? You're giving them a, you're popularizing a path that is not actually the best method, right? It's like giving medicine that's, you know, not as effective as the leading medicine when the leading medicine exists. Like as a doctor, you really shouldn't be prescribing like medicines that are not as effective. You should be prescribing whatever the most effective thing is in the market. So that's the first knock I have. And the second is you're actually lying about your past or you're lying about, you know, your present. Like the lying I think is obviously a deal breaker. It's obviously a trustbuster. So yeah, you know, that's kind of what I think. You said, "Who do I think is legit?" Okay. My honest opinion that I'm afraid to say because I think it'll immediately be attacked, but Tony Robbins I think is legit in the two definitions I just gave. One, I think his advice is extremely helpful and I think it is sort of the best medicine for a broad scale of people. So I think what he preaches is actually extremely helpful and I don't think he's lying.
What is there to lie about? What claims has he made? I've never seen evidence that he lies about like his past or whatever. You know, does he embellish or exaggerate or, you know, like conveniently trim the timelines for the story? I have no idea. I don't go audit that. You know, I think the criticism of him is twofold. One is like, did he get me to like, did he do that stuff? I don't know what that situation is. And the second is, is it a cult? Like, is he almost so effective that it becomes like a cult? Like he's sort of an abuse of power, like people are falling so far into his rabbit hole that like somehow that's a negative thing. I personally got a lot of value from it. So like I guess that's my bias on this.
I've read his books. I like him. I don't know anything about his personal life though. A person who I could say is totally legitimate and this is based off of me hanging out with him for collectively eight hours so not that much time but also talking to dozens of his employees. Gary Vaynerchuk.
Gary Vaynerchuk. Interesting. I have nothing but positive things to say about Gary Vaynerchuk. And he's one of these guys who gets criticized for hustle culture. I think he works actually that hard, which you could argue is not good, but everything that I've seen him say online, I have heard his employees who have worked with him for years back it up and say it was totally legitimate and he's a wonderful man.
I have another one, Jesse Itzler. I've now spent a lot of time with Jesse Itzler and you know if you think about when you meet people there's sort of, think of it like in math terms, there's like the y-intercept which is where the line starts, it's like how high up does it start, that's usually your expectations or their reputation. You know, people, you know, we met like Tai Lopez and we met the guy from Fyre Festival, right? So they're low on the y-intercept, you come in with an extremely negative perception. And there's other people who you come in with extremely positive perception of, like, are they really as good as it is. And then there's the slope of the line from there. Does it slope downward? Does it slope upward? Jesse's one of the few people that I came in with a high expectation and then he's only ever beat it. Like, and I've been to his house. I've met his family, his kids. I've done multiple like kind of events where he came and we hung out. We've done podcasts together. Like I'm not his best friend. I'm not with him all the time, but every time I'm around this guy, I'm like, "Wow, he's the real deal Holyfield. This is really like he lives what he preaches." And he's just a genuinely good dude. Like genuinely there for you. And I just haven't been able to detect the normal flaws that come with this sort of stuff, whether it's narcissism or it's extreme self-interest and they're money motivated underneath the hood or they're fame motivated or they're really protective of their image or they kind of have this like weird tendency to like brag or dominate the room or you know things like that. He's got none of that [__]. And I've literally asked him, I'm like, "How did you slay the money monster? You don't seem like you're the only guy in this room that's not just still chasing more and more and more on success or how did you, you know, they were talking about this and you actually have done more than all of them in the room, but you didn't say anything." He's like, "Well, I didn't feel a need to like, why do I, I don't need to prove something, I didn't need, why would I have needed to do that? I was there to learn. I wanted to learn. I wanted to hear." And I was like, "Wow, this guy's just showing up in a great way." All right. Can I talk to you about one more thing? Check this out.
All right. Sam puts this photo here of this extremely jacked man who's clearly a bodybuilder. Clearly some sort of athlete. Clearly that's his profession.
Do you know who that guy is?
This is the OpenClaw guy, right?
Is that incredible? Okay. So, could you tell the backstory of OpenClaw because it's a pretty amazing thing and I think you actually know a lot more about it than I do.
So, there's a guy named Pete. So he's an Austrian dude. He learns to code. He builds like a PDF side project of sorts called PDFKit and it actually becomes like the gold standard for like a PDF library for developers. It's used by like Apple and Box and DocuSign. And he basically bootstraps the thing. He ends up selling a majority stake. I think he sold it for a lot of money like $100 million.
Tries to retire early. He's like golf sucks. Has an existential life crisis like what do I want to do? Decides, all right, I'm going to keep building. That's what I enjoy doing. So, he starts building open source projects. He launches like, you know, 40, 50 different open-source small little tools or projects before this. And then he decides to create like Jarvis from the movies. He's like, why don't I just have an AI assistant that lives on my computer like on my desk and I just tell it to do things and it could just do it. And the problem with most AI tools before this was that they, you know, you could talk to, you could go to that AI app and you could talk to it and it could tell you things, but it couldn't do a whole lot, right? Because it didn't have access to your different apps and your accounts and it couldn't message somebody. It couldn't send money. It...
couldn't control this. It couldn't control that. And he was like, 'Forget it. I'm going to give it god mode. I'm going to give it access to this stuff.' And the reason why I can do that is I'll put it on my own little computer here instead of in the cloud and it'll run as an open source project locally on my computer. So he releases this thing initially called Claudebot and then Anthropic, who makes Claude, was like, 'Hey, we kindly suggest you change your name if you want to ever see your mother again' or something, you know. So he gets forced to change, he changes it once, twice, and it ends up becoming OpenClaw. So it becomes one of the fastest growing GitHub projects ever. Twitter goes nuts over this thing, it starts a revolution, people are buying Mac minis, the price of Mac minis is going through the roof, and then recently he gets acquired by OpenAI for an undisclosed sum of money that people speculate could be a very large sum of money. Is this a one-person billion-dollar acquisition? We don't know. We don't know what this is. And now he's part of OpenAI. So that's the story.
That's what people online were saying. They said it was a billion dollars, but I have no idea if that's true.
What's crazy is you talked, I think last year, you said the word of 2025 is generative. So Ari, do me a favor, share your screen again and click his GitHub link. Look at how many projects this guy has put out with the last one being OpenClaw. But is that amazing how many projects or little products that this guy tried to make before he got to the huge win?
It's not shocking. Let me put it that way. I think it's awesome, but it's not shocking because this is a pattern you'll see over and over and over again, which is that the people who are the best, they make the best quality stuff, tend to also make the highest quantity of stuff. They just take a lot of shots on goal. They're prolific. They're generative. Often it's because they start earlier, but even if it's not that they start earlier, they just attempt more than you. And that's a good example. In fact, Levels had this great tweet about his hit rate.
Levels being Peter Levels, who we've had on the pod, and he's kind of helped invent this word of indie hacker. He probably...
I would say he's the most famous indie hacker,
and he does something like $2 million a year with just him making a lot of these projects. And he's pretty amazing.
All right, so check this out. Same tweet, same idea from Levels. So he says, 'Four out of the 70-plus projects I did ever made money and grew. 95% of everything I did failed. My hit rate is only 5%. So ship more.' And then he had basically a list. He's like, all projects. And then he has projects that made good money and grew: Nomad List, Remote Talk, Breease, and a YouTube network for electronic music. Those are the four out of 70 that he did to try to make this successful. I've joked before he's like the Jordan logo for indie hackers, which is him sitting on a couch, shirt off in his boxers, just typing on a laptop, sitting in Bali or whatever. And he basically showed that he has a 90-something percent failure rate, that it took him whatever, 50-plus projects before he had a hit, and you know, all the revenue, all the success comes from like, you know, three or four projects that he did out of such a long list.
Incredible. I don't view myself as a prolific person.
I think you're blind to it, dude. Here's projects I know that you've done, just projects, right? Sam's attempts to make and be successful. Okay. Hot dog stand. Next one. Moonshine company selling moonshine stuff online, right? Book club that you did in San Francisco. Events business, newsletter business, blogging business, paid subscription business, Airbnb rental business, Airbnb community, mastermind community. That's, I'm on 10 and it's been 10 seconds, right? I don't even know half the stuff that you've done.
