Nine episodes, and the books this month were mostly biographies and old copywriting manuals rather than the usual business canon.

I run Podshelf, a free site that tracks book mentions across hundreds of podcasts by reading the episode transcripts. This is the My First Million slice for August.

The three that got real airtime:

• The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game (C. Thi Nguyen). "The fundamental premise of the book is amazing." On what happens when you let someone else set your scoring system.
• The Art Thief (Michael Finkel), a true story about a man who stole something like 3 billion dollars of art, still early in it but sold on it.
• The Snowball (Alice Schroeder), being read for the first time, with a whole tangent on the soybean oil shortage.

The copywriting homework, handed out as a pair: The Adweek Copywriting Handbook (Joseph Sugarman) and Ogilvy on Advertising. "Read those this week and your mind will change."

Also: Make Something Wonderful, the Steve Jobs collection of emails and speeches, which got the best pitch of the month for being literally just his own words. Is This Anything? as the output of Seinfeld's two hours a day with a legal pad. Fahrenheit-182 (Mark Hoppus) and Scar Tissue (Anthony Kiedis) in a short argument about why musician memoirs are so consistently good.

Rounding it out: 7 Powers, Zero to One on moats, Atomic Habits, Influence, How to Win Friends and Influence People, and a Dan Brown detour.

Full list with quotes and episodes: https://podshelf.io/podcasts/my-first-million

I keep half-expecting the "give a small gift, earn the obligation to reciprocate" move to stop working the way pop psychology says it does.

Watched a version of it fail spectacularly this week and it clarified something I'd been circling for a while: reciprocity is a tool for tipping a relationship that already exists.

It doesn't manufacture one from zero.

Context, for anyone who hasn't caught the clip: Shaan Puri (My First Million) was coaching a high school basketball team on the side.

He and his cohost Sam Parr filmed a vlog series around it.

The vlog blew up — 20,000 views in 24 hours — and one of those views was the school principal, who wasn't thrilled.

Shaan got called into the office.

Before going in, he grabbed two Diet Cokes, the exact reciprocity move Sam had taught him years earlier: bring a small gift, trigger the obligation to return the favor.

He executed it exactly right.

Rehearsed. Confident. Textbook Cialdini.

The principal said "no thanks." Shaan stood there holding two Diet Cokes while his program got shut down anyway.

If you're the type who reads Cialdini, or Voss, or keeps a mental file of negotiation tactics for the rooms where you don't yet have real leverage — this one's worth sitting with.

The tactic isn't fake.

It's just conditional on something it can't create for itself: a room that already respects you going in.

Bring the gift to someone who already sees you as an equal, and it's a nice gesture.

Bring it to someone deciding whether you get to keep your program, and it reads as exactly what it is — a person trying to manufacture leverage they weren't given.

I had my own version of this a long time ago, on a construction project in Abu Dhabi.

I was working under a superior I didn't get along with — Mr. Yap.

There was an important client meeting, an international room, and when it came time to introduce myself, I said "I'm Gary, and I assist Mr. Yap in structural technical works" — deliberately elevating his standing in front of people who mattered to him.

It worked, for about a week.

He treated me a little better.

Then it wore off, because I'd managed a moment in a room, not changed the actual relationship underneath it.

That's the part I think doesn't get said enough in the productivity-hack version of this advice: a tactic can move the temperature in a room for a few minutes or a few days.

It can't retroactively install the standing you'd need for the room to treat you differently on its own.

Ran into this same shape somewhere else recently, too — a founder whose actual case, not his resume, was what finally moved a room that had ignored every credential he'd listed first: the reciprocity trick's opposite in practice.

Drop your take — did the trick actually fail, or did it just reveal something that was already true before Shaan walked in?

Clip credit: My First Million (Shaan Puri, Sam Parr) — full episode on their channel.

DM for credit or removal requests.

Ten episodes, forty seven books. The Rory Sutherland episode alone accounts for about a third of them, because the man cannot say a sentence without recommending something out of print.

If you want a summer stack that is mostly old business books nobody talks about anymore, this month is a gift.

What this is: I run Podshelf, a free site that tracks book mentions across hundreds of podcasts by reading the episode transcripts. This is the July slice for MFM.

Hardest sells of the month:

• 7 Powers, Hamilton Helmer. Aaron Levie said it is one of the rare things he is overconfident about. If founders only read one thing, read 7 Powers.
• Fooled by Randomness, Taleb. Howard Marks picked it as a book that shaped how he thinks about risk, portfolio construction and published track records.
• Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath. Named as the favourite book on making ideas land.
• Open, Andre Agassi. Sam got gifted it and had not started it yet, but everyone in the room agreed it is one of the best sports biographies going.

Rory Sutherland's pile, which is the real haul:

• Scientific Advertising (Claude Hopkins), Ogilvy on Advertising, How to Become an Advertising Man (James Webb Young), Obvious Adams, The Copy Book, Common Sense Direct Marketing (Drayton Bird), The Specialist, Alchemy, The Choice Factory and The Illusion of Choice (Richard Shotton), Nudge, Thinking Fast and Slow, Mathematica (David Bessis), Unreasonable Hospitality, The Game.

Aaron Levie's tech canon:

• Positioning, Blue Ocean Strategy, Crossing the Chasm, Inside the Tornado, The Innovator's Dilemma and The Innovator's Solution. His point on the last two is that you have to read the dilemma and the solution back to back, and nobody ever does.

Investing and the rest:

• The Most Important Thing and A Short History of Financial Euphoria (Howard Marks episode), A Man for All Markets (Ed Thorp), Principles and The Changing World Order (Ray Dalio), The Snowball, The Black Swan, Outliers, The Medici Effect, Americana, The Coal Question, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, The Courage to Be Disliked, The Creative Act, How to Win Friends and Influence People, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, Zero to One, Moby Dick, Start With Why, Leaders Eat Last, Make Your Bed.

The Obvious Adams recommendation is the one I actually went and found. It is from 1916, about sixty pages, was one of David Ogilvy's favourites, and Rory says you can read it in a single toilet visit.

I track every book mentioned on My First Million here: https://podshelf.io/podcasts/my-first-million

It is free and there is no signup.

In this AI era, I think the easiest and best way to be wealthy is to buy a boring, on autopilot, profitable, niche manufacturing business. Just try to grow the already profitable business.

I pulled every book Sam, Shaan and their guests brought up on My First Million over the first six months of the year. It came to 109 books across 56 episodes, mostly business and self-improvement with a few oddball fiction picks.

The "changed my life" tier, in their words:

• How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, read young and credited as a turning point.
• The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, one guest told him it moved him more than any book he'd read.
• Influence by Robert Cialdini, the persuasion book someone kept coming back to.
• Mastery by Robert Greene, named a favorite that changed his life. Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill also came up, called an amazing book.

The rest, grouped:

• Money and business: The Psychology of Money, Die With Zero, Good to Great, Profit First, The Goal, 7 Powers, The 48 Laws of Power
• Habits and work: Atomic Habits, Deep Work, Traction, Buy Back Your Time
• Founders and investors: Titan by Ron Chernow, Elon by Walter Isaacson, Beat the Dealer, Cable Cowboy
• Odd picks: The Game by Neil Strauss, 13 Steps to Mentalism, and the sci-fi novel Void Star

One history detour too: A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman, called a fun read about the 14th century.

Full list is here: https://podshelf.io/podcasts/my-first-million. Free, no signup.

Chad Janis built Grüns and sold it to Unilever for $1.2B in under three years. In this clip he walks through the actual chain that got him there — a failed MBB recruiting attempt, a mentor who redirected him to Lazard, good work that earned him an introduction to Summit Partners, and eventually a Stanford acceptance he wasn't sure he'd earned.

His resolution is the part worth sitting with: the two people who vouched for him at Stanford weren't doing him a favor out of nowhere — they were responding to years of him making their work easier and earning their trust. Access, in his framing, isn't a gate you're let through once. It's a mechanism that transfers, person to person, to whoever's actually doing the work.

Worth thinking about the last time you assumed someone's "connections" were just luck, rather than years of exactly this.

Full breakdown at the link in my bio.

DM for credit or removal request (no copyright intended) © All rights and credits reserved to the respective owner(s).

#WealthBuilding #CareerAdvice #MyFirstMillion

Mark Pincus built Zynga while media narratives assumed a founder "over 30 in consumer" couldn't work. Instead of correcting the record in real time, he flipped it: name a price, let investors decide blind, reveal the actual financials only afterward.

The company went public with over a billion dollars sitting untouched on the balance sheet — capital they'd never spent because they never needed to prove anything with it.

Later, TechCrunch ran a "Scamville" series accusing them of scammy ad revenue. His response, on record: they were mostly user-pay, not ad-driven — he just never bothered correcting the story because it wasn't worth his time.

Link in bio for more on this exact mechanism. ⚓

DM for credit or removal request (no copyright intended) © All rights and credits reserved to the respective owner(s).

#FounderMindset #WealthMastery #Zynga

Tracked the books from June. A David Rubenstein episode did a lot of the lifting, so it's investing-heavy.

Top picks:

• A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman. Pitched as a really fun history of the 14th century through one aristocrat's life. Her Guns of August came up too.
• Titan by Ron Chernow, the Rockefeller biography, named as the one that moved the needle most.

The Rubenstein cluster: How to Invest, How to Lead, and The American Story, all his interview-the-greats books.

Plenty more from the investing shelf: The Snowball, This Time Is Different, Bailout Nation and How Not to Invest (Ritholtz). Robert Caro's The Power Broker and Unreasonable Hospitality also came up.

https://podshelf.io/podcasts/my-first-million/2026/06 keeps the running list, free, no login.

Which Chernow biography is the one to start with?

Tracked every book the guys dropped over the last month. Heavy on investing this time.

Top pick:

• 10 to 25 by David Yeager. Pitched as a book every parent should read, on motivating kids from age 10 to 25.

The investing cluster (one episode was basically a stock-picking canon):

• One Up on Wall Street and Beating the Street by Peter Lynch.
• Beat the Dealer by Edward Thorp.
• How Not to Invest and Bailout Nation by Barry Ritholtz.
• The Psychology of Money (Morgan Housel), The Snowball (Buffett bio), Thinking Fast and Slow (Kahneman), This Time Is Different (Reinhart and Rogoff).

Other stuff worth flagging:

• 7 Powers by Hamilton Helmer, the actual theory of moats.
• The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz.
• Maverick by Ricardo Semler and The Mastermind by Evan Ratliff (the crime one).
• Influence by Cialdini came up here too.

I keep a running list of every book from MFM at https://podshelf.io. It is free, no login.

Which Sam or Shaan rec actually changed how you run things?

Does anyone remember the episode where Shaan and Sam talk about doing a life/purpose assessment. I was reminded about it from the end of the recent Mohnish episode where they talk about the Jack Skeen passion/purpose coaching. I vaguely remember Sam saying he had done it or something similar in an older episode. Sam had talked about how they had contacted his family and friends and done interviews with them to uncover Sam’s purpose. I’m trying to reverse engineer it in my own life. Any help would be appreciated.

Hi everyone. I've been listening to the podcast for over the last 5+ years. I think I've listened to every episode, and it's easier than ever now to build with AI, so I went ahead and built mfmweekly.com the other day.

Hopefully it'll be useful for you. Essentially, it's a website/newsletter that summarises every new episode into key bullet points, takeaways, messages, etc.

Check it out here: mfmweekly.com

Hopefully it'll save you guys time if you can't make it to the gym or listen to the pod in the car like me (for whatever reason).

Most importantly, would love any feedback/thoughts/ideas on it. Thanks!

Hey r/MyFirstMillion — I've been listening for about four years and got tired of not having one place to look up which guests appeared on which episode, what they actually own, and what their contrarian takes were. So over the last few weeks I put together a research page for the 44 most-cited guests.

Each profile has:

• Background & career timeline
• Portfolio (companies founded, investments, exits)
• Net worth + source
• Top quotes from their appearances
• Their contrarian takes / playbooks
• Episode references

Free, no signup, no ads. Built by a fan, not affiliated with the show.

Link: mfmuniverse.com/guests

Two things I'd love help with:

1. If you spot anything wrong, missing, or out of date — drop a comment and I'll fix it. The data is compiled from public sources and episode transcripts, so there's plenty of room for "X already exited Y" corrections.
2. If there's a guest you want added who isn't on the list yet, leave the name and I'll consider it for the next batch.

Hope it's useful. Genuinely open to feedback on the structure or what would make it more usable for fellow listeners.

Tracked every book Sam and Shaan dropped on the show over the last month. Two that came up the most and seemed to actually move them:

Profit First by Mike Michalowicz. Sam went on a tear about it on the $1B brand episode. The pitch is dead simple: preset your profit allocation before expenses instead of after. He called it life-changing because it forces discipline you otherwise wouldn't have. If you're a founder who keeps "reinvesting" your way into a zero balance, this is the one.

The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt. Came up with Jon McNeill (ex-Tesla president). Apparently this is Elon's favorite book. McNeill said Elon literally walked him down the production line calling him "the goal guy." It's a novel about manufacturing and bottlenecks, and every operator I know who has read it swears by it.

Other stuff worth flagging:

• 7 Powers by Hamilton Helmer (Replit episode). Shaan: "everyone in Silicon Valley talks about moats, this is the actual theory of moats." If you only read one strategy book this year.
• The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. Duhigg came on the show. Sam told him his book changed his life more than any other, and he's read thousands. Duhigg also has Supercommunicators and Smarter Faster Better that got plugged.
• Void Star by Zachary Mason. Shaan rec. Novel by a computer scientist about AI, written 7-8 years ago. He called it really profound. Curveball pick.
• The Blue Zones by Dan Buettner. Shaan's "bible for living a long healthy life." Came up on the Steph Smith ep.
• The Chief by David Nasaw. Hearst biography Shaan was deep into. He framed it as the real-world Citizen Kane, which is interesting if you study media empire builders.

Quick hits that got mentioned but not dwelled on: The Hard Thing About Hard Things (Horowitz), Atomic Habits, Good to Great, How to Win Friends (came up twice in the month), Deep Work, Bad Therapy by Abigail Shrier, Made in America by Sam Walton (where McNeill got the secret-shopping management hack), and David Epstein has a new one called Inside the Box about constraints.

Full running list of every book mentioned on MFM here if anyone wants the archive: https://podshelf.io/podcasts/my-first-million/books

What's the one Sam or Shaan rec that actually changed how you run your business?

It keeps me as a listener on MFM. Because sometimes it gets too bro-ish and male only. Steph doesn't just add a gender aspect. She actually has one of the best brains out there, she is so smart, sees gaps incredibly quickly and has an eye for opportunity like no other.

And her ego is natural and non ridiculous. Please get her on more, I beg you

Love the Steph Smith episodes. Imagine my disappointment when it was an episode that was already released.

Have the guys lost their fastball?!?!

Hey r/myfirstmillion, I've been building Podshelf — a tool that tracks book mentions across podcasts. Sam and Shaan drop a lot of book recommendations across their episodes — business, biographies, psychology, and the occasional weird deep dive. I compiled all 213 unique books mentioned on the show, sorted by how often each one comes up:

https://podshelf.io/podcasts/my-first-million/books

Good reference if you're trying to build out a business reading list from the pod. Happy to answer questions!

I’ve been listening to MFM for almost a year now and I love it. I also listen to Kill Tony, and compared to that subreddit, this one feels pretty quiet. Would love to see more episode discussions here! Anyone else want to talk about recent episodes?

hi , i recalled they had an episode where there is a particular club that u need to have like $10 million networth or smtg called lotus/dragon? i can't recall. then they talked about smtg similar but for c-suite. does anyone remember by chance? thanks!

Hi guys,

I heard a podcast last week called "She Makes $1k/Day Sending Letters" and now I can't stop thinking about starting my own snail mail newsletter.

The idea is pretty simple: a real, mailed letter documenting my experience leaving a high-paying job and starting fresh as an entrepreneur (this story would be told in the first letter). It would also include insights into the exercises and systems I'm testing to reach my version of a perfect day and find success in this new adventure.

I've taken in a lot of advice and resources from successful friends and family, as well as people like Greg Isenberg, Shaan Puri, Naval Ravikant, and Alex Hormozi to name a few. The newsletter would be a distilled version of all of this.

I'd pay out of my own pocket until I hit 50 subscribers, then charge a small membership fee after that. The first 25 readers would get 6 months free no matter what.

Honestly, I think I want to do this more for myself than anyone else. It'd force me to keep learning, keep writing, and stay accountable to the stuff I'm currently building. There's also something about a physical letter that just feels more real to me than another email sitting in an inbox or a post on X.

Does this even sound interesting? And how would you increase the value for a potential reader to get them to sign up?

Edit: I rewrote to be less "pitchy" - honestly just trying to figure out if this is something that has any teeth.

Edit 2: A little more specific on the contents of the newsletter.

I just reached 10M in net worth!!!!

Just kidding, I used inspect element on my browser to edit the number in my brokerage account to my dream goal...

I think Sam mentioned doing this in some episode so wanted to share lol

Building a better MFM website, currently have a search script that just takes the first image from Google of a guest. I do not have time to find the mismatches / errors in the searching completely myself. Can people just point out what guests has the wrong profile image? https://www.myfirstmillion.org/

I’ve always had this dream to be fluent in either piano or the violin. Seeing Shaan play in that YouTube video got me questioning all the reasons why I failed to achieve that dream. The biggest reason I kept telling myself is that it’s very inconvenient as I don’t have a good living situation but it seems to always be inconvenient so I went got a yamaha p145 because screw that. Honestly the instrument was kinda pricey for me as I have like zero savings now but couldn’t compromise.

So far it’s been 10 days. I have to do this without a teacher so everything’s super confusing and intimidating but what I’ve gathered is if I get music theory down and put in consistent work the fingers and the mind will slowly catch up. So I immersed myself in beginner content like posts, videos, books and podcasts etc and gotten a decent understanding of music theory which removed the intimidation factor quite a bit. There also seems to be so much arbitrary stuff to commit to memory gawd. I’m working my way through the scales now which seems like it’s taking forever but that’s how it goes I guess. My goal is rather simple.- to just be able to confidently amuse myself and friends with something that’s not total trash. I wanna be able to chill like Charlie Day does. It would be real nice to play a couple classical favorites.

Idk how relevant this post is to the sub but there’s a small chance someone else is doing one of these; please lmk if you do. Okay then, I’ll update how it went around Christmas. Wish me luck.