The best My First Million episodes are the short ones
We broke twenty-six My First Million episodes into individual tactics, then ranked them by how many usable plays you get per hour of listening.
The result surprised us. The top of the list is not the famous guests. It is the short episodes.
Number one is a twenty-four minute solo where Shaan reads out ten years of notes. Number two is a twenty-seven minute trip to Jesse Itzler's house to plan a year. Ray Dalio, running a full hour, comes third. Howard Marks is fifth. Palmer Luckey, ninety-three minutes on selling Oculus to Facebook, is last out of twenty-six.
That is not a knock on Palmer Luckey. It is what happens when you measure a specific thing: how many do-this-now plays you get for each hour you spend listening. Long interviews spend their length on story, and story is why you listen to them. Short episodes have no room for story, so they spend everything on the plays.
One number, one sentence: tactics per hour.
Ten Years of Money Wisdom, Shaan solo
17.7 tactics per hour. 7 tactics in 24 minutes.
The densest episode in our entire catalog, across every show. It is Shaan alone, reading out the money lessons he has written down over a decade, with almost no setup between them. Nothing gets explained twice.
The rule worth stealing is the one about raises. Live dramatically below your income by saving most of the difference every time your income goes up, rather than letting lifestyle absorb it. It is a percentage, not a sentiment, which is why it survives.
The counterintuitive one, and it turned up again in a completely different context when we looked across shows: your biggest financial decision is who you marry.
This is also the free one, so you can check whether we are right about it without signing up for anything.
Jesse Itzler, planning an epic year
13.6 tactics per hour. 6 tactics in 27 minutes.
Itzler co-founded Marquis Jet and owns a piece of the Atlanta Hawks. Shaan flew to his house to plan the year, and the episode is short because it has a job to do.
Two things transfer directly. Schedule one deliberately uncomfortable thing per month, on the calendar, in advance. And the rule Itzler is best known for: do one more unit before you stop, whatever the unit is.
The counterintuitive part is the anti-hustle argument. Build businesses around your life rather than businesses that become your life. Coming from someone with his track record, it lands differently than it would from a productivity account.
Ray Dalio
11.9 tactics per hour. 12 tactics in 61 minutes.
Dalio founded Bridgewater and made it the largest hedge fund in the world. The highest-ranking long interview on the list, and it earns it by being relentlessly specific.
The Holy Grail is the one people quote: assemble around fifteen uncorrelated return streams and the maths of risk changes underneath you. Then the freedom number, which is less famous and more immediately useful. Write down the exact figure you would need, not a range. A range is a way of avoiding the question.
The counterintuitive part: he hires on values first, abilities second, skills last. Skills come last because they are the easiest thing to acquire.
How To Get Your First 100 Customers, hosts
11.4 tactics per hour. 10 tactics in 53 minutes.
Sam and Shaan on their own, working through the problem they have both actually solved.
The concierge MVP is the whole episode in one move: do the job manually for your first ten customers before you build anything to do it for you. Then the follow-up that most people skip, which is talking to every lead that went cold and asking one honest question rather than sending a survey.
The counterintuitive part is a two-step instruction that people only ever follow halfway. Do things that do not scale, and then deliberately stop. The stopping is the part that requires discipline.
Howard Marks
10.8 tactics per hour. 8 tactics in 45 minutes.
Marks co-founded Oaktree Capital and built it on distressed debt, which means his whole career has been about being right when the consensus is wrong.
Second-level thinking, made concrete: write down what the consensus believes, then write down why you differ. If you cannot fill in the second part, you do not have a position, you have an opinion. And build the ark before the flood, which is the same idea applied to timing.
The counterintuitive part is a discipline rather than an insight. Open every conviction with an explicit admission that you could be wrong, and when the facts change, rewrite the thesis rather than amending it.
6 and 7
Pieter Levels at 10.5 tactics per hour, the solo builder behind Nomad List and PhotoAI, whose central move is publishing his live revenue publicly and treating that transparency as the growth engine. And $20M A Year With Zero Employees at 9.9, where the plays are the contractor model and the observation that price is the lever nobody touches.
Scott Galloway's If I Could Start Over Again sits just below at 9.7, and he appears three times in the twenty-six, which is more than anyone else.
The episodes worth listening to that will not leave you with a to-do list
This is the more useful half of the ranking, and it is the part a list alone hides.
The Warren Buffett episode is our most-viewed at over three million, and it ranks twenty-third out of twenty-six. Worth being precise about what it is: Mohnish Pabrai, the investor who famously copied Buffett's approach, explaining that approach. Not a Buffett interview. It is two hours of investment philosophy from someone who has actually run it, and philosophy does not decompose into steps. It is also free, so it costs nothing to see what we mean.
Palmer Luckey is last on our metric and has the richest transcript in the entire set. Flipping iPhones as a teenager to selling Oculus to Facebook for two billion. There is no version of that story that gives you homework, and asking it to would be missing the point.
Martin Shkreli and Rob Dyrdek are in the same category. One is a story about a notorious figure, the other is a personal-systems memoir. Both are genuinely interesting listens with very little you can do on Monday.
The reason to separate these out: knowing which kind of episode you are about to spend ninety minutes on is useful. Sometimes you want a checklist. Sometimes you want to understand how somebody thinks. The mistake is starting one expecting the other.
What the ranking is not
It is not a quality ranking. Density of action and quality are different things, and pretending otherwise would make the list dishonest. Palmer Luckey is last and it is a great episode.
It is not complete. Twenty-six episodes out of many hundreds. This is the shelf we have broken down so far, not a best-of-all-time.
And the short-format finding cuts both ways. A twenty-four minute solo beating Ray Dalio does not mean it is a better episode. It means it is a denser one. If you have two hours, spend them on Dalio. If you have twenty-four minutes on a commute, the solo is the better trade.
Every tactic above came from a full transcript, attributed to the person who said it, on the episode where they said it. The breakdowns are on Podex.
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