Samir Chaudry: Why 99% Of Content Creators Fail At YouTube

Episode 491: Shaan Puri (https://twitter.com/ShaanVP) talks with Samir Chaudry (https://twitter.com/samirchaudry) — Youtuber and co-host of the Colin and Samir. You’ll hear Samir share how he prepares for interviews with folks like Tim Ferriss, MKBHD and Dream, where he thinks the creator economy puck is heading, what he’s learned from working with MrBeast, which Youtubers are building billion-dollar empires, and much more. Subscribe to Samir's newsletter → https://www.thepublishpress.com/ Want to see more MFM? Subscribe to the MFM YouTube channel here. — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Try Shepherd Out - https://www.supportshepherd.com/ • Shaan's Personal Assistant System - http://shaanpuri.com/remoteassistant • Power Writing Course - https://maven.com/generalist/writing • Small Boy Newsletter - https://smallboy.co/ • Daily Newsletter - https://www.shaanpuri.com/ Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com/ — Show Notes: (0:00) Intro (2:00) High stakes interviews (5:15) How Samir preps for big interviews (11:45) Learnings from Tim Ferriss interview (19:45) The next wave of creators (26:00) The future of the creator economy (34:30) AI tools Samir uses (37:30) What’s MrBeast actually like? (44:00) If Samir was advising MrBeast… (49:00) Why Samir made a newspaper (56:00) Creating scared (1:05:30) Hiring a collaborator (1:07:45) Most interesting creator businesses (1:18:55) Which Youtubers are building billion-dollar empires? (1:39:30) How long does it take to “make it” on Youtube? (1:44:10) Dabblers vs. Masters — Links: • Publish Press - https://www.thepublishpress.com/ • Autopod - https://www.autopod.fm/ • Dude Perfect - https://tinyurl.com/4jdpsbkj • Cody Ko - https://www.youtube.com/c/codyko • Chicken Shop Date - https://tinyurl.com/2wbfu9xc • Deestroying - https://www.youtube.com/@Deestroying • Paul Rabil - https://www.youtube.com/c/paulrabil • PPL - https://premierlacrosseleague.com/ • 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. — Other 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?

  Tell me about Mr. Beast.

• 0:02Speaker 01

  He like is is so unique in the fact that he is laser focused in a way that I've never really experienced. And and maybe at times like in a way that.

• 0:12Shaan Puri?

  I don't want to experience.

• 0:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 0:14Shaan Puri?

  He doesn't want to.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  No.

• 0:23Shaan Puri?

  You're about to hear a conversation I recorded with Samir when I went down to LA. I've been following these guys for a little while. They are knee deep in the YouTube game. And if you're a content nerd like me, somebody who really thinks about, okay, what is great content? How do I use content to build my business, which is what I've done? Then these guys are very interesting because they know everything about YouTube and all the YouTubers. They've done interviews with Mr. Beast and Dream and a whole bunch of the large YouTube channels. We talked about a bunch of things. What makes a great interview? How do you do? What are the questions you ask? How do you prep? And how do you show up the right way if you're going to do an interview? We talked about quality of audience versus quantity of audience.

• 1:05Shaan Puri?

  How do you think about not just the numbers, but like the real trick, which is getting the right type of people to actually watch your stuff? Hanging out with Mr. Beast. So they've spent days and days with Mr. Beast. I wanted to ask them, what did they learn about this guy? He is the most popular YouTuber in the world. He's one of the most popular entertainers in the world, period. It's rare you get that kind of access to that type of person. And I wanted to hear some stories and he told me some good ones. Then we did five great creator businesses that you've never heard of and some predictions. What YouTubers does he think have the potential to build billion dollar empires under their content? He gave me three that he he believe could be the case. And there's a bunch of other frameworks. So things that you only really have these insights.

• 1:48Shaan Puri?

  If you've been doing something for like 10 years, you've been thinking about the same thing from every angle for 10 years. Those are some of my favorite people to talk to. All right. So enjoy this conversation with Samir.

• 2:00Speaker 01

  Colin and I, you know, spent a lot of our career making documentaries. And what we noticed was like, if we were interviewing a subject and we were just interviewing them head on, we wouldn't get good answers. And then we started taking them like driving or have them do something else. And then you would get the truth. And it was really interesting. It's like the truth comes out in the car. I think it's something that some documentarians say where it's like, if someone's doing something else, they're much more open if their mind isn't a hundred percent on

• 2:26Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 2:27Speaker 01

  the interview.

• 2:28Shaan Puri?

  Why is that? You think they're just performing basically when they sit down in a like a artificial environment?

• 2:33Speaker 01

  Probably, yeah. There's a lot of like self perception stuff that's going on, right? It's like, how am I coming across? Who am I? Is the sounding right? And if you're distracted, then you.

• 2:43Shaan Puri?

  But you guys do your interviews at a table, basically.

• 2:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:46Shaan Puri?

  So you don't do that.

• 2:47Speaker 01

  Well, we've been trying to explore like the concept of creating the right energy for the conversations.

• 2:52Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 2:53Speaker 01

  Like you think about like this has a completely different energy than if there was a table has a completely different energy than if we didn't have mics and we were laughed or had booms. So we've been trying to explore like where our show is moving and what type of space we want.

• 3:06Shaan Puri?

  That's essentially exactly where I wanted to start, which is basically you guys do. So we came down here and we were like, oh, let's get like a place. Let's have some in-person interviews with people that we think are awesome. And it's different than the like at home thing for sure, right? The vibe is different. You get a different energy, but also you can do like high stakes interviews almost. It's like the whole day kind of gets built around this interview, which is not really the case when you do it online. And you guys have been doing some high stakes interviews. So you're doing stuff with, I mean, just recently, I saw the Tim Ferriss one. That was great. And I'm guessing you're like me that you grew up kind of like really into Tim Ferriss's stuff and like kind of admire him.

• 3:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was pretty surreal.

• 3:52Shaan Puri?

  And so that's a high stakes interview. You did Mr. Beast, you did Dream, you did a bunch of these things. First, do you prefer? Like being the interviewee, or in this case, you're kind of like more the guest on the on the show. Do you prefer guest or host?

• 4:06Speaker 01

  I like to talk. So like, I like when we are the host and it is a conversation. I think that's the most fun for me. Like, I do, I am a naturally curious person. And, you know, along with higher stakes, it's also like very, very interesting people that I'm inherently curious about. So that, to me, is really fun. I think where it's, you know, where it gets challenging is if you don't have chemistry. But we actually now do pre-calls and kind of not only chemistry reads, but we try and gauge what our chemistry is with the with the guest, because we've been in situations where the chemistry is not good. And then you're like, okay, how do I, like, what do, where do we go from here? How does this work? And when you're the producer of the show, or it's your show, in the middle of it, you're like, okay, is this going to perform?

• 4:50Shaan Puri?

  The voice in your head starts going.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. How do I edit this? How does, and that then puts you into a whole, like a disadvantage.

• 4:55Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Here, so let's say you were doing one of these kind of like interviews you're pumped for. I'll call it a high stakes interview. How do you kind of walk me through how you're preparing for that? And how you're like, just kind of like getting ready to perform that?

• 5:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, actually, we've been really trying to establish our relationship with prep. Because we found that sometimes if we're overly prepped, I'm barely listening to the other person. I just know where I'm going.

• 5:19Shaan Puri?

  My next talking point.

• 5:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know where I'm going. And also how much of them I listened to prior, because if I know their stories, I know their beats, I'm kind of like,

• 5:27Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 5:27Speaker 01

  You know, a bit.

• 5:28Shaan Puri?

  Curiosity wanes.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, the curiosity wanes. So been trying to explore that relationship. We do have a, like, we have a team that essentially develops a research doc. Like, we have someone on our team who does that. He was like, here's, here's kind of like some origin story. And we we structure it like a act one, act two, act three structure. Where where is their origin story? What's the inflection point?

• 5:48Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  Where has that put them today? Right? Because it's like, what was the tense part of the journey? What what didn't work for them? Do we know any of that? Is there something we can ask about that creates an inflection point? Because we are trying to tell a story with it.

• 6:00Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 6:00Speaker 01

  So we need to know the general themes of what's happening in the origin, right? The act one, what's happening in the conflict, the act two, and then the resolution and the future.

• 6:09Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  So that's like the most.

• 6:11Shaan Puri?

  Without knowing all the details.

• 6:12Speaker 01

  Without knowing all the details.

• 6:13Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  So, yeah, we're trying to establish a new relationship with that of how much is it like curiosity? And how much is it prep? And I think that's become more substantial for us as the landscape of.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  Interview shows is getting more and more saturated, right? Like when we interviewed, you know, certain creators three years ago, no one else was interviewing creators. So it was kind of like, okay, this is a talk show for our own community.

• 6:40Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 6:40Speaker 01

  Doesn't exist anywhere else. Now we're a part of a group and that then pushes you to try and become more singular and more differentiated. And chemistry, how you show up, who the hosts are, matters.

• 6:51Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 6:51Speaker 01

  I think you guys have done actually a really good job of that. I think about your show a lot because I think.

• 6:56Shaan Puri?

  Tell me more. What are we doing? What are we doing well?

• 6:57Speaker 01

  Well, I think you have to, it's similar because there's two hosts, right?

• 7:01Shaan Puri?

  Which is really hard.

• 7:02Speaker 01

  Which is really hard in interviews, but probably you have a better reception when it's just you and Sam.

• 7:08Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  On a lot, right? It's like, when you're building a show that's guest dependent, or all about the guest bookings, it's like, some people will look at this and be like, I don't know who that is, so I'm not going to click on it. Some people will give it a chance because they trust you. But really, if, if it's you and Sam, you can carry the show and then you become less reliant on bookings. So I do think like, Colin and I have been thinking a lot about that. How do we instill some of that? How do we think about that? But we are just like, the show takes us to really interesting people like Tim Ferriss. And so right now in this moment, it's like.

• 7:37Shaan Puri?

  Keep riding that way.

• 7:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, you keep riding it. Like this is cool. The type of outreach we have is really cool. The people we get to talk to is really cool, so.

• 7:43Shaan Puri?

  You said something like, uh, how, how do I show up?

• 7:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:47Shaan Puri?

  I think about this a lot because when it comes to like sports, we're used to an athlete having like a pregame routine, a meal, a nap, a stretch thing, a warm up, they're wearing the headphones, they're listening to their song.

• 7:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:59Shaan Puri?

  They get the motivational speech, they run out, they run out there, they do the warmups and then they play.

• 8:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:04Shaan Puri?

  And but for other types of people who need to perform, it's like, what are you doing? Why do you need to do that? Sit down and talk, right? It seems so easy.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  It, it's definitely presence. Like you have to become very present.

• 8:15Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  In the conversation. And so there's, there's a couple of different things to, to try and do that. For me personally, I've discovered this 11 minute Wim Hof breath work.

• 8:24Shaan Puri?

  Nice.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  Online, that's just.

• 8:25Shaan Puri?

  I think it's brutal. I do that a lot.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  Have you done it? Yeah, yeah. There's so many people who know this exact one. It's like 11 minutes.

• 8:29Shaan Puri?

  It's like his free YouTube, like top ranked YouTube one.

• 8:32Speaker 01

  And he's, and his accent is amazing.

• 8:34Shaan Puri?

  Like, come on.

• 8:34Speaker 01

  All right, guys. Yeah, it's so good. And like that just gets me in the zone. Like I love doing that.

• 8:40Shaan Puri?

  I want to do that right now.

• 8:42Speaker 01

  Hi guys. Yeah.

• 8:44Shaan Puri?

  Do you do it laying down?

• 8:45Speaker 01

  Yes, I do it laying down.

• 8:46Shaan Puri?

  Cause that's his way, right? On your back.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  So we, we made a documentary about Wim years ago. And so like, I've just been.

• 8:52Shaan Puri?

  Which one? I might have seen it.

• 8:53Speaker 01

  It's, uh, it's on Yes Theory's channel. It's all called Frozen Alive. Colin and I actually edited that.

• 8:57Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 9:01Speaker 01

  Yes, this is it. It's so good. Yeah.

• 9:04Speaker 02

  So. Lie down, sit down, whatever.

• 9:08Shaan Puri?

  By the way, this is good as a like, uh, I do this like whenever we have like a team retreat or like, we need to do something. I'll be like, hey guys, like if you're, if you're down, let's do something a little bit weird. And then they're like, what is he gonna say? And this is not so weird. They're down with it. And you've, you definitely feel energized right at the end of it.

• 9:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I try and get present. Like I try and take out a lot of the variables. I think as we've built a team, what's been great is like, it used to be me and Colin being like, okay, where do the mics go? Where do the cameras go? Or does lighting look good? Um, and that can be really stressful.

• 9:38Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  I mean, for example, our most recent interview with Mr. Beast, when we went out to North Carolina. You know, we were there for a full day prepping for the pod, but at the last minute realized we didn't have a table. And Colin and I went to a furniture store in North Carolina, two hours before we sat down with him. And we're just scrambling to buy a table and then.

• 9:57Shaan Puri?

  A template.

• 9:58Speaker 01

  Had to arrange for it to be delivered. And basically it all happened within a matter of, you know, that was a very stressful two hours prior to sitting down. And I felt very not present in the first half of that.

• 10:09Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  You know, I was, I was just coming off of like, okay, that, that was intense. Why didn't I think of that? Kind of immediately already being retrospective of the process of, you know, and so all of that stuff, I think you just have to eliminate.

• 10:21Shaan Puri?

  I made a bunch of mistakes like that when, uh, this podcast started with me doing long form interviews. Like the first 20 episodes were just me interviewing people at a studio and whatever. And I, I kind of like got reps there. And then it switched at like, I don't know, episode, something 40 or something like that to me and Sam as like a recurring thing, which was like way different prep. You know, turnkey, so turnkey setup, already have good chemistry. Um, don't have to book guests, don't have to research guests, just like be ready to talk about interesting things. And like, just turn up the, the, the sort of charisma as much as you can. But now that I got back into. Being like, all right, let's try to like, we have this amazing network. These are fascinating people to talk to.

• 11:03Shaan Puri?

  Let's just, let's do it. And I, I told Ben, I called Ben after the first one. I was like, dude, that was like an hour too long because I did three hours. I was like, I thought I was Joe Rogan for a minute there. I did three hours way too long. Then I was like, I over prepped like crazy. And the thing you were saying where you're like,

• 11:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:20Shaan Puri?

  I'm listening, but in my head, I'm like, okay, I'm supposed to, I'm supposed to be to this next. I was like, that wasn't right.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  It's hard.

• 11:27Shaan Puri?

  Before this, we went to Dave and Buster's in between interviews and, uh, you know, played Papa shot and I got in a good, good zone. And now I'm here.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  It's either that or Wim Hof, you know, Dave and Buster's or Wim.

• 11:37Shaan Puri?

  If you don't have a local Dave and Buster's, so you're unfortunate enough.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  I thought you were gonna say, if you don't have a local Wim Hof.

• 11:43Shaan Puri?

  You always got Wim. Um, you've had a bunch of these guests. Who's somebody that's been a lot of fun, uh, that you guys have had on recently? That's like, you know, giving you those kind of like mind blown, my brains leaking out my ear. Like who's done that for you recently?

• 11:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's hard to not say Tim, um, Tim Ferriss.

• 11:59Shaan Puri?

  You could say Tim, it's cool. But tell me what was dope about the Tim one?

• 12:03Speaker 01

  With Tim, it was the fact that he's been doing this for so long and, and, um, he really opened my eyes to this concept of having a very high quality audience. And I, I look at Tim and I think he has like incredibly high quality audience. Um, and I think we make a lot of sacrifices because we distribute our stuff on YouTube for viewership.

• 12:23Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 12:23Speaker 01

  Right? Like it is, it's very odd that we have public performance metrics next to our work. There's very few other places where that happens, right? Like in business, it doesn't happen where you're like, here's how well I'm doing. And anyone can see that at any time.

• 12:38Shaan Puri?

  If you go to a Shopify store, it doesn't just show you sales. How many sales has this had?

• 12:41Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 12:42Shaan Puri?

  The truest, rawest like benchmark is.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  Imagine walking into a grocery store and it just has like, you know, revenue under every product. It's just, it's a very odd thing that pushes us to make decisions for larger viewership rather than higher quality viewership. And I think sitting with Tim, uh, it was a deep understanding of how he's built a very high quality premium audience and a premium brand over a decade. And I think that.

• 13:04Shaan Puri?

  He said something in that interview to you. He was like, um, there's always a market for like the best.

• 13:09Speaker 01

  The best, yeah.

• 13:10Shaan Puri?

  And he's like, so I wanted to, whatever the ads were priced at, I was gonna go like double that and do that's, how do I get that to be the thing? Cause that will always be there. There will always be a market for whoever's got the highest quality audience with the best ad read. You know, that's, that'll always be there. And I think that's played out.

• 13:26Speaker 01

  And I think what's important is to, for us as creators to, to realize like what we are doing is not novel. It's been done before. We're building audiences. We're, we're media companies. You know, like this has been done before and we should look far back at who's done it really well.

• 13:42Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 13:42Speaker 01

  You know, and I, I think that sitting with Tim was that opportunity and you know, almost as a self fulfilling prophecy, like the type of people who reached out to us after the Tim episode really was emblematic of, it is a high quality audience that watches Tim and that's interested in him. It was not our highest performing episode.

• 13:59Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 13:59Speaker 01

  But it's one of my favorite and it's one that drove a lot of high quality outreach.

• 14:03Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 14:03Speaker 01

  And it reminded me of that, of, of, we can get really caught up in, you know, high viewership, but I think that was something that, that really pushed me. And there's a lot of stuff in there. There's something that I never forget that he said, which was, um, if you do something that is even slightly energy depleting, it will compound over time. And to like, really look at your day to day and recognize what is depleting your energy, uh, because it'll compound over 10 years.

• 14:28Shaan Puri?

  When you say that, it's like, I feel like everybody can think of like the one thing right away.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:32Shaan Puri?

  That you haven't been like really paying that much attention to, but when prompted, your brain is like, of course it's this.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. And this is, you know, this is four hour work week from his book, but he talked a lot about who are the right clients to have, like what, you know, money is not, we look at it as such, like, well, it's a lot of money. So I'll sacrifice these things for it. But if it, if the client relationship isn't good, if it's depleting your energy, if it's causing a strain on your team, it's not worth it. And all those viewpoints are almost antithetical to our, the, the internet age of us being like, all of this is infinite.

• 15:03Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  You know, we can always be making more money. We should always be pursuing more viewership, more money, more of everything. He came in with a perspective of what's the right money? What's the right view?

• 15:14Shaan Puri?

  So he said that energy depleting thing. What did you think of for you?

• 15:18Speaker 01

  I, I thought of, um, Like meetings.

• 15:21Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  I'm like a creative person. I like to be creative and I've kind of just spun myself up to be like, we run a media company, so I need to operate like a media company owner. And like, I think about hosting meetings or being on Zoom calls and I'm like, I, I really don't like it.

• 15:37Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 15:37Speaker 01

  At all. So.

• 15:38Shaan Puri?

  On the podcast once, Sam did a really funny rant where he was like, you know, he's like a long buildup. He was like, you know, I've been, uh, you know, we sold the hustle this many months ago. It's been six months. I've talked to this person, this person. I've thought about all these things. You know what I realized? I'm a fucking artist, man. And he just like, and I was like, well, it's not what you think is coming when he, when he says it. And he also doesn't like, like, he doesn't come across like an artist, like some people that the way they dress, what they do, you're like, that's an artist.

• 16:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:09Shaan Puri?

  And he's like, I'm a fucking artist, man. I just need to create. And I'm going to keep doing that. No matter what the situation is, I should have, they said be an investor. I tried. I don't want to do that. I don't want to do that shit. You know, I stopped doing it altogether. I just want to be an artist. And, uh, I think about that a lot. Actually, I think there's like a, a great way to like, kind of draw a line in the sand. Or I'm like, you know what? This is what I am because it gives me a bunch of energy. And like, what is, what is that not like, you know? And how do I just not have to do it? Maybe I don't have to do it at all.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  I think sometimes I, I operate from an old model with a new business where, you know, I grew up, my dad's an entrepreneur, I'm from an Indian immigrant family, like it was all about going to his office, you know, clocking in the morning, clocking out, like being there every day, being present, in front of your team. And I think we're just in a new world where it's like, is that, do I need to operate like that as a creative, as a creator? I, I found myself that, another thing that Tim said was, it was a quote from Whitney Cummings, but he said, if art imitates life, then you have to have a life. And I think that the, the mentality of like, I really want to succeed is, hey, I'm going to go to my office. I'm going to grind every day. I'm going to work really hard.

• 17:18Speaker 01

  But then as a creative person or as someone who's on a podcast, it's like, well, now I have very little experiences to talk about. Or, you know, it's kind of like, I can tell you about the coffee shop down the street from here where I get coffee every day. And then I come and sit here all day.

• 17:29Shaan Puri?

  Right. I'm so routine. Why does somebody want to listen to this?

• 17:31Speaker 01

  Why does anyone want to listen to if I don't have interesting life experiences?

• 17:35Shaan Puri?

  There's a. A thing I realized, which was my grandfather, like, what does your grandfather do? Or one of your grandfathers, like, did they like have like a factory job or like any like?

• 17:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, my grandfather that I knew, because the other one passed before I was born, had a like train engineering job in India.

• 17:55Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, almost exactly the same. Grandfather, some engineering, like a chemical plant of some kind. He worked there and like, to him, work was you come to the factory where the ingredients are coming in, they're getting processed, there's fumes everywhere and like, that's what work is. And there's like a shift supervisor.

• 18:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:12Shaan Puri?

  And then if he saw what my dad did, which was like, go to work with a briefcase, there's a computer on your desk, you sit in it like kind of cubicle or desk, like, oh, sorry, office. And, you know, you take phone calls or you get on a flight and go to a business meeting where you're gonna shake a hand and maybe do a paper contract deal. Like, that was kind of my dad's job. That's like what work became.

• 18:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:34Shaan Puri?

  It's just kind of unrecognizable and looks much less serious than the chemical plant or the fertilizer factory or whatever.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:42Shaan Puri?

  And then like to my dad, what I do, he's like, are you ever gonna work? Like, what are you doing? You're sitting in front of your phone, you know, you're talking to who? Who's listening to this? You get paid for this? Like, well, if I get a bunch of views, then yes. Or like, you know, sometimes, you know, if it's like, I'm working. It's like, no, you're just fucking around on YouTube.

• 19:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 19:02Shaan Puri?

  That's exactly what I do. I like, I'm looking for the most interesting things in the world. I'm synthesizing and I'm gonna talk about it. But it's like, our version of work is unrecognizable to like, you know, our parents. And I'm like, oh, like, I just have kids and I just have two little kids. I'm like, whatever they're gonna do is probably gonna blow my mind. It's gonna be so.

• 19:21Speaker 01

  Super unrecognizable.

• 19:22Shaan Puri?

  It's super unrecognizable, but every generation does that. I'm like, oh, that's kind of interesting. Like, I should kind of not write off those things that look like complete not work.

• 19:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:32Shaan Puri?

  And like, our company got bought by Twitch, which is like, if you watch people playing video games for a living, it's like, what? This is not work.

• 19:37Speaker 01

  That was a very confusing era. I mean, even now at, you know, in my mid 30s, when I look at what a 20-year-old creator is doing, it's hard for me to track. You know, I spend a lot of time on YouTube. I spend a lot of time talking to YouTube creators, but this next wave of creators is kind of like. Wait, what's happening? What's going on?

• 19:57Shaan Puri?

  What's the name of that girl who's like going viral because she's like a NPC?

• 20:00Speaker 01

  Pinky doll.

• 20:01Shaan Puri?

  Pinky doll, yeah.

• 20:02Speaker 01

  That's like, yeah, that's the thing. I don't know, man.

• 20:05Shaan Puri?

  Is that what our kids are gonna do? They're gonna be like a vending machine?

• 20:07Speaker 01

  All of this is so like, it brings so much about like, who are we as people? Like, what, what is that that we're into?

• 20:14Shaan Puri?

  Have you seen this thing, Ben?

• 20:15Speaker 01

  It's really strange.

• 20:16Shaan Puri?

  Have you seen Pinky Doll? Basically, she's, she's just standing there and like, people are donating using the TikTok Live thing. Have you guys seen this?

• 20:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, there it is.

• 20:25Speaker 02

  Gang, gang. Mmm, ice cream so good. Thank you, Jackie. Gang, gang. Gang, gang. Gang, gang. Oh, special. Gang, gang. Gang, gang. Gang, gang. Balloon.

• 20:37Speaker 02

  Gang, gang. Gang, gang. Mmm, that was good. Lemonade. Hee-haw.

• 20:40Shaan Puri?

  So she just, whatever, if they donate to Cowboy, she always says the same thing, the same way, like, like she's a bot. And she's just making like, I don't know, like, what, what is she making like?

• 20:49Speaker 01

  Seven thousand dollars a day.

• 20:50Shaan Puri?

  Seven thousand dollars a day.

• 20:52Speaker 02

  Gang, gang. Gang, gang. Slay home.

• 20:54Shaan Puri?

  There's all these funny memes too of like, guys filming their girlfriend like doing this now.

• 20:59Speaker 01

  Right, right, right, I know. I think it says a lot about what we crave as audiences. Obviously, there's like a lot there to unpack of what we're into, but the interactivity, like you think back to entertainment, even when we were growing up, it was like the TV told you what was on. It was a lean back experience.

• 21:17Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 21:17Speaker 01

  Turn on TV. If what you wanted wasn't on, you just waited.

• 21:21Shaan Puri?

  And you may not even know.

• 21:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, you don't know.

• 21:22Shaan Puri?

  That you're super into these like niche cooking shows.

• 21:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 21:25Shaan Puri?

  Until the, yeah, until Chopped comes out and you're like, oh.

• 21:28Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 21:28Shaan Puri?

  I didn't know I wanted to watch other people cook.

• 21:30Speaker 01

  And I don't know if you remember the TV Guide channel? It was a TV Guide channel. You just waited, it told you what was on, channel 12, and if you missed it, you had to wait a whole nother hundred channels. Scrolled by. So that was like a very lean back experience where we were like, okay, you tell us what's, what to watch.

• 21:44Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 21:45Speaker 01

  And then as we progressed, there was like TiVo and it was more on demand. It's like, oh shit, we can record a show and like have it on demand or

• 21:51Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  See what's coming up. And now you accelerate it all the way to YouTube or Instagram and it's like, I can search for what I want. I can curate my own entertainment. Now it's I can create my own entertainment, right? I can pay money and she will do something.

• 22:04Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 22:05Speaker 01

  That's like, and that's the next level, right? It's like interactive entertainment where I'm not consuming it. I'm creating the entertainment. I'm part of making it.

• 22:12Shaan Puri?

  Part of it, yeah.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think that's what, you know, Twitch, I think is a great example of that too, right? Like. People, people watching long live streams, why? It's because they can have an impact on it.

• 22:22Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think people don't really even actually understand what's going on with Twitch. Like now, I think it's accepted that Twitch is a thing, which took a while to be like, is that like a big deal? And it's like, yeah, it's actually a pretty big deal. But I think unless you use Twitch, I think people still sort of think the default is probably like, Twitch is people watching other people with video games live. And so maybe they're really good at the game. It's like, yeah, that's part of it. But then some people are, you know, like, a lot of people are just there for the chat. A lot of people are just using this background noise in another tab. Like, I remember looking at some data when we were there about how many people are literally just, that's not the focused tab on Chrome. And some people were like, well, we should, we should like discount that.

• 23:07Shaan Puri?

  And it's like, you talk to users like, no, that's like how I like to use Twitch. I'm not just, it's not like an accident and it's just running in the background. Like, I listen to it while I work and I'm coding and I'm listening to this and I'll check back in. Like every, every time something interesting is happening, I'll go, I hear the crowd roar. Basically, I go look at the score and I go see what's going on.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  To me, it's like the reinvention of the radio, right? Twitch has, has really operated like that. But then again, where you get to play a part in it. Ludwig was another creator that we, we talked to on the show where he has developed this kind of adversarial relationship with his chat.

• 23:38Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, because the way you said it was interesting, you go, it's kind of boring if everybody's, if there's also just supportive, right?

• 23:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:44Shaan Puri?

  It's like, you're right. And I was like, I never really thought of it that way. And he's not adversarial, like they hate each other. How would you describe it? Like, what is, what's an example of like what's going on on his channel?

• 23:54Speaker 01

  It is so odd. There's so many different things that go on. I would say his subathons are probably the thing to, to bring into focus, which is essentially, you know, he'll go live for, he, he initially started as 24 hours, but every time you subscribe, every new subscriber, he extended it.

• 24:12Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 24:12Speaker 01

  So essentially they were.

• 24:13Shaan Puri?

  Torture me.

• 24:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was an adversary, right? It was like, I want this to end, but when you take this action, it extends.

• 24:19Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  Right, extends an hour. So he ended up doing it for 30 days, uh, straight, live streaming for 30 days straight. But again.

• 24:26Shaan Puri?

  He's dead now, but it was okay. It was fun while it lasted.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  But that's an example of like having an adversary relationship, which, which is, you know, kind of like you can interact, but you're bringing me discomfort.

• 24:36Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 24:37Speaker 01

  You know, by, by doing this. So it, it makes it fun for the audience to, to play with that. And it's obviously like a joking relationship.

• 24:44Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 24:45Speaker 01

  But there's something that's. You know, fun about that. And I think we should really think about these audiences, the young audiences that are growing up with this. What do they want next? Right? Because we are, we are thinking about like the advancements of entertainment in the context of what we had and how advanced this is that we can self-publish on the internet.

• 25:03Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  And that people can comment and we can have Discord servers and we can engage with them. But there's, there's a whole nother, you know, version of participation. Even think about TikTok, like, why do, why did TikTok become such a big thing? It's participation. It's like, it was easy to participate.

• 25:18Shaan Puri?

  Oh, for anybody to make.

• 25:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was easy to, and they told you what to do.

• 25:21Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 25:21Speaker 01

  Here's the trend.

• 25:22Shaan Puri?

  Here's the dance.

• 25:23Speaker 01

  Here's the dance. Here's how you do it. Here's 100 videos of people doing it.

• 25:26Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 25:26Speaker 01

  Here's the sound.

• 25:27Shaan Puri?

  You try.

• 25:27Speaker 01

  Click this. You try it now, right? Yeah. So that the, even you look at Pinky Doll, right? What we're just talking about. For you to do that, for you or I to start doing that, it's, we just start a live account. That's it. We just start like there's, the participation is so easy, um, where we can either participate in the actual live stream or become that creator within a matter of minutes.

• 25:48Shaan Puri?

  Right. What do you think's next? Where do you see the puck going with that?

• 25:52Speaker 01

  I think.

• 25:52Shaan Puri?

  Obviously hard to predict, but.

• 25:53Speaker 01

  It's hard to predict, but I think.

• 25:54Shaan Puri?

  If anyone could, it might be you.

• 25:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. But I think, I think what we have to realize is that, um, TikTok taught us a lot about the fact that the platform is the creator, uh, in that context, right? Like, if you take the top 10 creators off of TikTok, TikTok's still TikTok, right? You still open it and you, it's a for you page.

• 26:13Shaan Puri?

  You wouldn't even notice.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  It's almost reverting back to the lean back experience. I open TikTok and I say, you tell me what's going on, right? Back to what we were just talking about with TV.

• 26:21Shaan Puri?

  It's just that it's personalized to every single person.

• 26:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it's hyper personalized, I think is number one, right? When we think about the trends that are, that are coming, which is already happening. But I think also, um, like participation forward. So it's like, it's personalized, but it's really easy for me to engage in the action too. And I think that's where maybe there's like two extremes. There's the, the Mr. Beast where it's like, I can't do, I can't buy a train and have it go into a ditch, which is something he did in his last video.

• 26:51Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I saw that.

• 26:51Speaker 01

  And then the opposite end of the spectrum is like, here's what's happening on YouTube Shorts or TikTok. And actually really easy for me to do that. And I can try it myself.

• 27:00Shaan Puri?

  I'm in S, I'm in San Francisco. If you walk around SFU, you can't like, you know, you stub your toe. It's like, what did I step on? Oh, AI. It's like, nothing is, the answer to everything is AI. And I kind of wonder if the answer to this is also AI, meaning you see that AI can draw amazing art. Like a paint, you know, it can paint better than, you know, a human can paint. It can paint anything you want instantly, whatever. It can write, it can make, you know, chat GPT can make rap lyrics. And so I wonder,

• 27:34Shaan Puri?

  you know, do we just get to the point where actually the creator is, the algorithm is the creator? It just, it's hyper personalized and here's just like, it's gonna just deep fake and create something that it thinks you like. And it's just gonna try 10,000 variations per second. And then if anything starts to work, it starts to like, go more down that rabbit hole for, for more creators.

• 27:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, it might not even be a creator. It might just be self generating video, right?

• 27:58Shaan Puri?

  That's what I mean. Yeah, the algorithm is just making the video. It's been like, okay, people seem to like, cause they have, I mean, an unreal amount of data, right? They're like, people like to hear people eat.

• 28:07Speaker 01

  Have you and Sam been deep faked yet? Have you heard of my first million?

• 28:11Shaan Puri?

  I've heard, I've heard of audio only, not a video one, but an audio only version. That's a fake conversation.

• 28:17Speaker 01

  And how, how close?

• 28:19Shaan Puri?

  I mean, it's like, like, okay, if somebody listened to it, if my family member who doesn't listen to the pod, listen to it, they would just think this is the podcast.

• 28:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:28Shaan Puri?

  Cause it doesn't sound robotic. There's little moments, but it's like, kind of passable. If you don't know what deep fakes are, you'd be like, I guess it just sounded like that. If you listen to the pod, you'd be like, oh, you're cool. But you're not really like substantively saying anything like, did you hear the one where they did Joe Rogan talking to Steve Jobs?

• 28:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I

• 28:44Shaan Puri?

  That one was pretty good. I think they kind of edited it to like, make a cool demo.

• 28:47Speaker 01

  I listened to Joe Rogan and Sam Altman, which is, it's a YouTube channel called the Joe Rogan AI Experience. And I

• 28:54Shaan Puri?

  Genius idea.

• 28:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a genius idea, but I clicked on it to, to find out like Joe Rogan and Sam Altman, talking about OpenAI and how chat GPT works.

• 29:03Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 29:03Speaker 01

  Started listening to it to be like, what does this sound like?

• 29:05Shaan Puri?

  I want to hear one.

• 29:06Speaker 01

  And then I just was like, wait, this is just good and interesting.

• 29:10Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 29:10Speaker 01

  And then I just found myself listening to it. And then I was like, do I care?

• 29:13Shaan Puri?

  So if we can do that with the like, the 0.1, then you just have to believe like, okay, inevitably that's where it goes. There's been a few of these that go viral, right?

• 29:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:22Shaan Puri?

  They kind of AI, fake AI things. Like, there's one on Twitch. I don't know if you've seen the Twitch one of Biden and Trump debating.

• 29:28Speaker 01

  Yes. I think where we're going to see this all really skyrocket is during the election, for sure.

• 29:34Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 29:34Speaker 01

  Right? And it's going to get really

• 29:36Shaan Puri?

  Weird.

• 29:36Speaker 01

  Crazy and weird. I brought it up about you because it happened to me and Colin recently, where it was a video of me, Colin and Mr. Beast talking about an online casino that he had started. And it was also, our lips were also

• 29:52Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 29:52Speaker 01

  defaked and

• 29:54Shaan Puri?

  Is it on YouTube or?

• 29:55Speaker 01

  No, it's taken down. We got it taken down.

• 29:58Speaker 01

  We got it taken down pretty fast, but

• 29:59Shaan Puri?

  You're like, it's cool, but fuck that.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was really compelling. But I mean, it was too compelling.

• 30:05Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 30:05Speaker 01

  People could click on it. It's like to the, to just the untrained eye. It's like, oh, that could have been a moment from the podcast I didn't watch. I've had to have conversations with my parents about like, hey,

• 30:17Shaan Puri?

  Be careful.

• 30:17Speaker 01

  Be careful if someone calls you and you think it's me. Let's develop like a safe word, basically. With all of this, like when you ask me what's next, the thing that's been on my mind the most is physical experiences. Okay, I actually think that we're going to want things that are uniquely human. In the coming years, I think we're going to want things that are like collective human experiences where

• 30:39Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 30:40Speaker 01

  Like standup comedy. I think we were going to want to sit and be like, that human is standing there delivering that entertainment to me. Or plays in theater.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  I think we're going to want that. And I think there's a lot of digital creators who are building really promising communities where people will show up. But a lot of online creators who are building high viewership, but no one would actually show up to something that they do. And I think that's

• 31:06Shaan Puri?

  And what's the difference?

• 31:08Speaker 01

  I think the difference is

• 31:11Speaker 01

  The amount of personality that you inject into your videos and if people are willing to connect with that, right? Like long form podcasting is, there's people who spend more time with you and Sam than they do talking to their own mom, right? Or their, their own best friend. So they, they have this like really in-depth parasocial relationship. You guys have done live events, people come.

• 31:30Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 31:31Speaker 01

  Right? And I think there's other creators who rip all of that out because they're looking at the algorithm and they're like, you know what? When I inject my personality.

• 31:40Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 31:40Speaker 01

  10% of people stop watching, but they're looking at it on a, on a view of like 5 million people and they'd rather have 5 million views than 4.5 million views. But when I look at it, I'm like, I think I'd rather have 100,000 views or 100,000 dedicated fans who are.

• 31:57Shaan Puri?

  Who walk away knowing something about me, like one more unit of trust.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  Who are, who are down to listen to me talk and, and understand my personality, then try and rip all of that out to make sure they get to the end of the video. And that is, that is how like the business of YouTube is, is predicated on, do they click and do they watch till the end? But I think sometimes that can give you the wrong signals of what should I keep in? What should I keep out? And again, back to the conversation of high quality audience. And I think the young creators, it's like, it's like playing video games on YouTube, right? If I try this, then this number goes up.

• 32:31Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 32:31Speaker 01

  Right? And I think that is too easy to manipulate right now. And there's, there's so much information. I think we're, we're part of that of like sharing information on how that all works. But you do have to take a step back and be like, am I building a brand? And a brand is about trust, credibility, depth of connection. And that comes from some stuff that might not be optimized for the algorithm.

• 32:53Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, there's, um, it's sort of like drop shipping versus like building an actual brand around what you do, right? Like.

• 32:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a good comp.

• 33:00Shaan Puri?

  There's, um, I don't know if you ever saw when Sony got hacked? Do you remember that? When the emails got hacked?

• 33:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:05Shaan Puri?

  There was one email that I remember came out that was like pretty interesting. And I think it was, um, one of the early Sony guys talking to the CEO and he was, or one of the, it wasn't maybe the early Sony guys, maybe it was like one guy from like a. Like a music, a record label talking to him and he was like, you know, here's what we're seeing. And he's like, basically the more popular this gets, like, you know, people streaming music at home, blah, blah, blah. He's like, it's also creating a pent up demand for what do you call it? He's like, I think out of home entertainment is going to be big. And he's like, out of home entertainment, like, uh, he's like, festivals will do well. This was like a while back and like there was like this kind of like pretty big music festival craze that kind of came out of it. Um, but there was also a couple of other like trends like that, like even things like Tough Mudder and Spartan Race.

• 33:51Shaan Puri?

  All of a sudden people were like, you know what? I just want to like go and voluntarily crawl through mud this weekend.

• 33:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:56Shaan Puri?

  Why would somebody want to do that? It's like, yeah, kind of because you're sitting in front of a computer all day.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:00Shaan Puri?

  Life got too easy and you don't kind of feel soft inside. So you go voluntarily have this like hardship, but also you want to be able to Instagram it and put it online that you did it.

• 34:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, uh, I, I totally agree with that. And I, I mean, obviously that, that it, that's what happened, but I think AI is going to create like this homogenous nature to content. Everything's going to feel the same. Um, and that is going to make us crave something completely unique and different. Almost like looking for like AI has brought a lot of efficiencies into our studio.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  We use AI for a lot.

• 34:34Shaan Puri?

  Like what?

• 34:35Speaker 01

  Do you guys use Autopod? Are you familiar with that?

• 34:37Shaan Puri?

  No.

• 34:38Speaker 01

  Okay, so there's, there's three cameras right now, right? And so basically you would bring these three cameras in and you want to get a clarity on like, if I'm talking, the cameras on me. If you're talking, the cameras on you.

• 34:50Shaan Puri?

  Oh, it does those cuts.

• 34:51Speaker 01

  It just does those cuts automatically. If it's a three hour conversation, it'll do it in 90 seconds.

• 34:54Shaan Puri?

  Oh, that's amazing.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  And it'll be very precise. When you start talking, it'll go there. If you have a human here live switching, which I don't know if he, if someone's watching.

• 35:02Shaan Puri?

  He's not live switching right now, but we talked about it like right before we started this.

• 35:05Speaker 01

  So if he, if he's live switching with a switcher, he actually can't predict when you're about to start talking, right? He's going to be a second late. So now I, do I trust the human more or do I trust the AI more? I mean, the reality is it's brought a ton of efficiency into our office.

• 35:20Shaan Puri?

  That's cool.

• 35:21Speaker 01

  We also explore YouTube titles and play around with AI to be like, hey,

• 35:27Speaker 01

  Here's the title we thought of, but give us 10 variations.

• 35:29Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 35:29Speaker 01

  And sometimes maybe it's it's ours that we like.

• 35:31Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 35:32Speaker 01

  But if we keep going down that path, you know, the other day we were in a

• 35:35Shaan Puri?

  That's just ChatGPT or it's a different tool?

• 35:36Speaker 01

  ChatGPT, but there's, there's other like creator specific AI tools. There's some that aren't public that can only be used if you're partnered with certain, you know, creator companies, specifically there's a company called Spotter.

• 35:49Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 35:49Speaker 01

  That has a really great AI tool that I was using this morning. And the funny thing is like, you're sitting in a room with your team and it's, is it more efficient to sit alone with AI and get hundreds of variations? Or is it, is it more efficient to sit together as a team for 30 minutes? I don't know the answer to that, but I think probably it's AI, right?

• 36:13Speaker 01

  So the question for me is like, if this, if it's driving so much efficiency, I think I'm going to crave inefficiency in other places.

• 36:19Shaan Puri?

  Right. It's like the slow food movement.

• 36:21Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 36:21Shaan Puri?

  It's like farm to tables.

• 36:22Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 36:23Shaan Puri?

  Fast food gets too present.

• 36:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:25Shaan Puri?

  It creates the demand, the craving for the other.

• 36:28Speaker 01

  For the inefficiencies, yeah.

• 36:29Shaan Puri?

  I've, what I've seen though, is that even though that gets created, it does usually end up getting dwarfed by the thing that's

• 36:35Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 36:35Shaan Puri?

  You know?

• 36:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:36Shaan Puri?

  Better, faster, cheaper, you know, like

• 36:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:38Shaan Puri?

  Style of stuff.

• 36:39Speaker 01

  But entertainment, I think is different. Like you go to a concert, it's the most inefficient way to hear the music.

• 36:45Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 36:46Speaker 01

  The Taylor Swift concert, right? If you like Taylor Swift music and you just want to hear it, just go on Spotify.

• 36:52Shaan Puri?

  Right. You're one tap away.

• 36:53Speaker 01

  So why do you want this collective experience? Why do you want to drive, deal with parking, get in there? You know, get to your seat. It's kind of a pain in the ass to go to a concert, right? So what is it about that that's, you know, it's a, it only happens once, right? It's like an experience that you get to happen.

• 37:09Shaan Puri?

  But you know, by the numbers, a lot more people will stream Taylor Swift.

• 37:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 37:13Shaan Puri?

  Then we'll go to that.

• 37:14Speaker 01

  Agreed.

• 37:14Shaan Puri?

  But you know, she'll make a lot of money and monetize totally, totally differently.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:20Shaan Puri?

  Tell me about Mr. Beast. So I've gotten to go to his place and hang out with him a little bit. Pretty remarkable dude.

• 37:29Shaan Puri?

  And not like, oh, he's like an alien or whatever, but just like very interesting to kind of see him in his like normal ways of working. And you can kind of see some differences between how he approaches things like, you know, for me, I was like, oh, how does he approach things? How does he see situations and approach things differently than I do? And he came on the pod, but it actually was like, nothing he said on the pod would have given me that insight. But actually watching him work and like kind of being in a brainstorm with him, then you do start to see those differences. I think you've gotten a lot of access to those moments.

• 37:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:59Shaan Puri?

  What's, uh, what stood out to you that you've kind of like picked up or noticed just by spending a little time with him?

• 38:05Speaker 01

  I would say he's like the most unique human I have ever met. Uh, I think he's like very, very unique in what he cares about. You know, I think what he cares about is very different from, you know, what I care about or what a lot of people care about. He's

• 38:18Shaan Puri?

  What does he care about?

• 38:19Speaker 01

  He like is, is so unique in the fact that he is laser focused in a way that I've never really experienced and, and maybe at times like in a, in a way that

• 38:29Shaan Puri?

  I don't want to experience.

• 38:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 38:31Shaan Puri?

  Just he doesn't want to.

• 38:32Speaker 01

  No, I mean, him and I have this conversation a lot. Like I, I don't crave what he has. I like to have more of a wide perspective on life and a view of, uh, different types of experiences. And he's very, committed to his craft and very like, he, he can laser focus in on something. Like if you've been in one of those brainstorms with him, he's just like very blunt. He's very, you know, he's just like, why would we do that? That doesn't make sense. Like no, doesn't, it, it doesn't exist in the same way for him that it exists for other people based on social context or based on like, well,

• 39:07Shaan Puri?

  Well, it's saying, so you said no, doesn't exist for him.

• 39:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:11Shaan Puri?

  The same way it exists for other people. I think that's really accurate.

• 39:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 39:14Shaan Puri?

  I have a story of an example of that.

• 39:16Speaker 01

  I have many stories of that. Yeah.

• 39:17Shaan Puri?

  What's one from you?

• 39:18Speaker 01

  The time where I saw that the most was at the Mr. Beast Burger opening in New Jersey at the American Dream Mall. Colin and I

• 39:24Shaan Puri?

  That was insane, right?

• 39:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, like we spent the 24 hours with him before and after.

• 39:28Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 39:29Speaker 01

  And lived with him through this, like what felt like a, a hurricane storm of fandom and new experiences for him and Reed and, and the whole team.

• 39:39Shaan Puri?

  Did you think it was going to be, go, go to the part where

• 39:41Speaker 01

  Where he walks out.

• 39:42Shaan Puri?

  Where he walks out.

• 39:43Speaker 01

  Dude, that was, so I was the only camera behind him at that moment.

• 39:46Shaan Puri?

  Are you this camera?

• 39:47Speaker 01

  I'm this camera. That's me. Yeah.

• 39:49Shaan Puri?

  Like later.

• 39:50Speaker 01

  He's famous.

• 39:51Shaan Puri?

  But I was like, this is not what I thought was gonna be.

• 39:53Speaker 01

  No, I mean, there's multiple times where I had the chills filming this video. So I filmed that. Yeah, I filmed that clip and then Jimmy was like, that's crazy. Send me that. And I sent it to him and then he tweeted it and it was just like, it's completely insane. But so that experience, there was, you know, the night before, there was a question around like, how many burgers they could serve? And there was already, I think, you know, 15,000 or 20,000 people there the night before, right? It was completely insane. And they were sleeping in the mall. Mall security was there and they were just like, okay, all right, I guess. No, I don't think anyone fully understood how big he was at that moment. And so they were like, okay, we don't know if we can serve all these people. And Jimmy was just like, what? What do you mean?

• 40:39Speaker 01

  Let's just figure it out. Like, what do we need to do? And they're like, it's just not possible. We can't get more supplies here. And he was like, well, can, can we pay for it? Can we just pay someone to do it? And he was like, well, I don't, you know, I don't think so. I don't think that's possible. And basically what ended up happening was it was possible and Jimmy just kept pushing.

• 40:56Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 40:57Speaker 01

  At a point where again, it's like, a lot of people would be like, okay, that's a no. If I ask three times, it's a no. There's no other possibility.

• 41:04Shaan Puri?

  Oh, the fire marshal said it. He's like, whatever.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think he thinks in different ways too of like, you know, that his immediate thought was around the staff. He was like, I need the staff to be really into this. I need them to be on it. And so he's like, I'm gonna pay everyone an extra thousand dollars today. And that is 30,000. There's 30 people working. It was $30,000. And it's in our video where he says, I'm gonna pay all of you guys an extra $1,000 to whatever you're getting paid today.

• 41:29Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 41:30Speaker 01

  That's like an irrational thing to do. A lot of people would look at that and be like, that's kind of irrational. To spend an additional $30,000. But, you know, he looks at that and he was like, this is what I need to make this excellent. We're just gonna do that. You know, and you look at what he tweets about now too. He spends, you know, a million or $2 million on a video and it makes 200,000 in AdSense revenue. And, you know, obviously his sponsors and stuff, but some of his videos don't make money and he's just like, but that's, they're good.

• 41:59Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  You know, he thinks in just different ways like that.

• 42:03Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 42:04Speaker 01

  He's just very unique.

• 42:04Shaan Puri?

  I, uh, yeah, I feel the same way. He also, um, said some things. He also said some things that were like really funny to me. Like, um, he was like, I was like, so do you want to like have kids or like, what's your, like, what do you want out of life? Besides, okay.

• 42:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:20Shaan Puri?

  I've heard the YouTube part and I was like, what else do you want? And I think he'd said, he was like, I want to be president. I want to do this. I want to be a billionaire and all that. And I was like, okay, cool. But like, what about just like out of your life? Like, forget the big, cool sounding things. Like, do you want to get married, have kids? Like, what do you want to do? And he was like, um, he's like, yeah, you know, I, uh, he's like, yeah, I'll, I think I'll probably like, you know, date or get married or whatever. He's like, I, he's like, I wouldn't want kids. No, fuck no. I don't want kids. And I was like, oh, why not? He's like, oh, he's like, actually, you know, like Steve and Elon, they have kids. There's probably something to it, so I'll do it. And I was like, at first, just hilarious to be like, uh, like, yeah. Just like the first name, basically, literally like the dead Steve Jobs. Who you never met and be like, he's just like, that's, that's the class of people I'm in.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:06Shaan Puri?

  You know, if those people did it, it might be something to it. So I'll do it just kind of for that reason, but I don't feel the need for that because I'm on this mission. And like, you know, that's where, where my head's at right now.

• 43:15Speaker 01

  I have seen him, you know, just being friends with him and having conversations. And we just did another podcast with him recently. Um, I have seen him mature quite a bit. Like, I think we, we do have to remember, like, that's a guy in his mid twenties.

• 43:27Shaan Puri?

  Of course, yeah. You know, he's, actually, he wasn't even, I don't even know how old he was. I, I remember laughing at something and I was like, dude, he's so much smarter, more mature than I was at 24, 23, whatever he is.

• 43:37Speaker 01

  Different though. Again, it's, it, that's not, I don't, I didn't have any friends like him when I was in my early twenties. I think he's, he's a very rare individual and he's 25 now and he's maturing into, he runs a company with, uh, over a hundred plus employees. Uh, he's, he's got this like whole massive operation, this massive platform, and he's 25. It's, it's, uh, going to be interesting to watch the next five years.

• 44:00Shaan Puri?

  If you were to advise him, uh, what would you tell him?

• 44:03Speaker 01

  I think he's already experiencing some of this where he's looking at his content and injecting more storytelling into it, which I think is really, really smart and something that Colin and I have been talking to him about for a long time. Um, you know, it's the same thing I was saying earlier of, I, I think it's okay to, to have a deeper connection with him and, and with the, with the content and with the contestants that he has on there.

• 44:30Speaker 01

  And he can sacrifice some of the, you know, hyper retention editing for that. I also, you know, a year ago, probably would have told him he potentially is doing too many things. And he's already, you know, refocused, right? He's, he's really just focused on the main channel and feastables. And if you think about a year ago, Beast Burger, feastables, uh, main channel, reacts, gaming, right? These are all different things he's doing.

• 44:56Shaan Puri?

  Right. Plus 25 other amazing opportunities.

• 44:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:00Shaan Puri?

  People who want to meet him and this and that, right? Everything will tug your attention away.

• 45:04Speaker 01

  And it's, he's, he can be excellent in all of those things. But as you, as you grow up, as you mature, it's like, what do you say yes to? What do you say no to? And when you're at that platform where you have any and every opportunity, um, how do you focus? It's, it's hard.

• 45:18Shaan Puri?

  Well, the way I'll put it is he can be excellent at any of those, but probably not all of them simultaneously.

• 45:22Speaker 01

  Probably not all of them. Yeah.

• 45:23Shaan Puri?

  Not at the same time. Like you could do anything, you just can't do everything at the same time.

• 45:27Speaker 01

  Because as a creator in a creator-led business, you are the bottleneck for everything. And I've spent time with him. He is the bottleneck for everything, right? Like, he needs to be pulled into the room to, to look at something. He has, uh, you know, say on, on all of that stuff. And he also has the right, you know, mind for it. That's the reason that company is so big and why he's built such a big platform. So where do you inject that? Is it across 20 projects or is it across two? And, um, you know, I think they've, they've really refocused and focused on, on two primary ones.

• 45:56Shaan Puri?

  Every one of these platforms has like a guy at a certain time or a girl at a certain time. That's like the one, they're like, you know, you know, whether it was like Casey Neistat or PewDiePie or like, kind of, they have these like epic arcs. And they're the top of the mountain. And then most of them either literally stop creating because they kind of, they transition careers, they get burnt out, whatever it is. Or they're still creating, but they're just not like, there's the new wave of new people doing new cool shit.

• 46:26Shaan Puri?

  He is kind of remarkable though. So you know, he may have a different path or trajectory than than most. If you, if I was to say, all right, make a prediction, um, five years from now. What is like today, if Mr. Beast is like, you know, the number one YouTube creator? And like launching a couple of these businesses underneath like Feastables and whatnot. Five years from now, do you think he's still the number one creator on YouTube?

• 46:49Speaker 01

  I think he's probably the number one online digital media company. I don't know that, you know, I I don't know what creator is going to mean in that many years. Like I think he has the best pulse on on online storytelling right now. And I think, you know, we saw some people try this, like the BuzzFeeds, the, you know, like these, these massive media companies that emerge. I think he's more akin to a media company than he is a creator. So I, that's what I think. I think he'll be the biggest media company. The way he's building is like a true company. It's a great vibe there. If you've been there, you know, like it's, uh, they have good people involved. So I don't know. I don't, I don't know, you know, what the content looks like. I don't know what he as the creator looks like, but I think it will be a, a

• 47:35Speaker 01

  media company. Like when we sat with him last, in our last interview, he has a ton of aspirations to make content for Netflix. He has a ton of aspirations to produce stuff. And, you know, I don't think he's that keen or intent on he has to be in everything, or he has to be the lead in everything.

• 47:49Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 47:50Speaker 01

  I think that's been the, that is the draw right now, but I think in the future, Mr. Beast is a content studio, you know? It could be, we could be looking at like, we don't know if we're not looking at the next Disney or Paramount or, you know, some massive studio that can build IP and monetize in different ways. Like Mr. Beast is the first, if we look at it and saying, that's the first show that was built out of there, right?

• 48:13Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 48:13Speaker 01

  It's a game show that has a couple of different formats. It's distributed. It's the biggest show.

• 48:18Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 48:18Speaker 01

  They built a chocolate brand out of that, that operates kind of like a game show. You can win stuff when you buy the chocolate, right?

• 48:24Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 48:24Speaker 01

  So it's like, okay, that looks and feels really similar to like a Disney and a Mickey Mouse, right? Okay, let's, let's build this big media platform and let's build a product connected to it. They're, they have that skill set. They could probably replicate that, right? And as you look at their cast of characters, you know, there is a cast of characters there that can be built out. There is more IP that can be built out. It's like, Build IP, connect product to it.

• 48:49Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 48:49Speaker 01

  You know, or connect experiences to it. It could be an experience too.

• 48:52Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, if he chooses to go that path. I want to talk about this. This is amazing.

• 48:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:59Shaan Puri?

  So your content company did something pretty dope.

• 49:04Shaan Puri?

  You guys did, I think, what is it? A hundred editions?

• 49:06Speaker 01

  We did 500 of those.

• 49:09Shaan Puri?

  No, no, but this was to celebrate.

• 49:11Speaker 01

  It was to celebrate two years of our newsletter.

• 49:12Shaan Puri?

  Two years.

• 49:13Speaker 01

  Two years of the newsletter, the published press.

• 49:14Shaan Puri?

  So you got this newsletter, the published press, which is dope. It's like what you guys do on the YouTube channel, sort of like creator. A great newsletter for creators.

• 49:22Speaker 01

  I mean, it was largely inspired by like the Morning Brew Hustle movement, right? Which was like, okay, we are subscribers to these newsletters. What if we made one about our own community?

• 49:30Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. And then you made an actual physical newspaper. And I'm very honored because you pretty much sold out of these.

• 49:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:38Shaan Puri?

  This was dope. Why do something like this? Because I'm asking because this isn't like an economic move. This is not going to grow your audience. It's not going to get you rich.

• 49:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:47Shaan Puri?

  It's not going to do any of those things. It takes effort.

• 49:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:50Shaan Puri?

  It's a risk in a way. What's your philosophy on just do dope shit like this? Why?

• 49:58Speaker 01

  It's fulfilling. Like it's hard to say that we have a hard-nosed philosophy on it. It's just like, we are creative people. And as we've built a business, like one of the things that's so interesting about being a creative is you're really good at kind of zero to one and the like, let's just do cool shit until something works. What becomes startling is when something works. And then you're like, okay, so what now? I just keep doing this thing. And that's like, that's the really funny thing about Colin and I always say that creatives aren't consistent people.

• 50:30Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 50:31Speaker 01

  And so we've surrounded ourselves with really consistent people who help us be consistent in the formats that we found. But you need that occasional pop of just like, you know, it'd be cool. To make a newspaper.

• 50:43Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 50:44Speaker 01

  Like, we were rebranding the published press. That's the new logo for it. We just were like, how do we? How do we tell people that we've been doing this for two years? How do we celebrate? It also was, we had just crossed 100,000 subscribers on the newsletter. And it was like, how do we celebrate this moment?

• 50:58Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 50:58Speaker 01

  What is it? Do we just put out a tweet that's like, hey, it's been great? And we were like, well, as things are getting more, increasingly more digital, what if we did something physical? And that was it. That was the impetus. And then it was just, hey, is everyone excited about this? Okay, cool. Are we down to stay up late at night for this? Great. And that's, it just organically happens when you're. There's a lot of people who we asked about this and they were like, that's, you know, that's not going to happen in the time period that we wanted to happen in. And then that's another exciting thing for a creative person.

• 51:27Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 51:27Speaker 01

  Who's driven.

• 51:28Shaan Puri?

  I found the challenge.

• 51:29Speaker 01

  That's another exciting thing. So, yeah, I would say that it's, again, like, it cost us money. We did not make money from this. There's no sponsor in it or anything. It didn't dramatically grow our audience, but it has been a moment where a lot of people could understand what the brand was. And a lot of big creators reached out to say, can I have one?

• 51:51Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 51:51Speaker 01

  You know, I want one in my house. And then we were seeing that creators have framed it and put it in their house. Seeing that there's just something.

• 51:57Shaan Puri?

  I asked you for one.

• 51:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, you asked me. You DM'd us and asked for one. And like, that to me is like, again, back to this concept of high quality audience. It's like, the people who reached out about this.

• 52:05Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 52:05Speaker 01

  It's a premium group of people.

• 52:07Shaan Puri?

  And the reason I ask is because it's like, in retrospect, once you see the final product and it's cool, and then you hear these stories and it's like.

• 52:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:12Shaan Puri?

  All these things make sense in hindsight. It's upfront when it's kind of unknown, kind of unproven, tight deadline, you know, a lot of things to do. That's when it's hard to do this. Or sometimes you say yes to too many of these things, right? So it's almost like, what you just said kind of reminds me of like, Google had like the 20% time.

• 52:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:29Shaan Puri?

  I hired the best engineers in the world and like, this guy's fixing the bug in the AdSense platform. But like, we gotta give these guys like 20% time to just tinker and hack on

• 52:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:39Shaan Puri?

  Stuff that that they, you know, get motivation from and like Logically, you'd say, well, you're losing, you know, 20% time is basically one day, one day out of, out of the week that they're not working on, on this, on their main job. But the reality is that like, sometimes those hit and also it makes the other four days out of the week.

• 52:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:58Shaan Puri?

  More productive. You don't actually lose anything.

• 53:00Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 53:01Shaan Puri?

  Cause you attract the best people and you gave them an outlet to like be creative.

• 53:04Speaker 01

  And also if you're not following what's exciting you, then you're just, you built yourself a job.

• 53:09Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 53:09Speaker 01

  And that's like, then you have to look at it and be like, wait, what did I just do? Right. What did I just do? I, I also think that, that, you know, what we do with our merchandise and what we do with anything physical, like, most of it at the moment is not driving crazy revenue, right? It's not like a revenue driver for us, but we think about building our community and we're, we're very niche. And so for niche creators, we think about collectibles, like, we want to create collectibles.

• 53:35Shaan Puri?

  That's right. Yeah.

• 53:36Speaker 01

  Um, and when we have collectibles, then you get to be a part of our community and be like, I'm, it's, it's the feeling of going to see a band when you were younger and keeping the ticket stop. It's like, I was a part of this community at this moment.

• 53:47Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 53:47Speaker 01

  So these are collectibles along the way of, of our journey. You think about the, the massive creators like Logan Paul and Mr. Beast or Emma Chamberlain, they're creating consumables.

• 53:57Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 53:57Speaker 01

  Which is great for mass creators, right?

• 53:59Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 53:59Speaker 01

  So, um, these, these things are like cool collectibles that we think are cool. Like we're planning another drop in, in October and our merchandise does not, you know, uh, drive like crazy amounts of revenue for us. It's relatively nominal, but it's awesome when you walk down the street and see someone in the merch. We've sold, you know, 2,000 of these hats and they're, they're out in the world and

• 54:20Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 54:21Speaker 01

  2,000 people are wearing them and we've, we, we see stories where people connect because they saw someone else wearing the merch. So that to me is like the symbol of community, building this tight knit group, uh, who can connect and be like, I'm part of the same group as you.

• 54:33Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 54:33Speaker 01

  Identify in the same world as you do.

• 54:35Shaan Puri?

  Totally. We, uh, that, I love the way you put it. It's a great frame on, on that idea of consumables versus collectibles. When we, uh, we're about to launch like merch for the pod or whatever. And it was like, oh yeah, merch. And it's like, okay, here's two things I know. Number one, people don't want to wear our, like for us, it was like, they're not going to wear a shirt that says my first million. Like this is not going to happen. It's not cool. I don't want to wear that. They don't want to wear that. Let's just all agree on that. What they will wear is like, Inside jokes and slang that only if you know, you know, and if you don't, you don't.

• 55:06Speaker 01

  No small boy stuff.

• 55:06Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, no small boy stuff or like I have this shirt that it's a we made that's a Polaroid of it's like a fuzzy Polaroid of Sam when he had his hot dog stand. It's like in the style of those like Kanye shirt, whatever. It's like some like cool, cool looking like it's an imitation of that.

• 55:21Speaker 01

  Great.

• 55:22Shaan Puri?

  And it's like, nobody will even know who that is or what hot, you can't even tell that it's a hot dog stand, but like, if you know, you know, and that's, and that's it. And I was like, we should just do, I was like, if my rule is like the Tim Ferriss rule is basically, if you're not going to make a ton of money on it, it should be free or it should be like as just sell it at cost, but like, and do like a limited run so that it's more interesting.

• 55:43Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 55:43Shaan Puri?

  And just only like, if you're going to try to make money, only make money when you're going to make a lot of money. Don't try to like trickle a little bit of beg for money everywhere because that doesn't like, nobody likes that. And that's not the right approach for someone like this. And

• 55:55Speaker 01

  A lot of our merch is also

• 55:56Shaan Puri?

  way to think about it.

• 55:57Speaker 01

  A lot of our merch shipments are driven by a referral program through the newsletter. Right? And so that's like, you know, again, that's like pulling from the playbook. Yeah. The, the, the whole, the newsletter playbook.

• 56:07Shaan Puri?

  You had this tweet or this video that I saw that was like a Naval quote that I really liked. It was, um, it said like, uh, was it was like, your problem is that you're writing to be read.

• 56:19Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 56:20Shaan Puri?

  That resonated with you and me. I want to like, talk about that. Why did that hit? Cause so simple. It's like, you know, seven words or something.

• 56:27Speaker 01

  I think it hit me at a time where I felt like we were creating very scared. The beginning of this year, I felt like we were creating very scared. Like we had crossed a million subscribers last year. We felt like we had built a brand in the space and opened up the year. We made a few videos that we just canned. We just didn't put them out because we were like, oh, those aren't going to work for the audience, but we liked them. And got really in our heads around, you know, again, you're, you're playing this dance as a creator of what you want to make, what the audience wants to watch and what the platform wants.

• 56:55Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 56:55Speaker 01

  Those are the three things that we think you're, you're constantly playing with. And if you overvalue what the audience wants, you will, you're, you're catering to. You know, this group that obviously they have created your career if you know you've made it, but you can't forget that it came from what you wanted to make. I think on one side of the spectrum of, you know, being a publisher or being a creator, there is the artist who's like, I do not care what you think. I'm going to make this. And that has financial implications, right? That are essentially very hard to make money like that, but very cool. We respect artists like that. Right? There's some most respected artists like are misunderstood, maybe understood once they pass or just didn't care about what the audience thought. Right. Your interpretation doesn't matter to them. Right.

• 57:40Speaker 01

  Then you go on

• 57:41Shaan Puri?

  Like love that you exist, but like, sure. I like guac on my chipotle. I'm gonna have a job. It's okay.

• 57:47Speaker 01

  The other side of the spectrum is being a distributor. It's like, why do we have so many Spider-Man movies? It's because they put butts in seats. Right. So the person at the studio, the movie studio is not an artist. They're thinking about, what do we make? What do we greenlight? Spider-Man. That's going to get people in the seats. That's going to sell tickets. And I think as a creator, you have to be in the middle of that. And some creators slide heavy on the side of distributor of just like, what does the audience want to watch? I'll make that. Whatever, you know? And then on the other side of what do I want to make? And so I think that Naval quote really hit me in this feeling of losing. You know, I did grow up. I went to film school. I, you know, took playwriting in college. I'm like really into artsy stuff. And I think when money gets involved, when

• 58:31Speaker 01

  you start commercializing your creativity, and when it doesn't work for years, that's an important part of our story, right? It didn't work for a long time. We didn't make any money for a long time. You get terrified of losing it. And when you get terrified of losing it, you start creating to be watched or writing to be read.

• 58:47Shaan Puri?

  What did you say? Creating scared?

• 58:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, creating scared. Yeah.

• 58:50Shaan Puri?

  Let's take a book title right there. I like that one.

• 58:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's something Colin and I talk about a lot. It's like, let's not create scared. You know, what are we scared of? You know, again, it's, it's, it's all this mix of the public view count, the perception, the tweets of like, these guys have fallen off or whatever you think is going to happen if you put out a video that people don't like. And people can feel that, I think. I think you can feel it as a creator. It feels really uncomfortable to create scared. And right. Yeah, it's not, it's not fun to watch.

• 59:17Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, absolutely. You know, you had Hasan Minhaj on the show and

• 59:21Speaker 01

  Love Hasan.

• 59:22Shaan Puri?

  He's very much on the artist side. I think he like drew a line in the sand for himself. He's like, okay, I

• 59:29Shaan Puri?

  Either I'm gonna get on TikTok and I'm gonna dance for the algorithm.

• 59:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:32Shaan Puri?

  Or I'm gonna go the other way and I'm not. And he's like, had like the soul searching moment. It's like, you know, he, he sent me a voice memo once. I was just like, bro, I'm gonna just create great art. I'm an artist and artist creates art. That's what I'm doing. I'm not a businessman first. I'm not a creator first. I'm, this is what I'm gonna do. And he's like, so I gotta be true to that. And I'm gonna work on projects that are like, interesting to me from that perspective. And it's gotta hit my bar on that. And like, that's the vibe I got from him. But you know, this was a few years ago when I,

• 1:00:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:03Shaan Puri?

  when we were talking about that stuff. You had him on, I think, more recently.

• 1:00:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. End of last year.

• 1:00:07Shaan Puri?

  Did he say anything that kind of resonated with you on that?

• 1:00:10Speaker 01

  Totally. Yeah. I mean, he, he talked a lot about, he kind of changed my whole perception on making YouTube shorts. Cause he,

• 1:00:17Shaan Puri?

  What did he say?

• 1:00:18Speaker 01

  He kinda made, he kinda made fun of it. Uh, you know, Hassan's like so funny, the way he, he talks, but he, he described making YouTube shorts as being a skinned rat for the engineers in San Bruno.

• 1:00:31Speaker 01

  Which I thought was really funny. Uh, he was just like, you're a guinea pig. You are, you know, essentially creating more data points for them, for their, you know, you're, you're, they're your boss. You know, whatever works on their algorithm, you then pander to that.

• 1:00:44Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:00:44Speaker 01

  And so he, he, he kind of pushed us in that, that direction of recognizing like, are we artists or are we creating for the algorithm? And the second thing he said, which I, I heavily resonate with, he's like, everything is about the PDF, which means like, what is the idea? Right? Write it on a piece of paper. Is the idea good? Show it to someone. Pitch it to someone. Do they immediately go, that's a good idea? Do they laugh? Do they feel some sort of emotion?

• 1:01:09Shaan Puri?

  Before it's packaged in.

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. And he was like, people, even when we got on our pre-call with him, he was like, all right, what are we making together? When we sit down.

• 1:01:19Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:01:19Speaker 01

  And he asked us that question. And I was like, oh, you're right. What is the Hassan Minaj, Colin and Samir interview? Let's write it out. Let's, let's not plan it, but what is it? Like, what's the idea? Why is this a good idea to do this?

• 1:01:30Shaan Puri?

  Right. What was the answer?

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

  We talked about like, how can we, um, like, how can we bring forward his creator story of starting on YouTube and using YouTube to, um, go through kind of this crazy windy path up to Netflix, right? And how he's now kind of left YouTube. Um, cause Hussin's, Hussin's origins are on YouTube.

• 1:01:54Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I didn't know that.

• 1:01:55Speaker 01

  He used to upload, he came up with shows and, and put them on YouTube. If you go to his channel and search by oldest.

• 1:01:59Shaan Puri?

  Like, like sketch shows.

• 1:02:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, sketch shows. He did hosted shows where he talked about the news, like, almost like Tosh, uh, Tosh. Oh, yeah. That for us was like, no one's, no one has told that story. That's interesting. Let's talk about that. And let's talk about your relationship with, with.

• 1:02:13Shaan Puri?

  And he was also like 18, 19, doing like comedy clubs, right? Like he was doing stand up at like, yeah, San Francisco or something like that, I think.

• 1:02:20Speaker 01

  Totally. Yeah, I, I watched him do King's Jester live. Uh, like we went out to go, did you go to one of his shows?

• 1:02:25Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it was really good.

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  So that's his stand up special. Um, that guy's like a performer, man. Like he, he really, he really inspired me to be like, this is a.

• 1:02:33Shaan Puri?

  Not like a comedy show.

• 1:02:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a one man show. It's a performance. Uh, and that to me, it really inspired both Colin and I to be like, this is a craft. You have to work on it. You know, performing is part of this craft. Um, ideation is the biggest part of it. You know, he has a writing partner that he sits and writes.

• 1:02:50Shaan Puri?

  Did you meet Pratt or?

• 1:02:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:52Shaan Puri?

  What's he like? I've never gotten to meet him. Um, but I, I'm very, I'm very, very fascinated by kind of the, the wingman.

• 1:02:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:00Shaan Puri?

  Like, there's a lot of popular, popular people, but almost all of them are not, nobody's solo. Everyone's got some kind of a team. And usually they have like their, their confidant, the person who's in the bunker with them, figuring things out, compliments them, does all the shit they're not good at. Um, but like, kind of like keeps them going in the right direction. And those people are actually really, really fascinating to me. And nobody really like, asked them a ton of questions. But I have a million questions for them. Uh, what, yeah, tell me a little bit about him.

• 1:03:25Speaker 01

  I think oftentimes as, as creatives and creators, we think we're, we want to hire an employee, but actually what we want is a collaborator.

• 1:03:32Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:32Speaker 01

  And if you're lucky enough to come up with a collaborator, then, you know, those are the people, in my opinion, who typically make it, like fully make it when they have a collaborator. So Pratt. Limited time with him, but I find comedians to be like astute observers of the world. And I found Pratt to be like very much that, right? Like he, he had a notebook and pen during the King's Jester taping. It was, I don't know if it was a taping or if it was just one of the shows, but they were prepping for the Netflix special.

• 1:04:00Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:00Speaker 01

  And he was sitting there during the entire show, sitting right in front of me, just ferociously taking notes on what was working, what the audience was reacting to, when there was too, too much of a pause when there wasn't like he was. And right after the show, before Hussin came back into the green room, him and Pratt were talking.

• 1:04:17Shaan Puri?

  I love that. Yeah. I love it when it's sort of like, all right, we're going back to the lab.

• 1:04:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:21Shaan Puri?

  It's like, we kind of like, we do our thing, but like, because I tell, so Ben's my collaborator, basically. So like, we did a couple of businesses together, but also when it comes to content, like we recently did. We're kind of new to YouTube, but we did, we used to just basically put the podcast on YouTube.

• 1:04:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I remember.

• 1:04:36Shaan Puri?

  And it was like.

• 1:04:37Speaker 01

  You guys are growing now though.

• 1:04:38Shaan Puri?

  It started really bad. It was like, we would, first time we did it, I remember we had like 4,000 views. And I was just like, oh man, like, but like, which is fine for when you start, but we already had the podcast was significant. So it was like, it's kind of like, if you play poker at one stakes and then you go down to the micro stakes, like, you know, quarters, 10 cent table. Doesn't feel very fun because you've now experienced a different level of stakes.

• 1:04:58Speaker 01

  But those aren't even in the same casino. Spotify or Apple pods and YouTube. Yeah. There's a completely different group of people. So.

• 1:05:05Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. So we were like, all right, we think we could do this. And so we started to grow, but recently we did one. And it's this, uh, this money one that's on the right there that has, how many views I have now?

• 1:05:16Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So 300,000 views. And this was a video, it was the first video that I made YouTube first. I was like, okay, I'm gonna, uh, create a video that I think is gonna be like YouTube. It's not just a podcast. And me and Ben were like, what if we just took three days? It's like, we just tried to make one great video for this. And we did, and we made that and we were basically collaborating on that for the first time we had done that, that way. But the cool thing is now we've been working together for a couple of years and you get this like mind meld where it's like, it's almost like you only can you could speak in shorthand or reference like it's like if you say something, I already know what part he's gonna be like, oh, we gotta talk about that later.

• 1:05:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:05:54Shaan Puri?

  Cause that relates to these other three things. And then earlier we talked about this, but that's and it's like, if you can get to that point, that's like a pretty like formidable thing that I think most people don't have. But when you have it, it's like, oh, fuck, this is, that lets you go places.

• 1:06:06Speaker 01

  I think you need someone who's excited and wants to to be a part of a team where their name isn't at the forefront, right? Which which can be really complex. Right? But we know who Pratt is, but if you're a fan of Hassan Minaj, at scale, you're not going to know who he is. Uh, so you have to find someone who's really into that too, right? Who likes to be that person.

• 1:06:24Shaan Puri?

  If you've ever tried to hire, a lot of people be like, I want to work for you because I want to be you.

• 1:06:28Speaker 01

  Cause I want to be you. Yeah.

• 1:06:28Shaan Puri?

  And it's like, okay, cool. But that doesn't really work. Like,

• 1:06:31Speaker 01

  Especially with this group.

• 1:06:32Shaan Puri?

  That's all I need.

• 1:06:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. This group right now, it's hard to hire someone who doesn't want to be the creator or, you know, is is trying to become a creator and and working with you to be like, okay, now I get it. Now I'm going to go.

• 1:06:42Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:06:42Speaker 01

  Do it. Um, but yeah, you have to find someone who's who's down for that. But it's it is kind of like being an athlete where, you know, you guys, when I leave, you're going to talk about the performance, right? You're gonna, you're gonna probably watch game tape back. You're gonna watch it back and be like, oh, maybe I should have asked this question there, or maybe this would have been more interesting, or he went a little long here. I should have stopped him, you know, like, there's so much uh, that goes into this, that if you deeply care about the craft and you have someone who cares that much about the craft, you can get better at the craft.

• 1:07:08Shaan Puri?

  You can get better faster.

• 1:07:08Speaker 01

  You can get better way faster. Yeah. It's hard to find.

• 1:07:11Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:07:11Speaker 01

  It's it's typically happens just organically. And then you're like, okay, this is my guy now.

• 1:07:15Shaan Puri?

  Right. How much do you guys, you guys have your business off the back of your thing, which is the newsletter. The newsletter is a Yeah. Kind of a different type of business.

• 1:07:22Speaker 01

  It's actually a separate company now.

• 1:07:23Shaan Puri?

  And there's separate people writing that thing. It's not you guys creating it necessarily. Have you seen, and uh, I'm I'm I'm keeping track of these kind of creator driven businesses where you have like a, almost like a an audience co-founder and like the way you used to have like a technical co-founder for a business. Now you have almost like a distribution co-founder.

• 1:07:40Speaker 01

  I love that. That's cool.

• 1:07:41Shaan Puri?

  What have you seen that maybe everybody hasn't heard of, right? Cause I think everybody's kind of heard of Mr. Beast and maybe a couple others, but um, What are some cool ones that you're keeping an eye on or I should know about or other people should know about?

• 1:07:54Speaker 01

  The typical creator business is make content, sell ads, right? Which is like, that's baseline. Some people never need to grow out of that because that's just a good business. But like when, when you go through those extensions, like I think Ali Abdaal has a fantastic education business. He's a creator out of the UK who talks about productivity and he's built a series of courses and

• 1:08:16Shaan Puri?

  Wasn't he a doctor too?

• 1:08:17Speaker 01

  He was a doctor prior. Yeah, you're right. He's a doctor. He's an excellent teacher. But he has built a great business that is, you know, very much focused on online education. I think

• 1:08:30Shaan Puri?

  He publishes his numbers.

• 1:08:30Speaker 01

  He publishes his numbers.

• 1:08:31Shaan Puri?

  He does like four million a year on his like four or five million on his

• 1:08:34Speaker 01

  Pushing to six this year.

• 1:08:35Shaan Puri?

  Creator Academy, which is like basically like become a YouTuber.

• 1:08:38Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. And he has a ton of courses on Skillshare about like studying for the MCAT or like he's just figured out that, okay, I'm really good at making online video. Yes, one of those ways is to monetize through advertising. But another one is through

• 1:08:52Shaan Puri?

  Teaching through online video.

• 1:08:53Speaker 01

  And that's the classic like build once, sell twice, right? It's like you build it, it lives on Skillshare or on your own website for years to come. People can buy it, right? So I, I really like the digital product business. Because it's just scalable and we do very few things that are scalable as creators, right? I also think there's a, there's a future model now, which is potentially, there's a creator named Amelia DeMoldenberg, who has a show called Chicken Shop Date.

• 1:09:21Shaan Puri?

  I think I've heard about this.

• 1:09:22Speaker 01

  It's a great show.

• 1:09:23Shaan Puri?

  Were you the one who showed me this?

• 1:09:24Speaker 01

  It's a great show. She's had Jack Harlow on it. She just had Jennifer Lawrence on it.

• 1:09:28Shaan Puri?

  And what's the shtick? It's like at a chicken shop?

• 1:09:31Speaker 01

  It's a date. Yeah. It's a date at a fried chicken place in London. And the chicken shop in London is like the last place you would go to have a date. So there's comedy in it. She's a comedian.

• 1:09:43Speaker 01

  And through, yeah, through this, it just had like, this has now spun her into essentially creating her own production company where brands come to her and say, we love your shtick. We love your comedy. We love the way you've created this show. Like this show has no advertising in it, no advertisers, and we'll never have advertisers. And this thing does, you know, the Jack Harlow episode has 15 million views. This regularly does, you know, one to five million views in the first week, but no advertisers. And what it operates as is like, it's a production company and Nike just came to her. So she kind of created an agency. She created an agency. Yeah. So like Nike came to her. She proved like, I can create cool, likeable content.

• 1:10:26Speaker 01

  It's vertically integrated where she can come up with the idea, then her company can shoot the idea, then she can be the talent in the idea. And then the thing that I think we forget is like, she's the distribution outlet for that idea too. So where does she post? On her own? On her own YouTube channel. Yeah. So she. She doesn't do ads, but she'll put like full episodes. Cause I saw Barbie. Yeah. She, she went and hosted the Barbie premiere. That's smart. So I like that. There's another creator named Amanda Rach Lee, who's, who's based in Canada. And what she did is she started YouTube by showing bullet journaling and how she was setting up her bullet journals. And what is it? So go to the channel, Amanda R A C H and then Lee. And now, yeah, like go to like one of these bullet journal setups.

• 1:11:11Speaker 01

  This just looks like Etsy of YouTube. Yeah. Yeah. And how many views does it have?

• 1:11:17Speaker 01

  3 million. So when she started, she was doing these bullet journal setups. Like here's how I set up my journal. And then what she did was swap out the journal she was using and create her own journal company. And that to me is like epitome of creator business. Right. Where it's what Colin and I call content product fit. She didn't have to change the content to integrate the product. Right? You just, I mean, to talk about a big example, it's Chamberlain Coffee. When Emma Chamberlain launched that, she drank coffee in every episode. Right. Swap her coffee out. Product placement, but done at like a whole nother level. Yeah. And I think, you know, it's something we're actually struggling with, with our newsletter, which is like.

• 1:11:58Speaker 01

  How do we integrate that in every episode? Sure, we can bring it up, but that doesn't drive subscribers. So it's Logan Paul said this about Prime. He said, a lot of creators, when they talk about their own product, it sounds like they're doing a brand deal.

• 1:12:12Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:13Speaker 01

  They don't know how to integrate it regularly, you know, and like the Nelk Boys with Happy Dad, right? Their alcohol is in every single episode.

• 1:12:21Shaan Puri?

  Right, because they're chilling over beers.

• 1:12:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. Logan has Prime everywhere with him.

• 1:12:27Speaker 01

  So, you know, I think creators who have this, like Amanda, they can build really substantial businesses.

• 1:12:32Shaan Puri?

  What do you call it? Content product fit?

• 1:12:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, content product fit. So this is a really impressive business to me because it's just, it's niche, but 3 million people watch this and she sells this journal.

• 1:12:42Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:42Speaker 01

  That's insane.

• 1:12:43Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, she's got to be doing, I mean, what do you think she's making on something like this?

• 1:12:49Speaker 01

  I've spent time with her, she's never told me, but I will say that she speaks at a lot of Shopify events as like a very good case study for them. I know she's doing well. She has a good team. The thing I love about this business too, it's it's repeat purchases. There's a new journal drop. You can run out of pages in a journal. Once, you know, once you have allegiance to this, it's like, yeah.

• 1:13:10Shaan Puri?

  You know, great. So I've had this idea for, because I'm a big journal guy.

• 1:13:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:14Shaan Puri?

  And so I was like, dude, I want to create my own because, I don't know, I like, I have an idea of what I want mine to be. I just haven't made it. So if I'm going to make it for myself, maybe I'll make it for others. But the best example, my favorite example of this is actually a really small stakes one, which is the Ryan Holiday coin.

• 1:13:27Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 1:13:28Shaan Puri?

  That's like such a good example of this because he was like, he's the way he described it. So first it was like the content product fit where he's just like stoicism. Here's the like reminder coin that like you're going to die. It's like, you know, whatever, remember you're going to die or whatever. But he was like, you know, I've done like t-shirts, t-shirts suck.

• 1:13:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:46Shaan Puri?

  And he's like, I wanted something that was like, I could fit in an envelope, a normal envelope. So like mailing was easy. I wanted something I can manufacture here. So I don't have to like produce overseas, whatever. He's like, no sizes, no colors. It's like, just like, there's one.

• 1:13:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:59Shaan Puri?

  Like there's one SKU and I'm going to sell, and I think he sold like $20 million of this one SKU over the year.

• 1:14:04Speaker 01

  Really?

• 1:14:05Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. I'm pretty sure he said that on our episode or we like. You know, waterboarded him out of it like, you know, we were like, I think you're like, is that wrong?

• 1:14:15Speaker 01

  Is that in the ballpark?

• 1:14:16Shaan Puri?

  And he's like, uh, you know, not wrong.

• 1:14:18Speaker 01

  I think probably one of the biggest creator led companies um right now that that maybe isn't as as prominent in the mainstream conversation is Mark Rober's Crunch Labs.

• 1:14:29Shaan Puri?

  Hmm, which is like a subscription.

• 1:14:31Speaker 01

  Subscription box.

• 1:14:32Shaan Puri?

  STEM or something, right? Like he's like a science kit.

• 1:14:34Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's a science kit. I got it for my nephews. It is excellent. They are hooked on it.

• 1:14:39Shaan Puri?

  Nice.

• 1:14:39Speaker 01

  Like it is excellent. I text Mark about it. I'm like, dude, this product is crazy.

• 1:14:44Shaan Puri?

  Like, that's huge. It's a big business.

• 1:14:45Speaker 01

  Huge. That's a big business. Um, yeah.

• 1:14:48Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:48Speaker 01

  And I know he said now that that makes more than his channel. Yeah.

• 1:14:52Shaan Puri?

  For sure.

• 1:14:52Speaker 01

  And his, I mean, his channel is massive.

• 1:14:54Shaan Puri?

  That's, that's a good other ratings because he does basically create science experiments, right?

• 1:14:57Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:14:58Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:58Speaker 01

  And he has big versions of that in his videos. So like, he'll make a big version of it. And then he'll be like, and you can make a miniature version of this at home.

• 1:15:07Shaan Puri?

  I think this content model, this, what you're just describing here, these examples is um like, I always think about when I meet someone, I'm like, wow, you had so much success. Like, what'd you do? And they're often the story is basically like, you know, there was like a moment in time where like, if you realized like X, like X thing works, which is like in the early days of Google, it would be like, I could buy clicks for a cent for like any keyword. Like, that's insane. Like, okay, let me just work backwards. What's the best keyword? And like, so that's how I got into like selling leads to lawyers or whatever. Like, you know, asbestos, you know, removal company or whatever. And then it's like, um, like our buddy created native deodorant. And he's like, yeah, basically like, I started this when Facebook ads were kind of like underused and people were only using them for like,

• 1:15:52Shaan Puri?

  like media companies are trying to buy Facebook ads, but then they were like driving them back to a blog post and monetizing with a Google ad there.

• 1:15:59Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:15:59Shaan Puri?

  It's not really a good model. He's like, I realized like you can sell just like a product through Facebook ads with really simple ads. And do you don't like, things that you used to have to go into Target, get Target to carry you, you could just start selling directly to consumer through Facebook, D to C.

• 1:16:12Speaker 01

  I mean, think about.

• 1:16:13Shaan Puri?

  There wasn't really like as much of a category yet, but it's like, if you knew, if you knew that secret during that time, it was kind of an open secret, but not like, wasn't obvious to everybody yet.

• 1:16:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I think movement watches another great.

• 1:16:25Shaan Puri?

  Influencers with them, right?

• 1:16:26Speaker 01

  Lead marketing, but I, I think what's incredibly hard, especially for creators right now is what you have to sacrifice to have that, that view and that long-term view of building a product because. Advertising revenue is so available right now to us. And again, you, you kind of pull the levers when it comes to YouTube. It's the highest margin advertising dollars that I think, you know, has existed in, in video content ever. Right. Because you don't get on the phone with the advertiser. You're, you're negotiating a contract. There's no sales team, there's no back and forth, there's no revision.

• 1:16:58Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, but YouTube takes what, like?

• 1:16:59Speaker 01

  Forty-five percent. Yeah.

• 1:17:01Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:01Speaker 01

  But still, it's like this.

• 1:17:03Shaan Puri?

  You just don't see it.

• 1:17:04Speaker 01

  You don't see it. It's just like, and like.

• 1:17:06Shaan Puri?

  You don't have to do any work.

• 1:17:07Speaker 01

  You don't have to do any work. You don't do it, right? You just, you upload content and you get a check in the mail. So creators who make really viral content that has reasonably high CPMs. It's like, well, I should, you know, I should make another video. And then a brand deal comes and that can be, you know, anywhere from, from 20, $50,000 all the way up to 200,000. Right. You're like, well, okay, all right, I'll make another one of those videos. And then what I find is that a lot of creators never get to that moment of, okay, now we should stop and put our focus in. Over here. And how do we even do that?

• 1:17:37Shaan Puri?

  And it's all totally different skillset.

• 1:17:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. How do I even do that? How do I hire someone? I think that's the biggest need in the creator economy right now is operators are the biggest need.

• 1:17:45Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 1:17:45Speaker 01

  And education on how to hire is so, it's just not there, right? Cause there were, it's all young people who, who.

• 1:17:52Shaan Puri?

  Which is funny, by the way, because there are so many operators, because I've come from an operator world. And all the operators are like, dude, I could, if I just had the right influencer, this, this is soap. We could sell a lot of this soap. Or whatever the thing is, they pick, they'll pick your favorite widget. And, uh, and for them, it's like a total black box. Like, how do I go meet these people, get them to trust me enough to do this? And so it's like this.

• 1:18:14Speaker 01

  And then also they have to have the temperament to, to want that, right? Like a lot of creators have to, they, they might conceptually think they want it. But then when they get into it and their name is on a soap product.

• 1:18:25Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:18:25Speaker 01

  And they don't really like that it went out to a customer and it wasn't perfect. And then they're like, oh, I don't want to do this anymore.

• 1:18:30Shaan Puri?

  They freak out.

• 1:18:31Speaker 01

  They freak out, right? Cause it's like, I have so much control over how my brand shows up. Um, that when you start to scale that, it gets uncomfortable.

• 1:18:38Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:18:39Speaker 01

  So.

• 1:18:39Shaan Puri?

  And do you, um, I have this question up here. I put on this list. So it's three creators likely to become a billionaire. I gave you the one freebie, you can say Jimmy, and, uh, he could be one.

• 1:18:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:51Shaan Puri?

  What other creators do you think have the potential to build a billion dollar empire around what they're doing? It's a combination of their content plus businesses, whatever.

• 1:19:00Speaker 01

  I think Dude Perfect.

• 1:19:02Shaan Puri?

  I saw they did like a amusement park or something, right?

• 1:19:05Speaker 01

  Well, they're working on it. Yeah.

• 1:19:06Shaan Puri?

  A hundred million dollar project.

• 1:19:08Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 1:19:09Shaan Puri?

  What does that mean? That's what they're investing into this project?

• 1:19:12Speaker 01

  I don't know the specifics of it. I've spent a lot. They're actually, I've known them for a really long time. Like, you know, I've been on YouTube and around YouTube for 12 years. They were the first group that I got involved with early on when we sold our last company.

• 1:19:25Shaan Puri?

  And they're kind of like, they're trick shots with their thing that worked, but like-

• 1:19:28Speaker 01

  They make sports accessible to, you know, young kids through trick shots and, you know, viral sports videos. And the reason I bring it up is like, I think those guys have been at this now since around 2006 or '07. And they have remained at the top of their game throughout that whole experience. They also went through a long period of time where, you know, they've done the work. Like, I watched them hold the cameras for years, even when they were at 30 million subscribers. They would just go out themselves and hold the cameras and edit the videos. And they still sit there in the edit bays and make sure they're perfect. And I think they, if you've seen images of, they just did a tour, see images of like-

• 1:20:12Shaan Puri?

  Their fans turn out.

• 1:20:13Speaker 01

  The young kids who turn out for that, the parents. I had a conversation with them one time where they said their goal is to be the most trusted brand in entertainment. And I actually believe that they are, they're on track for that, where parents really trust that they can take their kids to a Dude Perfect event.

• 1:20:31Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:20:32Speaker 01

  And that, when you take that to an amusement park, when you take that a couple steps forward, I think that matters a lot in the future. And I think they're on track for sure.

• 1:20:42Shaan Puri?

  That makes sense. That makes sense. I like that pick. Anyone else come to mind that you think has the potential to do something large like that?

• 1:20:48Speaker 01

  I think, I think of some creators who have the potential, but I don't know if they want to do it. You know, like I think Cody Co is actually someone who's.

• 1:20:58Shaan Puri?

  He's coming here tomorrow.

• 1:20:59Speaker 01

  Oh, he is? I love Cody. I know you went on his show. I think Cody is like one of the most intelligent people I've met in the space. I think he, even as he's like in, starting to invest now and I can just, I was thinking about it because him and I were texting yesterday. And I was thinking in my head, I was like, who's Cody Co in 10 years? He's either like in the woods, you know, like chilling.

• 1:21:21Shaan Puri?

  He's a free man.

• 1:21:22Speaker 01

  DJing and running, or he's like running the biggest capital company, you know, like I, and I think that's just a personal choice.

• 1:21:29Shaan Puri?

  Up to him.

• 1:21:30Speaker 01

  It's all available to him.

• 1:21:33Speaker 01

  But yeah, I don't, I don't know that, uh, I'm sure there's others that I'm not thinking of, but.

• 1:21:37Shaan Puri?

  They're my favorite brand on YouTube.

• 1:21:40Speaker 01

  TMG?

• 1:21:40Shaan Puri?

  TMG is my number one favorite channel on YouTube.

• 1:21:43Speaker 01

  I think Noel Miller's like a true artist and special. Like I think there's very rare people like him. And also very, not very many people like Cody Co.

• 1:21:52Shaan Puri?

  Right. So yeah, their music videos are so goddamn good. It's actually kind of annoying.

• 1:21:59Speaker 01

  Frustrating. Yeah.

• 1:21:59Shaan Puri?

  It's like a bit, it's a bit off putting. Like dude, what like, you can't just do that.

• 1:22:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:22:05Shaan Puri?

  At that, you could do it as a joke. It can't also be amazing.

• 1:22:09Speaker 01

  Be good. Yeah. It can't also be good. It can't also make me want to listen to it multiple times.

• 1:22:13Shaan Puri?

  Right. It's funny and amazing. And you just did it like for kicks on the side.

• 1:22:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:22:18Shaan Puri?

  On top of your other successful thing.

• 1:22:20Speaker 01

  I find this like pursuit of being a billionaire to be very fascinating. Like I, I, I don't really have interest in it. I don't, if it, if it's the outcome of what I decide to do, that would be interesting. But it's not like, I don't find myself to be focused on that outcome. And I also found most creators I talked to are not focused on that outcome.

• 1:22:42Shaan Puri?

  Totally.

• 1:22:43Speaker 01

  But I think it's in the video game of entrepreneurship, it is the final boss, right? So you're kind of like, if you're into that.

• 1:22:50Shaan Puri?

  Is actually walking away.

• 1:22:51Speaker 01

  Sure. Yeah.

• 1:22:52Shaan Puri?

  The person who says they have enough. Is is like, like, you know, Paul Graham, who created Y C, which is, I think, probably the most successful tech startup, actually, because it created

• 1:23:05Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:23:05Shaan Puri?

  all these other tech startups. And like, it created Dropbox, and it created Airbnb. Like, they probably wouldn't like to say created, but like, they, without them, there is no Reddit. There is no, there are, there probably aren't those, those businesses being successful, including OpenAI, because

• 1:23:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:23:20Shaan Puri?

  he saw Sam Altman and made him president when there was tons of other more qualified candidates on paper. But he's like, this, he even says something, he was like, this is like what it would be like to talk to a young Bill Gates, like, saw that before. And now he's created OpenAI, which is

• 1:23:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:35Shaan Puri?

  today, the most, you know, one of the most valuable private startups. So anyways, Y C gets to the peak of its powers, or gets like, you know, does amazing, amazing stuff 10 years in. And Paul's like, Sam, here you go. I'm going to the woods in the UK, and I'm gonna live in the woods with my family, and I'm gonna basically like, write essays, paint and code. And like, you know, that's what I'm gonna do. And that is the final boss of Silicon Valley, because you see most people just go right back into the hamster wheel, and they start running again.

• 1:24:07Speaker 01

  But that's like, the final boss of life, right? It's like making that realization is

• 1:24:10Shaan Puri?

  Not wanting anymore.

• 1:24:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, being like, content and, and developing a relationship with the term enough.

• 1:24:16Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:16Speaker 01

  That's, that's a hard thing to do, but

• 1:24:18Shaan Puri?

  Totally.

• 1:24:19Speaker 01

  Do you have that? Do you have a number or like a, do you, do you feel like you have enough? Like, what are you in pursuit of?

• 1:24:25Shaan Puri?

  Um, I'm in pursuit of a really specific thing, which is, I heard a quote once that I think Naval said, he goes, the, the day you stop trading today for a better tomorrow, you've retired. So he's like, basically, if the things you do today in and of themselves were the reward of what you did today?

• 1:24:50Shaan Puri?

  You've now, you've actually exited the game. You've retired. Retirement doesn't mean you go sit down and do nothing. It means you're not saying, all right, I'm gonna do this shit today that I don't really wanna do, I don't like to do, but I'm doing it because it's gonna pay off in the future. It's gonna pay off in the future and like, your whole life goes by doing that. And so when I heard that, I was like, oh, guilty, like, you know, put me in cuffs, take me to jail. Like, that's me. I've spent the first, you know, 15 years of my career, like, you know, from 20 to 35, basically, was that. I was like, oh, I'm gonna do X. And I'm gonna say I didn't enjoy it necessarily, but like, definitely, I was doing X because it might lead to Y.

• 1:25:28Speaker 01

  I totally agree.

• 1:25:29Shaan Puri?

  I've never just done X.

• 1:25:30Speaker 01

  That too, yeah.

• 1:25:31Shaan Puri?

  I've never just made my main thing. Like, I'm doing X because I'm just, doing X seems fun.

• 1:25:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:36Shaan Puri?

  And so that's the, that's the game I'm playing now, is to try to achieve that, to craft my life such that that's true. And so, even though it's like weird, it's like, you know, it's like, what do I like to do best? I don't know. I like to, I like to do this podcast. I like to read, like to talk, I like to like, you know, work on these little, tinker with these little things or, you know, just understand, go down rabbit holes and just see how things work in the world. And it's like, those are the things that I do without thinking about some like, future payoff. So I don't think they even, like, or they don't clearly have one.

• 1:26:08Speaker 01

  Well, you can also have the, there's another Tim Ferriss moment in our, in our episode together. He was like, something to the tune of like, you can decouple the, the non-financial reward and the financial reward.

• 1:26:20Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:26:21Speaker 01

  Right? So like this experience, there's a non-financial reward to this, which is like, we have a good conversation.

• 1:26:27Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:26:27Speaker 01

  Cool. This is fun. We both go home. That reward is complete. Then you put it out. If there's a performance reward to it, amazing. If that leads to financial opportunity, great, you know, like, but that's a separate reward. And if you can decouple those things, then that is.

• 1:26:42Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, just basically, like, the way I think about stuff is like, there's a car. And you can have a bunch of passengers in the car. It's like, you know, I have like my ego, but hopefully it's in the trunk. It shouldn't be driving. Like, you know, let's put him in the back.

• 1:26:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:26:55Shaan Puri?

  He's kind of annoying, but he's there. And you got like, you know, the thrill of things that's in the car, but I don't really want thrill to drive because he takes us off the cliff. Like, who gets to drive? And so, you know, that's kind of like, so to me, I'm like, all right, who gets to drive is like, the version of me that is following my curiosity, creating shit consistently, just creating things.

• 1:27:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:17Shaan Puri?

  And is content with life and has like, uh, I'm doing it because I want to do it. I'm doing it because it's enjoyable to do. I'm doing it because it's challenging. So even if it's not that enjoyable, like I'm struggling at it, I'm enjoying the struggle of doing this thing.

• 1:27:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:32Shaan Puri?

  And so that's who I want to drive, meaning that's who gets to ultimately make the decision of where are we going in this car? Other people might have input, other, the other parts of me might have input, like I want money, I want this, I want that.

• 1:27:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:43Shaan Puri?

  But I can't like, like basically money was driving for a long ass time. And then it's like, hold on, wait, the deal was you get to drive till we get to this number. We got to that number. You don't get to drive anymore.

• 1:27:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:27:53Shaan Puri?

  And maybe you shouldn't have been driving for the first place, but at least in my life, I was like, I want to get to basically a financial freedom number, a number where I can spend whatever I want in my lifestyle, and it's coming off of my investment income, not out of like my work income.

• 1:28:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:07Shaan Puri?

  Uh, because then it's like, all right, cool. Money works for money. I work for me.

• 1:28:11Speaker 01

  Man, I think that is a big opportunity with creators. It'd be like a smaller group, but I think as creators, we're really good at generating money, but we don't know how to turn money into money.

• 1:28:22Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:28:22Speaker 01

  Because it's like,

• 1:28:24Shaan Puri?

  It's a totally different skill.

• 1:28:25Speaker 01

  It's a totally different skill set. And then we don't know who to trust with that. You know, I think if there was a creator focused group that helped with that, that.

• 1:28:31Shaan Puri?

  Well, we went to this athlete thing yesterday with a bunch of, there's a bunch of basketball players there. And it's the same thing, like literally we were joking, we were like, this event would be cool if it was just the athletes who do what they do and us. But then you have all the clingers.

• 1:28:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. And you're like, who do I trust?

• 1:28:46Shaan Puri?

  And yeah, like, and some of the clingers are the people they trust and they're like, kind of safe choices. They don't actually know how to do the thing for them.

• 1:28:53Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:28:53Shaan Puri?

  It's like, you know, actually if they asked, I would for free, help them or tell them exactly what they should be doing. So that their money works for money and they don't piss it away.

• 1:29:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:02Shaan Puri?

  But, um, The incentive is not for me to go chase them and reach them and then beg them to listen to my advice.

• 1:29:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:09Shaan Puri?

  The guy who's trying to take their money is incentivized.

• 1:29:11Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:29:12Shaan Puri?

  To chase them and beg them and, and try to convince them that they're the guy who's going to help them.

• 1:29:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:29:17Shaan Puri?

  It's like this weird, like perverse incentive. It's like the guy who's going to like work his hardest to break into your circle is the one who wants something.

• 1:29:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. You actually don't want to work with someone who's like.

• 1:29:27Shaan Puri?

  Needs something from you.

• 1:29:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. On, on the sports topic, there's one more, um, destroying. Uh, he is a sports creator, a football focused creator. He, he played football at, uh, UCF and this is pre NIL days.

• 1:29:41Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:29:42Speaker 01

  So played football. He was making YouTube videos. They brought him into a room and said, you have a choice. You can either continue playing football or you can continue with a YouTube channel. He chose YouTube. And built this, this really substantial YouTube channel. He has this series called one-on-ones, uh, that just.

• 1:29:57Shaan Puri?

  Does he go live to places? Like he goes to like a city?

• 1:30:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. This is like live events and they get crazy. Like in Arizona, it had to get called off because it was like too many people there and the police had to get involved.

• 1:30:07Shaan Puri?

  I was gonna go, he, I think he, he messaged or his manager, somebody messaged.

• 1:30:11Speaker 01

  Okay, okay.

• 1:30:12Shaan Puri?

  And was like, I'm in, like, he's an hour away. I was like, oh, that sounds kind of fun, but like I didn't make it out. What does he do actually?

• 1:30:17Speaker 01

  So it's one-on-one. So basically it's wide receivers versus cornerbacks and they line up and they go one-on-one and one dude wins $10,000. And for, for some of the communities he's going into, that's life-changing really, right? For a lot of communities.

• 1:30:29Shaan Puri?

  Is he the guy in the thing or it's?

• 1:30:31Speaker 01

  He's the host.

• 1:30:32Shaan Puri?

  Two other guys.

• 1:30:32Speaker 01

  Okay, he's the host. Um, you know, and like you can see like this is, this is what it looks like. Um, if you go to his channel and go to most viewed.

• 1:30:42Shaan Puri?

  So cool. So, yeah. So that, if that guy had caught it, he would have.

• 1:30:45Speaker 01

  He would have advanced. No, he'd advance. So it's, it's, it's a tournament and you, and then you start to know these characters and they travel to different markets.

• 1:30:52Shaan Puri?

  This is the new N1 mixtape.

• 1:30:53Speaker 01

  Exactly. This is N1 mixtape.

• 1:30:55Shaan Puri?

  For football.

• 1:30:55Speaker 01

  And, um, Colin and I spoke with, uh, at, at a YouTube event with Dee and he was speaking with Roger Goodell and we were talking to Roger about destroying and he was like, this guy's like really impactful for football.

• 1:31:07Shaan Puri?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:31:08Speaker 01

  He's, he's creating new fans and the NFL just partnered with him on this series, the one-on-one series. And I think when I look at Dee, like the leagues are starting to get involved with him in a way where I'm like, wait, he is single-handedly. A really important part of the future of sports viewership.

• 1:31:25Shaan Puri?

  Yep.

• 1:31:25Speaker 01

  And that to me, I don't know that he, I don't know if he has aspirations to be a billionaire, but to solve that problem for the NFL is a big problem to solve. And if you solve that for the CFL and you start solving that, you know, you go down the line, this can also become camps.

• 1:31:41Shaan Puri?

  Totally.

• 1:31:41Speaker 01

  This can become, you know, so many things, right?

• 1:31:44Shaan Puri?

  The world is his oyster.

• 1:31:44Speaker 01

  He can become a host. He's probably should be one of the hosts for the NFL like.

• 1:31:50Shaan Puri?

  Or like the Pro Bowl, which no one's watching.

• 1:31:51Speaker 01

  I think he can also create a, yeah, I mean, he can redefine the Pro Bowl. Cause this is more interesting.

• 1:31:56Shaan Puri?

  This is already.

• 1:31:57Speaker 01

  This is way more, yeah.

• 1:31:58Shaan Puri?

  I'm like half looking at you because I'm like watching this.

• 1:32:01Speaker 01

  I mean, I, we, we pulled this up in our office and we have a ton of people who don't watch sports. And then they got hooked on it.

• 1:32:05Shaan Puri?

  Right. This is primal.

• 1:32:06Speaker 01

  It's primal. Yeah. And so he could redefine the Pro Bowl. He can also create a NIL agency, right? So you have college athletes who he represents this, you know, where college athletics didn't let you monetize. He knows how to do this, right? So, okay, now can Dee create a NIL agency where he's signing athletes and getting them contracts? He, the world of Dee, like the world of sports, no one is really approaching it like him. And I think that like sports is still highs, it carries a very high dollar value. Live sports.

• 1:32:38Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:38Speaker 01

  It's, it carries such high dollar value that I think he has that opportunity as well.

• 1:32:43Shaan Puri?

  There was a guy at that event we were at that was, um, you, you'll know him because he's lacrosse. Paul.

• 1:32:47Speaker 01

  Paul Rayball.

• 1:32:48Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. He was a groomsmen in my wedding. He's one of my best friends.

• 1:32:51Shaan Puri?

  Amazing. He is. I don't know much about this.

• 1:32:53Speaker 01

  So you were at the boardroom event.

• 1:32:54Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:54Shaan Puri?

  So tell me about it. So basically he, what he was saying on stage was like, okay, we created this professional lacrosse league.

• 1:33:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:01Shaan Puri?

  What he, what was interesting, he was like, there's like, whatever, I don't know, eight teams or something. But he's like, we own the teams.

• 1:33:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:06Shaan Puri?

  It's not like a franchise model. And I think he's like, we pay the costs, but then like all the players have upside in the thing. Like what is the business model of this? This sounded pretty fascinating.

• 1:33:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it's.

• 1:33:16Shaan Puri?

  Do you think it's a good model also?

• 1:33:17Speaker 01

  I'm an investor, so a biased opinion, yes. But, but I've, uh, You know, what I've always seen in lacrosse, if you pull up, go to the premier lacrosse league YouTube channel and play the last vlog from their All-Star game, you get a sense for like the community, that one, the fastest shot, right? That, yeah. So you get a sense for like what it looks like. I mean, they were going wild, but like they packed the stadium out in Louisville for their All-Star game. So basically what he did was there was a pre-existing league called Major League Lacrosse. They paid their players terribly. They treated them not well.

• 1:33:50Shaan Puri?

  That was the best league?

• 1:33:51Speaker 01

  That was the only pro league. It was like, and no one really cared about it. I mean, it was, it was kind of interesting, but it was empty stadiums. They didn't have healthcare. It was like, they weren't treated like, it was tough to be a pro athlete and not get paid much, right? And Paul became the, you know, number one lacrosse player. He had the biggest media platform. Colin and I actually ran his YouTube channel. That's how we became very close. We were running a lot of different athlete YouTube channels at one point. And so we became really close to Paul. That's how we met. And he had the best head on his shoulder for like media. How do you build a brand? How do you, you know, he had the biggest, he was called lacrosse's first million dollar man. He had deals with Red Bull and New Balance. And he had created the model for like, how do you make money as a lacrosse player?

• 1:34:35Shaan Puri?

  Was he the best and he was the best at media? Or he was actually the best at media and really good?

• 1:34:39Speaker 01

  No, he was the best.

• 1:34:41Shaan Puri?

  He was the best player too?

• 1:34:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was the best player. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:34:43Shaan Puri?

  So those are those like Conor McGregor at one time, like he's the champ and he's like the most marketable guy.

• 1:34:49Speaker 01

  So he, he decided, you know, at one point, just to say, hey, you know what? We're going to go raise money and create our own league. Like this league sucks that I play in. That's what he did. He turned to Joe Tai, who's

• 1:35:01Shaan Puri?

  The Nets owner.

• 1:35:01Speaker 01

  You know, yeah, Nets owner who played lacrosse in college and loves lacrosse and is a great dude. Met him a couple of times and he became the lead investor and then they partnered with Rain Group and

• 1:35:14Speaker 01

  They raised a bunch of money and said, we're going to pay the players a reasonable salary. We're giving them equity in the league. We're going to give them healthcare. Uh, and we are going to create media around them. We're going to create media opportunities for them. We're going to teach them how to, you know, and the last thing they did was they said, we're not going to stick these teams in local markets. We're going to actually take the whole league on tour.

• 1:35:34Shaan Puri?

  Makes sense.

• 1:35:35Speaker 01

  So they, they developed.

• 1:35:36Shaan Puri?

  That makes more sense.

• 1:35:37Speaker 01

  It's like a touring, you know, circus where it's like, is it coming to San Diego this weekend? Okay. Everyone descends to this major, major market. Yeah.

• 1:35:46Shaan Puri?

  Super unique. You know, if you have lacrosse people, they come to town twice a year.

• 1:35:49Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:35:49Shaan Puri?

  It's like, oh, we'll go to that. We may not go all the time, or there may not be enough people to support a stadium.

• 1:35:54Speaker 01

  Well, I think also what he knew and what, what we saw was that the model in lacrosse, where you made money was by doing camps and clinics. Right? So you, you, you have youth camps where like, there's a lot of young kids who want to play. They come from affluent backgrounds. Their parents are willing to pay a thousand dollars for them to get coached by their favorite lacrosse player. And Paul built a massive camps business. And so alongside this, you go to a major market. Now you have a weekend dedicated to, you can have camps. You can turn all these players into camp counselors and, and trainers.

• 1:36:25Shaan Puri?

  They earn extra money or whatever.

• 1:36:27Speaker 01

  They can build their own bespoke businesses, but that all, you know, connect to the league and.

• 1:36:32Shaan Puri?

  That's.

• 1:36:33Speaker 01

  So he, he, him and his brother are really sharp.

• 1:36:35Shaan Puri?

  And they didn't sell franchises yet.

• 1:36:37Speaker 01

  Not yet.

• 1:36:37Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. And they, uh.

• 1:36:39Speaker 01

  Barstool's involved in one of them.

• 1:36:40Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 1:36:41Speaker 01

  Uh, they, they got to name the expansion team and pardon my take, like they're the owners.

• 1:36:47Shaan Puri?

  What'd they name it?

• 1:36:47Speaker 01

  Uh, the Water Dogs. It's a ridiculous name. Yeah. But like that, you know, there's, that, that creates a kind of that, that inside joke with the part of PMT community. That it's like, they have their own team.

• 1:36:56Shaan Puri?

  Smart. It's a collab. It's like, oh, we're going to do a collab. Yeah.

• 1:36:59Speaker 01

  Cause when they play, big cats tweeting about it, uh, when they, they won the championship last year, he got his own ring, you know, it's like.

• 1:37:05Shaan Puri?

  Amazing.

• 1:37:06Speaker 01

  They, they're able to build, again, they're very media savvy. And so they, they understand that this is a long game. Lacrosse is not.

• 1:37:12Shaan Puri?

  Well, to build any league, I think I texted you this during the event. I was like, I think what this guy's saying is actually quite smart. We should look at investing and I go. I'll go, man, building a league is hard. Like fun if you do it, but that is like one of the hardest games you could play in the world of entrepreneurship is creating a sports league from scratch. Cause it's like kind of a 20 year arc.

• 1:37:32Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. You have to have such a long view on the world and on your life to do it.

• 1:37:37Shaan Puri?

  And you're doing live events, you're doing all the hardest things.

• 1:37:39Speaker 01

  I mean, every weekend he's in a different city. You know, I'm watching these and looking that the most promising thing is look how young the kids are who are there, right?

• 1:37:46Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:37:46Speaker 01

  So if they grow up with this league, these teams, these franchises, like they are playing a very long game here. And I credit them to for doing it, but it's, it's not an easy thing.

• 1:37:57Shaan Puri?

  They signed like a $10 million deal or something with ESPN, like ESPN, yeah, the media rights deal. That's good.

• 1:38:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. So when they first started, Colin and I made a documentary about them for NBC. We've had like many, many different lives of, you know, Colin and Samir. Yeah.

• 1:38:13Shaan Puri?

  That's amazing. Do you think that's going to be a, you know, a good investment for you? Were you like the first one in? Cause he's like your buddy?

• 1:38:19Speaker 01

  I was first one in, uh, which was great.

• 1:38:21Shaan Puri?

  So it's doing good.

• 1:38:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's doing, I'm having very happy.

• 1:38:25Shaan Puri?

  How like, um, like you're going to get like, let's say this works out hopefully, like, you know, like we all were rooting for this. Like you're going to make a bunch of money from this thing that was so impossible to predict, that that's how this whole thing would pay off. It's like, all right, mom, I know I don't have health insurance. I don't have a job. I know I'm kind of filming this like failing league. And you're like this, this like lacrosse thing. It's like, and it leads to the thing, right? So it's a Steve Jobs quote, right? You look back, you see all the dots, how they connected, but like,

• 1:38:55Speaker 01

  You go even further back, like, and the way this happened was my first idea when I was 21 was to set up a laptop and make YouTube videos about lacrosse.

• 1:39:04Shaan Puri?

  Commentating, right?

• 1:39:05Speaker 01

  That was a bad idea when you really, you know, you zoom out, but if you're into it, like a lot of creators ask me like, how long does it take to make it? On YouTube, like, how long does it take to make it? I'm sure entrepreneurs ask that question too, right? Or have that thought in their head, like, how long is this gonna take? And I was like, I always think it's such a ridiculous question, because I'm like, well, what's your relationship to making videos? Do you wake up every morning and you can't not do it? Like, you're just like, all I can do is make videos.

• 1:39:30Shaan Puri?

  Then you made it from day one.

• 1:39:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, you made it, and it will, there will be an outcome from that. There will be, it will lead you somewhere. But if you wake up and you're like, this sucks. It's kind of what you were saying, it's like, I'm doing X so I can get to Y.

• 1:39:42Shaan Puri?

  Well, the entrepreneurial version is startups fail, but founders don't. So like, I moved to San Francisco in 2012, so that's 10 years ago. And I met a bunch of people, and we used to have like these like underground fashion founder like meetings where we're like trading tips and tricks and being like, yo, what do I do? This person, I need to fire them. What do I say when I fire them? Like, basically, there's a bunch of CEOs being like, I can't, like, tell my team about this, I can't tell my customers about this, I can't tell my investors about this. I can only tell you guys, because you guys understand. And luckily, unlike YouTube, everybody who was doing startups at the time was like, all living in the same seven-mile radius city. And so we would just all meet up all the time. And sure enough, like, as you watch, if you track that cohort, there's basically only two outcomes.

• 1:40:26Shaan Puri?

  One is got so burnt out from like the grind and failure that they just stopped after like, you know, three, four years, more even five years. They just like, did that company, they're like, screw this, I'm taking a job, I'm moving back to Connecticut, and like, I'm gonna live in a low-cost place, I'm gonna de-stress, and I'm gonna do that. But everybody else who stayed in the game, won. Like, literally, like, almost like 100% of my friends who stayed in the game.

• 1:40:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:51Shaan Puri?

  And some of them won in year two, some won in year five, some won in year nine. Now we're in like year 11 or 12, people are winning like now, but like, and it's kind of like, it feels like a really long time, like, wow, 12 years? It's like, yeah, but we all started this when we were 21, so like, you know?

• 1:41:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:07Shaan Puri?

  Okay, we're

• 1:41:08Speaker 01

  Mid 30s, yeah.

• 1:41:08Shaan Puri?

  Poor us, we're 34 and rich, like, you know?

• 1:41:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:41:11Shaan Puri?

  It worked, and it worked, right? The 15-year arc, you get like, then the odds flip from like, 90% of new businesses fail to actually like, 90% of you guys will succeed if you actually enjoy this enough, where you'll keep doing this, even though you have easier options.

• 1:41:25Speaker 01

  Yes, I always, I've said that multiple times. Whenever I'm having something that feels like I'm struggling, I'm like, This is the, uh, the, the least rational path to making money, right? Is what I do. That I, at this point also now, I have enough exposure and enough of an abundance in my network that I can go and get a, get a good job, right? But like, I do this because it's, it's just what I do. It's just who I am. I don't even know what to do in another context. I don't know what that looks like. I, I will say though, like being, it, it's hard to be, uh, not outcome oriented. You know, like I think as an entrepreneur, you do think about like exits and you think about, you know, like these big paydays and, uh, I would say that even with, with our newsletter,

• 1:42:08Speaker 01

  like when I saw Milk Road, I was like, okay, I want that outcome too. But whenever I get too attached to that outcome, I'm like, okay, wait a second. Right. That, that's like, that's creating in a way that's just like, the product probably will not be great if I don't just put my head down and go, okay, it's Monday. Is this Monday issue really great? Okay, it's Wednesday. Is this Wednesday issue really great? And I've really tried to, um, refine my focus on process and impact. Like is, I, I have to focus on the process of creating the thing. And then the second thing is like my, a lot of my reward is seeing if we're having impact. Is, is this actually impactful, what I'm putting out? Right. Or is it just going out and, you know, no one's saying anything about it or we're

• 1:42:50Speaker 01

  not getting any, like I, I find I gauge the success of our stuff from like the texts I get or the DMs or like, hey, that episode was really impactful or hey, that really changed the way I think about this or hey, that newsletter taught me about this. If I see those, then I'm like, okay, we're doing, we're, we're doing something. Let's keep doing that. Hopefully that takes us to an outcome, but you also have to accept it might not. It might just be this and we might just get, you know, 5% better, you know, over the next two years. Right. And, and that's it. And you have to accept that that is a, that is the, maybe the most likely reality is that you just keep doing it. Right. And as long as you can accept that, at least for me, that's how I, you know, explore it for myself.

• 1:43:29Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, the best test of a project is basically, would we regret doing it if it didn't work?

• 1:43:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:43:36Shaan Puri?

  Like, obviously, we don't want it not to work, and we might be upset if it didn't work, but like, would we actually regret doing it if it didn't work? Cause then it's like, oh, I'm just actually dependent on the success or failure of what's usually a low odds of success endeavor.

• 1:43:47Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 1:43:48Shaan Puri?

  Whereas other things are like, I wouldn't really regret it because like, well, I'm still gonna get this, like, still gonna be fun to do, still gonna learn a ton. I'm like, this is the type of thing I like to do.

• 1:43:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:59Shaan Puri?

  So, you know, if this doesn't work out, it doesn't really matter. Like, I'm just gonna ping pong to the kind of the, the next version of this, but it was a forward, it was a forward step either way, right?

• 1:44:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:07Shaan Puri?

  There's this, uh, like Tony Robbins does this thing where he does this, um, dabblers versus masters. I don't know if you ever heard this? So he tells a story at his events where he goes, um, he goes, uh, there's some people that they go and they discover racquetball, which maybe now pickleball would be the same, but it's like, you know, they go, they go to the gym, they're like, they see somebody playing racquetball, they're like, oh, I'll try it. And they go and they have, they have some fun. And they're like, racquetball, that, this might be my thing. And they're like, okay, I'm gonna play racquetball. And so they, the next day, they come back, play again. Next day, they actually go and they, uh, you know, they get better shoes because they were like, oh, that was the problem last time. They buy the racket. They start playing, blah, blah, blah, and they, they, they're doing well, but then they play somebody who's been playing for like 10 years, who's like way better than them.

• 1:44:49Shaan Puri?

  And that's, you know, they're for three days straight, they're playing and they can't hit a good shot. Everything's going off and they're losing all these games. And they're like, this stupid, like stupid racquetball, like,

• 1:45:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:45:00Shaan Puri?

  Why am I in this box? I'm trapped. Like, you know, this is, it's too loud in here. It's,

• 1:45:04Speaker 01

  It is weirdly loud.

• 1:45:05Shaan Puri?

  This is more for old people. You start to find all these reasons to quit. So they, they, they quit. Like, I'm gonna go play a real game. I'm gonna go play tennis. So you go outside, you play tennis, you're like, oh, so much better. I'm outdoors. This is way better. And, you know, they're hitting the ball around, they're starting to learn the strokes, they're, they're enjoying learning a little bit. Same thing happens. They start to play somebody who knows what's going on. They're hitting the ball in the net. They can't really serve well and it's getting frustrating. It's hot out and they're like, stupid game. Like, you know, what is this? Then I like, this is, this is like a girly game. I don't want to play it. I want to play like, a real game and golf. And then they're like, just fuck. From day one, they're like, fuck. And he's basically like, you know, most people go through their whole life doing a series of these.

• 1:45:47Speaker 01

  Dabbling, yeah.

• 1:45:48Shaan Puri?

  And they're dabblers. And he's like, what's the difference between a masked, there's like, there's three categories. A dabbler, a dabbler is basically like, try it. As soon as it gets hard, bounce. Then he's like, then there's the stressor achiever. Stressor achiever is like, when it gets hard, they just start gritting their teeth and they're just gonna keep going, but they don't enjoy any of it. And like, all the hardship stresses them out, but they've just been trained since they were a little kid to like,

• 1:46:12Speaker 01

  Push through it.

• 1:46:13Shaan Puri?

  Just keep pushing through and like, you'll get a gold star later. Like, the joy will be later. He's like, then there's the master. And the master basically like, they're like, they know that when you start something new, there's the initial like, joy of discovery. There's the learning curve. There's the hard plateaus. And when the plateau comes, they greet it like an old friend, like, oh, there you are. Like, I thought you'd be showing up soon. I've been, I've been playing for a week and usually that's when I'll hit, that's when you arrive plateau. And I know how to like, deal with you because I know that after the plateau comes the next uprise and I'm excited for that upswing. But let me work through this plateau. And they don't really get like flustered by it. So they get the same or they get better results than all three, way better than the dabbler, significantly better than the stressor achiever. But the difference is like, the whole way,

• 1:46:57Shaan Puri?

  they're kind of actually like enjoying the dance or playing the game.

• 1:47:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:00Shaan Puri?

  Cause they actually understand that this is like, these are all normal for the game. And you find that like, the people who,

• 1:47:07Shaan Puri?

  get really like into like struggling or grinding or like get really overwhelmed by like, you know, the adversity. It's really just like, you haven't played the game enough to know that this is, this is how the levels of the game work. You shouldn't be surprised that the roller coaster is going up and down. Like, you remember you got on the, you got in line to get on a roller coaster, right?

• 1:47:24Speaker 01

  That's a good point. You know, one thing that, I don't know why this made me think of it. I think just because like the, the ups and downs of the game and the, the conversation we were having at the beginning of the show about interviewing. One thing that both Colin and I did was go to improv class to learn how to be.

• 1:47:37Shaan Puri?

  To get better.

• 1:47:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. Just to get better at like being present, working with whatever the other person says. Like, what, what we found was my wife was listening to our interviews and she was like, you're not. Listening to them. You're just not listening to your guests. They're saying something and then you say something completely different.

• 1:47:56Shaan Puri?

  You're just waiting to talk.

• 1:47:56Speaker 01

  You're just waiting to talk. And so I went to improv class and it was really this incredible lesson in the craft of how do you sit in the pocket and just be like, I can't have any preconceived notions as to where this is about to go.

• 1:48:12Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:48:12Speaker 01

  You're gonna say something and I have to let go of where I want it to go.

• 1:48:16Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:48:16Speaker 01

  I found myself in the first day of improv, I was like, we were playing this game and I was like, okay, I know exactly how to make this funny. This is gonna be funny. I know where to take it. And then the person right before me said something and I was like, why the hell would you say that? And then I had to deal with it. And then I was like, oh, this is the work.

• 1:48:32Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:48:33Speaker 01

  This is the craft or building the craft. And I think, you know, in, in, in the, the roller coaster of being a podcaster, like, you have to be willing to do all of that in public as well.

• 1:48:43Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:48:44Speaker 01

  Right? Like you, you, you go back and you watch your early episodes, that roller coaster is, there's a record of the roller coaster of like, times where it was going really well, times where it wasn't going well, times where reviews were up, times where reviews were down. It's like all public. And I think, it's, it's challenging because we have to practice in public. I think that's like as, as, you know, you build in public as an entrepreneur, but there's something incredibly just, you're like naked as a content creator out there. Everyone can see everything. So.

• 1:49:13Shaan Puri?

  Well, you guys are doing an amazing job. I'm a fan.

• 1:49:15Speaker 01

  Thank you, man.

• 1:49:16Shaan Puri?

  I look forward to kind of see if this is your kind of like learning phase, then like, you know, I'm excited to see what it's like as you guys master this. So.

• 1:49:24Speaker 01

  Appreciate it.

• 1:49:24Shaan Puri?

  Thanks for, thanks for doing this. I really appreciate it.

• 1:49:26Speaker 01

  Thank you so much, man.