The Decision Register, Newsletter Woes and An Audience of One

Episode 477: Sam Parr (https://twitter.com/theSamParr) and Shaan Puri (https://twitter.com/ShaanVP) talk about how to make better decisions using Shaan’s Decision Register (download here: https://shorturl.at/jzIXY ), they discuss why most newsletters are destined to fail in the long-term and the importance of creating content for an audience of one — yourself. Want to see more MFM? Subscribe to the MFM YouTube channel here. Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton • Ideation Bootcamp • Copy That Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Try Shepherd • Shaan's Personal Assistant System • Power Writing Course • Daily Newsletter • Small Boy Newsletter ----- Show Notes: (00:00) Intro (2:05) The Decision Register (10:55) Small Boy Newsletter Update (13:45) Why Most Newsletters Aren’t Valuable (1:15:00) The Power of Creating Content You Love ------ Links: • Shaan’s Decision Register: https://shorturl.at/jzIXY • Joe Rogan on Breaking Points: https://spoti.fi/3pZFmpN • Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. ------ Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. ----- Additional episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto • #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Shaan Puri?

  And I highly, highly recommend this because again, judgment and decision making is the most important thing you can have. People are terrible at actually honing that. They always say, oh yeah, I learned a lesson. Really? What? What was it? Did you, did you write down what you were thinking then and what you've learned since? No, like, you know, we put very little effort into this.

• 0:31Shaan Puri?

  So I have this list of questions that I sell. I have this document that I have, but I call it the decision register where I basically write down every major decision that I make. And so for example, the very first one that I have in this list is from when I was 18 years old. It says quit pre-med. This was, uh, sorry, I was 20, 21 years old. So I'm, I'm a senior in college. I'm pre-med. I take the MCATs, but I decide not to go to med school.

• 0:54Sam Parr?

  The most obvious, obviously good decision you've ever made.

• 0:57Shaan Puri?

  So then I have the, here's the column.

• 0:59Sam Parr?

  You'd be the worst doctor. You'd be the worst doctor.

• 1:02Shaan Puri?

  I'm like, we could fix this the obvious way, but let's try something. Stick out your tongue.

• 1:08Shaan Puri?

  We'll use that for your ACL. Alright, so and then I have an X column that says, did it seem big in the moment? Cause one learning was a lot of the biggest decisions didn't actually seem big in the moment, uh, but turned out to be an important decision. And then I basically have like kind of the, what was the one decisive reason why? So if I boil down like not a long list of pros and cons, but like what's the one thing that like the main reason I made that decision? And then outcome and lesson learned. And so I'll give you another example. Decision, sell to Twitch and not to Facebook. Those are the two final companies that we had given us good offers and we turned down more money from Facebook to take the Twitch offer. Did it seem big? Yeah. Felt big in the moment. Why?

• 1:49Shaan Puri?

  Because after six years of a startup, I was tired and Facebook was looking at us like we were going to save their kind of gaming initiative. Uh, you know, they were looking at us to like make, make it happen. Where I was like Twitch has already won. I like, you know, I can just cruise control when I'm here. Like, let me just go play for the winning team versus try to like take the underdog from the bottom of the league to the top. In terms of this industry and you know, then it's like, you know, one of the lessons learned is, you know, I don't know what the other side was. So I know what I got out of it. So I think it was a good call. I'm happy with the decision, but you never know. And that's how a lot of these decisions go. So I have this decision register. Now, a version of it would be like, there's a bunch of investment decisions here, you know, like not buying Ethereum and Bitcoin when the smartest people I knew,

• 2:34Shaan Puri?

  literally working in my office were doing it. At the time, didn't seem like a big decision. I just kind of overlooked it. I didn't even realize this was a big decision I was making. Seemed weird. I just kind of laughed at something because it seemed strange rather than leaning in and trying to understand, why, why are you so excited about this? And like, hmm, could I place a small tester bet, right? So terrible decision, bad call.

• 2:58Shaan Puri?

  You know, and I didn't pay attention to a signal, which is what the nerds do on the weekend will probably all do, you know, in a few years. And this is what the nerds were doing on the weekend back then. They were really interested in cryptocurrencies. Okay. So anyways, I have this like decision register. Now with it, I have a bunch of like questions that I ask when I'm going to make a decision. Let me pull that doc up real quick. And you've been, is this a running document that you've had for 10 years? No, I started it like four or five years ago, but I back, I tried to go back and figure out like, And it's like a Google doc? Just a Google doc, exactly. And I highly, highly recommend this because again, judgment and decision making is the most important thing you can have.

• 3:38Shaan Puri?

  People are terrible at actually honing that. They always say, oh yeah, I learned a lesson. Really? What? What was it? Did you, did you write down what you were thinking then and what you've learned since? No. Like, you know, we put very little effort into this. And so I, I've, I've basically realized one edge, one source of alpha is to take a disproportionate amount of time than most people. It doesn't even take that much time, right? It's like, you know, a couple of hours twice a year. But just doing that exercise can improve my judgment at a rate, maybe two or three X what a normal person's would, would, would do. And then all of a sudden people are like, man, Uh, you know, how do you, you know, like, whatever, where do you get this wisdom from?

• 4:18Sam Parr?

  God, Sean, you're so good at, you're, you're so wise. Yeah. You're such a good at decision making. Like those abs.

• 4:23Shaan Puri?

  But you gotta do something.

• 4:24Sam Parr?

  Yeah, put it on me.

• 4:26Shaan Puri?

  All right. So here's the decisions. Here's the questions I ask for an investor. Here's what I have to run through. I say, what is the decision? Explain why I'm doing this in a tweet length. So I have to be able to explain why I'm doing the decision in a tweet length. Uh, what alternatives did I consider? Did I consider any alternatives? What am I feeling? And I have some options, uh, like extreme fear, pessimism, neutral, boredom, fatigue, greed, extreme greed, FOMO. Right? Like those, those are things I could be feeling right now. Uh, how long have I been thinking about this decision? Right? Is it a few hours, few days, few weeks, few months, a few years? Who and what tipped me over the edge? So what is like kind of the last conversation or podcast or thing I read that like, made me make, take action?

• 5:11Shaan Puri?

  What are the secondary benefits of this? So like, can I sleep better at night because I'm not worried about a margin call or something like that? If I took away all the secondary benefits, would I still make this decision? Yes or no? What makes me think I'm right? So I have to write, why do I think I'm right about this? What makes, what makes you think I might be wrong? Upside if I'm right, downside if I'm wrong. So I have to define those two. I say, what follow-up decision should I make to make this decision more successful? And then how do you predict that this is going to play out? And I have to like answer how I predict it's going to play out. And then I basically set a date. It says, what date will you revisit this? And so I'll go revisit this. Um, and so I did this for when I sold all my stocks. I could go look at this right now and be like, was I right? Was I wrong?

• 5:51Shaan Puri?

  Do I, what can I learn from how I was thinking then so that the next time I can think better basically about this?

• 5:57Sam Parr?

  Like, how many decisions do you have that you've documented this way?

• 6:01Shaan Puri?

  I think I have done this maybe four or five times now in the last like, you know, two, three years. You know, like selling the mill core was one, for example, you know, making a big financial decision, investing in, um, you know, a private company, you know, deciding to rent instead of buy a house right now, things like that.

• 6:17Sam Parr?

  Do you consult your wife when you do these things as well?

• 6:20Shaan Puri?

  No, I probably should. She, she wishes I did, but I don't.

• 6:25Sam Parr?

  Well, not necessarily like asking for permission, but like getting your, her perspective.

• 6:29Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's the problem. I want her perspective, but I feel like there's like this messed up psychology in me is like, kind of turns into asking for permission at some point.

• 6:40Shaan Puri?

  You know, like you gotta be aligned to do this and like, what if she's not aligned? Maybe I'll just do this, which she hates.

• 6:46Sam Parr?

  And how much decision or how much like, when you're selling the milk road? You sold the last company, I think before you were married, but when you're selling the milk road, are you like, hey, just so you know, this is happening or is it like, hey, it's happened?

• 6:58Shaan Puri?

  No, no, I talked to her a bunch. I got her opinion on it and you know, several times during the process. And you know, she's very helpful with that. It's more of the like stock or startup investments that I don't really run by her. Cause I'm like, man, I'll have to explain so much context because it's not an area she pays attention to. She doesn't pay attention to the stock market. She's never bought a stock in her life. She doesn't know about startup investing, angel investing, or these companies. So I'm like, oh man, the context for that is really hard, but like selling a decision to sell a company or buy a company, that's much easier to explain.

• 7:27Sam Parr?

  Right. No, I, I consult my wife a ton on this stuff, but I, I think it's more so of like, I just need to speak this. And like, I need you to just like be a brainstorming partner.

• 7:37Shaan Puri?

  Sarah's a little bit like that character on Billions, the like, the office, like,

• 7:42Sam Parr?

  Wendy?

• 7:42Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, like mindset coach or psychologist, whatever. I feel like she's like Wendy. Like her demeanor is like so even keel.

• 7:50Sam Parr?

  Yeah, she's calm.

• 7:51Shaan Puri?

  She's like, I could see her being like, I'm going to help you with this decision versus like, this is our decision. I'm going to have my opinion. You're going to have your opinion. Then we're going to figure out whose opinion is right.

• 7:58Sam Parr?

  Totally. Yes. And I think that I have a history of making emotional decisions. And so I'm, a lot of times I need someone to just be like, hey, don't be crazy. Don't do this right now. Just like sleep on it. Just wait, just wait. Um, dude, the decision register is good. I think you should, I think you're very talented in these frameworks. I'm going to probably steal that for Hampton because I think it's quite good. So you have to post it on the YouTube link. So yeah, I can actually read it. I do something similar. It's different. This is more organized.

• 8:27Shaan Puri?

  I'll put it, I'll put a link to it in the description, the show notes for YouTube and whatever. And you could just, I'll just make it a template. People can make a copy of it for themselves.

• 8:36Sam Parr?

  And that's on, well, we'll plug your thing, small boy. Is it doco or docom?

• 8:42Shaan Puri?

  Doco, yeah.

• 8:43Sam Parr?

  A boy spelled normal or like baller boy?

• 8:46Shaan Puri?

  Not B O I, no, no. Normal boy, small, normal. So it's a small boy doco. Yeah, dude, that thing's grown like crazy, man. We have like a hundred thousand people on the list now. And it's amazing. That's like in a very short period, short period of time.

• 9:01Sam Parr?

  Did you start at zero?

• 9:02Shaan Puri?

  I started at forty, thirty eight K, I think.

• 9:05Sam Parr?

  When did you start it?

• 9:06Shaan Puri?

  So I had thirty eight K from like, you know, old email newsletter, five through Tuesday type of thing. And then basically at the start of this year ish, like maybe February or something.

• 9:18Sam Parr?

  Six months ago?

• 9:19Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, maybe five, six months ago, started.

• 9:21Sam Parr?

  Any paid marketing?

• 9:23Shaan Puri?

  Uh, yeah, paid marketing on, um, a little bit of paid marketing. You know, still, I think half is like organic or something like that. So, you know, it's like half organic growth, half paid growth.

• 9:33Sam Parr?

  Dude, newsletters, man, they're the best. They're the best. That, that, I take all the credit. I take all one hundred percent of the credit. I get one, not your effort, not your day to day hard work. It's all me of just saying newsletters are cool.

• 9:48Shaan Puri?

  Exactly.

• 9:48Sam Parr?

  I'll take, I'll take one hundred. Newsletters are awesome.

• 9:52Shaan Puri?

  Dude, my, my decision register for why to start the milk road was like, I think I know how to do this because I watched Sam do this like from scratch with the hustle. And like, I think if you took the hustle plus crypto, that would work. That was like, you know, the whole thing is like, pretty sure hustle plus crypto would work. Secondary benefits.

• 10:09Sam Parr?

  Hustle plus anything will work. Like this dude, the hustle plus, or as you say, it's like, you're like the milk road of business and tech news. Uh, you know, what's the hustle? It's like the milk road, but for this thing. But no, the milk road, the hustle plus anything, it's, it's all, that will work for the foreseeable future, I think.

• 10:30Shaan Puri?

  Well, you know what's funny? I don't know how much you get hit up by these people who are doing newsletter businesses, probably all the time.

• 10:35Sam Parr?

  I ignore them.

• 10:37Shaan Puri?

  You ignore them. I've learned to ignore them because my friend Ramin has this great little framework, he says, which is that every business is hard. It's just hard in one of two places. It's either hard zero to one, or it's hard one to N. And what he means by that is like, it's some businesses are really hard to get started and get initial momentum. And then some businesses are really hard, like really easy to get initial momentum, but then turning that into a valuable business that's like at scale is really hard. And I would say, because of this podcast, people basically see Sam did it with newsletter, Sean did it with the newsletter. I too will do, you know, the AI version of this. Like, you know, I'll do the whatever version of this. Newsletters are very easy zero to one businesses. They're not easy one to N. And as I've talked to people that are doing this and they're asking

• 11:22Shaan Puri?

  for kind of advice or whatever, I'm like,

• 11:25Sam Parr?

  Talk to me in six months.

• 11:27Shaan Puri?

  I told one of the AI guys straight up, I go, you're gonna drive, this is driving off a cliff. You don't even realize it yet. And I was like, he's like, why? And I was like, you know, to explain this to you will take like, you know, some time and like explain what I think you should do instead. I don't really feel like coaching that, but I'm just gonna tell you, like, please don't fall in love with this as is, because I'm telling you that this isn't, this isn't going to work. This is not the answer to making something that's successful. Like, because it's very easy to see just the subscriber count going up. Or like, if you're in a hot space like AI, you'll get easy sponsorship revenue for like, you know, the next six to 12 months. But like, if you want to take this to the finish line, where this thing is spitting off millions of dollars of your profit, and you're able to sell it for maybe tens of millions of dollars, which is what all these

• 12:12Shaan Puri?

  people, I think, would dream of doing. That's where the real skill comes in in this. And I think that a lot of these people I do not feel are equipped to do that, based on what I hear their plans are.

• 12:21Sam Parr?

  The person who's done it best, I think, is Austin Rafe from Morning Brew.

• 12:24Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 12:24Sam Parr?

  It's 10 years old now. I think they publicly said that revenue is in the 70 to 90 range. I forget exactly what they said publicly, but something like that. 200. 250 employees, I forget. I went to their office, dude, he's got like a tech office setup. It's like a beautiful office, like he has done it all the right way where, I mean, he's made a bunch of errors just like everyone. But that they, he's done such a good job of having durability and long-term view and also short-term like moving quickly. That guy's a machine. He's one of the more impressive operators.

• 12:58Shaan Puri?

  Well, the thing is, people see that, they see the hustle and they see just like the tip of the iceberg, right? Like it's like this iceberg theory, like when you see an iceberg in the water, you're only seeing, you know, the top little bit. You don't see the giant, 90% of the mass is under the water. The benefit for me with Milk Road was I was there when you were doing just events and then blogs and then you pivoted to the newsletter. We were in a mastermind group, so we're checking in every month. Every month we would meet, we would talk about what's going on, what you're trying to do. And so I got to see the five-year under the water like buildup. And I think most people don't have that, like that's a, that's just luck basically for me that I had that. And that's why Milk Road was able to work a lot better than if I hadn't had that.

• 13:42Shaan Puri?

  Most people don't have that. They're just trying to copy what they see on the surface level. And that'll get you kind of the zero to one. I don't know if that's going to get you to the one to N. I, I think for most people not, I think if you're a great entrepreneur, you'll make it work no matter what. The problem is you survey 10 entrepreneurs, they all think they're a great entrepreneur, but sort of by definition, not everybody's above average, right? Like you get maybe one out of the 10 are, the problem is all 10 think that they're that one and you know, that's gonna be.

• 14:04Sam Parr?

  Yeah, they're, they're challenging. What they don't see is that Morning Brew at this point, the hustle, I don't know how many employees they have now, but we don't saw ads. But with Morning Brew, in order to make 70 or 80 million dollars a year in revenue, you need 80 salespeople. And if you have 80 salespeople, you also need 30 like people to like handle the stuff that they're selling. You also need like.

• 14:25Shaan Puri?

  You need evergreen content, like you guys talk about what's going on in general with general business. People who are doing these AI newsletters right now, they're like, here's the latest new demo in AI. Guess what? 18 months from now, that shit's not going to be interesting at all to anybody. And the advertisers are going to realize that the type of person who just wants to like see an AI demo is not very valuable to advertise to. Milk Road worked because people who read about crypto, like what's going on in crypto, were crypto investors. Crypto investors are a very valuable audience segment. And so that was very different. They're just like, so crypto, AI, they're all just topics, right? They're all just the new thing. No, no, no, because the people who read about crypto were putting

• 15:09Shaan Puri?

  tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of dollars into those portfolios. And we're a very valuable customer. That's not true with an AI reader, right? But they don't see that. They just see the surface level stuff. They're not thinking about it critically enough to realize that they're just riding this like kind of current momentum where every day there's like a mind blowing demo and people are curious. 18 months from now, that's going to fatigue out. That is not going to be the case that. And then, and also your advertisers are going to realize that like, cool. Advertisers of the random guy who likes to see like, you know, the cool stuff that AI could do. That's not translating into a lot of money because that's not a very valuable audience demo. It's not going to work.

• 15:46Sam Parr?

  And you can't be a mercenary about the content. Like a lot of people are like, oh, I just hired this person overseas and we use AI to actually make the content. And that's really hard, not impossible, but it's hard. At the end of the day, when you have a newsletter, you have to get someone to act. You have to say, I'm going to be at this location at this time. And if no one shows up, then your shit sucks. And getting people to do that is really, really, really hard. It's very challenging. At the end of the day, it's about getting people to take an action, whether it's to buy something to show up somewhere. And that's really fucking hard if you're a mercenary versus a missionary. And you're like all in on this shit. That's why Milk Road worked because you said, I, one of the coolest things you guys did was I invested this much money into crypto.

• 16:27Sam Parr?

  Here's my portfolio. You can see it as we go. I am, I'm in this shit and I'm going to talk about that and.

• 16:33Shaan Puri?

  And I talked about the stuff that like each day, it was basically, what is the thing I'm most curious about? That was the only guiding principle. It wasn't like news. It wasn't announcements. Like if those were in the newsletter, cool, that's fine. But the lead story had to be the thing that I thought was most interesting, which was sometimes Twitter drama, which was sometimes a cool product, which was sometimes a price analysis, which was something, whatever. And.

• 17:00Shaan Puri?

  That's very different than if you hire a journalist or an aggregator to basically like summarize headlines from stuff. And so, you know, that worked for us. I don't think that's the only way to make it work, but it was one of the ways where it felt very different. And like you said, like if we said, hey, we're going to be here at this time and date, people would cut, people would come because they were excited and they were excited to meet us. They were excited to meet other people that are like them and the brand, you know, had had some influence on people, which is what you need in order to do this. If you just throw up a quick Beehive newsletter and you get like, you know, 12,000 subscribers and like, you know, the number of subscribers is really the wrong metric. I guess that's the other way of putting it. People, it's the easiest

• 17:43Shaan Puri?

  metric. And again, the easiest metric is not the right metric necessarily. It's the easiest metric to look at, but I don't think it's the right metric to look at for a newsletter.

• 17:52Sam Parr?

  This is one of those episodes where we talked about stuff that I personally care about. I could talk about those newsletter crap forever. I could talk about personal finances forever. This rate, it might be a high ratio of things we love to talk about, but maybe our audience doesn't all entirely love, but I'm very eager to see the response to this. I could talk about this stuff forever.

• 18:12Shaan Puri?

  And by the way, I think that's the only way this podcast can work is like, I was watching this thing of Joe Rogan. Joe Rogan doesn't go on very many other podcasts, but one of the ones he goes on is like this breaking points news thing that he likes. So they interviewed him and they go, Joe, what, you know, like everybody does podcast, everybody does interviews. Not everybody's having like, what's your, like what you, what you've created with JRE? Like, what are you doing differently?

• 18:38Sam Parr?

  Breaking Points is awesome.

• 18:39Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 18:39Sam Parr?

  I know Breaking Points. Yeah.

• 18:40Shaan Puri?

  Sager and I forgot what her name is. The, the woman there too, they're, they're good. And so they

• 18:46Sam Parr?

  And what'd he say?

• 18:47Shaan Puri?

  At first he just tries to brush it off. He's, he's like, I don't know. I don't like, I don't know. This is like, kinda like fake humility, but also like, you think he's trying to make a point, which is it's not some calculated thing. And then they go, but the guy pushes, he's like, but there must be something, like whether you, whether you planned it, or you intuitively do it, like, you agree, there's a difference between what you're doing and what other people are doing. And there's a difference in the results you're getting. Like, just if you had to think about it, if you had to answer, what would you answer? It's kinda, kinda pushing him. And he goes, he goes, I think that's the thing. I don't have a, like, I don't come in with this sort of like plan or agenda. He goes, look, when I started this podcast, I didn't think anybody listened. You couldn't even tell

• 19:30Shaan Puri?

  if anybody was listening. And he's like, so I just really had nothing to lose. And I just decided to do it the way I wanted to do it. So like, I just wanna, like, if I'm chilling with my friends, or we're smoking weed, and that's what the episode is, great, because that's what I wanted to do. If I'm fascinated by this alien conspiracy, and I can talk to this scientist, great, that's the conversation I want to have. Everybody told me, like, this needs to be one hour long, it needs to be shorter, three hours is just too long. He's like, but I didn't like how the conversation was gonna be in an hour. I liked having the three hour conversation. So that's what I did, even though it like, you know, broke the rule. It wasn't like audience driven. He goes, and so now, he's like, basically, that's what was working. So I just decided not to change it. He's like, basically, I just, this podcast is a massive education for me. I have the conversations

• 20:15Shaan Puri?

  I want to have in the way that I want to have it. And, you know, I just don't do things that are like, lean into this, the audience is really responding to this. He goes, that's how you end up like those late night talk shows, where everything is just fake. Like, the host is fake, the interactions are fake. It's just like, it's all the same. Quote unquote, professional, but it's the least real thing. And he's like, I don't think people like that, actually. He goes, podcasts are professionally unprofessional. And he goes, I, he goes, I just don't read the comments, and I don't try to do things based on what the ratings and reviews are gonna be. He goes, I realized the only way for this to be interesting was if I'm actually interested in it. I can, he's like, you can't fake being interested in it for very long. It comes through. He's like, so the only way to do this is if I'm interested in it, and

• 20:59Shaan Puri?

  Then I'm just, the audience will be what it's gonna be at that point. Like, it'll just be the other people who are interested in this. And that's sustainable for like, kind of forever. And I thought that that is, it relates to like, Hasan Minhaj. He, he said this thing to me once, he goes, he goes, I'm not, he goes, I'm like, why aren't you on TikTok, bro? Like, why aren't you more on Instagram? Like, you could be killing it, dude, these are growing. I'm giving him all the logical reasons to be on. He goes, I don't want to be on because I know to do that, to win in those games, you just have to dance for the algorithm. Like, whatever the algorithm wants, that's what you gotta do. And he's like, I just don't want to do that. I want to be an artist. He goes, the best, he's like, I come from comedy and the best people who are the best comedians, they, um,

• 21:39Shaan Puri?

  they're free. They just do what they want and they are the judge. They don't care really, like, they pick up on signals from how people react to it. But like, they are the end decision maker of if something was good or not. And he's like, you see this in everything. He's like, he goes, I love basketball. You see this on the basketball court. Guys like Steph Curry or Luka Doncic, they're free. They're just playing how they want to play and that's it. They don't, they're not like overthinking it. They don't, they don't, they don't have this like voice in their head that's constantly judging it and thinking it. They're actually free to just create their art. And he's like, that's what, he's like, that's like how the best people operate. And Rogan said the same thing about comedians. He goes, if you watch Dave Chappelle, he'll do these shows in front of like 50 people. He's done shows in front of 50,000 people, but he goes in front of 50 people.

• 22:24Shaan Puri?

  He's having a great time. He's having a great time because he's-

• 22:27Sam Parr?

  He's out there smoking a cigarette and chilling.

• 22:29Shaan Puri?

  He's just smoking a cigarette, he's talking, he's not even doing planned material. And he's like, he's having a great time because he just likes doing it this way. And that happens to have gotten him a huge fan base. And he's like, that's kind of my, like, if you want to say, what's your strategy? He's like, that's my strategy. And I think that that's just like a more admirable way to approach like content creation versus this like, I'm gonna just cater to this moving target of like what my audience, what, what the audience wants.

• 22:56Sam Parr?

  Well, there's a, there's, there's a way of like not truly caring, but then you also like, I like seeing our feedback. We had a guy message us and he's like, someone died in my family and I listened to you guys a ton. And that, and I'm like, oh, that's, that's sick. Or someone will be like, man, I love when you talked about this. I'm like, that's awesome. I feel good about that. I want to make people feel good as well, while also making myself be selfish and only talking about what I want to talk about. But it, there is a small motivation of it feels good to make others feel good. But we don't like go crazy on that.

• 23:27Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. It's just who, ultimately who's in charge, right? Like you might have three co-founders in your business, but ultimately push, who makes the decision if push comes to shove? Obviously you all talk about it. You all have a say, but if a decision needs to be made, who can, who can make a final call in a tough, tough spot? And I think that's in on the content side, I think that who makes the tough call in the end has to be, do you think it's good? Do you like it? Are you interested in it? All right. To me, that's the highest like order decision maker.

• 23:58Sam Parr?

  Well, sick. I think this is a good one. What do you, do we want to wrap here?

• 24:01Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, let's wrap it up.

• 24:03Sam Parr?

  All right. We have a bunch of stuff next week, but that's the pod.